San Dominico students tread the earth gently; campus is ecological workshop for lower, middle, upper schools

National Catholic Reporter, April 19, 1996 by Sharon Abercrombie

SAN ANSELMO, Calif. - The students at San Dominico School seem to have taken to the Buddhist wisdom that admonishes us to walk gently upon the earth, as if treading upon the heads of all sentient beings.

But there is also a strong Catholic element to the activities of the more than 500 students at the school, who walk gently upon the earth every day of their school lives. They are studying a curriculum that is teaching them how to make earth care an organic part of their adult lives - a practice as natural as breathing.

Notes Sr. Gervaise Valpey, head of the school: "Ecological consciousness is more than an add-on. We hope to someday make it part of our core curriculum."

As Earth Day 1996 dawns (April 22), San Dominico, the oldest Catholic school in California, founded in 1850, is well on its way to doing just that. Two years ago, fortified by a $111,000 grant from her religious community, Valpey and the faculty turned their 625-acre campus into a learning laboratory for sustainable living and design.

They enlisted the help of Sim Van der Ryn, a renowned University of California emeritus professor of architecture, who directs an ecological design institute in nearby Sausalito.

Van der Ryn's approach combines biology, chemistry and ecology with economics, public policy and systems theory, a discipline that traces the interdependent connections among all life forms on the planet.

Sustainable living creates links between the designed world, the natural world, the spiritual world and human experience - a practice with which Valpey's own community is familiar.

Dominican roots

The Dominicans, founded in 1216, lived in sustainable monasteries and convents, she explained. Members worked the land and provided basic necessities without depleting natural resources.

In 1965, when San Dominico School moved from San Rafael to San Anselmo in Marin County, about a half-hour's drive from San Francisco, it kept alive the order's 800-year sustainable legacy by using local stones and other sustainable materials for its buildings.

San Dominico may be the first elementary-secondary school campus in the nation to combine ecology with education, spirituality and human experience, said Valpey. Environment is part of the school's mission statement, which vows to "address critical issues of our time."

Valpey was a young fourth-grade teacher when her school moved to San Anselmo. "I remember thinking what an unbelievable blessing we had here." It was a biology teacher's dream come true, she said. The underbellies of fallen logs teemed with crowds of creepy crawlies; beautiful trees were everywhere. There was a pond, a stream, an abundance of wildflowers and a view of nearby mountains, including Mount Tamalpais.

One day, a voice inside Valpey whispered: "Listen to what the hills are telling you." In tune with the land since her childhood, she took the voices seriously, sensing there was indeed something special waiting to happen at San Dominico.

The years ticked by.

One day Valpey attended a joint meeting of Dominican communities and found herself sitting next to Sr. Miriam Therese MacGillis. MacGillis is founder of Genesis Farm, an ecological study center in New Jersey based on the ideas of Catholic "geologian" Thomas Berry.

As they became acquainted, MacGillis' ideas "struck a chord. But I didn't know what it was I was supposed to do," recalls Valpey.

A few years later, someone shoved a brochure about Genesis Farm under Valpey's door.

She took the hint. The hills had spoken. Valpey signed up for one of MacGillis' two-week seminars. Her journey had begun in earnest.

Earth Day every day

By the time Valpey became principal of San Dominico in 1985, she had a clear vision of what her school needed to become: a place where children could grow up learning how to restore an earth seriously wounded by the runaway technology of the past 200 years. It would be a community where every day was Earth Day.

Valpey began hiring teachers who "had a commitment to sustainability and who had the reverence for everything around us." In 1994, when her community began offering educational grants, Valpey applied for one.

Now into the second year of a four-year learning module, the "sustainable San Dominico" program is geared to help students understand how their campus ecological systems relate to the environment in general.

The first year, students spend time getting to know the particular ecology of their campus by immersing themselves in the natural world; year two emphasizes ecological accounting; year three, design with nature; and year four, integrating human and natural communities.

By 1998, Valpey hopes to make ecological design systems part of the core curriculum instead of having just a few courses to offer at every grade level.

What do ecological design systems look like to a 5-year-old? Or to a high school senior?

Appropriately age-different, the common goal is "to create a program with an earth ethic," said Katy Langstaff, 27, chief project coordinator for the program. Langstaff, a former student of Vander Ryn, is a design systems expert.