Blog Action Day!

Our first post of the 2007-2008 school year is for today, Blog Action Day. Today, bloggers all over the world-wide-web publish posts on one important issue. Over ten thousand posts from companies like Google, to your very own environmental club, to everyday people trying to make a difference.

This year, the Environmental Club is reaching for new heights, and working on really making a difference to the NNHS Community and beyond. Leading the club this year is Danny Piccirillo, Laura Nichols, Alison Denn, and Henry Carrera. We've got big plans for this year like events, cleaning up the school's recycling, and getting involved with campaigns and projects like the new high school building plans. It's another new year!

Climate Crisis Essay Contest

The global warming crisis is upon us. Scientists agree that unless we begin to substantially reduce our CO2 emissions, erratic climate patterns will continue and intensify leading to sea levels rising by 25 feet or more, as well as famine, disease, and homelessness on a scale never before witnessed in human history. Our community must begin to conserve, to reduce our energy use, and we must do it now. The Green Decade Coalition/Newton with funding from NSTAR and the Newton Schools Foundation is offering an essay contest on this topic, and we hope to read the winning essays in our local paper later this year.

Newton Student Contest Rules

Newton energy consumption continues to climb in spite of increased awareness of the harm caused by CO2 emissions and global warming. The purpose of this essay contest and the publicity it will generate is to increase awareness of the issue amongst Newton residents and to encourage them to choose more energy efficient products and to waste less energy.

You may want to consider tackling one or more of the following questions in your essay:

1. Do you think that people understand the consequences of global warming on the future livability of the planet? Do they understand that conserving can mitigate the trend of global warming? If not, how can this awareness be created?
2. Once people understand the need for reducing energy consumption, what ideas do you have to help people conserve?
3. Should people be rewarded for conserving?
4. What are you and/or your friends doing to conserve energy consumption? What is your family doing to conserve? How are you helping?
5. People sometimes equate conserving with sacrifice rather than merely cutting out waste. This can be a barrier. What are your suggestions for removing this psychological barrier? What would motivate you, your family, and your friends to conserve? What, if any, barriers need to be overcome? How can this be achieved?
6. What creative or new ideas do you have about conservation? Have you tried implementing them? What was your experience?

In addition to the essay, you must list 20 actions that you and/or your family can take to conserve energy. There are many websites and books focused on energy and climate that can help you; please choose your favorite actions with care!

Eligibility

The Essay Contest is open to all students in grades 1-12 who either live or go to school in Newton.

Essay Requirements

Essays should be no longer than 1500 words (excluding the 20 key action points), typed and double-spaced. Students must produce their own work, using information from other sources where appropriate. All references must be clearly marked and can appear as parenthetical citations, endnotes or footnotes. Materials used for research that are not cited in the student's essay should be listed in a bibliography page at the end.

Students must include a title page with their submission stating their name, address, telephone number, school, and grade level. They should not include their name on any other page of their essay.

Prizes

Elementary	Junior High	High School
1st Prize $75	1st Prize $150	1st Prize $300
2nd Prize $50	2nd Prize $100	2nd Prize $200
3rd Prize $35	3rd Prize $75	3rd Prize $100
4 Distinction Prizes @$25	4 Distinction Prizes @ $25	4 Distinction Prizes @ $25

Submissions

Student submissions should be sent to: The Green Decade Coalition P.O. Box 590242, Newton, MA 02459 post-marked no later than March 15, 2007.

Dear Newton Resident:

Here is your chance to shine. While the students are working on their conservation essays, it is your turn to do the actual conserving!

Contest Objective:

To reduce household energy consumption in Newton.

The Contest will allow the residents of Newton to flex their conservation muscles by demonstrating who can reduce their energy consumption the most.

