Earth Day began with suppressed laughter as Tyreis M. ‘25 introduced Julia Cavicchi of Rich Earth Institute, a Brattleboro-based non-profit whose work explores urine as an alternative fertilizer source. All jokes aside, ‘peecycling’ offers an alternative to fertilizers whose extractive and energy-intensive production process contributes mightily to GHG emissions, and whose application has been demonstrated to wreak all kinds of ecological havoc. Billed as a project that aims towards establishing reciprocity between body and planet, ‘peecycling’ is just one way non-governmentals are exploring creative solutions to climate crises. Rich Earth Institute is part of a budding network of nonprofits who are exploring the viability of ‘vitamin-pee’ as an ecologically responsible nitrogen fertilizer that reimagines the typical linear “take-make-waste” model of wastewater treatment. 

Fun fact: each day we produce enough nutrients through urine to grow enough wheat for a full loaf of bread…

Julia’s morning session was an inspired start to a full day of Earth Day programming organized by seniors Tyreis M., Aaron M., and Will P.. Tyreis’s Senior Project involves creating community through climate education, an idea he says was partially inspired by the Harris Center for Conservation Education’s Climate Cafes, which provide a forum where members of the Monadnock Region can discuss issues, anxieties, and solutions to climate change. He joined forces with Aaron M., whose project takes an interest in marketing, and Will P., who will be producing a short documentary of the day, and together devised an Earth Day they hope will “inspire students to take meaningful climate action by learning from experts and engaging with hands-on, real-world solutions.”

Following our education on lesser known fertilizer sources, advisory groups split-off to engage in small group discussions that called upon students to respond to questions like: what actions—big or small—could you take to help reverse or prevent further destruction to our planet? These discussions culminated in a collaborative art project inspired by the land art of Andy Goldsworthy. Students gathered materials from the outdoors to create some crazy assemblages in an activity Tyreis hoped would encourage students to really tune into the world around them. 

Probably most exciting for the students was the clothing swap, which invited members of the community to offload unwanted clothing onto their peers – truly a demonstration of how “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.” What’s funny is that second-hand clothing commands a premium, clout-wise, and so that garment you wouldn’t dream of wearing first-hand begins to scintillate and call to you once placed in the second-hand bin. Alongside recycling clothing, this event aimed at igniting a conversation about the environmental impacts of fast-fashion, and prompt reflection on our habits of consumption in this area. Companies like Shein, Zara, UniQlo, H&M, to name just a few, are major emitters of GHGs, and have been repeatedly flagged for their rapacious consumption of water (not to mention their ghastly labor practices). 

After lunch, we were back in the Louise Shonk Kelly Recital Hall with Joe Falconeiri of Northeast Wilderness Trust to learn about their work rewilding and stewarding the old-growth forests of the future. The day ended with more breakout sessions, except this time students were able to self-select into the group(s) that most interested them. This final session of the day saw groups participate in a farm-to-table cookoff, explore lower campus, hike, help clean up the roads around Dublin, continue construction on our new hoop house, and much more! 

Asked where inspiration fits into efforts to address climate change, Tyreis reflected that inspiration points to action vs. merely “talking the talk” around taking action. We can go all the way back to the beginning of the year when Associate Head of School for Academics Sarah Doenmez traced the etymology of the word. As she explained then, inspiration has to do with breathing in and filling up. Classically, to be inspired is to be divinely affected, and it's a word that invokes a vivifying influence, one that lifts you up. Regarding climate change, Tyreis points to the need to overcome feelings of doom and despair about the future. To take inspiration, then, is one way to achieve this, maybe even a necessary element of truly transformative climate action. 

As we talk, Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark, which members of English 12: On Suffering are currently reading, feels relevant. In Hope in the Dark, Solnit examines the centrality of hope across different social movements in history. She contrasts hope with wishing, arguing that hope only rises above the threshold of mere-wish when expressed through action. Hope without action, without a praxis, is just wishing.  

“Hope just means another world might be possible, not promise, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”

But why should we hope for the future of our planet in the absence of any reason to hope? One weakness of Solnit’s account that Tyreis’s approach to climate action improves upon is the need to address how unreasonable it sometimes is to hope. That is, the reasons to hope are, on balance, outweighed by reasons to despair. If we’re to carry on, then, we need something like inspiration, the royal afflatus that lifts up above darkening skies, to guide action. 

This whole day reminded me of a conversation I shared with Xero W. ‘26 and Molly F. ‘26 during Workgang this past weekend. Collecting roadside trash as part of the Dublin Community Center’s annual Earth Day cleanup event, we marveled at how good we humans are at producing waste. We discussed how people in so-called developed countries, places where the standard of living is generally high relative to the global norm, generate vastly more waste per capita than less affluent nations. This, in turn, recalled a favorite line from the Italian author Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities. Calvino writes of waste in a very memorable passage about a fictional city called Leonia: the city’s “pleasure is not enjoyment,” he says, “it is the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of recurrent impurity.” What I find so mesmerizing about this line is Calvino’s contention that waste is the telos (final aim) of all consumption; that, for instance, the enjoyment we get from purchasing a new pair of shoes derives at least in part from the reciprocating action of discarding an old pair, that part of enjoying those new shoes also has to do with the knowledge that we will scuff them up, wear them through, make waste of them in due course. Calvino is relevant this Earth Day because he challenges us to view waste as something more than byproduct, a shift in perspective that calls upon us to rethink how we relate to waste, which is so much of what our Earth Day programming challenged us to do. 

Outside of Earth Day, Dublin School has been a leader in climate education within the independent school landscape. Earlier this year, Head of School Brad Bates was tapped to present on Climate Change and Education at The Association of Boardings Schools (TABS) annual conference in Washington DC. He spoke there about Dublin’s ongoing efforts to lower our carbon footprint, including our 325kw solar array, diversification of heating sources, including the addition of heat pumps, window replacement, automatic lights, EV charging station, and initiation of future EV fleet of vehicles. Inside the classroom, faculty like Katri Jackson have developed classes dedicated to topics pertaining to Climate Change. Dublin School is such a beneficiary of the natural world, we know what’s at stake here.