“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” –Abraham Lincoln
Earth has worn many faces: The Devonian Period’s 20 foot tall fungal towers, the Carboniferous period, where scaly trees led to the mass creation of coal, the Archean period where cyanobacteria oxidized the atmosphere. The ebb and flow of everyone's favorite compound is the paintbrush that created the alien worlds of the past. The star of today's show is carbon dioxide. The flowing, crashing, chaotic, and melodious movements of this special molecule shaped our world—and continue to do so. What kind of future do we want? Or, rather, what kind of future can we live in? The scaled trees of the Carboniferous period locked away masses of carbon dioxide; and we are, slowly but surely, undoing the work of an eon. That eon shaped our world to be a place that life, life like us, can live in. We must learn to live with all our ingenuities by finding sustainable ways to power our evolutionarily unnatural lifestyles.
This all seems pretty big, right? How can we do anything to affect the totality of this great big world? How can we create the future we want to see, Abe? That’s the question—well, maybe not the exact question—that sparked discussion at Concord Academy’s very own Centennial Celebration. In “Designing for Resilience and Sustainability: The Future is Up to Us,” an event held as part of the Centennial Speaker Series, Lisa Dreier ’85 highlighted the ripple effect small actions can have. Deceivingly small changes on a personal, institutional, or systematic level can have huge impacts.
CA fosters these rippling changes through our Green Seed Fund. The mission statement of the Green Seed Fund says “The grant provides interested students opportunities to pursue and implement sustainability initiatives here on campus.” Chris Labosier, a biology and environmental science teacher at CA, serves as the main outreach coordinator for this year's Green Seed Fund. He describes the fund as an opportunity for students to lead in sustainability. “The [completed] projects will plant the seeds for what sustainability looks like at CA moving into the future,” Labosier remarks. The fund was founded by alumni from the class of 1972, and their legacy creates a catalyst for students at CA to start making those rippling changes. Labosier encourages students: “Be creative. Go big…Don’t settle for easy.” While the Green Seed Fund currently only applies to initiatives relating to CA, Labosier shares his hopes for the greater Concord community to be engaged. He noted, “The residents of Concord are key partners and stakeholders for CA.”
If you want to apply for the Green Seed Fund, it is not too late! While early October proposals are no longer being accepted, the fund also takes proposals in March. Making an impact on our planet takes time and effort, but opportunities like this fund is how we create the future we want to see.