The ruler is the ugliest thing ever made. It makes people think in straight lines, and John Hardy hates straight lines. The right angle does not exist in nature, he says, while standing in a bamboo building, bent into curves and soft arches with a roof built to capture breezes that work as nature's air conditioner. That bamboo building is The Green School in Bali. John Hardy is an evangelist for all things green.
Toronto's Yorkville, a place filled with draft dodgers, coffee shops and Joni Mitchell singing about not paving parking lots. But what he preaches, and what he lives, is the world of sustainability and making sure the next generation lives and learns outside the straight ruled boxes of concrete with desks all in neat rows.
The Green School in Bali is the creation of John and his wife, Cynthia. It opened in August of 2009; the main building is three stories tall, formed from seven kilometres of giant bamboo sitting in Balinese rice fields and food gardens.
John Hardy is an unlikely schoolmaster. He hated school. His mother told him he cried walking to class, and he was lucky to manage to graduate from high school in rural Ontario; he puts it down to undiagnosed dyslexia.
He was born on November 28, 1949, in Toronto and grew up in the village of Cannington, named for George Canning, the 19th century British Prime Minister. “It had a thousand people on a good day,” says Hardy. His family owned a general store and John worked there after school and on weekends as a delivery boy.
John found life stifling in small-town Ontario. That changed when he went to the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. At art college, he met Penny Berton, the daughter of Pierre Berton, the journalist-author and television personality whose 72 books of Canadiana made him the richest writer in the country.
In 1975 John and Penny decided to drop out and discover the world. He never lived in Canada again and describes his odyssey as an escape from Canada. The two set off on the dreamers around the world tour, but when they hit Bali, Indonesia, they decided to stay. John drifted into the jewelry business. He spotted the work of artisans in Bali making bracelets and other jewelry, and he sold some before designing versions of his own made by those same local artisans. John and Penny married, but after several years she returned to Canada. Cynthia Boesk, an American who was planning to study law at Berkeley, also stopped in Bali on an around the world odyssey in 1983. She too set up a small jewelry business. John and Cynthia married and in 1989 merged their jewelry businesses, and together built John Hardy Jewelry. They made their name selling elegant bracelets made of woven precious metal.
The Hardys sold the jewelry business in 2007, and it still operates as John Hardy, with the website boasting it was founded in 1975. Hardy regrets leaving his name on the business. "Never sell your name."
John Hardy's day in paradise starts with an hour of yoga before he sets off with a sharp stick in hand to pick up trash. He wades through streams and passes ancient brick walls in the nearby village, all the while spearing pieces of paper, plastic and metal, putting them in a bag slung over his shoulder. Later the junk is sorted and sold, through a micro business he set up. "We hope to make enough money to pay the sorters," he says.
While John is dyslexic, he is digitally literate. His jewelry business flourished on the web. These days he works from a smartphone and uses WhatsApp to send messages, links to things such as his Ted Talks and to make phone calls. He doesn't own a landline. His first Ted Talk, two years after the school opened, was seen by on the internet by people who then chose the Green School for their children and made it a success. John is a natural public speaker, self-deprecating, saying he is just a country boy from small-town Ontario. But he knows how to work a room. Wearing a Balinese Sarong in Cape Town or Taipei grabs their attention.
One Ted Talk began with how he almost didn't make it to the stage because he was hit on the head by a falling coconut in Bali. It fractured his skull and sent him down a 25-foot embankment. The audience was his from then on. He tells them the idea for The Green School came after Cynthia took him to see Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth
“This guy ruined my life,” says John and Ted Talk audience laughs as an image of Al Gore appears on the giant screen behind him. "It's a movie that changed my life forever and made me realize what we've done to the planet and that I needed to spend the rest of my life mitigating the damage that I'd done. We built a school to prepare children for what seemed like an uncertain future."
Students at the Green School are not force fed eco thought; they are taught to look at things in a different way. One teacher explains how they tackle a subject like hydroelectricity: "We incorporate geography through looking at dams around the world, physics through concepts like pressure and electric generators, social studies through stories of displaced families, and environmental science through impact studies of dams."
Hardy says the plan for the school was to be off the grid, but that hasn't happened yet, though a lot of power comes from solar panels and a unique hydroelectric system called a vortex, which looks like whirlpool inside a well.
"The classrooms have no walls. When you take children out of that educational box, they thrive. Children at Green School are happy, and this creates an incredible environment for growth. We thought it would take many years to manifest the green leaders we wanted to create (but) we were absolutely wrong. When you give children a voice, they lead," says John.
He is particularly proud of two students, sisters Melati and Isabel Wijsen who founded a group called 'Bye-bye Plastic Bags' to ban plastic bags in Bali. When the provincial governor ignored them, they went on a hunger strike, inspired by learning about Mahatma Gandhi at school. Hunger strikes are illegal in Indonesia, so the police escorted the girls to the governor's office and by the time they left he was onside, and this year the governor of Bali banned single-use plastic bags, Styrofoam and straws. Bye-bye Plastic Bags is now in twenty-eight locations around the world.
Students did an audit of the carbon footprint of parents driving their children to school. They launched a bus program, but rather than running the five buses on diesel they are fueled by used cooking oil collected from local restaurants.
Seventy-five percent of Green School parents move to Bali to allow their children to attend the school. They come from around 40 different countries. "After a year of travelling around the world with the kids we just couldn't get that excited about returning to our conventional lives in Toronto," says Charlie Scott, an entrepreneur whose children Sophia and Alfie, are enrolled at the Green School. Tuition is about US$15,000 a year; there are free spaces for 50 local students out of a population of about 490. The scholarships for Indonesian students are funded in part by ticket sales of the curious who go on tours of the Green School. The New York Times described many of the parents who send their children to the Green School as: "digital nomads, early retirees and midcareer rebooters." Like the students who are taught to become eco-leaders, Hardy says the parents also spread the green message.
"The best example of this is parents who have gone back to their home countries and are helping us to build more Green Schools. New Zealand, Tulum in Mexico and right here in South Africa. We will have more Green Schools," says Hardy. The first Green School outside Bali opens in Taranaki on New Zealand's North Island in 2020.
John's other passion is building with bamboo. In April of 2019, he went to a bamboo symposium in Havana. His daughter Elora runs a company that designs and builds in bamboo. The enemy of bamboo is water and insects, but when it is treated, it is as strong as steel. Proof is a six storey building Elora's firm built.
John extolled his green philosophy in his latest Ted Talk in Cape Town in 2019. "You just have to follow these simple, simple rules: Be local, let the environment lead, and think about how your grandchildren might build."
John Hardy thought he retired when he sold his jewelry business in 2007. Nope. This ageing boomer is on a mission for the rest of his life. “Because today’s children are not going to have the free ride that we had.”
Portrait written by Fred Langan