Next year will mark ten years since the first Green School families first enrolled, with a shared belief that education needed to change. A belief that we owed our children a better education. An education that focused on the whole child,  equipping them with the skills to not just get a job, but to become green leaders in a world that desperately needs them.

Ten years on, the School has grown stronger and much more relevant. With the world rapidly changing and new opportunities for learning emerging, Green School’s mandate is to stay on point to address environmental issues in the most dynamic ways. As the Founders of Green School Bali, we have been privileged and pleased to witness the growth of the Green School movement, as it continues to be a beacon of hope in education and sustainability worldwide.

Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide connect with Green School each year. People wanting to participate, learn and share new ways of educating. In just 10 years, Green School has firmly taken its place as the vanguard of progressive learning and learning for sustainability.

When we look at the School now, we see our original dream brought to life. We see a place of learning for local and global children and their families, a microcosm of the globalised world. A community made up of 33 nationalities, highly representative of local children; indeed, Green School Bali is a community of learners, committed to making our world sustainable.

No one knows better than the children themselves that connecting, collaborating and developing the skills necessary to embrace the opportunities and challenges of the world today and tomorrow is what they need. When we see global youth movements like Bye Bye Plastic Bags, cross-school collaborations on renewable energies such as Operation Rain or Shine, we know that students can learn and experience the power of making a difference while still at school. We owe this to the next generations; it is their future, it will be their world. This is our legacy.

The Green School journey continues and the evolution in education world-wide must also continue. As we head towards our ten year anniversary, we celebrate Green School’s place in the world of education.

It has been our great joy to witness not only the growth of the school but every child within it. Their growth intellectually, creatively, socially, emotionally and physically – true to the holistic philosophy of Green School Bali. Of course, dear to our own hearts are the local Balinese children who have thrived as Green School Local Scholars. We now have 31 full time Scholars enrolled this year and as the program has grown year to year, we are looking forward to welcoming nine new Scholars in 2017/18.

There is much to celebrate after ten years of growth. There is much to do. But this is the kind of education the world needs. As we now embark on establishing a Green School Foundation, we remain as committed as ever to be offering children the opportunity to access a Green School education.

We dreamt it, we planned it, we built it, and now we are truly celebrating it. In just a few weeks, we will witness the graduation of the fifth Grade 12 class. With a holistic education behind them, an internationally accredited Green School diploma in their hands, a strong sense of their place in the world as global citizens, they graduate skilled and equipped to embrace life’s amazing possibilities. They are the change makers. They are the future. They are the living example of the School of the Future, Now.

Cynthia & John Hardy
Founders,
Green School

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Some BIG NEWS is in the air and a STORY ABOUT EVOLUTION.

The BIG NEWS is that Elora Hardy is going to be speaking at TED2015 in Vancouver 16th – 20th March. It’s a big step for everyone, and as you remember my TED talk added super powers to Green School recruitment. I know Elora’s talk will add super powers to the bamboo revolution she’s leading.

I don’t know how many of you are aware of it but she’s taking bamboo technology using artisans that hasn’t been reached anywhere else in the world.

The STORY ABOUT EVOLUTION is this:

This is where I was 14 months ago.

And here I am today

It’s been a journey. It’s been about shedding 50 pounds and changing a lot of things in my life. It was led by a gentleman by the name of Dr. John Ratcliffe. He’s an amazing healer. Here is a link to his book called Low Carb Made Easy and Biting Through.

DR GUNDRY

Recently, I’ve become an amour of Dr. Gundry, a good friend of mine who is leading a major hotel group. He went out to find which doctor is really leading health in the world. I think The Gundry story is very simple. He was one of the top surgeons on the planet. He could do things no one else could and it lead to putting down his knife. He is healing thousands of people around the world with a change in their diets. Heart disease, diabetes, who knows the cancer?

