By the Upper School Human Ecology and Sustainability Inquiry Class, Introduction by Dr. Heather Heenehan
This year is the first year we have two different Human Ecology and Sustainability classes and it has been so fun to watch the students' projects develop over the year. The inquiry class in Human Ecology and Sustainability is a full-year half-credit class open to any student in tenth, eleventh, or twelfth grade. The Advanced Inquiry class is a full-credit, full-year course for seniors who are pursuing an independent project. The Inquiry fell in rotation 1, and 3 and just wrapped up a week or so ago. While the first semester of the Human Ecology and Sustainability Inquiry class was dedicated to building students’ understanding and their own views of sustainability, the second semester was dedicated to individual or small group projects. We met twice a week and we had a few snow days reducing the number of class meetings we had, but, the students were still able to make significant progress on their projects and making GFA a more sustainable school and as their teacher, Dr. H., I am so excited to share their work with the community. Here is the list of the project titles the students worked on, in no particular order. Below lists a description of each project and the significance of the project written by the students if you are interested in learning more.
- Garden Efforts Information System: Google Classroom Page by Annie Dizon ‘23
- Rain Barrels and Greenhouse Preparation: Improving GFA’s Garden Efficiency! by Annabel Lawton ‘21 & Annika White ‘21
- From GFA to Oak Ridge and Everything in Between, The In’s and Out’s of Waste Management by Jonnie Jackson ‘21, Ava McCormick ‘23, Will Paliotta ‘21
- GFA is Coming for you Norway: A Proposal for Electric Car-Charging Stations at GFA by Lily Lind ‘23
- Nitrogen and GFA by Noah Bachner ‘21
- Spreading Sustainability with Instagram by Charlotte Calderwood ‘23
- Earth Day Scavenger Hunt by Katie Gabriele ‘23
- Beachside Avenue Road Culvert Redevelopment by Mary Kessler ‘22
- It’s Just Water Right? by Hannah Shairer ‘22
- Historical Analysis of Republican Stances on Environmental Action by Alex Lind ‘21
Garden Efforts Information System: Google Classroom Page
By Annie Dizon ‘23
My project for this rotation in our sustainability inquiry was to create a more streamlined information system for managing the garden in the form of a Google Classroom page. It has information regarding all of the different components of the garden, volunteer information for different gardens on campus, people to contact, seed inventories and to-do lists, what groups are involved in the garden, and more. I did this because it’s difficult to communicate what needs to be done and what has been done across the divisions to numerous people, and by creating a page in which people can communicate with each other easily, more can be accomplished in the garden to make it more productive and efficient.
This project is important because it has helped to create more efficiency and productivity between the different groups and people involved in the garden. The communication between the different divisional groups involved has improved, thus allowing us to have more tasks done before the important period of planting and harvesting in the garden. This kind of setup could be helpful for community gardens anywhere and could be built upon or modified to allow for flexibility for any gardening community. By creating more productive and efficient community gardens at GFA and anywhere, it can involve more participation from outside groups, whether it be students, teachers, or parents. In accordance with the GFA sustainability mission, spending more time cultivating the quality and quantity of plants will create more biodiversity in the garden. Hopefully, with more student involvement in the garden and grounds, students will be able to live up to the innovative mission of GFA and take notice of what needs to be done or changed to further improve the garden and make it more useful and a better space for everyone.
Rain Barrels and Greenhouse Preparation: Improving GFA’s Garden Efficiency!
Annabel Lawton ‘21 & Annika White ‘21
Our project has consisted of two parts: installing rain barrels to supply the greenhouse irrigation system, and cleaning the greenhouse to prepare it for spring planting. The goal of the combination of these two projects is to make the school’s springtime organic gardening as efficient as possible, in terms of resource usage and optimizing growth.
The GFA Sustainability Mission Statement talks specifically about water and being conscious of our water usage, so the idea to install rain barrels came easily because we can think of no better way to conserve water usage than by redirecting a naturally replenishing water source. This will reduce our reliance on groundwater sources, which will reduce the energy required to process water.
We also noticed that the greenhouse has been functioning as a garden shed, likely due to neglect during COVID-19, and would like to revitalize its awesome technology. As the greenhouse is typically used to prepare sprouts to be moved into the organic garden for the spring growing season, we wanted to prepare the greenhouse for use so that spring growing will go as smoothly as possible.
