by Gregory A. Smith

As news stories about global climate change, the peaking of oil production, or the threat of major water shortages appear more frequently in the mainstream press, it is not surprising that concerns about the long-term sustainability of institutions associated with industrial civilization have become common.  Although national and global organizations have been involved with this issue since the 1970s, only in the past decade has the general public begun to attend to the degree to which our economy and way of life are vulnerable to the impact of human behavior on the natural systems that support our species.  The term, sustainability, has become part of our daily language, and even though it is now employed to justify the efforts of transnational corporations as well as environmental organizations, its use points to a growing awareness that humanity can no longer ignore the environmental consequences of our activities and decisions.

Preoccupied for over two decades with the challenge of raising test scores and overcoming the achievement gap, educators have been slow to grasp the curricular implications of broader trends that could unravel the very institutions they believe await their students upon graduation.  This is not to say that some educators and policymakers have not been attempting to raise the alarm about these issues for some time.  The United Nations, in particular, has sponsored numerous conferences and curriculum development efforts over the past few decades aimed at enhancing young peoples’ awareness of the environment and the rights of future generations to resources currently used with abandon.  In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency has until recently underwritten a variety of educational efforts, and numerous states have incorporated environmental themes into their curricular standards.  All of these efforts deserve commendation, but it would be overstatement to suggest that they have begun to address the gravity of the challenges that lie before us.

Models of sustainability education are few and far between. Environmental topics are themselves the subject of controversy, and schools are structured in ways that often prevent teachers from engaging their students in activities aimed at developing dispositions and skills likely to support the formation of a more sustainable culture.  More challenging is the likely possibility that at the core of an education for sustainability must reside an ethical perspective about students’ interconnection with one another, future generations, and the planet.  From such a perspective could emerge the forms of action and restraint that support cultural practices capable of providing for human welfare but at the same time preserving the integrity of natural resources and systems.

Little in contemporary schools encourages the development of such connections.  Students instead are drawn into an institutional environment characterized by a preoccupation with individual performance and a curriculum that focuses primarily on the national and international.  The school day is organized in such a way that children have limited contact with the lives of adults beyond the classroom walls.  What they learn only intermittently deals with the substance of their everyday lives and the places where they live.  And within the context of their classrooms, the formation of long-term relationships with peers or teachers — the relationships that often serve as the basis of care and obligation — is given little thought.  Current efforts to downsize large high schools does reflect a growing understanding that student achievement is itself impeded by the absence of meaningful social ties, but there is little to suggest that this effort will result in the widespread adoption of an ethic based on a deep understanding of humanity’s fundamental interconnection with one another, other species, and the earth.

The STAR School outside of Flagstaff, Arizona is one of a handful of institutions striving to address these issues in an intentional way. Founded in 2001, this small charter school is becoming a model of both sustainability and indigenous education.  Its princpal, Mark Sorenson, served in his earlier career as administrator of the Rough Rock Community School and the Little Singer School, both located on the Navajo Reservation.  The Rough Rock Community School was one of the first Native American schools in the United States to create a curriculum that incorporated indigenous knowledge and perspectives. The Little Singer School continued this tradition, becoming a center of community activity and education, affirming Navajo culture but at the same time introducing innovative technologies, agricultural approaches, and social practices.  Throughout his career, Sorenson has sought to bridge Navajo and Euro-American cultures in ways that prepare students to interact with off-reservation society while at the same time grounding them in the integrity and beauty of their own traditions. The STAR School continues this work.

Currently enrolling about 60 K-8 students, the majority of whom are Navajo, STAR School activities are predicated on the Navajo value of k’e.  The term, k’e, denotes clan membership or kinship, referring not only to one’s blood relationships, but one’s relationship to all people and beings.  This sense of relatedness permeates all aspects of the school.  Located on 40 brush- and juniper-covered acres on the main road between Flagstaff and the reservation, the school can be identified by a blue tarp that covers an outdoor area behind its brown adobe-like buildings.  When Sorenson initially shows me around the school, he explains that the tarp is the school’s effort to replicate the traditional Navajo shade house, a simple pole structure roofed with loose branches that provides cover from the sun in Navajo land.  The outdoor classroom it provides serves to signal to students that the school is connected to architectural structures with which they are familiar.  From a child’s first sight of the school, he or she can see its relationship to their own community.

Sorenson goes on to say that the property on which the school stands was previously owned by a Navajo man who had allowed it to become covered with old machinery and refuse.  This is not atypical in reservation settings where trash collection may be unavailable and people have not yet adjusted to products that either biodegrade slowly or not at all.  One of Sorenson’s hopes is that people driving by the school and noticing the property’s transformation will realize that they can effect a similar transformation at the own homes.  Pointing out the small junipers that dot the property, Sorenson notes that buildings and paths have been sited to avoid taking out any trees. Later, a class of K-2 students describe to me the way that they are caring for a juniper on the property that was not thriving.  Clearly influenced by the school’s concern about vegetation, they have placed recycled cardboard on the ground around its trunk to increase the amount of moisture available to its roots.