Sugar is killing us and we all know it. But, not only does Dr. Gundry give you the diet to lose the pounds, he gives you a diet to rebuild and to extend your life. I have just given it a very good friend of mine and he read it in 3 days. He’s totally converted. He looks terrific after 3 weeks on the diet. Watch his video and buy the book called Diet Evolution. It works for everybody. It’s the most powerful thing I’ve encountered recently.

THERE ARE A FEW SEATS ON THE MAGIC TRAIN TO MOGOK

Mogok is the valley of ruby and sapphire in northern Burma. We’re leaving Bangkok on May 4th, and will be back in Bangkok on May 14. We are being escorted by an amazing woman named, Miemie Tin Htut. Her great grandfather was the king of Mogok. You need a special permit to enter this area, it’s an amazing possibility. We’ll also be stopping at Inle Lake and travelling back through Rangoon.

Let me know if you want to go. This is a once in a life time possibility.

Love

John

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Not only is Green School soon to be using water to start selling energy back to the grid through its Mini-Hydro Vortex, donated by Akuo Energy and Zotloterer back in 2009, but our new Aquaponics System, brought to us by Green School Parent and Board Member, Peter Barge, will start producing food for our kitchen with next to no energy, or space, needed at all!

Acquaponics: Mimicking Mutually Beneficial Natural Systems

Peter Barge gives a workshop to parents on Acquaponics

Our Local Scholar’s Programme is what makes this school special. We currently educate
34 Indonesian students throughout the school and we want to educate more. Finding ways of funding their education is constant. To have our Indonesian staff at Green School contribute to the fund says so much.

Check out our page at CrowdRise

Thank you!
Love John

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We are also going to have mother-daughter, father-son building teams after the floor pod is finished and we will be building all the beams hope to get them up.

I am still doing morning walks every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and I have lots of plans for dinners to talk about doing things in Green School.

United World College South East Asia is coming to GreenCamp for a week. I took grade 5 last week. It’s really fun to have kids on the tour. It’s great to see kids who live in a giant city relating to GS. We had the group jumping up and down on the bridge.

I have always been interested in having UWC and GS connected and here we are at last with a connection.

On the vortex project, we are building the trash collector to catch the plastic bags coming down the river before they go down into the ocean.

I am going to set up some dates to see the [enviropallets]http://enviropallets.com

A few years ago an amazing Dutch bamboo man came to the school, his name is Anton Versteegde ](http://versteegde.nl/Home_2.html text: Antoon Versteegde). Unfortunately he didn’t have enough time to build with the kids.

Since then we acquired a suitcase full of rubber bands and this summer I did the first rubber band bamboo building structure.

Bamboo team building a giant bamboo model using rubber bands

I mentioned this on my welcome speech and a lot of people are very interested in having their kids build. See what the kids created in Challenge Week in this edition of Bamboo News.

The Hardy girls working on their project

Love,
John A. Hardy

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I’ve noticed that a large number of kids around the world do not get to experience a green graduation. Ceremonies are held in auditoriums or rented tents. This year, the venue for our graduates was quite special. I’m very proud to say that between Elora, her team and the Green School team, we built a green graduation structure out of bamboo and klangsah (coconut fronds). The cost was a little more than a tent rental, but it was magnificent. It showed what people can do when they choose the right materials.

I’m so proud of my daughter Elora, who may not have graduated from architecture school, but has been featured in Architectural Digest (wait for the link from Elora). At 32 years old, she is becoming an icon for bamboo construction.

When we built the school out of bamboo we knew it was just the beginning of the bamboo revolution. We now have universities around the world wanting to come to Green School to study bamboo.

One of my goals for next year is to start Bamboo U (Bamboo University), so that people from all over the world – students, those on a gap year, professional architects, or all those in Asia, who have already expressed special interest in bamboo design – can visit Green School and Ibuku and learn about the most advanced bamboo technology on the planet that makes the most efficient use of the material as is. We don’t necessarily have the best machine to turn bamboo into plywood, but then again, if the gods had wanted bamboo plywood they would’ve made the plant 4 ft wide and 8 ft long.

