NMH Magazine : Winter 2008

Green Is Beautiful

NMH’s school colors may be maroon and blue, but we’re getting greener by the moment. Like the rest of the world, we’ve become hyperaware that the planet is fragile, and saving it or breaking it lies in human hands.

In the last few years, NMH has worked double time to improve its environmental IQ. In 2004, the school identified promoting environmental responsibility as one of its five key goals, and Head of School Tom Sturtevant established the NMH Task Force for Sustainability the following year. Terms like “reducing our carbon footprint” and “creating sustainable efficiencies” are commonplace at faculty meetings, and recycling bins have become fixtures in every campus building. Environmental awareness runs like a grass-green thread throughout our curriculum.

We’re aware of how much we still need to do—but we’re proud of the work we’ve accomplished so far. Read on to learn how NMH is becoming more environmentally responsible every day, and how our alumni are practicing what we preach.

Eco-friendly classrooms

NMH offers more than a dozen courses that delve into sustainability and other environmental issues. All ninth graders take Humanities I: Environmental Perspectives, which focuses on the relationship between humans and their environment. Other courses include Environmental History and Ethics, Global Futures: Global Warming, and Environmental Studies.

Students yearning to go further afield can sign up for a three-week trip to Costa Rica. NMH also offers Turtle Island, a cross-country odyssey to such sites as Yosemite National Park and the Grand Canyon. In Humans on the Edge, students study natural disasters; for the past two years, the class has traveled to New Orleans to help with post-Hurricane Katrina rehabilitation.

There’s also a tremendous amount of crossover in the curriculum. Sustainable themes show up in Geology, Economics, and Anthropology, for example. NMH’s outdoor education courses are rife with lessons about nature, while sophomore biology students do lab work on the farm.

The binding lesson in all these courses is our connectedness—and attendant responsibility—to the environment. NMH students learn, as the great American naturalist John Muir put it, “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

A golden opportunity

NMH’s new arts center will be gold—LEED-certified gold, that is. If you’re puzzled about what that means, your lesson in green building design is about to begin.

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) provides the national benchmark for green buildings. Its rating system gives points in six areas, ranging from water efficiency to materials and resources. The greenest buildings win platinum certification (52–69 points; extremely rare); the second highest rating is gold (39–51 points), considered an extraordinary achievement.

“We feel confident that NMH will win gold certification,” says Marie McMahon of the Green Roundtable, a sustainable-design consulting firm that has been collaborating on the project since April 2006. “Right now we calculate that we have forty-one points.”

One big point-earner: nothing in the building comes from farther than 500 miles away (saving energy in transportation). Another key factor: lots of recycled content in materials such as bricks, insulation, and carpet. Miles of windows flood the arts center with light—which also brings passive solar energy. The bathrooms have water-saving fixtures; overall, the building will use 40 percent less water than if it had standard fixtures.

Documenting the project and submitting the paperwork for LEED certification is no small undertaking, but for NMH it’s been a priceless education in building green—one that will inform all future building projects, with the Rhodes Arts Center setting the gold standard.

How green is my cup?

It started as a contest among three boarding schools. Now the Green Cup Challenge has 32 schools vying to see which can cut electricity use the most.

NMH science teacher Becca Leslie cofounded the competition, which debuted in February 2006. NMH won the Green Cup that year, beating Exeter and Lawrenceville and reducing its electricity consumption by 10.73 percent.

Since then the challenge has grown exponentially, and NMH’s role keeps getting bigger. An organizational conference for the 2008 Green Cup Challenge took place on campus in November. One hundred and fifty representatives of independent schools from Maine to Florida attended workshops and enjoyed a sustainable lunch whipped up by dining services. The Green Cup Challenge, of course, is not just about winning. The real payoff comes from raising awareness about the environmental impact of electricity production.

the green team

NMH Task Force for Sustainability

The Green Team

The Task Force for Sustainability is not a sitting-still kind of bunch. In less than three years of existence, it’s catapulted the school forward in sustainability practices. Part watchdog, part hound nipping at the heels, the TFS has set ambitious goals for minimizing campus water and energy use, and closely monitored recycling and hazardous waste disposal. The group’s sweeping sustainability audit sets clear and powerful mandates for NMH through 2012. The éminence grise of the group is Walt Congdon, retired NMH science teacher and renewable energy expert (his home is fully solar-powered), who began pushing sustainability efforts at the school 50 years ago. Solar engineer Pete Talmage ’66 is another key player: he was instrumental in making the new arts center as green as possible, and last year he donated compact fluorescent lightbulbs to the entire NMH community.