A little further on this tour, Sorenson points out compost pits similarly covered with cardboard.  When left in piles, plant and vegetable wastes in the Southwest’s climate dry up and fail to decompose.  Buried in the ground and kept moist, compost has a  chance to form and become a fertile source of nutrients and material capable of holding moisture and enriching the spare lava soils around the school.  Earlier in the year, students raised earthworms in garbage containers inside their classroom.  Finding that the worms were not doing as well as they had hoped, they relocated them in the compost piles.  The worms are now increasing in size and reproducing, thriving in their new setting.  Sorenson and his teachers are watching to see whether the worms begin to migrate into the soil adjoining the compost piles, bringing the benefits of their nutrient-rich castings.  There is also speculation about whether introducing soil cultures permeated with the mycorrhizal fungi encountered in compost might in time enhance the agricultural potential of the school’s gardens.  Ecologists have recently discovered that the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest intentionally inoculated unproductive soils with samples from fertile ground to good effect, significantly increasing the productive capacity of the ecosystems in which they lived.  Perhaps buried compost piles could do the same thing in Arizona.  Engaging in this experiment, people at the STAR School are entering the dance between human beings and the earth that characterizes indigenous societies from South and North America to the Himalayas, a dance in which nature and humanity are not adversaries but convivial partners.

This dance can also be seen in the way that students and their teachers are shaping gardens to make the best use of the Southwest’s limited rainfall.  Gardens are either sunken slightly in the ground or surrounded by stones that trap water.  All of these methods have been introduced by a Navajo gardener skilled in permacultural techniques. One of the central goals of permaculture is to create an approach to food production that requires little if any external inputs.  Ideally, this would mean that neither fertilizer nor irrigation would be necessary.  By exploring this innovative technique, the STAR School is opening up possibilities for agriculture that could potentially increase the range of vegetables available to people in this drought-prone region and enhance their food security.  With regard to architecture, land use, and agriculture, the STAR School is modeling a variety of activities that demonstrate its concern about maintaining and extending beneficial relationships with the land and the surrounding human community.

The STAR School is also experimenting with alternative sources of energy.  Surprisingly to an outsider, this region of Arizona is not served by electrical utilities.  People either live without electricity or produce their own.  Sorenson and his family have lived for a number of years on a small ranch five miles from the school.  They have become knowledgeable about the use of solar and wind power, and have brought their expertise to the school.  A sizeable array of photovoltaic cells has been built just to the south of the school’s gardens.  This array produces all of the school’s electricity, which is stored in a collection of batteries for days when the sun is not shining.  Although this system requires ongoing monitoring and adjustment, the school prides itself on being the only totally solar educational institution in the United States.  This technology, as well, provides a valuable learning opportunity for students.  Some are involved in its maintenance, and others design solar experiments that they then take to regional science fairs.  Parents have also become interested in solar technologies and are exploring the possibility of introducing similar systems for homes that are off the grid.

In a wide range of ways, the STAR School is modeling to its students and the surrounding communities cultural practices that exemplify a relationship with the natural world that is beneficial and sustainable. Some of these practices are grounded in traditions familiar to students’ home communities; others are new but reflective of the long-standing value of k’e and its implications for relationships between people and the natural world.  All embrace practices and perspectives that contribute to the sustainability of human communities in an ecosystem that demands from its inhabitants imagination and adaptability,

It is often easiest and less threatening to bring conversations about sustainability to a stop following a discussion of various technological innovations.  While such innovations are essential, they are unlikely to prove sufficient to the task of far-reaching cultural transformation that may be required of the earth’s current residents. This is where the human side of k’e becomes significant.  Environmental educator and writer David Orr has spoken about how the process of reversing the degradation of natural systems is not dissimilar from treatment offered to a person suffering from heart failure.  At the outset, every technological aid that can be enlisted to save the person’s life should be used.  The person’s long-term health, however, will require deeper changes in lifestyle.  It is these changes that will ultimately make the difference between an abbreviated life or one that approximates the human potential.  With regard to societies, communities that have learned how to balance their own needs with the needs of the environment have demonstrated that they are capable of persisting for thousands of years.

In such societies, people know that they will be cared for by their fellows.  Biologist Mary Clark argues that the capacity to participate in collaborative communities is one of the primary reasons that our species was able to survive the challenges of rearing helpless infants and children to the point where they could take care of themselves. Absent social relationships and support, our early human ancestors would have been unable to protect themselves and their offspring during the long years of maturation.  The need to belong to such communities, however, has been attenuated by a century of industrial and technological developments that have mediated the more immediate environmental challenges that threatened our forebears.  Privileged residents of the industrialized world now can leave their natal families and communities, move to distant places, and establish secure lives for themselves through participation in a market economy that offers insurance policies in lieu of familial and communal support. The notion that individuals need to remain conscious of “all our relations” as many North American indigenous peoples enjoin, has for many residents of the modern developed world become vestigial.

One of the consequences of this development, however, is that people have come to define security, itself, in terms of accumulated material wealth rather than membership in a stable community.  If, as many proponents of sustainability argue, the creation of an ecologically sustainable society requires a steady state rather than growth economy and the adoption of lifestyles characterized by thrift and simplicity, then the level of individual wealth recently encountered in the United States is likely to become a thing of the past.  To some extent, the increasingly bi-polar distribution of resources that has come to characterize the economy of this country during the past quarter century suggests that this is already happening.  People, however, are ill-prepared to reestablish the kinds of social relationships that once contributed to our sense of security.  As humanity’s relationship with the natural world needs to be mended, so does our relationship with one another.

