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At the onset of the 2016-17 school year, students at Cheverus High School in Portland, Maine, walked outside their classroom to learn about trees. Beforehand, theology teacher Mary King had quizzed them on corporate logos - they knew hundreds - but found they lacked similar recall about the local flora.
"We don't know an elm from an oak," she said.
The outdoors exercise had students identifying the trees around their campus: In Maine, plenty of pines, though students spotted a maple and American beech, as well. Back in the classroom, they took to social media to share snaps of their campus foliage, but also to see what grew near Catholic schools elsewhere in the country. There was a cottonwood in St. Louis, a sycamore and aspen in Omaha, Nebraska, and redwoods outside Santa Cruz, California.
The photo-sharing activity, through the hashtag #iggycarbon, was part of the Ignatian Carbon Challenge, a program created by Cheverus teachers King, Cicy Po and Helene Adams, but adopted by Catholic schools nationwide through the Ignatian Solidarity Network.
"It was just one of those really cool moments where we recognized that this was something people were really doing everywhere," said Karen Nielsen, a junior at Cheverus, a coed Jesuit prep school.
Since its debut in September, the Ignatian Carbon Challenge has presented thousands of participating students each month with eight possible actions: some simple, others more intensive, but all aiming to bring Imudato Si' to life within Catholic schools, and ultimately, in students' daily lives. Each challenge is grounded within a concept from Pope Francis' encyclical on the environment and human ecology, "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home," something teachers appreciated as Catholic backing for what they were doing.
In different ways, the challenges attempt to stimulate thinking in students about sustainability and climate change, the impact of seemingly innocuous habits, and their relationship to the world around them. A separate institutional track takes the challenge to the wider school to consider ways it can implement sustainability along three dimensions - facilities, strategic thinking, community formation - into the on-campus culture.
The "ID a tree" challenge was from September, when all challenges focused on confronting habits. A couple of November challenges encouraged students to learn about the Green Climate...