We think that, in collaboration with members of the advanced and regular inquiries, we can optimize the garden as a resource for organic food supply, reduce our negative environmental footprint, and facilitate learning about sustainability in organic farming across the grades.
GFA’s large emphasis on partnership is a critical component of our project. Collaboration between Annika’s and my project, Annie’s designs to establish an easily accessible school sustainability database and sharing platform, Samara’s plans to optimize garden growth through complementary planting, the middle and upper school gardening clubs, and faculty and grounds crew members to aid the implementation of these projects have helped each of us to achieve our own goals in the betterment of GFA farming and will improve the sustainability of our grounds as a whole. Curiosity is another one of our school’s core values, and we believe that providing students with the most high-functioning gardening facilities and easy access to hands-on experience in sustainable farming will allow them to better engage with the process, and urge them to want to learn more about it. Additionally, as presented by the Stonebarn and Versailles farms who advocate for sustainable methods of organic farming, the memory of each thing we eat can be improved by the knowledge of where it came from and who its production benefitted -- we can create an “ecological food culture” by reinforcing our connection to the land and doing the work ourselves to create intimacy with and appreciation for our resources.
From GFA to Oak Ridge and Everything in Between: The In’s and Out’s of Waste Management
Jonnie Jackson ‘21, Ava McCormick ‘23, Will Paliotta ‘21
For our project, we chose to delve into the Waste Management industry in order to see first-hand how our school’s waste habits get processed, how our actions negatively impact the environment, and to relay the information we learned back to GFA so that we can build a more sustainable community that manages their waste properly. We have put together a video that demonstrates what the waste management system at Oak Ridge looks like, provides information on how to properly dispose of your waste, and contains an interview on Oak Ridge’s general waste management process. Our goal is to communicate this material effectively to the GFA community so that we can all dispose of our waste properly and make a long-lasting, positive impact on the environment by recycling and disposing of material properly. This project focuses specifically on the issue of waste at GFA and our hopes are to combat it by showing the video to the entire community.
This is such an important project because many people at GFA don’t exactly understand the effects of their actions, like how they dispose of food and trash. It’s something that should be relayed to the rest of the GFA community especially if we are trying to build a more sustainable school and the necessary actions are fairly simple. We believe by creating a video that shows not only the waste management process that Oak Ridge completes, but also containing interviews of those that are part of their team will allow us to influence the GFA community in a positive way. Hopefully encouraging them to do better and understand the process of trying to be as sustainable as possible from a waste management perspective. Because we have completed the process correctly we believe more students and faculty will learn and understand how to properly dispose of their waste, eventually leading us to become a more sustainable community and hopefully starting a movement that becomes routine at GFA. The opportunity to learn more about Oak Ridge and its efforts has been an eye-opening experience, and the goal of this video is to open the eyes of the GFA community and get everyone to care more about their waste and recycling. The GFA community should be excited because we will be bringing an educational, easy, and efficient demonstration to campus to show everyone how to make a positive impact. This is something that all high school students could benefit from and could teach the younger divisions through eco clubs and more. Our project fits the narrative of the GFA sustainability mission statement because it will allow us to bring a new and informative practice to campus.
