A Greener Path Forward

“Oh, look,” Sandra Marr says pointing to a crepe myrtle, branches bare in late February, “it’s an Eastern towhee.” Momentarily sturdy, the bird flinches along the branch, its silhouette stamped against the pale blue sky, and belts out a call, breaking the silence of the afternoon like a stone dropped into a still pond. “Listen,” Marr says, interpreting its song, “it’s saying, ‘Drink your tea. Sweet. Sweet.’” She’s right: the twittering does sound that way. Taking in the Eastern towhee’s bright white belly flanked by crescents of orange, I hear and see the bird with sharper focus, as if looking at the creature through binoculars. It’s a strange urge — our impulse to attach a name to a thing — but, putting language to an object, we feel a deeper sense of connection. I ask Marr why this is the case. “Since our brains have evolved to name things, we care more about things that we can name,” she explains. “If you go through the world and all of the plants are just anonymous green things, then you won’t pay attention to them. You won’t notice if they suddenly have a viral infection, or that they’re blooming earlier — and earlier. You won’t notice when you stop seeing the butterflies coming to your flowers. If you go outside and you’re able to share with someone the name of a plant and some of its traits, your brain begins to pay more attention to the world.” 

Walking around the North Mooreland Road campus, listening to Marr, who was named the School’s Director of Sustainability in 2021, I notice nature developing more detail. The spindly branches of maples in winter tangle with the clouds, the morning frost bluish in pockets the pale sun hasn’t touched. Among her many gifts is her ability to infuse more life into the natural world; speaking to Marr is similar to the experience of walking through a garden, where, listening to her, life blooms and becomes more poignant. It’s a practice she performs with students constantly: offering up nuggets of knowledge, the world and students’ place within it become more recognizable. In her new role overseeing sustainability projects and programming at Collegiate, Marr’s intention is to heighten the School’s awareness around the realities of climate change and detail the small, daily actions everyone can take to reduce their carbon footprint. 

It’s a big task — a job that goes beyond the borders of a single locality — and there is tremendous work to be done. In 2015, world leaders at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Paris, called for emissions to be reduced by 45% by 2030, keeping global warming to a modest 1.5 degrees celsius, and 2050 has now emerged as the consensus target for many countries to go carbon-neutral, with the two intervening decades between these years seen as a great cleaning up of our planet. In the meantime, the planet’s average surface temperature has risen roughly two degrees fahrenheit since the 19th century, with the ocean absorbing most of that heat. Ocean acidification is increasing and sea levels are rising. The number of record-high temperature events in the United States is also increasing and, not coincidentally, the number of record-low temperature events is declining. Snow coverage in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the last 50 years and snow is melting earlier — and earlier. 

The hard breaks with the status quo — how we think about our daily lives as it relates to the environment — have to change in the next six years. “That’s really soon,” Marr says, letting out a nervous laugh. But Marr is a self-proclaimed “stubborn optimist.” She believes change is possible and has ideas of how Collegiate can have a positive local and global effect on the environment, some of which she’s already put into practice. 

As a signature placed at the bottom of each of her emails, Marr includes a quote from the social, environmental and political activist and winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Wangari Maathai: “Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven’t done a thing. You are just talking.” Certainly a call for action, Marr sees this quote as a mantra for her own approach to sustainability. “I need to feel like I can do something about a problem — or else I fall apart,” she says. “So I’m very action-centered. If there’s something wrong with the world, I need to feel like I have the power to do something within whatever spheres I’m in about it.” 

In her capacity as both Director of Sustainability and an Upper School biology teacher, Marr believes part of that action is simply bringing classrooms of students out into nature. She takes Upper Schoolers whale watching off the coast of Virginia Beach. She organizes hikes for the Lower Schoolers in the Pagebrook Outdoor Classroom on the Robins campus, where students study the characteristics of oak trees and explore organisms like the bess beetle, noting how they break down tree limbs into soil. “You can watch a video or documentary or look at a worksheet, but nothing connects with students as much as firsthand experience does,” she says. “People are more invested in a solution to climate change when they’ve spent time in the ocean snorkeling and they see the plastic floating around them. It’s all about engaging students with the environment that we’re trying to get them to care about.” 