The STAR School, with its emphasis on the value of k’e, provides an example of the way that this aspect of sustainability can be addressed in educational settings.  Sorenson’s service to the broader community as a Navajo peacemaker has helped him to understand the dimensions of this endeavor.  He speaks of the importance of placing what he calls the 4 R’s–relationship, responsibility, reverence, and respect— at the center of the school’s culture.  He notes  that “Respect is such a key element, especially when you are dealing with kids because so often [their] conflicts have to do with feelings of respect having been violated.”  Focusing on relationships and respect in this way contributes to a school environment that is safe and trusting, homelike in the best sense of the word.

To support this effort, the school has adopted the principles of non-violent communication to guide teacher’s patterns of speaking with students, one another, and parents.  This approach to communication (Rosenberg 2002) emphasizes the maintenance of compassion in dealings with others, even when conditions are threatening or interpersonally difficult.  Teachers at the school speak of the challenge of embracing a way of listening and responding that focuses on what is being observed, what they and the other person may be feeling and needing, and what they and the person(s) they are speaking with require to be satisfied, content, or happy.  By consciously setting aside a pattern of response based on defensiveness or attack, non-violent communication provides a means for sustaining rather than weakening connections between people.  Although teachers have yet to make the specific strategies associated with non-violent communication a regular part of their everyday practice in the classroom, the school’s willingness to adopt this approach speaks to the faculty’s and staff’s awareness of the impact that communication patterns can have on human interaction at the school.  When asked about what made the school unique for him, a teacher said:

“I just want to emphasize the feeling of warmth.  That’s very true, not only the way we treat children at the school, but the way we treat teachers and staff.  I always feel welcome here when I come, everyday. . . . We truly get to know each.  And on more than a professional basis: just knowing how we feel about things, how we think about things, taking that into account.  It’s very unique when I compare it to other jobs I have had.”

He was backed up by another teacher who observed:

“We really try to be honest about things, too.  When we have an idea about something or an opinion about something, we talk about it. . . . We actually say what we believe.”

When faculty and staff embrace this kind of communication with one another, they embrace an interactional style that sets a tone of openness and kindness that can then become the behavioral norm of an institution.

The STAR School also strives to affirm students’ relationship with their own communities, integrating into its curriculum multiple opportunities for students to serve others.  During the week of my visit to the school, for example, the third and fourth grade class visited the home of an older Navajo culture to help shear sheep. Earlier in the year, other students visited the homes of elders on the reservation where they distributed baked goods and helped with household chores.  In the spring, the K-2 students had taken offshoots of spider plants they had been cultivating, potted them, and then distributed the fledgling plants to other “grandmas” and “grandpas.” One of the most striking examples of this service ethic that I was able to observe involved the development of a plan to address the litter problem in Leupp, a reservation community 17 miles away that is home to the majority of the school’s students. The following excerpt from my fieldnotes describes the classroom discussion and work that led to the plan.

Sixteen third- and fourth-grade students, nearly all of whom are Navajo or part-Navajo, sit on the floor in front of their teacher. The teacher, Navajo herself, suggests that they begin the morning by chanting a poem entitled “We Say Nahasdzaan Shime” written out on butcher paper and posted on the door to the bathroom.  The children chant vigorously:

We say Nahasdzaan shime:

Earth, my Mother,

Even though she takes us daily

We will become part of her again

For we are her.

The earth is our mother.

The song continues for several more lines, and the children conclude it as strongly as they began.

After they have finished, their teacher asks what they can do to help Mother Earth.  One boy says that they can water plants in the small garden they have created outside the classroom door.  A girl says that they can sort the seeds they have been given by friends of the school.  Another student says they can make compost.  Then a boy talks about picking up trash.  A plastic bag filled with garbage had fallen from a passing truck by his home and split open.  In the relentless wind of the previous three days, trash had caught on brush around his house, and he had helped his family clear it away.

The teacher picks up on this suggestion, saying that she had noticed how much litter had collected on fences on the reservation between the school and the village of Leupp.  She asks whether students think putting up a sign will help.  They say, “Maybe.”  She then asks which people in Leupp they should talk with about dealing with this problem.  A girl raises her hand and says that her grandmother takes her and her sisters to the Chapter House — Leupp’s equivalent of a city council — to serve food.  She thinks that it might be possible for students to get on the agenda of an upcoming meeting.  The teacher thanks the students for their good ideas and indicates that they will talk more about this in the afternoon.

During the last hour of school, their teacher pulls students together after they have finished their work in the classroom’s literacy centers to continue the discussion they began in the morning. She says that students are going to engage in a “Think, Pair, Share” about the question: “How can we help Leupp deal with the trash problem?”  For two minutes, students pair up and discuss possibilities. When the timer buzzes, they redirect their attention to the center of the room and share ideas that include enlisting the aid of students at a school in Leupp, going door to door to encourage people to help pick up trash, telling stories about Old Leupp to show why the community is worth caring for, approaching a reporter from the Navajo-Hopi Observer to write an article about the issue, and giving people seed packets for trash.  The teacher says that one of the activity groups that afternoon will be called Community Helpers and develop a plan for helping Leupp. Other groups will sort seeds, pick up trash on the school ground, and water the compost and raised-bed vegetable garden.  After 45 minutes, the Community Helpers have written two versions of a letter to the school’s principal requesting permission to attend a Chapter House meeting in Leupp and a 10-step proposal for addressing the problem of trash in their home community.