GFA is Coming for you Norway: A Proposal for Electric Car-Charging Stations at GFA
Lily Lind ‘23
Sustainable energy is the future of the world. Getting electric car charging stations will help the GFA community in many different ways. This project will reduce our CO2 emissions significantly and encourage more students and teachers to take a step towards being more environmentally friendly with their car choices. This project indirectly reduces the amount of CO2 emissions that our community produces because the charging stations will charge electric cars that release significantly less total emissions than gas cars. Although creating the electricity to charge the car generates emissions, the total amount in comparison to gas cars is significantly less because electric and hybrid cars are much better at using their energy. In an electric or plug-in hybrid car, you get a lot more driving in for a lot less indirect emissions. Having these stations at the school will promote more people to drive electric cars because they would be able to charge it during their school or workday because of the new convenience. This project would also encourage people to get electric cars because if the school paid for the charger’s electricity, the people investing in an EV would be saving money having the stations at GFA, lowering the total price to have their EV. Many of the teachers at GFA have long driving commutes and if they had a hybrid car, the electricity would be fully used by the time that they arrived at school, making their whole commute back fully gas-powered. If they were able to charge at school, part of or their whole way back would be electric. These stations will also help the advertising of GFA as an environmentally green school because these stations will be something that people see as soon as they drive onto the campus. We pride ourselves as a green school and I think that this would be a great way to not only continue our efforts but to show the rest of the community that being sustainable is vital to our community. GFA’s Mission statement states that “GFA engages students in an innovative, inclusive, and globally-minded community to prepare them for a life of purpose” This project will live up to our mission statement because these chargers will make us more globally-minded regarding sustainability and climate change. It will also continue to normalize these ideas for our generation because we are the only hope for the future of the earth. GFA’s sustainability mission statement says, “GFA’s mission to build a sustainable future means ensuring the best opportunities for all by investigating and implementing environmentally responsible solutions on campus.’... ‘To seek out and implement strategies for energy efficiency and engage in conservation” This project would directly correspond with this mission statement because EVs are the most realistic energy-efficient mode of transportation for students and faculty. This project is important because electric cars reduce the number of greenhouse gases and smog pollutants that are directly emitted into the atmosphere. Electric vehicles do not have any direct emissions and they, therefore, improve the air quality and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. They use an electric motor instead of an internal combustion engine that does not release emissions through the tailpipe of the car. Plug-in hybrid cars also use both a battery engine and a combustion engine but it has been proven that the emissions released from that car are significantly lower than the gas-powered vehicles. Although there are no direct emissions released from the tailpipe of the car on electric cars, they do produce some emissions when creating the electricity that they are charged with. In Connecticut, the annual emissions per vehicle in pounds of CO2 equivalent for gasoline vehicles was 11,435 pounds (the same as the national average) VS the 4,835 pounds for plug-in hybrid vehicles and 2,435 pounds for all-electric vehicles. Based on these statistics, if GFA were to encourage people to get EVs, we can significantly improve the number of emissions that our community releases. Through a survey sent out to the upper school and faculty, 19.2% of the responses said that they had an EV or plug-in hybrid and 100% of the responses from the faculty said that they think it is important for GFA to have these chargers regardless of their ability to use them. One member of the faculty said, “I think it is a signal to the members of our community and those that visit our campus that we are supportive of electric vehicles” and another said, “It's where the future is headed. I want my next car, and all future cars, to be electric, so a charging station at school is essential for me.”
Nitrogen and GFA
Noah Bachner ‘21
I would like to explore the relationship between GFA and excess nitrogen in the Long Island Sound. To do this I would like to interact with the grounds crew and whoever else necessary to gauge how much excess nitrogen we put into the ecosystem. I would then like to conduct comprehensive testing of both the marsh and Burying Hill Beach as well as other preselected local beaches/marshes in residential/natural areas. I think this would give me a good look at how well GFA is doing compared to other areas in terms of limiting excess nitrogen pollution. I would also like to test both oxygen levels and nitrogen levels and test each location ideally weekly. I would also like to extend this project out and make it a multi-year process. Perhaps adding testing to a work crew like aquacrew. Initial data collected by me during my research phase indicates a nitrogen pollution problem in our area, not just around GFA. I would like to expand out this testing and make it more consistent. I would also like to explore more thoroughly what GFA can be doing to mitigate our nitrogen pollution.
This project is important because it addresses an issue that is massively harmful to our sound, and yet is very avoidable if the proper steps are taken. This is a widespread issue, but when steps are taken massive change is possible. This project aligns with the sustainability mission statement because polluting our marsh and local beaches with nitrogen do not, “mitigate our impacts on the surrounding water to prevent pollution, and emphasize the importance of this vital global resource” or “implement best practices for maintaining and improving biodiversity on and around campus.” This project will help ensure that students in lower grades will have a clean, thriving ecosystem to visit both in the marsh and in the sound. With excess nitrogen in the water, it is extremely difficult for a lot of cool wildlife and plants to flourish.
