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Sustainability
Sustainability is clearly at the top of the agenda of all three main political parties, as well as forming the basis of the Green Party's philosophy and consequent policies.
Sustainability is also clearly at the top of several major newspapers' news agendas.
There is a wealth of material out there about what we can do to change our lives to create a sustainable future for ourselves and our descendants. At last people are beginning to take it seriously.
So is Wellington College. The Master has declared that he wishes Wellington College to be the 'greenest' school in the UK by 2015.
What follows shows how we are trying to achieve that.
A Grand Plan and Our Guiding Principles
It is Wellington's intention to become one of the most sustainable schools in the UK by 2015.
We accept climate change and the end of a fossil fuel based economy as givens, and seek to promote among the whole College community - pupils, teaching staff, support staff, parents and governors - a way of living that treads responsibly and therefore lightly on the Earth, our only home and only physical source of sustenance.
Without such a way of living, our mindset is unlikely to remain unchanged. If our mindset remains unchanged, our future - ours, our children's, their children's - cannot be assured. There have been mass extinctions in the past resulting from natural causes; we do not intend to allow a future in which humanity may be the cause of the next one. We mean to live ourselves into a new way of thinking.
Our Guiding Principles for the year can be found at this link.
How are we going to achieve this?
Wellington has its Green Czar whose role is to promote and oversee our sustainability programme, and whose is responsible for creating and driving forward both institutional and personal changes in the College community's attitude to the environment.
As an institution, College needs to live out in its daily life a changed way of living to develop a transformed way of thinking in its community.
Most urgently we need to cut our carbon footprint. This requires a carbon audit and a consequent well publicized and well explained action plan for the College community to embrace.
The plan will be formulated by the Sustainability Committee whose membership will consist of both adults and pupils. Within the committee, Sustainability Target Action Groups (STAGs) will make Action Plans which will be regularly monitored.
The STAGs will be organised broadly to embrace the 'portals' that the government has set out for schools (http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/sustainableschools/upload/Sustainable_Schools_doorways.pdf ). These will be to start with:
Food and drink
Waste
Grounds and Gardens
Buildings, Water, Energy
IT
Transport and Travel
Purchasing
Local Wellbeing
We will add Inclusion and Participation and the Global Dimension later.
It will be the responsibility of the members of the Sustainability Committee to promote, encourage and monitor the College community's adoption of our Action Plans.
And we hope that the College community will come to see it as their responsibility as individuals to engage with the process of change. To those who say 'What difference does it make if I don't turn off a light?' we say:
'If a million people think like that, an individual will make no difference at all. But if a million people see turning off a light as important, and act accordingly, all those individuals will make a big difference. So turn off your lights, live differently, and you'll soon start to think differently.'
These ongoing processes will be supplemented by an annual Sustainability Week, an annual Sustainability Science and Design Challenge Prize, an annual Sustainability Art Prize, regular visiting speakers across the curriculum, allotments, and a flagship project. We are also looking into the feasibility of creating a Timbertop experience on the lines of Geeelong Grammar School in Australia (http://www.ggs.vic.edu.au/index.asp?menuid=060.050.020).
There will also be a weekly Sustainability Poster circulated both electronically and in hard copy.