This classroom scene demonstrates the way that students at the STAR School are being inducted not only into patterns of communication aimed at maintaining positive relations among themselves and their teachers; they are also being given the opportunity to act as responsible participants in the civic life of the school and their home community.

Such learning experiences are being encouraged through staff development activities associated with the work of Rolland Tharp (Tharp et al. 2000), an educational psychologist with extensive experience working with indigenous populations.  In the 1990s, Tharp and his associates established the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence (CREDE) at the University of California-Santa Cruz. CREDE emphasizes the value of creating learning environments in which relationship building rather than isolation is the norm. Three of CREDE’s five instructional standards provide students with opportunities to form meaningful ties with one another in the context of the school’s academic program: learning through teachers’ and students’ joint productive activity, connecting school to students’ lives, and teaching through conversation.*  All of these standards are in evidence in the classroom activities described above.  What is surprising is how infrequent this kind of teaching and learning is in many conventional classrooms where teacher-centered talk dominates and student conversation is discouraged.  It is not uncommon, especially is secondary schools, for students to be unaware of the names of other students in their classes.  In such circumstances, the initiation and sustenance of relationships are given little considerations.

Also evident at the school is the frequent use of study centers. Because class sizes are small, students often learn in the company of three or four others either at stations that allow for independent work or close interaction between a teacher or aide and a small group of children.  When students are working at a station with no adult present, they turn to one another when they have questions or need assistance.  At stations with an adult, they receive direct guidance with skills related to literacy or numeracy.  At the STAR School, little instruction involves teachers lecturing or presenting information to an audience of passive children.  Conversation and interaction are ongoing, exactly the kind of social experience that forms the basis for sustained relationships.

One final aspect of the STAR School contributes to the cultivation of k’e.  Parents are more visible here than they are in many schools.  To begin with, a half dozen of the school’s faculty and staff members are the parents of students.  They include a teacher, an aide, the school’s secretary, cooks, and janitor.  For them, the school has become a vital part of the community, providing both employment and education. Furthermore, other parents and community members frequently visit the school.  One teacher observed that in places where he had previously taught the school was disconnected from the community.  “Here, it’s almost like teaching on stage.  The parents, they are always here. They are always looking at how you do things.  They always have comments to make to you about it.  It’s a discussion; it’s very open. It’s not like the teacher is over with the kids, and the parents are somewhere else.  They are here.” For a number of generations, Native American parents have been denied this kind of access to schools and teachers.  Relationships between indigenous families and teachers who served as agents of a contrasting culture were virtually non-existent or adversarial.  At the STAR School, parents — mostly Navajo — are co-partners in the education of their children, a situation that allows them to part of the broad circle of relationships the school is attempting to describe.  Here, service truly is to “all” relations, including the critical relationship students experience with their parents and extended families.

From a school climate characterized by interpersonal warmth to service learning projects that link children to their community, from instructional activities that encourage relationship building to the accessibility of teachers and principal to parents, the STAR School embodies educational practices that underline students’ connections to people both inside and outside the school.  Rather than functioning as an institution that isolates children from their natal community and its values, the STAR School helps to integrate its students into the broad kinship networks that link them to all people, beings, and things.

The formation of societies that are both socially and ecologically sustainable will likely depend on the induction of children into a deep recognition of their membership in an ever-expanding set of nested communities.  In the absence of this recognition, people will possess neither the sense of security nor the sense of connection to place required to move beyond two of the central compulsions of industrial society: the accumulation of material wealth and the domination of the natural world.  It is human alienation from social communities that compels individuals to assure their own welfare through participation in a competitive market economy.  It is human alienation from the natural world that leads people to exploit resources that rightly should be preserved for future generations and other species.

The Navajo principle of k’e exemplifies an understanding that may need to be reclaimed by residents of developed societies.  In blending aspects of both an indigenous and a developed society, the STAR School demonstrates how this task might be accomplished.  Central to its methodology is an emphasis on embodying in daily life and activities an ethical principle that supports the maintenance of relationships. Students are reminded by their teachers of the importance of caring for others, the earth, and their communities.  But more than injunctions must be incorporated if children are to be socialized into a society that protects its member, other beings and the earth, and their descendants.  The strength of the STAR School lies in the way that students are led to embody the value of k’e and to make it their own. If a sustainable society is to become a reality, human beings must learn to translate ideals into actions in the way that the Navajo students in this small school are learning to live responsibly in their communities and place.

References:

Rosenberg, Marshall.  (2003).  Non-violent communication: A language of life. Encinitas, CA: Puddle Dancer Press.

Tharp, Rolland; Estrada, Peggy; Dalton, Stephanie Stroll, & Yamauchi, Lois A.  (2000).