Spreading Sustainability with Instagram
Charlotte Calderwood ‘23
My project is going to be about educating others, and myself, on ways and products that we can use to make our everyday lives more sustainable and eco-friendly. This ranges from switching from plastic shampoo bottles to shampoo bars to learning the basics of composting. This project is important because hopefully, it can help GFA, and maybe other, families become more sustainable in their everyday lives. I’m super excited to work on this project because I can’t wait to find out how I can better my family and then share those new discoveries with the community around me. This project will, hopefully, teach the GFA community and families how to be more environmentally friendly and sustainable in their everyday lives. This project aligns with the sustainability mission statement because it targets the education, waste, and food subtopics directly. This project aligns with the GFA mission statement and core values because it goes along with curiosity and excellence and that we are learning to be globally minded and inclusive. This project embodies those words by being curious to find out ways to be more sustainable, and inclusive because it is tailored more towards people who want to better themselves, but don’t know where to start. I think this project will benefit other GFA students in other divisions because they will learn how to make more sustainable choices at a younger age which they can carry with them the rest of their lives and teach others about.
Earth Day Scavenger Hunt
Katie Gabriele ‘23
My project is an earth day scavenger hunt activity for the fourth graders. On earth day, the lower school students will each have activities according to their grade. For the fourth graders, they will walk around campus in groups of 5 or 6 with an assigned upper school student and use the seek app to look for the plants that our bees on campus visited over the spring and summer of 2020. They will be looking for designated plants, which are the ones that we know the bees went to. The activity should not take longer than an hour, and upper school students will rotate in for different activities to chaperone.
I think that this project is important because it teaches younger students about the way that the bees function, and also shows them that they are surrounded by ecosystems and nature. It will benefit the community because hopefully, the Lower Schoolers will come out with a better understanding of what the bees do and why they are important. I think that it should make the GFA community a more sustainable place because I think that a lot of people on campus don’t know a lot about the bees, and if the lower schoolers grow up interested in them they might take action to protect them and get involved in the nature around them. I am excited about this project because I am interested in the bees and how important they are, but I am also interested in helping younger kids learn, and I think that showing them how the bees function is a great way to do that.
Beachside Avenue Road Culvert Redevelopment
Mary Kessler ‘22
One of the most recognized advantages that the school has to offer is the accessibility of three different ecosystems: the sound, the Audubon, and the marsh--aspects which we’ve become accustomed to accessing. And it might not be until low tide that you take the time to appreciate the viability of the marsh, but it is critical to recognize that along with harboring relationships and interactions between the organisms within the marsh, we also significantly interact with it daily, specifically when driving on the bridge on Beachside Avenue. In the same ways that we examine and analyze the threats that are inflicted by other nonnative organisms--like Phragmites, the Common Reed--on the native biodiversity, we need to investigate the impact that we have on the marsh’s health, especially since we capitalize on so many of the valuable components the marsh has presents us with.
My project is based on finding a more suitable alternative to the current “bridge” (classified as a road culvert) that extends over the marsh on Beachside Avenue by redeveloping the two box culverts into box culverts with open bottoms. The road culvert currently instigates an insufficient flow of water through its two, inadequate culverts, likely following the precedent that other marshes under the same conditions have set such as road flooding, water purification, invasive species permeating, tidal changes, altering soil chemistry, and an accumulation of organic matter and an inability to properly export it. As mentioned before, these are only prospective consequences of the road culvert, so what I hope to gain from this project is to establish the repercussions of the culverts on the ecosystem and biodiversity in the marsh in order to blueprint a more conducive system for tidal flow to lessen the identified problems.
This project is significant because there are a variety of services that the marsh offers us, especially for educational purposes, and although we analyze the threats and changes that the marsh is facing, we don’t do as much as we can to mitigate these risks; we often establish them and research the impact of them. Something important to consider is that the information that we gather each year likely varies because there are so many different components that can impact a marsh’s health. A component that has stayed consistent and hasn’t varied or changed its impact is the road culvert. We have identified it as a problem, but identifying it isn’t really enough. Since we know it is there, it is important to try to search for solutions or changes to try to mitigate the threat that it imposes on the marsh’s health. This is something especially prominent in the Sustainability Mission because one of the values it stresses is taking care of the ecosystems around campus and doing what we can to conserve them, and this has been a known danger to the marsh, which is something that we might be able to try to lessen the damage of. Although there are many difficulties in terms of rights and laws to change a road, it is possible that it can be changed with the right amount of information and evidence presented, which follows the core values of “curiosity” and “passion” because, with the right amount of intellectual drive, change can occur.
It’s Just Water Right?
