All around the world, students have been uniting to protest for climate justice. They have been at the forefront of this struggle, urging the leaders of their country to treat climate change as real and to take concrete steps to solve it. Change, more often than not, comes from schools. In addition, it makes complete sense that we start by changing how our schools work, with relation to ecological issues.

The Green Schools Program

Bhavyata Foundation collaborates with the Centre for Science and Environment to facilitate the “Green Schools Programme“. A unique initiative to promote environmental education in an experiential format in Mumbai. While sensitising students to the environment through hands-on. And thought-provoking activities, this initiative moves beyond theoretical approaches. And textbook learning and focus on the practical skills with which we can make our schools, and ultimately all our institutions green.

The field of environmental education is has a fundamental contradiction. While everyone asserts the importance of sustainability. And working to save resources, the environment remains an afterthought in our formal education system. It continues to be viewed more as an extracurricular activity. And less as a subject that should hold a priority position in the national curriculum.

The Green Schools Programme is also an environment management system that audits, through the students of the schools, the consumption of natural resources within school campuses. It provides schools with the methodology to assess themselves as environmental managers. Then, it tells them how to overcome the shortcomings that they tend to identify in their current practices. It is an ecological textbook with a difference. In addition, it teaches real lessons.

What Is A Green School?

A Green School is a resource-efficient building one that uses little amounts of water, optimises energy efficiency, minimises waste-generation, recycles water, and provides a healthier space to its occupants as compared to a conventional building.

Why Should We Join The Green School Programme?

Here are your reasons.

The Green Schools Programme helps benchmarks a school’s performance as environmental managers. Above all the audit measures impact and motivate participants to work towards tangible change.

The monitoring process of the GSP is participatory and transparent. It encourages teachers to convert audit tasks into assignments for students. The initiative-based tasks also test student’s skills of communication and analysis, which provide them with invaluable skill sets.

A new report prepared by scientists from Australia, Britain, and Switzerland claims that some people are resorting to excess accumulation, and this habit has become a threat to nature. These scientists also believe that humans are consuming an excess of resources, causing pollution, global warming, natural disasters, water crisis, and climate change. The GSP enables schools to record their available resources and trains students to collect information systematically to feed and ease up the analysis process. In addition to facilitating environmental sustainability, it also teaches students analytical skills.

The post-audit information can be used by a network of schools or by city or state governments to do a comparative evaluation so that best practices can be shared. So through the GSP, your school could contribute to the betterment of your city or state.

GSP empowers students to use natural resources responsibly and efficiently and practice effective and incorporate sustainability methods into their everyday life.

Information On Various Fronts

The Green School Programme helps schools audit their use of resources and map their consumption and wastage. The exercise involves the collection of information on these fronts:

Air: Analyse school transport policy, its relation to air quality and ways to reduce emissions.

Energy: Audit the sources and consumption of energy, exploring ways to minimise energy wastage, pollution, and costs.

Food: According to a UN report, 130 million kilograms of food is wasted every year in the world, costing over Rs 75 lakh crore. Coordinate, implement, and monitor school canteen to provide high-quality and nutritious food, encourage students to have a balanced diet, along with minimising food wastage.

Land: Focuses on the land-use of schools to map green areas, identify biodiversity and grasp the enormous ecological and economic value of this resource.

Water: Examine water use, the sources of water, water conservation (rainwater harvesting and water recycling), and the importance of sanitation facilities.

Waste: Help finding out the total amount of waste that is generated, offers ways and means to reduce it by segregation, recycling and reuse.

A large number of schools across India are already a part of the GSP network and are familiar with the environmental audit process. We, at Bhavyata Foundation, wish to encourage more schools to participate in the Teachers Orientation workshop on the Green School Programmes (GSP) Audit.

The objective of the workshops is to build the capacity of teachers. Or master trainers to conduct the environmental audit through their students. During the workshop, participants will be taken through the Green Schools Programme Manual. In addition we will be collecting information for the review.

Becoming Aware

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change we want to see in the world.”
Our lifestyle has an impact on the environment. What we do and how we do it makes a crucial difference. This is why the first task of being the change is to become aware of what we do — benchmark how much water and energy we use and waste we generate. It is only then that we can transform our ways so that we can use as little and waste as little as possible.

