The FuturArc Interview

Chief Editor Dr Nirmal Kishnani and Managing Editor Candice Lim visited the Green School in Ubud, Bali where they caught up with John Hardy and Ronald Stones OBE.

Hardy is the visionary behind the Green School project who speaks passionately about nature, beauty and architecture. He is long known for his jewellery business but has, more recently, set up PT Bambu that grows, designs, crafts and manufactures the world according to bamboo, everything from buildings to furniture. Clad in a white shirt and sarong, there is a restless energy about him—a cocktail of angst and humour—as he sounds the alarm on a few inconvenient truths of his own.

Stones is an educator by profession; at the Green School he is the man with the plan. He joined the School at the end of 2008 to bring leadership, focus and structure to the founders' vision. His has been a career in education, spanning decades. He held chief executive and head positions at three prestigious international schools in Southeast Asia. And now, after an epiphany accrued from years of working inside failing conventional education systems, he speaks of the 'Green School way' of teaching and learning.

(Due to a scheduling constraint, Hardy and Stones were interviewed at separate times.)

The following are excerpts from the interviews.

JOHN HARDY

JH: It's really all about taking the children and reuniting them with the Earth. The kindergarten teacher (at the Green School) told me the other day they've moved the fence; made a new hole in the fence, and what did they find? They found the fence was made out of tapioca; big tapioca roots. So (the class) ate them. I believe that the kids that dug up the fence, found the roots, sliced them and fried them under the hand of a wonderful Balinese chef and ate them, I think they learnt something. That's kind of a pivotal point in the life of a human being, understanding that we ate the fence. It's so important and, probably, several lives were changed because of the understanding.

I want to put a fence around a botanical garden and put in 25 people and see how long they live. How can we have a botanical garden that is not full of durian trees and papaya plants and all the other things that grew in Singapore before it became what it is now? And it's not just Singapore Botanical Garden, its all botanical gardens.

NK: But John, the fact that you've chosen Bali to build the first Green School speaks as much for Bali as it does for the Green School. How would you adapt this idea to big urban centres? If you were to build a Green School in, say, Hong Kong, what would that be like?

JH: Well, we'll implode half a dozen of those ugly buildings and make a park. (Laughs) I can answer that actually. I've been asked this many times. One of the big assets of cities is rooftops, almost 100 percent is unused. If you think about a mall, the Pacific Place mall, it has a huge roof space with a roof membrane that is rated 20 years. If you cover it with soil it may bring the rating up to about 35 years. So we have to regenerate systems that we've let go dormant.

Land in Detroit, for instance, sells for 3,000 dollars an acre. There's a hedge-fund guy that's planning to turn Detroit into a farm; read that in Fortune magazine. That's such a glimmer of hope; people there are impoverished, literally starved to death by Burger King and MacDonald's. If you lock people into a 7-Eleven, they would be dead in six months, even if the shelves continued to fill themselves; they would just die because there is no nutrition in there. They would be in some catatonic diabetes-induced stupor within a month.

In my jewellery business I used every surface of the factory to grow food; we grew pumpkins on the roof; we grew squash; we grew everything you can grow in this climate. Snake beans everywhere, we grew corn, we grew rice. We had a little land but we grew as much as we could. We certainly couldn't grow enough to feed the 700 workers but we found a symbol in the energy and beauty of the gardens. And the gardeners, rather than trimming bushes and wondering where they can illegally dump the trimmings, were farmers all of a sudden. We turn gardeners into farmers.

The approach to landscape has to change. It can change tomorrow. It wouldn't take much to pull up the bushes in Singapore and plant food. I mean Singapore could save the world because it would just have to be decreed and it would happen, in a minute. If Singapore went carbon neutral, what would it do to the world? It may be too small to make a difference (to climate change), but it's not too small to make an example.

If you're not doing things that are inconvenient now, you're really not part of the future. I turn 60 in November and you know, like all 60-year-olds, I was dreaming of kicking back. (But then) Al Gore ruined my life.

NK: (Laughs) That film made an impression on many of us. Do you think that that's part of the reason behind the success of the Green School? Why it's grown really fast…

JH: Yes, it's about the timing. It couldn't be at a better time to do this. People are hungry to see something different. People come here and they ask "Where did you copy this from? Where's the first one?" And they go into a spin trying to figure out what they can attach it to. It doesn't attach.

RONALD STONES OBE

NK: Break it down for us: what is curriculum at the Green School? What exactly do you teach here?

RS: We hold on dearly to English, Math and Science, taught in a continuum of progression, from the little ones all the way through. That's the first strand. The second is a Green studies curriculum—this is what makes us different. This is an approach of hands-on, 'mud-between-your-toes' learning, again a progression from nature study to ecological studies to environment studies to sustainability studies. It's in the planting, in bamboo design technology, in looking after animals, in permaculture as a way of life. The third strand is the creative arts: taking in the influences of Bali around us. We deliver all of this in this incredible environment, this teaching and learning environment, where we're at one with nature.

NK: What exactly does the physical environment do? Could you give us an example of how it transforms learning?

RS: I can give you an example of what happens when you go into the opposite. I was at one international school recently where I went in to an enclosed classroom and it was an incredibly 'shutting down' experience. We don't appreciate being here, how it actually opens up, until we go into an enclosed environment. There are no walls here; there are no doors; there are no windows. And that just frees up the mind and creative juices. And what of the distractions that are all around? Creativity comes out of chaos, doesn't it? Chaos is caused by distractions. So this has been an environment that encourages freer thinking, more creative thinking.

NK: That's reminiscent of old-school architectural psychology. We once were talking about how spatial patterns in classrooms can have a direct impact on learning. Here you're talking about connectivity to the outdoors and nature. Of course you've got a climate in Bali that lets you do that.

RS: Yes. And that's why I say you can't do a bamboo school in the middle of Melbourne. When I am at international conferences, I shake people up and get them thinking "What can you do?" And even when we're documenting this model in Bali, we've got to make it such that you can break off chapter two, and chapter two is relevant to your own circumstance.

To read the complete interviews, get a copy of the 2Q 2010 edition at our online shop or at newsstands/major bookstores; or subscribe to FuturArc.

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