This year’s TFS mandates include working with local elementary schools, creating a Little Green Book, and starting “Environmental Week” at NMH. “The biggest challenge is realizing that we can’t do it all, all at once,” says task force leader Becca Leslie. “It’s really hard to slow down when there’s always more to be done.”

Front: Charlie Tierney, Michelle Siegel (seated), Robbianne Mackin ’90, Mike Henderson, Emily Stephens ’09 (seated), Sher Sweet (seated), Jahyung Song ’10, Stan Pitchko, Walt Congdon (seated), Margaret Fellows ’09 Back row: Cam Margeson ’09, Nicole Derr, Anna Stevens ’09, Cody Valdes ’08, Craig Hefner (seated), Becca Leslie, Pete Talmage ’66, Seth Clare ’09 Not pictured: Rich Messer, Jim Poulsen, Richard Odman

the mover and shaker

Becca Leslie NMH science teacher, environmentalist

Becca Leslie NMH science teacher, environmentalist

With her dimpled smile and cheery voice, Becca Leslie takes the doom out of global warming. Her version of environmentalism, rife with right action, hits students square in the conscience.

In 2005 Leslie advocated for a schoolwide commit­ment to sustainability—thus the NMH Task Force for Sustainability was born. Leslie has urged the school toward countless green initiatives, and she’s cofounder and chief organizer of the nationally recognized Green Cup Challenge.

A Colby graduate with a BA in biology, Leslie has taught marine biology at St. Edward’s School, worked at the New England Aquarium, and educated kids about marine biology in the Florida Keys (snorkeling included). She came to NMH in 2002, excited by its track record in environmental education—and its potential. Of the environmental movement, she says, “We’re in the midst of a worldwide paradigm shift, led by dedicated individuals who harness the power of teamwork and ingenuity.” It takes one to know one.

the island environmentalist

Jack Kenworthy

Jack Kenworthy ’95 eco-businessman and educator

Ninety feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, a huge, flying-saucer-shaped cage holds 20,000 fish. Because the cage lies far from shore, the tide circulates more water through it than is possible with traditional fish farms closer to land, making for healthier fish, and healthier humans who eat them. The fish provide food and experiments for students at the Island School, an eco-themed boarding school on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera.

Jack Kenworthy ’95, who helped initiate this offshore aquaculture project, is a master of intersystem efficiency. To wit: the school also sells the fish to local resorts, bringing in revenue and keeping dollars circulating in the Bahamian economy.

Kenworthy, a former science teacher at the Island School, created Cape Systems, Ltd., a for-profit subsidiary of the school, to take this experiential education model and point it outward to the wider Caribbean region. For one resort client, the company installed solar-powered irrigation systems and solar water heaters for showers and laundry. The group, with students’ help, also designed and built a biodiesel plant that converts used cooking oil from cruise ships into 20,000 gallons of fuel per year.

For Kenworthy, who majored in environmental studies at the University of Vermont, problem- solving—and teaching others that skill—sustains hope in the planet’s future. “There are a lot of problems,” he says, “but we’re not short on solutions.”

the organic entrepreneur

Tom Stearns

Tom Stearns ’93, business owner, farmer

Tom Stearns ’93 could sell a wheelbarrow full of organic seeds to a plastics mogul—he’s that enthusiastic about his product. Stearns started selling seeds in 1996 while he was a student at Prescott College; his hobby has since bloomed into a Vermont company that sells more than 750,000 seed packets annually. With 35 employees, a 100-acre farm, a 13,000-square-foot warehouse, and almost 10,000 square feet of greenhouses, High Mowing Seeds is flying high.

The timing is impeccable. Organic food has moved from a fad to a trend growing at 20 percent a year, and the USDA now mandates organic farmers to use organic seeds. “Right now, of the organic vegetable acreage in the United States, only one percent is planted with organic seeds. So that’s a ninety-nine percent unfulfilled market,” says Stearns, who’s just opened up the company to investors.

A natural-born entrepreneur, Stearns initiated a recycling program at NMH, worked on the school farm, and helped tend the gardens at Perry Pond. Now his High Mowing Seeds customers include NMH faculty, who sing the praises of his products and, along with Stearns, are living metaphors for sowing the seeds of learning.

the spiritual ecologist

Ellen Berstein ’71

Ellen Berstein

She didn’t set out to be the birth mother of the Jewish environmental movement, but that’s exactly what Ellen Berstein ’71 became. In 1990 she founded Shomrei Adamah (“Keepers of the Earth”), the first national Jewish environmental organization. As its director for six years, she worked with rabbis, scientists, environmentalists, and writers around the country to create educational materials that would bring the Bible’s ecological messages to life. Along the way, she became captivated by Genesis 1 and its seven-day creation story, which she describes as “the Western world’s first environmental epic.” Bernstein wrote a book, The Splendor of Creation (2005), about Genesis’s ecospiritual themes.