Congratulations to all the Green School graduates. I hope you all follow your passions in life. And congratulations to my 18 year old daughter Carina who graduated from a school in New York and is heading onto Barnard College.

Love,

John

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John Hardy tells of how his experience at TED changed his life, grew a school and is influencing a new generation

Cynthia and I founded of a little school in Bali, I didn’t have a clue about what it would take to make Green School great and a friend of mine, Stefan Sagmeister (read more) said, “John, you have to talk about this Green School at TED”.I had never been to TED, I didn’t know what TED was, I thought it might have been an airplane.

There I was, having prepared my talk, 2 hours before leaving for the airport and my TED talk coach said, “we have to change everything”. Zissou (read more) is a bit of a miracle worker. We changed everything, I traveled to Oxford a University I never had a possibility of attending.

I did rehearsal and they (Bruno) said, “it’s OK, just be yourself.” I sat through some other TED rehearsals that were not OK, somehow they fixed those talks by the time they appeared on the stage a few days later.

It was hard to concentrate before I actually got up to speak. Cynthia, who listened to my talk at least 50 times gave me a lot of support. The talk has 654,991 views. I constantly meeting people who go, “I watched that talk and I decided to move to Bali for Green School.”

TED just happened in Vancouver. They moved to an amazing new Convention Center (see more), and amazing new hall. Cynthia and I went because TED has done so much for the Green School, what can we do for TED we asked ourselves?

We took as an exceptional birthday present our daughter Carina who’s 18. I wasn’t clear whether she wanted to go, whether there were young people there and fortunately TED started with the TED fellows who were all young. She had a fabulous time. She sat very close to Al Gore, she watched Bill Gates and his wife Melinda on the stage, not 20ft away.

She actually sat there and made notes for every talk and elbowed me hard when I fell asleep during talks made by people with brains much bigger than mine. But I was jetlagged. Basically what she said about TED was everyone that was there was somebody. She met Shonda Rhimes who wrote Scandal (see more). We had amazing chocolate from Katrina Markoff (see link).

John and Carina Hardy at TED in Vancouver

A lot of friends were there and it was beautiful to be in Vancouver. The sun even came up for a minute.

I still meet people who don’t know what TED is and it always amazes me, but I’m a big TED fan. If you haven’t watched my talk, watch it, if you think it will influence someone in the world that needs to move to Bali and go to Green School, send it to them.

Thank you TED for all that you have done for Green School and the world.

Love,

John

PS. I traveled the world for 5 weeks, I gained 1 pound, making my effective weight loss 49 pounds. Feels great. When I saw my long term
doctor in New York he said my tests were looking better than they had in ten years. So hooray for John Ratcliffe and the magic of protein.

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I found in the storage clothes that have been put away for years and years and you can imagine my happiness at being able to wear those wonderful things that I bought so many years ago. So I guess I’m starting a retro period.
How do I feel? I feel good everyday. As I used to feel bad everyday that I feel that dealing with the giant amount of extra weight I was carrying. Through the worst news there’s a buoy, it’s like a fishing thing that bobs to the surface but I’m succeeding. I’ve been on this journey for many years and it was so unsuccessful that it’s really amazing to be on a journey that works.

I’ve had 3 chocolate bars in the last few months, and seem to be enjoying them less and less.I haven’t had a cup of coffee. It’s something that I look curiously at the coffee machine wondering how I used to make it through the day without 4-5 hits of caffeine.

A person who’s responsible for this, an unassuming man, his name is John Ratcliffe. He wrote a diet book 10 years ago that sold 500,000 copies. He turned up in my life. Low Carbs Made Easy

GS student, Mytrha – Suki’s high school photography workshop

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As I look into the future I see many things that make me happy. I have met a number of people who have come to the school because they saw my TEDtalk, My Green School Dream. It has 727,488 views. In the New Year, I plan to audit the talk and see how close we’re coming to “My Green School Dream” and how we can exceed these goals.

