Every April, as buds appear on the trees and the school grounds shake off winter, St. Michaels University School marks Earth Week with a question that is harder to answer than it looks: is caring enough?
For Humanities teacher Susan Vachon, a member of the SMUS Sustainability Council, it is a question she has wrestled with personally. The work of raising awareness about climate change can feel overwhelming, she told students at a recent Middle School chapel service. But a thought from historian and author Yuval Harari offered her a new frame: most of the complex problems facing the planet are human inventions, and because humans invented them, humans can solve them. When it comes to sustainability, the math is fairly simple. There just need to be more people who care about the natural world than people who don't.
Students shared reflections about how they have observed changes in places meaningful to them.
Grade 7 student Shang Shang L. described a favourite childhood spot, a hidden cove where she and her sister would sit on a bench tucked past the rocks and watch sea anemones and urchins in the shallows. She used to find beached jellyfish there and try to rescue them, curious about why so many appeared. The answer, she learned, was not a good one: jellyfish thrive when algae increases in polluted water, a sign that the ocean ecosystem is out of balance.
"It makes me concerned," she said, "not only for this little cove but for the ocean."
Grade 6 student Viviana X. described a small, tree-lined playground on a neighbour's property where she played freely as a child. It is off limits now. She hopes it stays the way it always was.
French teacher Valerie Pike brought the same spirit into everyday life with a focus on food waste. Even within the SMUS community, she noted, food that could have been eaten is thrown away every day. Globally, roughly a third of all food produced never reaches a plate.
Each student and staff member at the chapel service received a paper leaf to write one small action they committed to taking for the planet. Pike asked students to consider what it might look like to care just a little more about food waste. The message she planned to write on her own leaf: Love Food, Hate Waste.
For Vachon, the goal was to make sustainability feel less like an impossible problem and more like a shared one. A hallway bulletin board in the Middle School now holds the evidence: hundreds of paper leaves, each carrying a single handwritten pledge. One small intention per person, and together, they fill a tree.
