Lets take action together!
By Moss Pelvin | Posted: Wednesday August 5, 2020
Sustainability is defined by Wikipedia as “the ability to exist constantly… the capacity for the biosphere and human civilisation to coexist.”
As you will know, with the ongoing climate change movement across the globe, the world needs our help. For centuries now we’ve been burning fossil fuels, manufacturing plastics and causing insidious but constant harm to our environment. We are running out of natural resources. At present, our civilisation is not sustainable.
But we want to change that.
Starting with our school.
The Otago Boys’ High School Sustainability group is a student lead, student run organisation who want to ensure our school is environmentally friendly, clean and raising the best boys we can. We all have to protect the future, and the best place to start is here, and the time is now. There has never been a better time.
The overarching aim of the group is to protect our green spaces around Otago Boys’ and reduce our environmental impact. For several years now, Otago Boys’ High School has been involved in projects around Dunedin such as Town Belt Kaitiaki and School Strike 4 Climate. We plan to continue our involvement, and work towards receiving an enviroschools bronze award in the near future.
This year we have many goals:
To educate students and parents about how to be sustainable
To plant trees and start trapping projects both locally and at our School Lodge
To ensure our lodge has a sustainable source of energy
To clean up our school’s rubbish, and lower the amount of plastic students waste
But to manage this, we need your help. Parents and students need to take action too; we can’t do this alone. Over the course of this term, and the rest of this year, there will be weekly articles in the Newsletter about sustainability, what it is and how you as parents and students can help.
To begin with, our advice is simple. Public transport. Dunedin has a wide reaching bus service that caters for thousands of people every day. It may seem convenient to drive into town to drop off your child, or to hop in a car for that shopping trip, but taking a bus is a much more sustainable and simpler way to travel. A bus service will be there anyway whether you drive or not, and that small walk to and from the local bus stops isn’t going to hurt you. As easy as driving may seem, every litre of fuel releases 2.4kg of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Taking the bus to work and school means your car isn’t running as much, meaning less carbon output. This is a tangible first step towards a sustainable future.
Keep an eye out for our articles on sustainability, and what you can do to help us and our school be a sustainable and healthy environment for all.
We have a planet to save. Let’s do it together.
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