The Green Schools manual is about green practice. It takes the classroom into our lives. The joy is not just in the learning, but also in the experience of making a change in our environment.
If each school and each home becomes the laboratory of action, then the ripples will spread fast and furious. Above all every single drop added together can create an ocean. Alone, we are the drop. Together, we are the ocean.

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The ancient Indian cultural history has the mention of something called the sacred groves. Ideas for forest conservation and sustainability have existed since prehistoric India. Both protective and productive sides of a forest cover were shed light on the Vedic age. Religious texts such as Aranyakas (“forest” works), Upanishad, and Smritis hold in them tenets of forest conservation, usage, and management while highlighting the value of sustainable use implicitly.

The Traditions In Vedas

Despite the notion that the West pioneered forest conservation and management, its roots lie deep in the heart of prehistoric India. The Vedas contain several mentions and instances on the optimal utilization and management of forests. Thus, we see forestry traditions have been documented in the religious texts of this country for long. Environment consciousness, besides natural resource and biodiversity conservation, is intrinsic features of Hindu religious rituals and practices.

According to the Vedic traditions, every village will attain wholeness only when certain types of forests are present. Villages should be within the forest existing in a mutual relationship with the trees around; sourcing livelihood from them and in turn, not exploiting them. Forest management was participatory much like today; community help in conservation was also prevalent in ancient India, This can be proven by citing an example of village committees that came into existence to oversee the management of the forest cover around them.

Emergence Of The Dominant Economic Activity

The late Vedic period saw agriculture emerge as the dominant economic activity, the concept of cultural landscapes such as sacred forests and groves, hallowed corridors, and a variety of ethno-forestry practices evolved, which continued into the post-Vedic period. The Himalayas since Vedic times also have been home for an array of medicinal plants and other resources. Furthermore, several Indian trees and shrubs were regarded as sacred because of their medicinal/aesthetic/natural qualities as well as their proximity to a particular deity. Religion was probably used in ancient India as a tool to protect nature and natural resources and several instances of worshipping the trees have been reported from different parts of the country, besides a wide range of ethno-forestry practices. All these probably highlight the conservation ethos of ancient Indian people.

In more recent Indian history, Mahatma Gandhi has been a flagbearer for sustainable living and minimalistic lifestyle. He also reflected on the connection between man and therefore, the environment, thus becoming a precursor to a new sort of environmentalism. Modern concepts, like ecology and fate of the planet, degrowth, moderate life, and compact communities, were what drove his ecological senses. Gandhi’s thought can thus be the start line for creating what might be a concrete alternative to urgencies that, unfortunately, are becoming stronger.

His nonviolent philosophy was applied by Gandhi in every field, including the connection between man and nature. The great man claimed for all to have an uncomplicated lifestyle, away from the clutches of consumerism. He imagined the formation of small communities that had to integrate with the environment, something that anticipated the philosophy of local food and native communities.

The Status Quo

In light of the status quo and India’s fight against Covid-19, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has called for an Atmanirbhar India. This means supporting the growth of local businesses and using indigenous products. With the plethora of indigenous products now available, we see consumers also shifting to these for economic constraints. Or simply, out of the will actually to help the economy grow from growing business within.

This will see many people coming up with products and services that are local. Amongst all available sources, the one most widely accessible and rich in resources is forests. 21.67% of India’s total geographical area is forest cover. This, if used judiciously, could be a considerable source of revenue for those in need.

Plantations help bind soil together like what forests do. This increases the fertility and quality of the earth. Also, other effects like water retention, air circulation, and so on are visible. Plantations do not count for building ecosystems similar to forests, but plantations can be our shrivan and provide for us if treated with care and nurture.

Around 30 mango saplings can help an entire family earn a lifetime’s worth of living with yields each year. This might seem a meagre exercise to some of us. But to the persons pushed to the brink of poverty and starvation by unemployment, this is a huge boon.

Today we are a global community. Though not small, we have in our power to do much more than a small community could. Let’s contribute to making a difference by our actions. And keep in mind that our heritage has already been preaching this for a long time. Just about time, we applied it to our lifestyles.

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