On Thursday, November 30th, Fieldston students flocked to the quad to enjoy many delicacies including decadent, chocolate-filled cookies, plump jelly-stuffed donuts dusted with sugar, brightly colored cupcakes frosted with sweet icing and many other sweet treats, all for the cause of saving our environment.
The Environmental Club serves an integral role in uniting the Fieldston community through a goal of making the school a more ecological place by teaching sustainable practices, ensuring that climate change and sustainability remain on the minds of community members and organizing many other specific initiatives each year. This year, the Environmental Club found a fun way to engage the community and promote petitions addressing various environmental problems in our country by hosting a free bake sale. The bake sale did not require money; students only had to scan a QR code to sign petitions. As Genevieve Paul (Form VI), a leader of the Environmental Club for over five years says, “We did a similar thing last year except we had slips of paper with emails to representatives on them. While that was really effective, it also used up a lot of paper and then required members of the club to sort through the slips of paper, organize them, and mail them. This was a much more effective and sustainable way of doing this kind of bake sale.” The QR code led to three petitions for students to sign.
The first petition, called “Save Community Composting Now”, asked the city council for help in urging Mayor Adams not to eliminate community composting. Compost projects such as GrowNYC and the New York City Compost Project serve the New York City community throughout all the boroughs and, as a whole, composting organizations redirect more than 8.3 million pounds of waste from landfills. These organizations serve an essential purpose in combating climate change and budget cuts of these programs will result in a loss of over 115 green jobs, a loss of the provision of soil for parks and gardens and much more. The petition urges Mayor Adams to stop the budget cuts and guarantee funding for these programs.
The second petition, “Treeage”, calls on Mayor Adams and the City Council to annually invest 1.8 billion dollars in green, healthy schools. The majority of public schools rely on fossil fuels as their source of energy, which leads to public schools being one of the biggest polluters in New York City. Additionally, lots of public schools are built next to highways, filling schools with extremely dangerous air pollutants. Children deserve healthy schools to learn and grow in. The petition calls on the New York State Legislature, Mayor Adams, and the City Council to invest $1.8 billion annually by 2030 to become a net-zero school district.
The third petition, “Petition to President Biden: Declare a Climate Emergency”, urges the Biden Administration to declare a climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act. Without this declaration, the ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions has been hindered. Declaring a climate emergency would allow for the redirection of disaster relief funds toward renewable energy construction, marshal companies’ ability to fast-track renewable transportation and generate power cleanly as well as reinstate the oil export ban.
The bake sale exceeded all expectations, garnering a multitude of signatures from the Fieldston community. Environmental awareness started decades ago with the slogan “Think globally, act locally”. This event epitomizes the local action that we can take as a community in order to make a difference. We look forward to more opportunities from the Environmental Club to raise awareness and take action for climate change!
