Greening Bedales

“Going green is highly fashionable, but going green seriously is not a fad:
it is a major commitment. We are in this for the long term.”

Keith Budge, Headmaster of Bedales, comments on the Greening Bedales conferences, held on 8 September 2007.

What does it mean to go green, if you are really serious about it?

A green philosophy should permeate everything we do. Bedales, by virtue of its ethos, and its history of liberalism, should be a leader among eco-friendly schools. Our initial aim is to become carbon-neutral. We could do it the easy way, by contributing to a carbon-offset fund; or we could go for a quick fix with technology – wind turbines are relatively cheap at the moment, because they are subsidised. But this would miss the point. We would be distancing ourselves from the problem by spending money, not changing fundamental beliefs and behaviours.

Some of our students questioned the scientific evidence for global warming, and others asked what is the point of switching off lights in the UK when pollution in China is increasing massively. The advice from the experts is that we have a social responsibility to act, and to act soon. Bedales has always emphasised that individuals have a duty to their community; consuming fewer natural resources is one way to fulfil this duty.

The second lesson from the conference and our advisers is that there is no one-shot solution. Bedales has a long history of constructing buildings out of wood – which is a renewable resource – but then we heat them using fossil fuel, which is not. We try to source food locally, but it still has to be trucked in. We could make more use of our 120-acre estate to grow food or to grow fuel – but this would be a large and complex undertaking. We must question everything we do.

And thirdly, students and staff must want to support the Greening Bedales campaign. Ideally, that would go for parents, too. The initiative will not work if it is seen as just another chore, so the experts believe we must find a mixture of carrot and stick to change behaviour and attitudes. As a start, we will publish figures for our energy consumption, so that the school can see immediately the effect of measures to cut waste.

Going green is highly fashionable, but going green seriously is not a fad: it is a major long-term commitment. We have taken the best available advice, and this is what it tells us. Altogether it will take a year to produce a comprehensive plan for greening Bedales. Putting the plan into action – insulating all our older buildings to the highest standards, for instance – could take ten or fifteen years after that. We are in this for the long term.

Green policy