Teaching transformed; Achieving excellence, fairness, inclusion, and harmony. Boulder, CO: Westview Press

Greg Smith is Associate Professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland.

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By Ryan Johnson

When I was ten years old, I was absolutely obsessed with the original Nintendo Entertainment System. My cousins had one, my best friend had one, it seemed like everyone I knew had a Nintendo. I would have done just about anything to have one as well, but my parents refused, despite my continuous complaints and numerous solicitations.

I thought I was the most neglected ten-year-old child in the world, while my parents, patiently suffering my pleas, would remind me that the Beartooth, Big Horn, and Pryor Mountains, the McCullough Peaks, and Shoshone River were just beyond my doorstep. These natural features were, in fact, truly magnificent and unavoidable constituents of the landscape, dominating every view with snow-capped peaks, granite cliff faces, rainbow-colored bluffs, and crystal clear riffles, containing everything from wild horses to Grizzly Bears to rattlesnakes. Now, perhaps needless to say, I prize every single second I am able to gaze upon the mountains and deserts of northern Wyoming, and I cherish every memory of running through alpine forests and mountain biking through tumbling sage brush. But a conscious acknowledgement of my privilege of being born into such natural wonder eluded me, and as a result I still found modern, escapist forms of entertainment media seductive. Even in a place completely dominated by mountains, peaks, rivers, valleys, prairie, and high desert, I still found a way to explore MTV far more often than Heart Mountain. Taking for granted what you are born with is obviously not unique to me. Nor is seeking out replacements for direct experience through television, the internet, gaming, etc., which have become pervasive in our society and, with the exception of the internet, were common ways to replace experience in my youth (I did a fair share of mountain biking, hiking, and kayaking in my middle and high school years, but not nearly as much as I could have or wish I would have).

It could be argued that human beings are genetically predisposed to seek entertainment, at least that which conveys a story; the ability to transport oneself to distant lands and imagine oneself in an infinite number of alternative settings has been a compelling part of human history via oral stories and the written word for thousands of years. Only relatively recently, however, has it become a nearly unavoidable aspect of our cultural landscape, available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week by means of innumerable glowing screens. Our society generally and our youth specifically spend an enormous amount of time “plugged in” to various types of entertainment media. The inexorable progression of technological innovation has led to the production of a multitude of gadgets that provide constant channels to maintain one’s connection to digital content; we’re voluntarily (and often involuntarily) inundating ourselves with images, videos, links, buttons, logos, and just about anything and everything else imaginable. And all too commonly, our youth are “discovering” their own backyard, its geography, cultural history, ecology and biodiversity, through pixels on a screen rather than boots in the mud, if they learn about it at all.

There are now so many ways to replace actual experience with virtual experience it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference. Video games, Second Life, GoogleEarth, Facebook, and many more electronic media all provide avenues for replacing physical reality with a digital substitute, abstracting relationships and, perhaps arguably, contributing to feelings of alienation and detachment in an age of unending connectivity. From a look around it is starting to seem as if digital devices that maintain that connectivity are viewed by their owners less as tools for productivity or communication than necessary prosthetics of the new digital self. We are, quite frankly, culturally enslaved to them. While this isnít necessarily problematic in itself, there is now unassailable evidence that we are living in an age of ecological crisis for which we will need to retool the ways in which we view technology and it’s social, economic, cultural and ecological significance. The days of driving technological innovation predominantly for entertainment media, unsustainable forms of energy production, or simply conspicuous consumption will need to come to a close. We need a new technology, or at least a new perspective on the role of technology in our lives, one that embraces ecological principles and aims to more effectively align human society with sustainable forms of living and working. To do this, we will need a new generation of technologically and environmentally literate citizens for whom technological innovation is viewed as a powerful way to collaborate, communicate, and democratically solve the ecological problems we now face. Technology must cease to be an end in itself and become a means to confront the enormous environmental problems future generations will face. We must find a way to direct our collective, and vast, technological literacy toward ecologically sustainable and socially equitable solutions to our environmental problems, while continuing to explore emerging technological innovations in promising and environmentally sound fields, such as green energy and biomimicry.

In order to direct our technological prowess to address our environmental problems, we must have an environmentally literate society, one that understands the consequences of failing to address the tremendous environmental challenges that confront us globally. To that end, media has been instrumental in communicating the issues, from the likely repercussions of global climate change, as portrayed in the films “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The 11th Hour”, to media-heavy, environmentally focused expeditions, such as “Summit on the Summit” and “The Plastiki”. These latter so-called “eco-adventure” spectacles have attempted to leverage the profound pedagogical opportunities of media technology to bring awareness to environmental issues, in this case clean and accessible water and plastics in the ocean respectively. But is environmental literacy as delivered through a screen enough to cultivate a new generation of environmental stewards? Does there not need to be a second movement, one of direct connection with our biological neighbors and our geological phenomenon? Furthermore, these often smart, creative, and important media projects meant to attract attention to an environmental cause tend to focus overwhelmingly on the potential calamities that could result from our currently precarious global environmental state. While this awareness is vital to a 21st Century environmental literacy, it can all too often result in a feeling of hopelessness in the audience, particularly for young people who may have never seen a spawning Pacific Northwest salmon in their home watershed but know all to well of their declining numbers, just to offer up one example. Recently, this despair among young people regarding the state of the natural world has been given a name: ecophobia. If the only exposure our youth have to ecosystems comes from YouTube or Google Earth, regardless of how charismatic that exposure may be, their sense of what the natural world is, and the environmental issues that threaten it, will not only be abstract but often times lead to resignation or detachment. While the knowledge, or even environmental literacy, gained from these media may be perfectly relevant and the amount of information prodigious, what is lost in translation? Unsurprisingly, if our youth are only consuming information about the environment by way of their television or laptop screen, it isn’t hard to imagine a certain level of ambivalence or even dread dominating their perspective of the natural world. Consequently, there is evidence that our next generation of environmental stewards may be giving up before they even start.

