Sustainable Environment
The Hawbridge School is working closely with the Institute for the Environment at UNC-Chapel Hill to ensure that our graduates are well-prepared to enter this and similar programs nationwide. Dr. Douglas Crawford-Brown, the Institute's Director, has served on the Hawbridge Board of Directors and currently is Curriculum Consultant at Hawbridge, assisting the faculty in writing the school's Environmental Studies curriculum. UNC students and members of the Epsilon Eta Honor Fraternity in the Institute also are working with the hawbridge Faculty to plan the Sustainable Environment Interdisciplinary Unit, scheduled for the month of April, 2008. The EE students mentor Hawbridge students, tutor, and teach occasionally in Dr. Johnson's Earth Science classes, as well.
Renowned environmentalist Aldo Leopold’s writings in his monumental book, A Sand County Almanac, will structure the Sustainable Environment Unit. Leopold developed the concept of a Land Ethic, and Hawbridge School students and faculty consider environmental stewardship a problem of ethics. Ph.D. candidates from the UNC-Chapel Hill Philosophy Department will conduct a short course on the ethics of environmental stewardship during the April unit.
Art students will use quotes from Leopold’s book as inspiration for paintings and other works. One beautiful example is this:
…visit the sandbar on some bright morning just after the sun has melted the daybreak fog. The artist has now laid his colors, and sprayed them with dew. The Eleocharis sod, greener than ever, is now spangled with blue mimulus, pink dragon-head, and the milk-white blooms of Sagittaria. Here and there a cardinal flower thrusts a red spear skyward. At the head of the bar, purple ironweeds and pale pink joe-pyes stand tall against the wall of willows. And if you have come quietly and humbly, as you should to any spot that can be beautiful only once, you may surprise a fox-red deer, standing knee-high in the garden of his delight.
The Sustainable Environment Unit will feature workshops with a host of local and organic farmers. Hawbridge School is applying for status as a Chez Panisse Foundataion School Lunch Initiative site since produce from the school’s teaching garden is used daily in lunches. Award winning organic farmer Kevin Meehan’s students in the Sustainable Agriculture classes are selling what the school does not use at the Carrboro Farmers’ Market.
Field trips to Benjamin Wineries in Saxapahaw, to the North Carolina Zoo, and to DuPont State Forest will be taken during this unit.
This unit's information will continue to be updated.