Above, a New York Times photo of solar panels on the roof of Scarsdale, N.Y. High School.

As anyone with children knows, few things are harder to oppose than the determined advocacy of a child.

Often enough, it is in service of a toy or snack purchase that they advocate, something toy manufacturers and their advertising firms have known and traded upon for years.

But sometimes, it is for a cause even us grown ups can support.

Consider these paragraphs from an Oct. 9 New York Times article about how children are shaping our habits at home and at school.

"Children are part of what experts say is a growing army of “eco-kids” — steeped in environmentalism at school, in houses of worship, through scouting and even via popular culture — who try to hold their parents accountable at home. Amid their pride in their children’s zeal for all things green, the grown-ups sometimes end up feeling like scofflaws under the watchful eye of the pint-size eco-police, whose demands grow ever greater, and more expensive.

"They pore over garbage bins in search of errant recyclables. They lobby for solar panels. And, in a generational about-face, they turn off the lights after their parents leave empty rooms.

"'Kids have really turned into the little conscience sitting in the back seat,' said Julia Bovey, a spokeswoman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group that recently worked with Nickelodeon on a series of public service announcements and other programming called 'Big Green Help.'

“'One of the fascinating things about children is that they don’t separate what you are doing from what you should be doing,” Ms. Bovey said. “Here’s this information about how we can help the environment, and kids are not able to rationalize it away the way that adults do.'”

Locally, the line between learning what's right and doing what's right is being blurred at The Hill School, where a year-long sustainability initiative is taking root.

The elements include reduced waste and buying local organic food for the dining hall, increased recycling in the dorms and water conservation throughout the campus.

The school will compete in the 2009 Green Cup Challenge. The independent school that conserves the most electricity will take home the Green Cup Challenge Trophy. The competition will last four weeks and 32 schools will compete, according to the school's Web site.

Now, Pottstown's public schools have an opportunity to set an example as well.

Having decided on the renovation and expansion of four elementary schools, the Pottstown School Board now faces the daunting task of trying to figure out how to shave costs off a project that could cost as much as $50 million.

One way, which was raised last week by architect Hal Hart, is to go green.

More energy efficient windows, geo-thermal heating and cooling systems were just two of the things Hart mentioned as possibilities.

But "going green" is often an investment which does not see immediate financial returns and requires a little bit of faith. The traditional knock against going green is that its systems cost more up front and it takes years to make the up-front money back before you begin to realize the savings.

The knock has a hard basis in fact. As anyone with any familiarity with grants for eco-projects knows, most grants, particularly for those with an energy-savings component, pay the difference between traditional systems and the more-efficient but more-expensive green systems.

In a tax-base challenged borough like Pottstown, spending more money up-front for any reason is going to be a hard sell.

But Hart had an interesting observation and a suggestion about a new financing method that seems promising.

He said in some projects his Harrisburg-based firm has conducted, they have been able to finance green systems without any increase in price up front.

Although specifics were not offered (it was not the time as the board was still in the midst of deciding how many schools to keep) the idea seems to have merit.

What happens, Hart said, is that the difference between the more expensive green systems and the traditional ones is paid off over time with the savings on energy costs.

In other words, if the district saved $8,000 in fuel costs in 2010 as the result of having a geo-thermal system, that money would go toward paying the higher cost of the system, which was not paid up front, but financed until the additional cost was paid off. Once the difference is paid off, the savings accrue to the taxpayers.

This seems like a "win-win" solution (God I hate that phrase. Forgive me for using it). Let us hope the board pursues it.

If Pottstown schools do go green, as speaker Wendy Wilkinson suggested during one of many public hearings on the issue, they won't be alone.

Schools across the country are using solar panels, organic gardens to feed their students and using energy efficient fixtures.

According to this Oct. 10 story in The New York Times, "New Jersey and Connecticut are among 10 states in the nation requiring schools to use renewable energy sources for new school construction and major renovations."

Schools are in a unique position to serve as role models.

