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The annual environmental prize |
The project was an environment project, which partly wanted to achieve some nature protective results, and partly wanted to make people learn to protect the environment. By offering three prizes a year for the best projects the board of the Foundation wished to be instigator of many initiatives. The board imagined that the existing wish on many of the schools within the School Cooperation Tvind to take good care of the environment, would be turned into concrete plans at the occasion of arranging the Annual Environmental Prize. In November 1994 the board of the Foundation took the initiative to institute the Annual Environmental Prize. The intentions were - as stated in the board's announcement of the environmental prize:
Up to 300,000 Dkr were granted. The prizes to be distributed annually were: the use of a Landrover for one year as a first prize, a second prize of 10,000 Dkr, and a third prize of 5,000 Dkr - to be used for the protection of the natural environment. In the last decades of the 20th century, a combination of well-intentioned environmental activists and more sensationalistic "couch debaters" worked up a general atmosphere of the global environment being so threatened, that it could not be saved. This atmosphere of catastrophe was difficult to handle and to transform into anything else but a vague fear. On the one hand it was indeed correct, that there were good reasons to sound the alarm - our planet was threatened. On the other hand, the ascertainment of this fact is seldom enough for people to hereafter realize, what they should do about it - save the baby seals; plant trees in the desert; protect the whales; collect money to save the panda; clean a water stream; put up signs in the forests against littering; write a letter to the editor about oil pollution .......? By instituting the Annual Environmental Prize the board of the Foundation wanted to focus on the gravity of the issue and get students and teachers to relate to it and thereafter act "transformingly". The understanding and the insight start with the individual person. Every morning I run five kilometers along the old closed down railway track, but I gladly stop when the warbling of the birds comes too close, when the deer crosses the track, or when the spring water gurgles among the beech leaves. How do we learn to "take notice of". Take notice of the nature, listen to the nature, feel the rhythms of the year and the seasons changing. We educate our children much too little in these questions during their schooling. "To take notice of" is the basis for change, because if one does not take notice of the singing birds, then one will not be surprised that they some day might not be there at all. The teacher's task is to create the situations, where the interest of the students is awakened, teaching them to "take notice of" and thereby to change. The School Cooperation Tvind has been known to work with environmental questions in our many years of school work. To mention a few examples; energy classes which produced solar heaters and wind mills, school camps in nature, a zoological garden with extensive information for children and youth, a center for horse back riding and cross-country running. We have persistently worked on getting our students to experience nature close up, we are known to cross the oceans in our large wooden sailing ships, and every year we participate in the Danish championships in ballooning. The Tvindmill is a big ongoing energy project, which has had a big influence on those students who have been close to it. The students at Tvind Friskole got acquainted with a special worm species, Tennessee Wicklers, which has the special characteristic of multiplying very rapidly. One million Tennessee Wicklers were added to the pig manure, and the result was a good compost, used for a big green house, where we cultivated the best cucumbers and tomatoes. We have had many teams of students at the Traveling Folk High Schools, who after having been trained in tree planting in Denmark have traveled to Africa as participants on tree planting projects for the benefit of the environment and for many villages. We have participated in the clean up of beaches, stayed in home build bivouacs, and been on survival trips and canoe trips and experienced the transformation of the students from people environmentally ignorant, to people taking notice of each other and of nature. Children and youth who have often known only backyards and concrete pavements, have become acquainted with the wonderful gifts of nature, and we have seen them begin to perceive and take interest in changing what did not look nice for the better. Environmental projects have a very big influence, when they involve many people. The participation in the process itself - and the acknowledgment of one self as a more experienced person when the process is finished - is a good experience. At the same time it is this experiential process, which is of the very greatest significance for the global environment. Ever so many experts can have ever so many opinions about our immediate or more remote environment, but when we have not had a more personal access, our interest is much smaller. In this matter adults are not very different from children and youth. Children and youth and other people learn the most and experience the most, and can therefore also contribute the most, when they have been close to the issue in question, and have transformed their knowledge into practical projects. The time you got wet feet in a big moor, while you were out listening to the nightingale; the time you together with your class got six liters of water heated through an elaborate system of radiators and tubes and sealed glass; the time you were part of breaking the sod for the Tvindmill with a small spoon in your hand. The actions can be very small in scale, but they will be remembered, and this is where the forces of change speed up. Ten projects were announced in April 1995 by ten different schools. They concerned the development of forest areas, an environmental conference about India, recycling systems, solar heaters, becoming a "green school", preserving the bird life, beach investigations, green houses, the energy consumption of the school, beach clean up, saving campaigns and waste sorting, energy patrols, cleaning of coastal areas together with others, etc. The Foundation evaluated the ten applications with decisive emphasis on what the applicants had carried out in practice. Two of the applicants were considered qualified for a shared third place. One was 'Friskolen' in Tvind with the protection of Tvind's bird life by setting up 100 nesting boxes, bird tables and producing winter feed for the birds. The other one was Asserbohus Continuation School with a three week educational course aiming at mapping and changing the school's own energy consumption. The Foundation instituted the Annual Environmental Prize, but did not get great support for this special initiative. It was no doubt a decisive factor that the special legislation against "Tvind" in 1996 had the effect that the schools no longer were allowed to see themselves as a cooperation, and that the Annual Environmental Prize then lost its meaning to these specific schools. The above examples, however, do not bear witness to a lack of interest, but on the contrary to a many-sided effort within the environmental field on the schools having their origin in Tvind. |
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