I’m excited that the vortex is somewhere in transit and the gardens at Green School are growing and looking terrific.

This month, I will be traveling to Beijing; I’ve never been to the Forbidden City or the Great Wall. I will be speaking among some architectural luminaries, at the Eco City and Green Building 2013 Asia Forum at Tsinghua University. I’m also making a presentation at the Peking University. I hope this will increase our Chinese enrollment and bring us a Chinese teacher or two. They’re very excited about bamboo and I think they’ll be surprised to learn about Green School and Green Village.

A bright star is rising in the South. John Stewart and his family are coming and I’m really excited to have a well-seasoned professional as the Head of Green School.

Don’t miss the Soulshine Festival, December 27th and 28th. The dream has always been to host an amazing event like this at Green School. Come enjoy!!!

novEMBER 2013

Last month I found myself flying through the air and landing abruptly on the roadside after my bicycle wheel hit a nasty hole in the road.  Thankfully, a neighbor was behind me on motorbike and took me to get medical attention. But when I turned up in Singapore a week later, the doctor found that I had bursitis. A few hours later, I was in an operating room wide-awake, but half frozen, as the doctor pulled out a bunch of dirt from my elbow.

After thousands of miles of riding, this was the first time I’ve fallen off my bicycle. The moral of the story is to get your wounds cleaned before they are sewn up. I’m recovering now, but with lots of new scars.  Once my ribs settle down and my shoulder starts working again, I’ll be back on the track – older and hopefully wiser.

Bring your garbage to school | We had the 2nd Annual Pemulung Garbage Fest with an important addition that made all the difference. Darren from Enviro Pallets visited and gave us a lesson in trash sorting.  This year the major difference was that we were not left with a pile of plastic bags at the end of the day.

We sorted our garbage, Darren took home all the plastic bags to make pallets and one of our students, Tristan had a great idea. He decided to put a mesh net in the Ayung River and start mining plastic bags. Eco pallets need washed polyethylene bags and that’s what’s in the river. Unfortunately we’ve had so little rain, that there’s been very little delivered to the net. Tristan and I are working on a project to possibly mine all the plastic bags out of the Ayung at the vortex dam. More updates soon.

So, you’ve heard me talk about Enviro Pallets and hopefully others are talking about them too. They’re going to need 30 tons of plastic bags each day and they’re offering $150 per ton for those plastic bags, so it will probably make it worthwhile for many people to collect them. Help us spread the word.

Bamboo car drives in Italy | It’s all happening. Hopefully the car will soon come home to Indonesia to become Bali’s first bamboo car.

Samsara movie screening | My friend, Mark Magidson from LA came to India to INK with me where he spoke about the movie Samsara.  I convinced him to do a screening at the school, which he generously agreed to. The plan was to show it outside or in our Mepantigan- but 10 days before the screening, I decided I wanted to make a special presentation for it. So, with the help of a young man named Matt Bell and a Sumatran guy named Epin, we created the bubble.

The inflatable theatre we created was amazing, beautiful, and big enough for more than 200 people. Samsara was great, and I think the grandness of the structure was the perfect fit for such a fabulous movie. We want to continue showing movies in the bubble but we need a projector. If anyone has projector knowledge please let me know. Here is a picture of our bubble.

Elora in New York magazine I was very happy to receive the hard copy of the New York magazine in India, which had an amazing 9 page spread of a house Elora recently finished. I’m happy this went into the world.

October 2013

As many of you know, I’ve lived through a great deal over the years. The coconut that fell on me during a hike last year tried to get me, and many other things have tried to quell me, but I live and I’m strong.  My commitment to making Green Schools across the world is bigger than ever today.  As Green School lives and grows stronger, so Green School will grow across the world- and I’m more committed than I’ve ever been.

One of the highlights of last month was John Stewart’s visit and address at our Annual General Meeting.  He is a very special man: strong and smart, he and our existing team will together continue to take Green School into the future. He will be here in January, and I’m very excited that he’s chosen to come to our school and with our people make it great.

