John & Elora Hardy Reinvent Sustainable Bamboo Design In Bali
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GreenTracker
John Hardy: My Green School Dream
It’s been five years since AOC first featured John Hardy’s TED Talk about his and wife Cynthia’s founding of The Green School in Bali in 2008. John Hardy, a dyslexic Canadian art student first arrived in Bali in 1975 and found himself intrigued by the Balinese craft traditions. The John Hardy jewelry brand was born.
His American wife and business partner Cynthia arrived in Bali in 1982, on a round-the-world trip while she evaluated attending law school at Berkeley. She, too, stayed in Bali and opened her own small jewelry business. In 1989, their professional collaboration became a magical success.
Giving back while doing good was a key plank of their business strategy from the very beginning, manifesting itself in a principled commitment to Bali’s land, its environment, people and culture. The Green School website sums up the goals of its founders:
‘We are building Green School to create a new paradigm for learning. We want children to cultivate physical sensibilities that will enable them to adapt and be capable in the world. We want children to develop spiritual awareness and emotional intuition, and to encourage them to be in awe of life’s possibilities.’
As John Hardy explained in the first few minutes of his TED Talk and affirmed again in this interview withEco Gypsy:
‘Watching Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ changed my life and kind of ruined me! Once I had seen that I could not turn my back on the environmental situation happening and it inspired me to create a more sustainable business model and establish the green school to change the existing education and environment paradigms.
Renewable energy and resources is also something that interests me and we are continually trying to develop at the Green School with the water vortex for power and solar. Energy today is not infinite.’
After watching ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ John Hardy became known as the Bamboo Missionary, with The Green School becoming a living paradigm of his holistic approach to saving the planet. The Green School is an open-air educational center run with a traditional British curriculum. The school is built entirely of locally-grown bamboo and is surrounded by gardens that students tend themselves.
With 20 percent of its seats reserved for local Balinese children, the Green School currently teaches about 275 children from more than 40 countries to see the world as a complex, inter-related whole. John calls the Green School a ‘Cathedral to Green Education’.
A Daughter Follows Her Father’s Lead
The vast majority of TED Talks are worth watching. This one is a must-see for anyone interested in sustainable design. Read on for more images of Elora Hardy’a bamboo architecture in Bali.
Elora Hardy Talks to TED About Building With Bamboo in Bali