“You’ve got to walk the walk, not just talk the talk of what you are preaching,” Steven Frantz, a retired school principal who is coordinating Scarsdale’s efforts, said in the Times article.

The article also cites Rachel Gutter, senior manager of the education sector for the U.S. Green Building Council, who said 1,000 schools nationwide are registering for certification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, or LEED, a green standard. About 115 schools nationwide have already been certified as meeting the standard, she said, and the number of those interested is growing every year.

"A recent study by the American Federation of Teachers showed that the costs of renewable energy technology and energy efficiency programs are decreasing, coming in at $3 more per square foot, or 2 percent more over all, to build a green school. 'With new construction, the biggest challenge is not related to cost but the perception of cost,' Ms. Gutter said."

Certainly, Pottstown's school vote itself can be argued on an environmental standpoint.

Those who favored closing all the schools and building a single, consolidated campus, could correctly argue that economies of scale and the potential to build a fully green campus would have reduced the district's environmental burden significantly.

At the same time, renovating existing schools, which are generally built in a more robust way, takes advantage of preserving the "embedded energy" it took to construct the building in the first place, as well as offering an example for a town full of older buildings.

The nature of the split vote by the school board represents that this matter is by no means settled in people's minds. However, the two areas of disagreement have more to do with cost and educational issues than the environment, so The Thin Green will tactfully (and with full acknowlegement of its own cowardice) prudently avoid them there.

Instead, it seems prudent to merely observe that, as board member Judyth Zahora noted, whether you agree with it or not, the decision has been made. "Now we move on," she said Thursday.

Perhaps one area to build consensus and help pull the board and the community back together, is making the decision to make these buildings and extensions as green, energy efficient and as sustainable as possible.

It will have the triple advantage of actually doing what we tell our students every day they should be doing, as well as having the potential to save taxpayers money and might just help to save the world those students will inherit.

Wouldn't that be a great lesson for our town to teach?

Let us for a time turn our gaze from Washington, dear reader. It is a depressing view.

We at The Thin Green Line have written quite a lot about solar energy and other alternative forms of energy like geo-thermal and wind power.

What is encouraging to note is that as we scan the information landscape about these subjects, primarily in other newspapers around the country, we find increasingly that the subject is not dealt with in special "environmental" sections of the paper or Web sites, but rather in the "business" section.

We are becoming convinced that this is because green building practices and practices of sustainability are increasing in popularity not because of marketing, or because of some sense of moral obligation on people's part, but because it makes sense -- period.

Back in June, The New York Times ran a story about how high fuel prices were making the old suburban ideal of the big-house-with-the-cathedral-ceiling-in-the-big-subdivision-at-the-new-exit-off-the-big-highway harder to sustain.

Of course, since then the housing market has collapsed (or perhaps, in part, because of that) and there are all sorts of reasons why the building of such megaliths has stalled.

But the underlying conflict remains.

People like us who read planning journals call living an hour or two away from the city or town in which you work so you can live "in the country," living in an -exurb or "on the fringe." It's like a suburb on steroids. Twice the square footage, twice the lawn and six times the commute."

"Before it was ‘we spend too much time driving.’ Now, it’s ‘we spend too much time and money driving,’” was how one ex-urb resident described it in the story.

"In Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Minneapolis, homes beyond the urban core have been falling in value faster than those within, according to an analysis by Moody’s Economy.com," the Times reported.

"More than three-fourths of prospective home buyers are now more inclined to live in an urban area because of fuel prices, according to a recent survey of 903 real estate agents with Coldwell Banker, the national brokerage firm."

Now please excuse me while we cut and paste even more shamelessly from the Times article, because it's relevant and, well they've already written it more clearly than we would.

-- “It’s like an ebbing of this suburban tide,” said Joe Cortright, an economist at the consulting group Impresa Inc. in Portland, Ore. “There’s going to be this kind of reversal of desirability. Typically, Americans have felt the periphery was most desirable, and now there’s going to be a reversion to the center.”