Now developing a program in Judaism and ecology at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, Bernstein eschews the term environmentalist in favor of ecologist. “I’ve always been squeamish about labels, and have felt that the language of ‘environmentalist’ sets up an ‘us against them’ dichotomy (tree-huggers vs. corporate types),” she says. “Ecology literally means the study of ecos, the house—which in this case is nature, God’s house—and whatever actions we take, whatever thoughts we think, yield consequences in it.”

the wilderness saver

Stephen Johnson

Stephen Johnson ’75, land conservationist

The scenic mountains, rivers, and rangeland of southwestern Montana have a strong protector in Stephen Johnson ’75, executive director of the Gallatin Valley Land Trust (GVLT). By creating conservation agreements with private landowners, GVLT preserved about 4,300 acres in southwestern Montana last year. Overall, the trust has conserved just more than 30,000 acres, equivalent to the land area of Boston.

Conservation in the region, which includes gateway communities to Yellowstone Park, is an uphill battle. For example, the city of Bozeman (population 40,000) has 10,000 new house lots on the market. “The rate of change is just extraordinary,” says Johnson. “Our goal is to stop the unraveling of the greatest intact ecosystem in North America, but our real satisfaction lies in helping families who homesteaded here to keep on ranching for another generation, ensuring that their land never becomes a subdivision.”

Big sky country is a far cry from New England, where Johnson lived for nearly five decades, getting his BA from Dartmouth and master of city planning from MIT. As executive director of Sudbury Valley Trustees for ten years, he worked to conserve the Massachusetts landscape that Henry David Thoreau treasured. Now Johnson’s work, though similar, is on an epic scale. “We conserved more last year, at this small land trust, than in the fifty-year history of Sudbury Valley Trustees,” he says. “It’s an incredible honor to do my little piece.”

the greenskeeper

Jeff Carlson

Jeff Carlson ’67

golf course superintendent

There are only three organic golf courses in the country, and Jeff Carlson ’67 runs one of them. His work at Vineyard Golf Club on Martha’s Vineyard netted him a 2008 award for environmental stewardship from the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America.

An experience early in his career convinced Carlson that old-school pesticides were dangerous. In the late 1970s, he and his new bride were living on Cape Cod in a house next to the green. As course superintendent, Carlson was mixing mercury-based pesticide and spraying it on the grass; soon his wife’s hair started to fall out. A trip to the doctor confirmed that she had heavy metal poisoning, and so Carlson’s search for more benign pest control management began.

As he became known for his organic tendencies, Carlson was recruited to help create Widow’s Walk Golf Course, built on an abandoned gravel mine in Scituate, Massachusetts. He and architect Michael Hurzdan experimented with sand traps made of reused carpet; the project earned Carlson his first environmental stewardship award in 1998.

A developer in Martha’s Vineyard then asked him to plan an all-organic course on the island. Facing strident opposition from locals, Carlson insisted Vineyard Golf Club would use no synthetic pesticides, and he stuck to it. “I believe firmly that the industry is changing and that we need to use more benign pesticides,” he says, “and maybe none at all.”

the nest-makers

Laura ’86 and Will Wear ’86

Laura ’86 and Will Wear ’86 company owners

When their daughter Lily was born, Laura ’86 and Will Wear ’86 wanted a tasteful toy box for her room. Appalled by the molded plastic boxes he saw in stores, Will, a product designer, created a storage chest out of organic cotton stretched over a wood frame. Thus was born Nest, the Wears’ line of environmentally friendly products for kids. Started in 2004, the company offers products ranging from step stools to infant car-seat covers. As a green company, Nest uses organic cotton, water-borne finishes, and recycled wood products.

The couple, who met at NMH and now live in Granby, Massachusetts, became environmentally supersensitive with parenthood. “Having children changes your perspective about the future,” says Will, who used to design landfill-destined products like cell phones and computers. His latest oeuvre is a line of wheeled toys made from sustainably produced Vermont maple; Whole Foods Market has already signed up. Other retailers who carry Nest products include ABC Carpet & Home and Giggle. The Wears also have a thriving business through their website, www.nestplease.com.

“We’ve never been green because we think it’s a good marketing tool,” says Laura, a trained chef and former dot-com entrepreneur. “We just believe that no kids’ product should contribute to degrading the planet they’ll inherit.”

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