Natalie Harwood ’25, a four-year member of Collegiate’s Earth Society, was one of the students that went whale watching this winter. The tour boat skipping along the Atlantic coast, she saw the ocean jump with bottlenose dolphins, minke and humpback whales. Amazing, seeing firsthand that you exist in the same world as creatures of such magnitude. “I felt really small in that moment,” Natalie recalls. When the boat returned to shore, students walked the coastline of First Landing State Park, along the Chesapeake Bay, picking up trash. Piles of plastic bottles accumulate. Hundreds of cigarette butts discarded among jellyfish and other sea creatures that have washed to shore. Then Marr explains to the students that even something as small as a plastic water bottle can harm something as large as a humpback whale, and, suddenly, Natalie felt big — that her existence alongside other lifeforms had a major impact. 

Marr realizes that speaking of whales ingesting plastic water bottles is potentially disturbing, that these conversations are daunting. But she approaches the work required of slowing an increasingly warming planet with a joviality that inspires hope. In all her conversations she speaks lightly, her voice, when discussing her work or nature, often reaches pitches of childlike enthusiasm. She emphasizes the small actions that, when done collectively, generate large results. “I think about the word capacity a lot,” she says. “Not all of us have the time or motivation to go out and clean a beach. And that’s OK. But what else can you do?” Maybe it’s finding alternatives to single-use plastics in the Estes Cafe, as some Upper School students are researching, or maybe the School can distribute Homecoming T-shirts without the individual plastic wrapping, as Director of Student Life Beth Kondorossy realized this fall. With Marr’s encouragement, teachers have become more cognizant of their use of paper in classrooms and have begun switching to PDF versions of worksheets. Students and teachers both are using the composting stations around campus. All small acts, sure, but these are the ripples that begin a wave of cultural change. “It’s about creating the capacity for this work, creating the cultural norms that enable this work, establishing the stubborn optimism that changes the attitude from ‘Nothing we do is really going to matter,’ to saying, ‘Every little thing we do matters.’ These little choices add up.”

But Marr can’t change the culture around sustainability by herself. The work requires the efforts of everyone. “I know that my approach to sustainability cannot only be housed in me or any one person,” she says. “When you shift a culture — one where students, faculty and staff are all thinking about how we can reimagine our community — we become better stewards for the environment, and magic starts to happen.” 

Some of that magic lives within the Earth Society. A club of Upper School students, the Earth Society partners with organizations around Richmond to clean up local spaces. For two years they’ve been volunteering with the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay to help establish a 15,000 foot rain garden at a local Richmond elementary school. At Collegiate, they’ve created no-mow zones around the Upper School’s native pollinator garden. Constantly planting native perennials on Collegiate’s grounds, they have established diverse ecosystems around campus. But their work goes beyond mending greenery. Equal to the slow, silent gathering of life beneath the surface of soil are the conversations Earth Society members are having with their peers to promote this culture of sustainability. “We sometimes see ourselves as living in this little bubble that is Collegiate,” Natalie says. “And our work in Earth Society is to try getting people to see outside this bubble and notice how much of an impact each of us has. We try fixing what’s both inside of Collegiate’s bubble and outside of it. Small actions making a big difference has a tremendous butterfly effect on a larger community.” 

On a faculty and staff level, the same kind of work is being done with the help of the Sustainability Task Group. Established by Marr in the spring of 2023, the Sustainability Task Group is composed of faculty across all divisions and staff members with a unified intention of making a large impact through small, intentional actions. The group gathers frequently to discuss ways they can make individual classrooms more sustainable and create conversations with their peers to encourage them to adopt some of these practices. “What creates community and culture around sustainability is about interacting with others and sharing ideas and finding common ways of how to proceed with a problem,” says Middle School technology teacher Dan Bell, a member of the task group. “We’re no longer just individual teachers doing something on our own. We’re a group of people coming together and creating a culture of change. This is the start of creating larger ripples throughout society.” 

When Marr works with students, she likes to provoke what she calls “huh.” moments. These are serendipitous instances of discovery meant to inspire curiosity within students. “It’s h-u-h period,” she explains. “That period at the end of ‘huh’ is important. We want to lean into our curiosity, not question it.” It’s a method of reducing fear when approaching something scary, similar to the way she approaches climate change. If a student is apprehensive about holding a praying mantis, Marr will encourage the student to say, “huh.”; she invites them in. She’s inviting everyone to join in the work of creating a more sustainable Collegiate. “It’s a chance to use knowledge and excitement to replace fear and avoidance,” she says. “Humans have no problem hurting something they’re afraid of or ignoring something that feels too big.” She sees her job as both a teacher and Director of Sustainability as a process of reducing that fear surrounding climate change and illuminating the small possibilities of what can be done. “I want to model that work and plant seeds that allow for other people to do similar work. It’s scary — and there’s a lot of emotional resistance around climate change — but our work is urgent and important. And if we each make the choice for ourselves to do our part, really great things can happen.”