America's Top Ten Coolest Schools - Sept/Oct 2011 - Sierra Magazine - Sierra Club
Students plow their way to the top of Sierra’s ‘Cool School’ rankings | greenrightnow.com | Dallas - Fort Worth
Cattle helped Green Mountain, in Poultney, Vermont, achieve climate neutrality. The school gets upward of half its energy from Central Vermont Cow Power, a utility that harnesses biogas from manure. Above, students learn to drive GMC's oxen for spring plowing. The school's agricultural projects are an experiment in fossil-free farming—instead of tractors, draft animals do much of the work. Score: 81.1
Students plow their way to the top of Sierra’s ‘Cool School’ rankings | greenrightnow.com | Dallas - Fort Worth
“The pendulum has really swung back to the age of these kids grandparents or great grandparents,” said Avital Binshtock, lifestyle editor of Sierra magazine, which just released its 5th annual Cool Schools rankings identifying the top green campuses.
“They’ve taken up knitting. They want to have chickens in their backyard and learn how to plant a plot of land.”
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Binshtock, who oversaw the 2011 Cool Schools project ranking 118 campuses for their climate-cooling practices, says research from multiple sources shows that a university’s commitment to sustainability is part of what students consider in selecting a school.
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9 comments:
Last time I saw the south end of a north bound mule over a plow was about 1967. Great fun, but we used tractors for real farm work. They really suck these rich city kids into going back to the 13th century, don't they. Are kids really that dumb? I knew it was going down hill when I left academia in 1976, but I didn't think the bottom was this far down.
I lived in Indonesia and the people there use oxen as you photo shows. However, they hope their children will get educated to enjoy a better standard of living with a big house, an SUV and a couple of plasma TV's. How dare the idiot greenies deprive these people of the developing countries this dream. The Indonesians want to live like Al Gore and his ilk, not like they have been living for centuries.
This may be "fun" for a while, but have these kids sign a 10 year contract and don't let them back into "advanced" civilization for that period. This is like Paris Hilton and "The Simple Life", not a new dedication to living like a third world country.
What they are NOT being taught is that the price of a Stone Age 'green' culture is an average life expectancy of 30 years. My ancestors have been diligently working at leaving that behind for centuries. I would be betraying my Heritage as a Homo sapiens to abandon that on the word of a self-anointed 'defender of the earth.'
These students all go home every evening to their air conditioned/heated homes, dorm rooms, or apartments, pick up some take-out food, turn on the flat-screen TV or iPod, climb on their laptops with wi-fi or iPhones, and blog/rave to their Facebook friends about how wonderful it is that they're living sustainably.
What they're doing here is a slap in the face of all the people in the world who have no choice but to live the way they're pretending to live for a couple hours every day. It's slumming at its worst, because they're also thumbing their noses at those who would sell themselves into slavery for the chance for their own kids to live the plush lives of these students for just one day. I live in a rural part of the country where people really do have to sell eggs and produce to get by, while these "green" posers think such a life is all the rage without ever truly living it beyond play-acting in this school play.
My grandfather was born in the 1890's and came to this country and worked like a dog in the coal mines. He also had a farm which provided everything that this family of seven consumed except salt, pepper, flour, sugar and tobacco...he smoked. He utilized everything. Not one thing went to waste. I'm now 65 and grew up on that farm and I know for a fact that my grandfather loved all the modern agricultural techniques as they became available.
I think it is wonderful that these kids are "going back to the 13th century" for three reasons. One, it is good for young people to know where food actually comes from and how it is produced. Two, They learn how hard it is to produce these commodities and three, because it won't be long before they become educated to the fact that everyone abandoned "all natural", "green” or “organic” agriculture for darned good reasons. That will be the beginning of wisdom for all of them.
There isn't an absolute need for them everywhere, bu a responsible adult ought to be in the Oval Office.
I remember seeing a hippie commune in 1967. The squalor would make one vomit. But some people have a taste for it, evidently, and there's little anyone can do.
And one would think the animal rights activists, PETA, and their sympathizers would have a heyday with this photo. The oxen needs to be replaced with about 12-20 strong young men. Of course, the amount of food being produced would have to increase across the board in order to provide sustenance to those pulling the plow, leading to an even greater amount of labor necessary.
As per Rich Kozlovich's comments, maybe these students will learn why our modern agricultural technologies evolved to the present methods. By the time a person spends 8-12 hours per day cultivating the produce needed for a family's daily/weekly sustenance, caring for and maintaining the health of the animals, there's not much time if any to spend learning readin', writin', and 'rithmetic, let alone hanging with your buds down at the coffee shop with a latte.
My first girlfriend in 1968 lived on a commune. There are two types of people there: half would cook, sew, raise animals, work gardens, chop wood, etc., and the other half smoked pot, drank beer and slept. She couldn't hack the freeloaders and left. I might add that every bit of socialism was beaten out of her in those 6 months, she's been a conservative ever since.
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