by Hilary Grant
Can a mother of three small children, sitting at her suburban kitchen table with pen in hand and cup of coffee nearby, change the planet?
If you’re Jill Buck, daughter of an Illinois coal miner, commissioned United States Naval officer and California State Assembly challenger, you already have.
Buck’s Go Green Initiative (GGI) program, which started at that table with a single goal -- to educate one child, one classroom, one school at a time about the necessity of recycling – is now the fastest growing environmental education program in the nation. In addition, it’s the largest program of its kind, currently operating in schools in 30 states, as well as the United Kingdom and Africa. Given those statistics, here’s another surprising fact: Go Green began just five years ago.
Why has GGI – which further exists on a shoestring budget, doesn’t go after grant money, and has nothing in its coffers for advertising or marketing – taken off so quickly?
“When school administrators look at Go Green, they can immediately see that it was written by someone familiar with, and sensitive to, the hectic daily lives of those working in the schools,” says Buck, who has also served two terms as a PTA president in Pleasanton, just east of San Francisco. “That includes teachers, administrators, custodians and parents. Plus, I’ve never felt like the lone ranger with this endeavor. From the very beginning, I’ve always encountered the same concern and willingness to work hard for our children, whether that’s coming from teachers or parents.”
What additionally makes GGI so user-friendly, continues Buck, is the fact that it has never taken “a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach.” For example, a school’s yearly Go Green budget can be zero dollars, while another school might set aside $20,000. To make that money, students (pitching in from one classroom, several, or even the whole school) can recycle cans, paper, water bottles, ink cartridges and cell phones. In turn, all of those contributions will fund that school’s Go Green budget.
Still other campuses, adds Buck, figure out through GGI’s web site how to secure corporate funding and/or seek out their own local donors. In some cases, entire towns have sponsored the program. “Bottom line: our schools are very self-sufficient and don’t require money from taxpayers, or us,” says Buck.
Teachers are especially happy to embrace GGI, too, she says, since making it work requires neither extra time nor study materials. “Schools that don’t want to add instructional minutes don’t have to. This isn’t a program about doing new things,” she emphasizes. “This is a program about doing what you already do, but in an environmentally responsible way.
“For example, when you’re done with a piece of paper, you’re going to put it somewhere. If there is a paper recycling box beside your trash can, it isn’t any more time-consuming to put the discarded paper in the recycling box than it is to put it in the trash and send it to the landfill. The same is true with plastic, aluminum, and anything else that can be recycled.”
What every GGI program should strive to do, says Buck, is teach at least three of what she calls “The Five Principles” – an idea that first took shape at that kitchen table.
Buck believes that these simple directives provide the framework for learning and then implementing environmentally responsible behaviors on campus. In order, the principles are this: Generate compost, Recycle everything, Educate students, parents and teachers, Evaluate the environmental impact of every activity, and Nationalize the principles of responsible paper consumption. (Kids also like the fact that when the first letter of each principle is written down, it spells GREEN.)
Creating those principles, much less founding GGI, was not something Jill Buck had ever planned to do. With her PTA hat on, she had been looking for an environmental education (most often called EE) program to match the need for one at her children’s elementary school. Doing that research, Buck says, taught her that while most of the curriculums gave out good and accurate information, they also provided little or no
follow-up action.
“Having a puppet show about recycling on Earth Day, then not having a systemic way for kids to practice what they’ve learned that day is ludicrous,” Buck explains. “It’s like having a puppet show about addition, and then never giving the kids the opportunity to practice math problems. So after weeks of research to find a fully comprehensive EE program that measured success in real terms, I realized there wasn’t one. So – whadaya gonna do – I wrote one myself!”
Thus came those hours at her kitchen table.
“When I first started writing, I had stacks of material around me, papers on environmental education and environmental issues from every conceivable source,” remembers Buck. “It was in the afternoon, and my two younger children, just three and five years old, were in the backyard playing. I distinctly remember feeling a great deal of hope, because what I was embarking on would help preserve the same sunny, green, safe and healthy environment for their kids, grandkids and great-grandkids…. I couldn’t wait any longer for the government, the Sierra Club or Greenpeace to fix the problems.”
Those who know Buck as a green activist mom might be astonished to learn that her roots in environmental awareness began, she says, during the 14 years she served with the armed services. “Most people think of the military as the organization with the $600 toilet seats,” says Buck, laughing. “But at the ground level, the military has always had conservative habits. In war, or in training for war, everything is rationed and conserved, because you can never be sure when your next meal, canteen of fresh water, or magazine of ammunition is coming. Even when I was a midshipman out doing field exercises on the weekends, we never left anything that didn’t belong there. We picked up after ourselves and would never consider littering the land we signed up to protect.
“I don’t know if the people I served with would label themselves ‘conservationists’ or ‘environmentalists,’” adds Buck. “But they would accurately label themselves ‘patriots,’ and conserving natural resources is part-and-parcel with patriotism. As for me, I always knew that I wanted to grow up to be a good citizen who served my community well, no matter what my vocation was.”
As a good citizen, Jill Buck is proof that it only takes one person to change Planet Earth. Just in the last two years, she says that all of the current GGI programs combined have avoided more than 15,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions; saved 1.3 billion gallons of water through paper recycling alone, and saved more than 64,000 cubic yards of landfill waste.
Where, then, does she see the future of the Go Green Initiative?
“I would love it if GGI went out of business, because a culture of conservation was so pervasive that we were no longer needed,” Buck says firmly. “Honestly, in 50 years from now, I hope no one even remembers that we existed. Because that would mean one thing: that no one could imagine a time when schools were anything but perfect role models for environmentally responsible behavior.”
Hilary Grant is a writer and filmmaker in Cambria. For more information about the Go Green Initiative program visit
www.gogreeninititative.org
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