Baltimore schools drive home pope’s message for sustainable environment

Schools around the Archdiocese of Baltimore, like Kermit the Frog, are finding “it’s not easy being green.”

Baltimore-area schools are doing their best, though, to transform the landscapes and practices on campuses to find ways to embrace Pope Francis’ leadership for a seven-year journey toward “Integral Ecology” that he announced in his encyclical letter “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home.”

Included among the pope’s seven goals are: responding “to the cry of the Earth;” ecological sustainability as well as ecological education and community engagement. School administrators and educators are adding curriculum and making infrastructure changes, often driven by the passion of their students.

Hands-on at NDP

At Notre Dame Preparatory School in Towson, students experience hands-on environmental awareness in an Advanced Placement environmental science course with a new service-learning component.

In the fall, NDP began offering a course that focuses on the loss of biodiversity in the environment due to development and pollution. Students work on natural-habitat and stream restoration, looking at everything from invasive species to water quality.

Rusty Kahl, chairman of the NDP science department, said the pope’s mission dovetails with the School Sisters of Notre Dame’s mission to educate “young women to transform the world.”  

NDP students combine course work with a service component, Kahl said, by assisting the Baltimore County Department of Environmental Protection and Sustainability with fish counts in streams at Cromwell Valley Park.

“We are trying to teach the students how they can be advocates,” said Kahl, who also noted that NDP already was committed to litter pick-up programs in neighboring green spaces. “The students are gung-ho about the hands-on part. The pope seems very concerned about care for creation. But society doesn’t change overnight, and we are trying to teach our students to effect change. We are teaching them to advocate for change locally as well as globally.”

Transformation

At Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Essex, Alex Brylske led a project that transformed school and parish grounds. He now leads a campaign to build an outdoor classroom.

Brylske knows the challenges of channeling both environmental consciousness and storm-water runoff.

“It doesn’t happen overnight,” said Brylske, who spent 14 years as a student at Mount Carmel and has been a teacher and athletic director for the past decade. “Nature is nature. It takes time.”

Mount Carmel has witnessed the fruits of an environmental transformation. With grants and guidance from Gunpowder Valley Conservatory, the school and church installed two rain gardens, six retention ponds and one bayscape. They also planted 10 native trees during a project that started in 2018.

The gardens and ponds help curb runoff and also serve as living environmental classrooms for students. That’s the idea behind Mount Carmel’s latest push to build an outdoor classroom. Children can interact with the butterflies, tadpoles and birds that Brylske said are now regularly attracted to spots that were once derided as potential “mosquito ponds.”

The outdoor classroom also will be used as a meditative space by the church.

Brylske grew up near the water in Bowleys Quarters and knows the benefits of a healthy environment. The avid hiker and sailor said Mount Carmel is in a unique spot to promote the pope’s mission.

“We’re a stone’s throw from the Chesapeake Bay,” he said. “Having these things on campus helps the message resonate. It’s a very key component for our teachers to be able to utilize the outdoor space to convey that message.”

‘Free Fridays’ 

At The Catholic High School of Baltimore, a certified Maryland Green School, Colleen Guler is the moderator of the Green School Club as well as the chairperson of the social studies department. She has seen the mission for the care of the planet in action at the East Baltimore school. 

“As a Franciscan school, it’s ingrained in the school as part of our mission,” Guler said. “It’s something the students are very passionate about. They come up with all of the ideas and I just moderate.”

Students swung into action recently when Baltimore City stopped making recycling collections for institutions. With recyclables piling up because of the pandemic, Catholic High students have found alternative ways to recycle what would otherwise go to landfills.

Students also have visited other schools to present PowerPoint projects on environmentally conscious uses of water. They’ve held fundraisers for water projects in Haiti and Africa and installed an outdoor classroom and a bio-retention pond. Students also have planted bay grasses and contributed to artificial reefs in Chesapeake Bay.

They even preach to their elders, producing a newsletter on better environmental practices that goes home to parents.

Lent is a particularly active time of year when the green club hosts “Free Fridays.” During Lent, students strive to free their campus of a particular ecological detriment each week. The club hosts waste-free lunches, avoids using disposable bottles, limits paper waste and reduces the use of unnatural light. 

“I’d like to see us do more, like getting rid of the plastic bottles in the vending machines,” Gruler said. “The key is to teach people sustainable environmental practices, and the students are the ones doing that.”

Focus on sustainability

It’s also a group effort to push the pope’s mission at local colleges. Loyola University Maryland recently unveiled several initiatives that promote Pope Francis’ environmental cause.

The North Baltimore campus initiated climate-action and energy-management plans and constructed a new green facility, the Miguel B. Fernandez Family Center. The university also sponsors a community-focused farmers’ market and several other environmental-education initiatives.

Loyola is pushing to become carbon neutral by 2050 and bolster its use of sustainable energy, said Tracy Harvey, the school’s newly hired director of sustainability. Loyola also has started a pilot program to reduce food and plastic waste.

“There’s a lot of work to do,” Harvey said. “Fortunately, we already have a lot of champions to rally the campus around the effort. Students here are very passionate about sustainability. We’re trying to take a holistic approach involving academics, research and the administration.”

Harvey said the university’s goal is to develop what the pope called “ecological spirituality.” She noted that Loyola sits on nearly 80 acres and its campus is a certified arboretum.

“There’s a lot of stuff in the works on campus that the students are really excited about,” Harvey said of Loyola, which now offers a degree in sustainability management.

Email Gerry Jackson at gjackson@CatholicReview.org

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