Is there a union of technological and environmental literacy to be found, one that uses technology to encourage our youth to experience the natural world for themselves? One that uses technology as a bridge to outdoors? One that adds that unquantifiable experience of being surrounded by nature and feeling part of it? It is just such a union that can help us forge a new era of environmental stewardship while encouraging the use and creation of new tools to confront environmental degradation.

Technology as a “Bridge” to the Outdoors
The educational possibilities that modern, web-based technology provides are startling in both number and content. Combined with the fact that we now have an entire generation that cannot imagine life without an iPod and a cell phone (and are rarely seen without both), the opportunities to employ technology in the classroom are limitless. As outlined above, the problem isn’t technology itself, but our propensity to let it take us outside of ourselves and replace actual experience with virtual experience, while promoting detachment and even hopelessness regarding the state of the environment. So how do we utilize the manifold educational applications of emerging technology without compromising the vital, irreplaceable, and less quantifiable educational and ecological benefits of hands- on, authentic, experiential learning? Today’s students are so comfortable with technology, its use to supplement authentic, place-based investigations seems both timely and necessary to reconnect students to the outdoors and support their role as active, lifelong environmental stewards.

There are now multiple web-based tools, rich internet applications, and geo-RSS mapping interfaces that educators and students can use to find place-based venues for study, create dynamic research projects, and share the product of their study online. Moreover, the open source movement, one of the most promising and unapologetically democratic developments in the short but extremely prolific evolution of the web, is offering up professional tools, from blogging to video editing to GIS mapping, that are beginning to change the landscape of content creation and dissemination on the web. No longer are the tools needed to create dynamic media projects or sophisticated geographic models only for those with high budgets for the latest plastic-wrapped software package. The open source movement, essentially an organic network of software and website developers working collectively to create new and revolutionary ways to use the web, is churning out free, accessible, and innovative alternatives to the software applications that have been the (expensive) status quo for at least two decades. In addition, there are now numerous ways to access and post local information geographically on the web. Several mapping application program interfaces, the most popular of which is provided by Google, allow users to convey their own content and geographically relevant information directly onto a dynamically generated map. These tools were almost unthinkable just a decade ago. Now they are both changing the way we think about place while offering incredible opportunities for educators.

Now that so much information is available online using these dynamic tools, especially if that information can be customized locally, how do we avoid replacing the authentic experience of place with such tools? For example, there are now online mapping tools that allow for such sophisticated hydrologic and land-use modeling, it can be tempting (and, for the first time in history, less expensive) to use them as a replacement for field investigations, providing as they do access to so much information in one place. Despite this temptation, and with the realization that there is no replacement for field research,  these sophisticated web-based tools are valuable supplements to field study, helping to draw connections between concepts and contextualize data sets. To use an example of the how these connections can be made using emerging technology, the United States Geological Survey automatically updates streamflow measurements throughout the country,  allowing students to compare stream discharge in multiple locations with ease. In Oregon’s  Tualatin River basin, students collecting water quality data in the field can compare their data with that being continuously updated thanks to an Oregon USGS map that syndicates real-time water quality data from numerous locations in the watershed.

With reference tools like these, perhaps the most profound educational possibilities with respect to technology, environmental literacy, and service-learning lie in “ground-truthing,” the process of confirming or disputing information derived from computer models and GIS applications by gathering data and observations on the ground. Today’s ground-truthing practitioners often make use of multiple technologies, from GPS units to geo-tagging digital cameras to sophisticated monitoring equipment. Educators can effectively employ both the process and tools of ground truthing, beginning with the study of aerial photos and online geographic and hydrologic models, as well as research conducted by NGOs, agencies, or other organizations.

This information helps introduce concepts and allows students to formulate guiding questions and draft hypotheses before moving on to field-based research to explore realities on the ground.

Students and educators can access multiple online databases to help them prioritize areas of investigation and make use of numerous web-based outlets to share the results of their findings, making available their work to the larger community via presentations, videos, photography, and other creative pursuits. Students can utilize social networking sites to organize events at which to share the results of their field work with the community and alert regulatory agencies to potential anomalies in their data sets. Also, students can use a variety of new so-called “cloud-based” tools to create presentations, spreadsheets, and other documents and easily embed them in virtually any social networking site, blog, or webpage using simple cut-and-paste HTML code. These exciting new networking possibilities are providing new avenues for students and educators to share their work and, in the process, helping to reestablish classrooms as central to thriving communities while cultivating a new generation of civic leaders and environmental stewards.

