Poly has a unique place in New York City. Among other things, we have acres of open space, studded with trees, ponds, a greenhouse and gardens. Our campus, well-maintained by a skilled and hard-working staff, looks great as we walk to and from class, our vehicles, or to one of our beautiful outdoor facilities. But that green expanse also represents an unrealized opportunity on many levels: as a place to brighten our moods, as a laboratory for sustainable urban practice, and (most importantly) as an educational tool. 

Not enough has been done to capitalize on the potential of Poly’s natural environment, especially the park-like front of our campus. Except for sports, recess and occasional outside classes, our grounds exist largely apart from the life of the school. Not only have we failed to consistently use the land as a “living classroom,” we have largely missed the opportunity to adopt sustainable practices more widely. With a few exceptions, like Ms. White’s gardening work with the seventh grade, this is a concern throughout our institution. Last year we got evidence of one major problem when the city posted energy efficiency ratings on our buildings. According to the New York Times, buildings of over 25,000 square feet “must submit their latest annual energy-use data, which comes from the utility companies that service them, to an online tool created by the Environmental Protection Agency… letter grades [are] based on the scores generated by the E.P.A. tool: D’s will go to the energy guzzlers” getting scores of 54 or below on a 100 point scale. Last year, Poly received a 9, down from 37 three years ago. It’s true that our physical plant is extraordinarily challenging. We have old buildings that flow into outdoor spaces, creating many conservation challenges. And to give credit where it’s due, this year we got our number up to 17. But it seems worth noting that we’ve had no real sustainability staff on campus during the time that our (already failing) score went down by dozens of points. 

In my time as a teacher and parent, I’ve noticed how upsetting it is to young people when adults say one thing but do another. This can be seen as an unfortunate inconsistency, or more harshly, it may be labeled hypocrisy, but either way, it is a hard pill to swallow. And it has consequences. This generation of students has been raised by adults who have say lot of the “right” things about the environment. We use words like “sustainability” and “environmental justice.” We make heroines out of people like Greta Thunberg, Jane Goodall and Wangari Maathai. We tuck our kids in at night with characters like the Lorax, who speaks for the trees, and we may even paused on the book’s last line: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing’s going to get better. It’s not.” But in most of the places that young people look, they adults are not living up to these ideals. 

We can do better. With thoughtful and well-constructed mechanisms, we can rise above normal practice and achieve a better ecological balance, which would pay dividends in human health, psychological well-being and social justice. In recent decades, a “green schools” movement has begun, and some schools, both public and private, are now leaders in the field. Poly can be said to have joined the movement at one time, hiring a Director of Sustainability for about six years. (His tenure ended as he moved to another state, and the role was never refilled.) However, since COVID, that momentum has been largely lost, despite predictions of a rapidly changing climate in New York itself. 

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the research is clear on the harms of inaction. Our city has been battered by a range of climate-driven natural disasters, from hurricanes to flooding rains to fires that have filled our lungs with smoke, shocking longtime locals who remember November as a time for winter coats, not red flag fire warnings. On a global scale, a study published this decade in The Lancet concluded that “pollution still causes more than 9 million deaths each year globally.” Another Lancet study found that 84 percent of young people were worried about climate change. The authors added that “based on our results, children and young people would benefit from having a social discourse in which their thoughts and feelings are respected and validated, and their concerns are acted upon by people in positions of power.” The authors ended their article on a surprisingly personal tone, noting “We wish that these results had not been quite so devastating. The global scale of this study is sufficient to warrant a warning to governments and adults around the world, and it underscores an urgent need for greater responsiveness to children and young people’s concerns.” 

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported in November that “countries have made scant progress in curbing their greenhouse gas emissions over the past year, keeping the planet on track for dangerous levels of warming this century.” And that was before the current administration in Washington moved to “shutter environmental offices across the government,” in the words of the Washington Post. 

Poly students regularly ask me why the school isn’t doing more, or how they can help the school do better. Answers have been hard to find, but in a way, that isn’t terribly surprising. Issues of sustainability are complex, they have no human face or voice and so they are widely ignored. We walk unknowingly past plants and animals that perform vital ecological functions. The last living member of a species can’t appeal to us with a moving speech before it disappears forever. And we couldn’t see the 400th part per million of CO2 that entered our atmosphere, though its emission took us across a significant risk threshold. Despite these gaps in our perception, though, such phenomena are real and they matter. 

Rectifying all of this will be slow and challenging, but the potential to do good is enormous. And, I’m happy to say, there is good news to report, at least as far as Poly is concerned. I recently visited the Gordon School, currently the professional home of Dr. Noni Thomas-López, Poly’s next Head of School. I was thrilled by most of what I saw, and particularly thrilled to see their sustainability program, which is ably helmed by the school’s “Green Dean,” Cushman Gillen. Their program is impressive, joyful, varied, and sustainable in multiple ways, not least because so many different people there embrace it. 

I came back with a few lessons. The first is the importance of centering positivity and joy in a sustainability program. The students at Gordon are gardening, recycling, composting, and playing in on-campus forests and creeks. They go outdoors to have fun, and when they go outdoors, they see multiple sustainability programs at work. So kids connect sustainability with what they love and enjoy, which is how it should be. (My experience with Service Learning has reinforced over and over again the importance of connecting joy to the things we value.) Gordon students are also learning about the environment in a variety of ways. The school has hosted sustainability conferences, engaged in environmental service learning, and used sophisticated benchmarking systems to track its progress on a range of metrics. But most of all, the students there are enjoying and learning from the natural environment, and there’s no reason that we can’t do the same at Poly. 

Embracing this kind of program will require change, and meaningful change will require time, staffing and resources. But at a moment when we’re surrounded by so much bad news on the environment, wouldn’t it be amazing to make some positive change right here at Poly? The right approach could build on Poly’s unique location and grounds to give our school a position of leadership in this field. We have the potential to become a sustainability exemplar, showing other schools how environmental policies can benefit everyone at a school. Poly can be a place where community members feel empowered to engage seriously and honorably with this challenging issue, and where young leaders come to begin their journeys in this field. And we can do it with joy. 

So that’s my “hot” take. Poly can be, and should be, a school that others look to when they want to understand how to lead on sustainability. So let’s make it happen. I hope you’ll join me in the process. It should be quite a ride. 

The Polygon is launching a new column in the Opinions Section called Teachers’ Take, where we invite faculty members to share their thoughts on anything related to Poly, the Poly teacher experience, or the world beyond Poly. Got a hot take your itching to share with the Poly community? Send your pitch to Opinions Editor Brianna Sylvain or Faculty Adviser Rachael Allen.