I used to arrive on the Stone Ridge campus and be greeted by lush, woody foliage and wide lawns. As a lower schooler, I might have seen deer–or even a fox–cruising around campus near the playground during recreation. Those animals called the campus woods their home. As a middle schooler, I might have walked through those woods on the way to soccer practice, surrounded by the sounds of nature, birds chirping and leaves crunching beneath my feet.
Now, as an upper schooler, I see a forest that has receded considerably. I see a turf field that has replaced the lawn that once hosted my Stone Ridge MSI soccer practices. I see a trailer that sits atop the lawn that once served as a sunny outdoor classroom last year in AP English Language and Composition with Ms. Fontanone.
And naturally, many might consider the reduced woods, modern turf field, and impinging trailer contributions to lacking environmental health on campus. However, despite Stone Ridge’s current external appearance, our school has indeed made a few internal, though perhaps less recognizable, shifts toward being a more environmentally friendly academic institution.
Mr. Osberg, Director of Finance and Operations, relates that “a small portion of [the trailers] house tech offices.” The other three-quarters of the trailers “will become music classrooms, mainly for the lower and middle school students, as that program has been growing over the past few years, [and] we’ve been running out of space.” They’ve encroached into the sunken garden because “we have younger students coming from the lower and middle schools, [and] it’s right off of their hallways.” He also comments on the convenient proximity of bathrooms.
Current Third Academics in Ms. Fontanone’s AP English Language and Composition class will not experience the same Friday afternoons that I spent in the sunken garden discussing William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. A new technology trailer now uses that space. Says Ms. Fontanone, “While I can appreciate the need for new space and realize that this is a temporary fix, it’s been disappointing to not have the usual spot. But we’ve been able to accommodate our needs by checking out various areas on campus,” she remarks hopefully. It has been a “minor inconvenience.”
The trailers won’t be permanent, as we’re leasing them, says Mr. Osberg. Once the Board [of Trustees] decides to build the Performing Arts Center as part of the long-term campus enhancement plan, we will get rid of the temporary trailers. However, those temporary fixtures will continue to intrude in the sunken garden for “likely several years,” according to Mr. Osberg. He then voices the school’s plan to “do some replanting around [the sunken garden] to return it to how pretty it was before.”
It’s not news to most of us who attended Stone Ridge before its major investment in a turf field that that development chopped down many trees on campus. However, the turf field did not take its toll solely on those trees, but also on all of the interconnected elements of our campus ecosystem that were once dependent on them–the species that once formed their habitats within them, the greenhouse gases once absorbed by them.
In AP Environmental Science, we watched part of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, which symbolically conveys the devastating effects of deforestation, including its unanticipated consequences. The Lorax “speaks for the [truffula] trees, for the trees have no tongues,” and against the indirect consequences of deforestation on the swans, fish, and humans.
Lena Bakalian, ’16, the Fourth Academic Social Action Leader of the environment rotation, shows the First Academic students that she teaches The Lorax during their on-campus learning day because it explains “overconsumption of our resources and [its] aftermath […] in a very down-to-earth, relatable way.”
Mr. McGhee, Director of Athletics, also comments on the environmental health of the turf field. When a decision was being made regarding the type of cork to be used, cork was chosen because “it is organic and matches the goals and criteria of environmental concern.” In creating the turf field, “sustainability was very important.”
Maddie Carr, ’16, who uses the turf field during her soccer and lacrosse seasons, describes its benefits. “Games used to be cancelled all the time when we [played on] grass,” comments Carr. “Now, there are rare occasions on which games have to be cancelled because of the weather. The flat, balanced, and professional surface is good for injury prevention.”
Yet the fact that a new turf field, instead of the trees, is now outside of Ms. Johnson’s window “makes [her] sad.” She “used to look out her window and see deer sometimes,” but she “no longer see[s] them out there.”
In compensating for the trees cut down, Stone Ridge has planted new trees elsewhere. Ms. Johnson really appreciates Stone Ridge’s effort to “keep sustainability in mind by replanting the trees.” However, she questions the rise of a “monoculture [in which] trees are just being replanted [or] an increase in efforts to restore natural habitats that other animals can survive in.”
The Here and Now reached out to Montgomery County’s Department of Environmental Protection for detailed stipulations regarding replanting trees. Laura Miller, the Forest Conservation Coordinator, explained that if a school were to cut down a considerable number of trees, it would need to first look for another location to replant those trees on property, and if sufficient space were not available, it would need to buy acres of land to replant on within a forest bank.
Mr. Osberg explains that “Montgomery County [has] pretty strict requirements about ‘forced conservation.’” As such, “we’ve planted new trees around the field. In addition to that, we bought into […] a forest bank. So we paid, if I recall [correctly], around $130,000 for trees that will be planted somewhere else in the County.”
According to Mr. Osberg, Stone Ridge planted a total of 4.63 acres of trees in the Stoney Springs development, on the south side of West Offutt Road near Poolesville, Maryland. We have indeed made an effort to compensate for the lost trees.
Does planting new trees in a different ecosystem equate to relocating the old ones? That ecosystem “will never be the same,” suggests Ms. Johnson. She notes that being mindful of sustainability “is a great priority when we do this development on campus.” She then proceeds to pose a compelling question to the entire Stone Ridge community: “If we are [cutting down trees], what else can we do better to help counteract the effects?”
When I was in Middle School, Stone Ridge initiated a school-wide composting system. Says Ms. Johnson, composting essentially “keeps things out of landfills, which contribute to climate change, and can be used as natural fertilizer, which is better for the environment than synthetic fertilizer.”
We middle schoolers initially had some trouble dividing our lunches into the respective composting, recycling, and waste bins in the Multipurpose Room. Years after our launch into the world of composting, “the Upper School has a reputation for being the worst offenders of not sorting [its] trash and compost properly,” according to Ms. Johnson.
Dubbed “Queen of Composting,” Liv Anderson, ’16, relates that “while recycling is effective, [composting] really breaks down food instead of putting it into landfills. It’s an alternative to creating more waste [and a] way to reuse [food].”
Aside from our daily environmental efforts at lunchtime, our entire community has benefited the environment through its progressive shift from Word Documents into the world of Google Docs. “Using Google Docs will allow you to share and collaborate on documents without using extra paper,” explains Mr. Rosenberg, Upper School Educational Technologist. “That in and of itself is a way to prevent multiple printouts. Any collaboration with a teacher through commenting is certainly going to save time and printouts and energy being used for that […] And certainly, not using paper resources helps, [as it involves] logging [in order to] generate the paper resources that we use.”
Both composting and our use of Google Docs have been school-wide, transformative shifts. But even in the classroom, our school does make efforts to be more environmentally friendly.
Ms. Johnson, for instance, invites her students to hand in most assignments in digital form via email, welcomes assignments turned in on recycled or GOOS (good on one side) paper, and encourages them to use the smallest practical margins and fonts.
Though we have visibly altered the natural campus beauty that I grew up surrounded by, I take comfort in the fact that we are moving toward sustainability internally, specifically in the lunchroom and in the classroom; I am confident that those internal shifts will eventually expand outside of our school’s walls.
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