Perhaps human beings, and especially those among us who advocate for sustainability and environmental conservation, will always have a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward technology. As we know, technology has allowed human beings to extract the earth’s natural resources with increasing speed and efficiency, find and burn fossil fuels at an almost incomprehensible rate, and ultimately alter the very climate in which we (and everything else) live. For our youth to confront the ecological challenges they will undoubtedly face, they will need to re-tool their relationship to the technological “tools of the trade”. They will need to embrace a new view of technology that encourages innovation, creativity, and sustainability. In order for coming generations to feed an increasing world population while beginning to address natural resource limits and climatic disruption, they will need all of the tools of human ingenuity they can possibly muster.

Perhaps our most important role as educators is to try to prepare the next generation to face those challenges through new tools and a new perspective, simultaneously guiding them and ourselves to a future that embraces technology as a means to live more sustainably on this planet.

Ryan Johnson is the StreamWebs Coordinator for the Freshwater Trust in Portland, Oregon. To find out more, visit www.thefreshwatertrust.org/education/streamwebs

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The interdisciplinary study of food has emerged as a theme in sustainability education at Catlin Gabel School, an independent, co-educational school with 725 students in preschool through 12th grade in Portland, Oregon. The focus on food—a necessity for human life, and a subject of much recent thinking worldwide in terms of sustainability—touches many disciplines across the school and touches our learners from age 4 to 18.

A Big Step in Thinking About Sustainability: The Natural Step Framework

The school has long identified sustainability as an important direction. This direction received an important boost during the spring of 2007, when more than 45 community members participated in a series of half-day workshops on the socio-ecological principles of the Natural Step framework. Natural Step posits that in a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust, concentrations of substances produced by society, or degradation by physical means, and people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their ability to meet their needs.

During the series of engaging workshops, teachers and staff members from each school division, Middle and Upper school students, parents, alumni, and trustees chose to explore one of three topics: facilities, food service, and curriculum. Food appeared as a key theme in each of these topic groups.

Facilities

Catlin Gabel’s current effort to achieve “Zero Waste by 2012” had its birth during the Natural Step process, in the facilities topic workshop. Right after the workshop, as a first step toward eliminating its contribution to concentrations of substances produced by society, the school started removing food waste from items sent to the landfill. By the spring of 2008, landfill contributions had fallen from 70.23 tons per year to 46.35 tons. By the spring of 2009, landfill contributions had fallen even further—to 32.49 tons—as shown in the chart below.

These figures are determined by our janitors, who weigh each school division’s landfill contributions daily and record the weights on a clipboard log sheet. Data from the log sheets is transferred to an electronic spreadsheet for monthly reporting to all students, teachers, and staff members. Students participate in the Zero Waste by 2012 initiative as part of their experiential education.

Since 2006-2007 landfill contributions have trended downward. Recycling was the focus of year one. Composting was the focus of year two. Year three is focused on purchasing.

Food Service

Catlin Gabel began analyzing and altering its food source selections based on Natural Step principles after the food service workshop. The school began listing its food sources on the school’s internal website, and posting lunch menus on the external website at http://www.catlin.edu/. Current food sources include eggs and produce from a nearby small farm and fruit from Parkdale and Scio, Oregon. Organic potatoes and winter squash come from a farm in Hillsboro, Oregon. Grass-fed lamb is sourced from Canby, Oregon, and beef from Scio, Oregon. These food sources are all within 150 miles of the campus.

In a big change from previous practices, the food service began using washable dinnerware instead of throwaways. In the cafeteria area, housed in a former barn (and called the Barn), students have learned to separate food waste from recyclables and the landfill contributions in a series of containers.

The Barn kitchen separates out pre-consumer vegetable trimmings, which are then fed to chickens and goats. In an unusual departure from the norm, Catlin Gabel has established a small herd of goats on campus for management of invasive plants. The goats also serve as a learning tool, as students help grounds staff move the goats from area to area during campus days.

Post-consumer food waste goes into the school’s hot compost system, which was designed and built by the grounds staff. Finished compost is used in raised beds at the Middle School garden.

^[7]Members of the grounds staff monitor the health of the goats.

Catlin Gabel has also considered the transportation component of food deliveries and its resulting impact on local air quality. Rather than separating food-related transportation from employee commute trips, the school tracks the total number of vehicles entering campus. Students receive weekly reports estimating the carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles that come onto the campus. Employees who use alternative forms of transportation receive a $1 per day credit for food in the cafeteria. As a result, 7,426 commuters used alternative transportation in 2008-09, and 15,389 fewer vehicles entered campus than in the previous year.

Curriculum

Although sustainability education has been part of the curriculum for some time, the effort to publicly present sustainability education at Catlin Gabel School began with the Curriculum and Educational Program topic group during the Natural Step workshop.

Monthly emails to all students and teachers raise awareness about the comparative amount of waste that each division generates—which the school hopes also creates impetus for change.