Hannah Shairer ‘22
My project is going to be a series of GFA Instagram stories along with a blog post that shows the GFA community the importance of water conservation and ways in which we can use water better. It will also illustrate questions like, what GFA does to conserve water, how people can conserve water at home, etc. By doing this, I’m hoping to make the invisible visible and point out the things at GFA that people either don’t see or don’t notice. I’m also trying to educate people about why water is important and give them some solutions, or at least some small ways in which they can be more conscious about their water use. This is important because we only have so much accessible freshwater and it will run out eventually so we as a community needs to do our part in conserving water.
My project will benefit the GFA community by educating students and faculty about when, where, and how much water we use. My hope is that by sharing this information, people on campus will be more conservative about how much water they are using and form healthy habits that lead to water conservation at school across all divisions in the GFA community. This project will make GFA more sustainable in a few ways. One way is that it will make the invisible visible. By sharing where our water comes from, the community will now have at least an idea about where their water comes from instead of just turning on the tap mindlessly and knowing that clean water is coming out. Another thing is more educational-based. By educating the GFA community about water at GFA, my hope is that we will try to apply some good habits into our day-to-day lives at school but, we as a community can take these habits and apply them to our lives at home as well. I am excited about this project because, in the past three years, I have done a lot of activities including water quality monitoring, some work with water chemistry, and a lot of research about the water in the Long Island Sound and the marsh. Given those activities, I have really grown to appreciate water for more than just something to quench my thirst. I view water as a resource now and I want to share my love for researching water and finding ways to be more water conservative with the GFA community. I think the GFA community should also be excited about my project because I am making the invisible visible. I am turning something that we use every single day, water, into something that is not just coming out of a tap but is flowing through a watershed and being sanitized to make sure that it is safe. By bringing this to light, my hope is that the GFA community will appreciate how fortunate we are to have clean water and to learn about what we as a community can do to keep it that way. I think my project will make GFA a greener place by not necessarily having a drastic change, but simply by giving everyone at GFA something to learn about that impacts everyone. Everyone uses water on a daily basis. To wash their hands, when they flush the toilet when they wash dishes. All of these events include water and by making the GFA community aware of these issues, I hope that as these habits develop amongst the students, we will waste less water and be more conscious of our water use. Part of the GFA sustainability mission statement reads, To be conscious and responsible about our water usage, mitigate our impacts on the surrounding water to prevent pollution, and emphasize the importance of this vital global resource”. That is my hope for students at GFA. My hope is that my project will bring awareness to water usage and simply be more conservative with how much water each person at GFA uses on a daily basis. My project aligns with GFA’s mission statement mostly with the globally minded part. As I have said before, my goal is to help everyone at GFA build habits to be more water-conservative. I am encouraging them to do this not just at GFA but to apply these habits that started at GFA and bring these habits into their own homes. By being more aware of water conservation, the students at GFA hopefully will take one tiny little step towards a more sustainable future.
Historical Analysis of Republican Stances on Environmental Action
Alex Lind ‘21
Generalizations about the Republican Party’s stance on environmental action formed on a regular basis due to their lesser engagement with progressive activism and identity politics; however, the change from a more environmentally conscious stance to one placing less priority on environmental issues, raises the question of how we got to this point. In my research, I searched for an answer to the following questions: What was the Republican Party’s response to President Richard Nixon’s establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency? How do changes in the Republican Party’s stance on environmental policy align with political polarization patterns in the United States? When setting out on this project, I believed that the answers to these questions would help to reveal the reasons why the Republican party has drifted away from environmental advocacy, something that is important to understand when trying to unite the world to fight climate change.
This project is important because I, as well as many political scientists and sociologists, believe that political polarization is detrimental to our democracy’s ability to make a change. If we can better understand the polarizing forces working against environmental action, it will be easier to work with those forces to create a less hostile environment on certain policy topics like climate change. At GFA, my presentation will help others learn about the Republican Party’s stance on environmental change through the years, and hopefully, my attention to Nixon’s EPA will help listeners understand that climate change does not have to be as polarizing as it is now. This project will hopefully help republicans understand that climate change has nothing to do with “party morals'' or affiliations. I also hope that this project will help liberals and progressives gain some insight into the opposing perspectives in order to reconcile the two in efforts to create a better world. My project aligns with GFA’s sustainability mission statement in that there is an emphasis on educating students to create sustainable solutions for the future.