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Thomas: This, to me, is an example of the right use of planning. Not only does it work economically by reducing the taxes through lower spending, but it provides a hands on experience for the students of proper environmental design at a most effective and impressionable time in the life of future adults. Much of our knowledge comes from books and teaching/learning - true. And much comes from the environment in which we grow up. I know that much of my sense of what's right comes from my childhood on the farm, traveling across North America on family vacations, playing in schoolyards, going to government parks and camping. I try to replicate some of my memories for my children, but for many kids, it is daycare while mom and dad work, eviction from schoolyards because there is no supervision, TV propagating mindless social values such as Friends and The Simpsons. Respectfully, Thomas Lunde EarthVision Reports 07/21/99 LOS ANGELES, July 21, 1999 - The enormously expansive Los Angeles Unified School District is giving itself an expensive facelift - tearing out thousands of acres of asphalt at hundreds of campuses and replacing it with grass and trees. Each school, according to an article published today in The Los Angeles Times, is developing its own landscaping plan. The district is footing the bill of about $190 million, money that is partly from a 1997 school construction bond and partly from the Department of Water and Power's Cool Schools program. Concurrent to all the "greening," the district has also launched a program it is calling "sustainable schools," a term meant to suggest that each campus should produce its own energy, collect its own water and feed its own students. Although those lofty goals are not likely to happen anytime soon, The Times said in the article that each school will work hard to "become less of a drag on public resources." Some of the options currently being considered are solar panels on rooftops to generate electricity, and cisterns to capture rainwater for irrigation. The district is even considering building tunnels under classrooms to bathe the students in air cooled to the constant 55-degree underground temperature. According to the article, the main inspiration for the Los Angeles initiative is the sketchbooks of Scott Wilson, a landscape architect and environmental visionary who is the founder of North East Trees, an organization that has planted thousands of trees across California's Arroyo Seco basin in the last decade. Associated Link: [1]North East Trees 1. http://www.treelink.org/act/mem/netree.htm 2. http://204.255.211.112/ColdFusion/news_top10.cfm?start=1 |
Title: Some sanity Planning