On a sad note, Roger Hamilton, the Chairman of Green School Board has resigned as Chairman and is going on to pursue other interests. His absence is clear to everyone and I know over the next few months people will start to understand what a significant loss this is for our community. He, his wife, and kids were some of the school’s greatest supporters and will be greatly missed by our community. I personally am very sad he will no longer be at the school. Roger, best of luck, as you continue your journey in the world.  I know you will make a huge difference to all the people you meet.

I’m happy to share that I attended the Energy and Environment Foundation Global Excellence Awards in India last month where I represented Green School and was presented with the Global Excellence Award in Renewable Energy Sector.

Living in Bali has been fantastic every week. This past week we had garbage day where everyone brought their garbage to school and dumped it in the Mepantigan to sort. We’re going to see Enviro Pallets next. This is the first period in history that plastic bags have found a home, in that plastic bags have become worth collecting and are possible to recycle locally (as opposed to other plastic waste that has long been locally recycled).  As you all know there are too many plastic bags on the beach, way too many in the ocean and absolutely too many in Bali. We’re supporting a couple of our local pemulung (scavengers or DIY recyclers) to begin collecting bags. Our support will happen by paying them cash for the plastic bags and together, visiting the local factory that turns these plastic bags into pallets, which helps replace wooden pallets in the shipping world!

The Vortex Lives! I know this is a very old story and it’s kind of embarrassing because I’m the old guy telling the old story, but the vortex lives. We’re doing testing and we’ll be ordering our turbine by the end of the week. This means, hopefully, by Christmas we’ll be pumping vortex-generated electricity into the Green School and into the grid.

We just had our 2nd Educator Course where I invited all the participants to have dinner with me in the rice paddy below my house. It was an honor to see such a turned on group of international educators from 12 countries coming all the way to Green School to learn about green and our curriculum.

Green School Blue? A visitor from the north came last week to speak to us about the possibility of Green School Blue. That’s all I can say for now, but stay tuned for more on having a future Green School on the ocean with floating classrooms.

Click the buggy below to get a sneak peak of the Green School bamboo car from Italy.

sepTember 2013

I was very happy to stand up for the 6th time and welcome new families to Green School. Someone remarked that there were as many new families as we had total families 3 years ago. This is good. A lot of good energy there; I met great new people and I’m very open to meeting more of you, just come up and say hello.

Becoming more local is the Green School challenge. Here is a simple idea adopted from a Balinese world. See what happened.

LIVING IN BALI 
Living in Bali: An 8 part series sharing the secrets of living in Bali successfully. Read more by clicking below…

CARBON POSITIVE COMMUNITY

I’m making a personal commitment to be carbon positive and I need people to join me. Read more by clicking below…

FAIR EXCHANGE
We can know the price of pork bellies in Chicago, but the fair price for a banana often alludes us in Bali. Join fair exchange and see what others are paying for everything from a driver to the size of a Balinese wedding gift. Join now! Read more by clicking below…

I’M A PROUD FATHER

4 Amazing kids and what they’re doing, read more by clicking below…
VORTEX WORK GROUP Call for Support

People that know me understand I never give up or go away. The vortex is coming and you can help. Read more by clicking below…

(For full note)

augUST 2013

It’s summer in Bali, the very best part of the year. It’s much better to leave in February than in the summer. The nights are cool, the days are long. We’ve been having intermittent rain because the weather pattern seems to have completely gone mad. But we planted rice the other day with some kids from Green Camp.

I went with my daughter Chiara twice to do the EYE walk for the John Fawcett Foundation and she raised enough money to do 29 cataracts surgeries.

I had the pleasure of visiting China. They have the most beautiful hills and rice fields ever. But it makes me happy to be living in Bali in an intact culture. That’s why I hope we’re all here.

Melissa Abdo has arrived to run Green Camp. I’m super excited about that possibility. Her commitment is very strong to the lives of our young people and adults alike.