How to Enter:

1. Submit copies of either your electric or heating bills for any one month period ending no later than April 15, 2007 along with the same period in 2006.
2. On a separate sheet of paper included with your submission, state your current usage consumption, the usage for the same period in 2006 and percentage reductions for electric and/or heating. For example, if you used 250 therms this period, and 400 therms the equivalent period last year, the percentage reduction would be (400-250)/400 = 37.5%. Also include your name, address, and telephone number.
3. Tell us how you accomplished your reductions. You must be able to demonstrate that reductions were achieved through conservation alone.
4. Submissions should be sent to: The Green Decade Coalition P.O. Box 590242, Newton, MA 02459 post-marked no later than April 15, 2007.

To Win:

Reduce your electric and/or heating bill by the greatest percentage of any Newton household.

Prizes:

The winner of both the electric and heating categories will each receive a $200 gift certificate from Whole Foods Market. All winners will be announced on Earth Day, April 22, 2007.

Examples of Disqualifiers:

Energy usage reductions achieved by:

1. leaving town for the month of March.
2. reducing the number of people in the household.

View a printable copy at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ajfmqrj9wk72_4fkfxcv

Sign up for Solar!

An amazing company called Citizenrē offers a great solar solution for any homeowner. Most people avoid switching to solar because the initial investment of the solar panels are so heavy. Citizenrē solves this problem by making the investment for you by purchasing solar panels, paying for the installation and maintenance and charging you a fixed rate for the energy it produces.

You save money (and the environment!) because they charge you at a fixed rate lower than what your current utility company charges you and you can sell the excess energy you generate with your solar panels back to your utility company. Over a period of 25 years you can save over $40,000!

Seem too good to be true? You obviously benefit because you don't have to pay as much money for your electricity bill and you don't have to suffer that huge initial payment for the solar panels and Citizenrē makes a profit by charging you for the electricity over a period of time so that the initial heavy investment that they made for you pays off.

Sign up now at http://renu.citizenre.com/

Movie Series

Just posting a short notice letting you all know what's been up. We ended up showing Too Hot Not to Handle and An Inconvenient Truth for our movie series and we hope that you either got to show up or that you will have seen the movie on your own time. Let us know if you have questions or comments or anything that you'd like to discuss.

Campaign! Store! Contest!

Announcing a campaign to raise awareness, the coming of our new online store, and a contest-

Campaign

First off, we would like to announce an ongoing campaign that we are launching to raise awareness about environmental issues. We are looking for facts, tips, additional messages, and possibly art and images to post around the school.

Here are some examples of what kind of stuff we're looking for:

• Fact: Recycling one aluminum can saves an amount of energy equivalent to half that can filled with gasoline.
• Fact/Tip: The cleaning products that are harmful to the environment, are also more toxic to you! Try biodegradable cleaners.
• Tip: Buying sustainable, organic, locally grown food is good for you and the environment-- not to mention it's so much more flavorful!
• Message: Think Green.

We would like to have club meetings where we could discuss these ideas and put together posters with these messages.

It might help to brainstorm with other NNHS Enviro Club members in the discussion group!

Online Store

We would also like to be able to offer organic cotton t-shits available at an online store that feature the facts, tips, and messages from our campaign. The club leaders will decide which messages, facts, and tips we will use on the shirts. We may also be able to print on other products too! If you have any facts, tips, messages, or clever 'strings' for the store please send them to us along with a source for all facts; all facts must be verifiable and reasonably recent. Along with these messages we'd like to apply a new official logo that the NNHS Enviro Club can be recognized by which brings us to the contest.

Contest

We will be holding a concept contest for our new official club logo (Don't worry, we're not being branded). We will put this logo on our site, on products that are to be offered at our online store, etc. The final product must be in uncompressed JPEG or PNG digital image file formats and should be as relatively large. There are very few requirements. The logo must include "NNHS Enviro Club" and the dimensions should easily be scalable to an icon sized image. You may begin with a vector image and create different sized images from wallpaper to icon sized and send us the entire package.

