Derek Ivester composts. He buys local produce. He teaches at a preschool founded on eco-friendly principles.
It would be hard to find anyone living a greener lifestyle.
Still, there is one person who puts him to shame. His daughter Ashlin, who is 5.
If Ashlin catches her father letting the water run while he brushes his teeth, she’ll let him have it. If Ivester mistakenly drops a brown paper towel in the recycling tub instead of the compost bowl, she’ll correct him.
And when a visitor recently used tissue paper to wipe her face and then proceeded to flush the tissue down the toilet, Ashlin could barely believe the offense.
“She said, ‘You are wasting water and paper!’ ” recalls Ivester with a smile.
As a child steeped in a go-green way of life, Ashlin needs no reminders. Placing banana peels in the compost pile and turning off lights when leaving the room is as automatic as lacing up sneakers and brushing her teeth (with the tap off, of course.)
“For her, it’s just second nature. Taking care of the earth is part of her consciousness. And quite honestly, she’s better schooled on this than me,” said Ivester of Atlanta.
Earth Day, an annual celebration honoring the planet with a string of green festivities, will take place later this month, on April 22. It started in 1970 with 20 million Americans turning out and kicking off a grass-roots effort to save the planet. This year, more than 1 billion people around the world are expected to mark Earth Day, making it the largest civic holiday in the world.
But for some children, every day is earth day.
An army of green kids are leading the charge in protecting the planet. They time their parents’ hot showers. They pester them to ditch bottled water. These little eco-warriors have their eyes on you, Mom and Dad.
‘Little earth police’
Last year on Earth Day, a group of young people launched “Green My Parents,” a mostly online forum encouraging young people to nag their parents (if necessary) until they get green results at home.
While parents may know more about math and grammar, many children are teaching — or at least reminding — their parents a thing or two about green living.
Tiyash Bandyopadhyay, an east Cobb mom to two sons ages 5 and 2, wants to encourage her children to keep a watchful eye on the family’s green practices. Bandyopadhyay, who founded bloggermoms.com, an online forum which has an ongoing dialogue on green living, plans to mark Earth Day by giving her kids the power to issue warnings and tickets when their parents break eco-friendly rules like leaving the water running or wasting food.
“I think it’s fun to empower children and to make them little earth police,” Bandyopadhyay said.
Sandra Steingraber, author of the new book “Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” said children have a natural affinity for the world around them — the plants, animals, lakes and streams — and are true believers in the role they can play in saving the earth. But Steingraber said the environmental crisis is far too urgent for children to take the lead.
“They are being used as ambassadors to take home environmental messages,” Steingraber said. “But we can’t look to our children to save the world.”
Steingraber believes that climate change, melting glaciers in the Arctic, species nearing extinction and a slew of other environmental woes require adults to make bigger lifestyle changes.
In her own household, her family has gotten rid of the clothes dryer and uses a push mower to cut the grass. Steingraber (who wrote the book “Living Downstream,” later turned into a documentary) also seeks out opportunities to speak and debate a variety of issues, including a push to end the use of pesticides on lawns. “Look, we are all musicians in a great orchestra, and it’s time to play ‘Save the World,’ ” she said. “It’s time we find our place in the orchestra.”
Learning together
In many schools and pre-schools, all things green are getting more attention as adults help mold children into environmental caretakers.
On-site gardening is becoming a standard part of the educational experience. At Sprouts day care in Norcross, children as young as 3 did an experiment with their garden by covering half of it with plexiglas to see if covering it would help the peas and lettuce germinate faster. An elementary class at First Montessori School of Atlanta in Sandy Springs has been weighing its trash for the past three years in an effort to try and cut down on waste. Through composting and efforts to eliminate all disposable containers in lunches and snacks, the daily weight of trash in the one classroom has gone from a high of 6 pounds to under 1 pound.
The Oakhurst Cooperative Preschool in Atlanta, founded with a green philosophy, encourages “zero-waste” lunches (no juice boxes or zippered plastic bags), has invested in real utensils and cloth napkins for schoolwide potlucks, and makes learning the green three R’s — reduce, reuse, recycle — as much a part of the curriculum as the ABCs.
At a recent green enrichment class, 4-year-olds went on a rock hunt, then turned their rocks into pet rocks. Science and the environment is a part of everything they do. When they set up obstacle courses, they set up with bottles needing to get to the correct recycling bins.
Christine Cox said her 3-year-old daughter Madeleine is leading by example. One day, Madeleine came home from the Oakhurst preschool and explained to her parents how you can compost crackers, but not cheese. The family now composts at home.
“I am not a gardener, and she came home one day recently and said, ‘What are we going to plant?’ ” Cox said. “So I guess I’ll learn, and we’ll learn together.”
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Tips to go green
Here are five ideas from local schools and preschools on eco-friendly activities you can do with your kids:
1. Start a garden. Talk about what vegetables you want to plant and let the kids get right into the dirt to plant, tend and pick the vegetables.
2. Start composting. Much of what’s left over on your dinner plate — the bread, pasta, fruit, etc.— can be composted and used for your garden, instead of filling up your trash can and eventually ending up in a landfill.
3. Get crafty. Get those cardboard boxes, cereal boxes, scraps of metals and other items from the recycling bin to make robots, wind chimes, even yard art.
4. Go on a nature walk. You don’t have to go far. You could likely stay in your neighborhood and see lots of cool critters, flowers and colorful rocks. Consider taking a field guide, magnifying glasses and binoculars.
5. Run a green 5K race. Beat the Street for Little Feet, a 5K race on April 23 in the Kirkwood neighborhood of Atlanta, features door prizes for runners who use alternative transportation or carpool to the race. There will be a Nike reuse-a-shoe drive, and reducing your carbon footprint the day of the race is encouraged. Details: www.oakhurstcoop.com.
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