Sustainability Depends on Schools and Local Efforts, Says Jayni Chase

Early Bird Deadline to Hear Chase Speak is July 31

Jayni Chase recognizes that her husband, Chevy, is a valuable asset in her mission to develop greener citizens through changes in schools and education. His celebrity has given her a national platform, a bounty of social capital and financial resources to advocate for what she believes, yet Jayni also understands that her husband buys into her lifestyle choices and green vision primarily because he loves her. She knows that a cultural shift in the United States depends on personal choices, the influence of interpersonal relationships and the collective sum of local, community efforts—not a national agenda.

“So, as she has been doing for decades, Jayni Chase is leading by example,” wrote Jill Brooke in the July 1, 2010, issue of Westchester Home magazine. 

“It started, for me, the way I was raised,” Jayni earlier told Mike Bennett, a Westchester County, NY, radio and television personality. “But, yes, now I use my husband, absolutely, blatantly, and he knows it. He believes in all this, too, but it’s really my passion. “

Jayni, who will be a keynote speaker at the Green Schools National Conference in October 2010 , sees education as an important civic foundation where communities work to balance their shared and competing values and get baseline knowledge to inform their individual choices. She founded the Center for Environmental Education in 1988 to provide high-quality free resources and materials to educators.

In 2008, she initiated an effort to create green model schools as demonstration sites that explore the many ways school facility designs and dialogue in classrooms serve as laboratories where Americans harmonize their individual rights and freedoms within a democracy to achieve common goals. Almost no other construction or remodeling project gets as much as attention as a community decision to build or upgrade a school. Weighing and balancing costs and amenities with state of the art green principles in school renovations is a valuable teachable moment.

Jayni explains that greening our American culture has been and continues to be urgent, but that citizens must be able to make decisions and changes within their local context, priorities, values and traditions. Her work with schools is to ignite change on a faster pace.

“Even though I’ve had this [green] mindset my whole life, I’ve often fallen into some way of doing something that is wasteful or less environmentally sensitive than it could be. I’m always learning and, if you ask me, that’s a great way to live life!” she says, expressing her belief that lifelong learning that begins in school is the route to long-term cultural and economic sustainability.

In that vein, for example, Chase and her husband believe the Deepwater Horizon disaster is a valuable moment to focus citizens and students on the lack of knowledge about the world’s oceans.  “We just don't worry about stuff that happens out there,” they wrote in an editorial published online by CNN. They point out that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) budget to explore and study the world’s oceans is about $5 billion, which is a fraction of the nearly $20 billion NASA spends to explore and study outer space.