-- In March, Americans drove 11 billion fewer miles on public roads than in the same month the previous year, a 4.3 percent decrease — the sharpest one-month drop since the Federal Highway Administration began keeping records in 1942.

-- Long before the recent spike in the price of energy, environmentalists decried suburban sprawl a waste of land, energy and tax dollars. Governments from Virginia to California have in recent decades lavished resources on building roads and schools for new subdivisions in the outer rings of development while skimping on maintaining facilities closer in. Many governments now focus on reviving their downtowns.

-- In Denver — a classic Western city, with snarling freeway traffic across a vast acreage of strip malls, ranch houses and office parks — the city has had an urban renaissance over the last decade.

-- A $6.1 billion commuter rail system has been in the works over the last four years, drawing people downtown without cars, while stimulating swift sales of densely clustered condos near stations.

Imagine, building a commuter rail system to take cars off the highway and revitalize downtowns along its route. Are you listening Pennsylvania?

Of course, if you have enough money to have a second home (and who doesn't? Umm, us?), you may also have enough money to operate that home "off the grid."

In this August article in "Great Homes/Great Destinations section of The New York Times, readers learn about a new trend in getaways epitomized by Lake Bill Chinook in Oregon where second homes have evolved from tents and trailers to giant homes. What makes them significant, is they are all, by necessity, "off the grid" and have to generate their own power, water and waste disposal.

Imagine if the rest of us had to do that. We would find out what we are capable of.

To help us learn, we now can turn to a growing number of consultants who specialize in teaching how to practice sustainability.

The trend was documented in this August article in The New York Times Business section.

"It reported that at the end of 2006, the Green Building Council’s membership included 679 consultants. By July 31 this year, there were 1,590."

"This mirrors the rapid increase in the number of buildings certified by the council: In 2005, there were 404 buildings that met LEED standards. Midway through 2008, 1,705 buildings have been certified," the article notes.

For the uninitiated, LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. And, because Americans love to quantify things, it of course has a rating scale that lets you brag to the neighbors about how much your greener your house is than theirs.

In fact that is undoubtedly part of the motivation for houses like this one, highlighted in another New York Times article about how LEED is "the new trophy home." This California home they used as an example is priced at $2.8 million.

For those without the time or the inclination to click on the link provided, allow me to provide you with a sampling of what it reveals:

"Its rating was built into that price. LEED — an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the hot designer label, and platinum is the badge of honor — the top classification given by the U.S. Green Building Council. “There’s kind of a green pride, like driving a Prius,” said Brenden McEneaney, a green building adviser to the city of Santa Monica, adding, “It’s spreading all over the place.”

"Devised eight years ago for the commercial arena, the ratings now cover many things, including schools and retail interiors. But homes are the new frontier.

"While other ratings are widely recognized, like the federal Energy Star for appliances, the LEED brand stands apart because of its four-level rankings — certified, silver, gold and platinum — and third-party verification. So far this year, 10,250 new home projects have registered for the council’s consideration, compared with 3,100 in 2006, the first year of the pilot home-rating system. Custom-built homes dominate the first batch of certified dwellings. Today, dinner-party bragging rights are likely to include: “Let me tell you about my tankless hot water heater.” Or “what’s the R value of your insulation?”

What can I say, "we've come a long way baby.

But we should probably make sure we don't go too far.

While all of the previous examples show the power of persuasion and peer pressure at work, there are other methods and this one being practiced in the city of Marbug, Germany, is probably a step too far for most Americans.

There, in a city in which is already a "model of enlightened energy production and consumption," the leaders took things one step further. Instead of encouraging the installation of solar panels on new construction and significant renovations, it is now requiring it, or pay a $1,500 fine.

The law is being challenged, as well it should be.

One opponent, who calls the law the beginning of a "green dictatorship," makes the very relevant observation that compelling people breeds opposition to green practices whereas encouraging them and helping them instead breeds support.

After all, we say, why compel when the trends, circumstances and market all seem to be pointing us in the right direction anyway?