We strongly encourage you to share ideas and upload your designs to our discussion group for feedback and discussion. Everyone should join the group to start reviewing ideas. We will announce a closing date for final submissions and we will choose the winning design. We are accepting up to two designs per person. The winning designer will receive one free t-shirt with our mission statement and the logo they created for us on it!

Please pass this on to friends who you know are interested in graphic design.

It's a New Year!

Welcome to a new year of the NNHS Enviro Club! Well, a new school year anyway :)

Our mission statement - "The NNHS Enviro Club works to reverse environmental issues through education, collaboration, and action."

Our first meeting is next Thursday, October 19th. We will have food, drinks and, candy! Feel free to bring your own in as well, as long as it's in some way environmentally friendly; organic, sustainable, and/or locally grown. We will be able to tell you more about what we have planned for the year and you will have a chance to meet the student leaders and advisors!

The club meets primarily during Thursday X-blocks in room 202 and we will send out a notice in advance to notify you of upcoming meetings.

We have a lot of new, exciting things in store for you all! We're all really excited for a great year of community service, fun activities, and other celebrations to help spread the message of environmentalism.

Here are a few of the projects and events we are planning so far:

• Showing movies
• An Inconvenient Truth
• Too Hot Not to Handle
• Cell Phone Recycling
• Give Presentations at Middle Schools
• Collaborate with EEC
• Improve School Lunches
• Bake Sale
• Trash Pickup fund raiser
• Earth Day
• Arbor Day
• Plant a tree
• Charles River Cleanup
  
• World Environment Day
• Newton Environmental Fair
• Earthfest
  
• Locker Cleanout
  

These events are open to everyone and we will be publicizing them as they come up. We hope that your interest in environmental issues will help drive lots of participation within the club to organize great events and have lots of fun!

Check out our new website!
http://nnhs.enviro.club.googlepages.com/

It is currently under construction and will be developing over the next week or so. There are a lot of loose ends but please be patient and we will fix them ASAP. In the meantime we're sorry for any inconvenience.

We are always open to feedback, questions, comments, suggestions, and new ideas so feel free to email us at any time!
NNHS.Enviro.Club@Gmail.com

Leaders
Lyuda Kovalchuke
Elena Swartz
Fanny Wu
Danny Piccirillo

Advisors
Ms. Dannenberg
Mr. Snow

Work Study Program

The NNHS Enviro Club is starting a work study program and we would love for you to get involved! The work study program offers a credit and cash incentive to help the environment and get involved with the Club. We're looking for motivated and dedicated people who have a serious desire to help and probably three lucky students will be accepted!

Students will receive $6.75 for every hour of work and 1.25 credits towards graduation. Participating students will manage the recycling throughout Newton North High School, a task previously carried out voluntarily by dedicated environmentalists. We will be holding two informational sessions for the Work Study in Room 202 after-school on September, Wednesday and Thursday the 20th and 21st. At the sessions we will review the general information on the application and if time permits, show the students what their duties will consist of. The more applicants we can get the better, so please, if you're interested, show up!

Participants will:

• Empty recycling from big blue bins
• Separate redeemable and nonredeemable recyclables
  
• Take out nonredeemable recycleables to the curb on Friday mornings
• Bring redeemable to Shaws in Newtonville
  • Collect cash to support club
    
  • Deposit money to Ms. Dannenberg, Rm 201
• Attend mandatory monthly meetings with the Environmental Club leaders
  • Flexible and at the convenience of all involved

*If, when primary tasks are complete, time commitments haven't been met, program members will use their skills to help the club in other areas to satisfy the time commitments.

Contact: Peg McGowan is the NNHS Work Study Coordinator and can be contacted regarding the program at peg_mcgowan@newton.mec.edu The club can be reached via email at NNHS.Enviro.Club@Gmail.com

This is a great opportunity for students who want to make a difference within the environment and contribute to the club.

Great Thanks,
The NNHS Enviro Club