I’m doing my Living in Bali course this fall. It’s going to be a lot of fun. It’s got me thinking about lots of things that I haven’t thought about for a while. We’re going to get dirty and learn things together. It’s very exciting. Get dirty, get washed, get blessed. It’ll be an eight week course, I’m hoping it will grow into some very active group in the school and some very incredible projects will be kickstarted through it.

I’m off now to the mountains in Ladakh. Probably the most beautiful and peaceful place on Earth. I’ll be back in the middle of August, recharged and energized for more fun at Green School.

The kites have appeared; I’ve noticed for a week or two that little kids are making kites and by August everybody will be making kites. No country in the world celebrates kites the way the Balinese do. That means the cool season is upon us; I’m walking often 10 km early in the morning and there’s a cool breeze, which is a blast to experience in the tropics.

JulY 2013

Green SuperCamp is coming, my daughter Carina is going to be a Group Leader. If you haven’t heard of Green SuperCamp, it is probably in my view the most amazing social educational week that my kids have ever spent. They come home with rhymes like, “if you’re early, you’re on time, if you’re on time, you’re late, and if you’re late, you’re left behind again.” I mean, wisdom for a lifetime. I love Green Super Camp.

I wrote last month about watching kids in my old high school in Canada with their heads down, looking from side to side, being herded around, closely guarded by teachers. It really double hit me when I saw the Green School graduating class. We have such an amazing group of young adults! People that will surely change the world. Good luck, class!! You will be very missed. I was watching some of them play the marimba and I thought we’re not going to see them anymore. And that’s cool. Grade 11 is going to come into its own.

See an update on the Green School vortex in this video, good news:

Summer is upon us, the beautiful season. Enjoy the cool breezes and the clear days!

JunE 2013

Visiting the Grave of the Ancestors

Dear Friends,

I had the distinct pleasure recently of visiting my birth place and it was a haunting experience. The sky was blue, the sun was out, and Cannington, Ontario, Canada was experiencing one of those rare beautiful days. Walking down the street, I was flooded with memories of my childhood there and my days at the school.

Great grandparents resting in a bush

I had the pleasure of meeting some of my old classmates from 1957 that remembered our music teacher, Mrs. Pinkam, who had told 3 of us to go to the other side of the room. We found out later that we were not going to be in the Christmas concert, because we couldn’t sing. The power and the responsibility of running a school became very clear to me.

I went to my old high school (Brock High School) and that’s when the real trouble started. I felt quite strange walking down those halls, which haven’t changed a cement block since my days there. I had the pleasure of presenting to a lot of old and young people. The old people came voluntarily; the young people were shepherded in by ever observant teachers. The talk was very interesting, laced with memories of the past and visions of Green School and the bamboo future we’re building.

My most inspirational teacher, who is now 91, was there and he asked some difficult questions, looking to trip me up as he always had. But he was the ray of hope in my life as an undiagnosed dyslexic. He was the guy that gave me B’s, the only ones I ever got because he engaged me. I was always inspired by his passion, not just for delivering his curriculum, but because he started his lesson by opening the morning’s newspaper, and that’s what he would teach. He also was running for the New Democratic Party, in our county which hadn’t elected anyone except a Conservative for 50 years.  He never gave up running! He never got elected.

The thing that really got me was the looks on the faces of the children: the downcast eyes, the quick glances to the side. I’m always amazed that children are smiling. We take it for granted at Green School, but when I went out there into the real world I didn’t find children smiling, I didn’t find young adults given the opportunity to be responsible members of their community. What it showed me is that we at Green School, especially when you look at our soon to graduate class, that we have done something different. And I believe better. Kids at Green School are smiling. I’m going to be very proud to see the first group of graduates go into the world, hopefully to become the new generation of green leaders.

May 2013

Kuningan, a day in Bali. It means yellow. It’s one of my favorite days of the year and I know some of you have experienced this with me. It’s our 7th monthly (Kuningan is every 7 months) trip to Klungkung, to the village of Paksebali to experience the Perang Dewa festival.

It was amazing to be with some young children from Green School this Kuningan. The altar boxes are taken down to the river and blessed. Kadek as usual feeds us with an amazing feast by the river. And then the fun begins, as the boxes head back toward the temple they decide that they don’t want to go back inside for another year. You can see what happens in a small video below. Please watch the video, and next time you’re going to be here on Kuningan come and join us.

Bali Shortcuts: Perang Dewa (War of the Gods)

I’m in awe. I’ve been to this festival more than 25 times and I’m still in awe. It hasn’t changed except this year it rained like madness which made everyone soaking wet. The people that came were very excited, for some it was their first time in Bali, some were residents.

It’s a very exciting month. The cold breeze is starting in the morning and the season is changing. The little kids are on the street with their kites and that’s a sure thing that the winds are coming from the east.

Good things happen when good energy is in existence. We got our first multi-year commitment to the Balinese/ Indonesian Scholarship Fund, Grade 8-12, from an amazing young man. One of my main missions in life is to support the green leader vortex at Green School. We’re having our first graduates this year and we’ll see what magic they perform in the planet.

I was asked to come to Jakarta to speak at the GreenRight Conference held by the Green Building Council and the experience was really inspiring. Who would’ve guessed that Jakarta would be full of people committed to green building and companies committed to bringing innovative techniques to green building into the world?

I met a young man that made insulated concrete houses which use 60% of the air conditioner required on a regular house. The return on investment is 7 years. What an incredible concept, considering the number of air conditioned buildings in the world. Here is a brochure:  and a semi-detailed technical write-up about b-panel.

I also in awe of the talent in this country and the diversity. So many things that aren’t just carbon copies of what’s going on in the West. I renewed my commitment to getting more Indonesian and Balinese involvement in Green School. I don’t think anyone’s dream is to have just like it is in the West. I’ll be working hard on diversity in the future.

I have another group of people making early commitments to help me with my favorite subject, which is garbage. The plastic bags on the island can be recycled. It’s just a matter of will. It can be profitable and sustainable for the recyclers. I had the pleasure of going to China and looking at machines that take all kinds of plastics and turn them into pellets where they can be reused and fed back into the industry.

As you know we have a massive problem here of plastic washing down the ditches, into the stream, into the river, and you see it on the beach. Worse than that, you see them in the ocean, miles and miles away from Bali, in perfectly clear water. You think it’s a fish coming by, but it’s a Cheetos package from somewhere.

I also had the pleasure of addressing a company called ARUP. They’ve engineered some of the most amazing things in the world, and their 30 top leaders were in the room in Singapore. I got to show them the magic of bamboo, growing vegetables instead of bushes, many kinds of magic. The reception was really warm. I felt a little bit like I was walking into the valley, but they were impressed and we hope that in the future there’ll be more bamboo skyscrapers.

April 2013

As you know we’ve been working hard to make Green School’s footprint smaller. We have the solar panels running – we need to make a few adjustments and we’re going to eventually have a vortex on the river. This will make our footprint very small. We have a long way to go to make our carbon positive community, but I personally will not rest until we’re there.

The other footprint of Green School continues to amaze me. It’s our footprint in the world. For a tiny school of 300 kids half way between an island and nowhere, we’re attracting a huge amount of attention. You can see by this newsletter that people are hearing about it, thinking about it, dreaming about it. This makes me very happy and very proud. Artists are coming out of the wood work; musicians and inventors are getting involved and all of this is good for our community, good for our school, and I believe, good for the future.

Click here to watch my February presentation at alldesign 2013 in Istanbul.

MarCH 2013

So much happened in the last month. I really can’t even begin to tell you. But it’s terrifically exciting, from buggies to harps. Please click here to see my slideshow and what I have been up to.

To all the Founders Dinner Participants – Thank you so, so much for coming to the dinners. I thoroughly enjoyed them. I hope you did too. I’ll think of the next series of fun we can have together soon.

JanUARY 2013

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