Throughout the 1990s, fourth grade faculty members led by example through efforts to recycle copy paper, and Middle School faculty members led Can-Dow-Ment, an endowment funded through collections of refundable bottles and cans. Winterim, the Upper School experiential learning week, often touches on themes of food, including one workshop in 2006 that explored sustainability in the city of Portland. Students and teachers toured a local food co-op, pressed apples at a farmers market, and watched and discussed the film Future of Food. They also visited Hot Lips Pizza (a model of sustainable business practices) with owner David Yudkin, a Catlin Gabel parent, as well as Zenger Farm and the Permaculture Farm & Institute.

Lower School

Lower School students, grades one to five, take care of worm farms, and these worms find a good life in the garden and compost pile. During the 2009-10 school year to date the Lower School generated an average of 1.08 ounces of landfill waste per person per day, which is the lowest throughout the school.

First grade students start seedlings to plant in the garden later in the spring and during early summer.

Fourth grade students regularly compost, recycle, and reuse food and supplies for the classroom. Teachers have purchased dishes to wash and use during classroom celebrations.

Fifth grade students follow the pitchfork to plate process. Working directly with farmers and businesses, children study different planting and farming methods, view packing plants, and follow food to their plates at home. Along the way students study the consumption of energy and the social and environmental choices that must be made along this journey.

Middle School

During April, Middle School students study food. They compare diets of families in different countries, economies, geographies, weather, nutrition, and life experience. Student research includes obesity and diabetes, agribusiness, global food supply, local food, GMO versus organic versus conventional food, and finally the carbon footprint of food.

Farmers speak to students about their lives and work. Students hold a potluck where they make a dish from scratch and write the recipe as an essay, using only fresh, local (defined as within 150 miles from Portland) and organic ingredients. The rules are that their dish should be free of trans-fats, excessive salt, or sugar. Students present their dishes, the sources, and the carbon footprints before eating the meal.

^[8]Sixth grade students are studying sources of food and diets around the world.

Upper School

The first part of the year-long Environmental Science and Policy course looks primarily at the creation, distribution, and consumption of food, largely in the United States but within a global context. This interdisciplinary course combines natural science, economics, politics, ethics, cultural studies and anthropology, statistics, behavioral psychology, and history.

Upper School students in other science courses serve as scientific advisors to Middle School students working in their garden. Student scientific advisors amend the soil to maximize yield for each particular crop without using artificial chemicals. Finished compost from the campus hot compost process is used to fill the Middle School garden’s raised beds.

Upper School students also view sustainability and food through an urban planning lens. Catlin Gabel’s PLACE Program (Planning and Leadership Across City Environments) uses urban planning as a tool to examine sustainability in the living laboratory of Portland, Oregon. Students form a consulting firm and complete a real-world planning project for a client, after learning about all facets of sustainability, including social equity.

One class is teaming with graduate students in Portland State University’s Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning to plan and design four acres at Zenger Farm, a unique urban farm within Portland’s city limits. This is a unique project because the farm is a nonprofit situated in a food insecure neighborhood with a program that caters to youth involvement and immigrant farming. Students are gaining the opportunity to work on issues relating to access to healthy food, which is imperative for a sustainable and equitable community.

Summary and Conclusions

In summary, the focus on food is an emerging theme in sustainability education at Catlin Gabel School. This interdisciplinary focus appears in a variety of Lower, Middle, and Upper School courses, including science, history, economics, Spanish, and French. The food theme appears to be spontaneous and takes a variety of forms as individual teachers adapt sustainability education to the circumstances of their particular disciplines. In addition, the school’s food service plays a key role in bringing better food and sustainable practices regarding food to this unique educational community.

Article printed from Journal of Sustainability Education: http://www.journalofsustainabilityeducation.org/wordpress

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By Donald J. Burgess and Tracy Johannessen

Introduction

A common raven suddenly begins to call from Cornwall Park. I rush to the front porch trying to see what the commotion is all about. Two adult ravens are flapping high over the green canopy, croaking vigorously. Like vigilant Block Watch captains protecting the integrity of a neighborhood, ravens exhibit exceptional observational prowess coupled with intense fidelity to family and place. I scan the forest with binoculars and notice three raven fledglings perched in a scraggly birch tree at the edge of the forest. Scanning higher, I finally detect a distant bald eagle circling over the urban park where the ravens have nested for a decade. Ravens recognize an opportunistic predator like a bald eagle as a “threat to the neighborhood” and they act decisively to protect their home. The raven’s objection is clearly articulated through their vocalizations and aerial antics and the bald eagle soon circles out of sight.

Why is it that when human observers experience an ecological threat and speak out in alarm (warning against drilling oil 5000 feet below the ocean surface or climate change) that our most heartfelt appeals remain ineffective? Is it an inability to understand the true threat to our children? If we truly perceived the ability of humanity to survive as linked to the ecological integrity of our surroundings, would the human response to these cries of alarm be different? What roles do love and caring play?

Problem Statement

As life-long naturalists in the northwest, we intimately know the texture and nuance of our home landscapes. We welcome the migrations and bloom sequences that pulse with seasonal variations in climate as evidence of the cycles that contain and sustain us. Through surveys and species inventories of rare plants, birds and marine communities, we have helped to systematically chronicle the changes in distribution of northwest flora and fauna. After years of naturalizing and teaching in the wild places that comprise Cascadia, we unabashedly venerate the relationships between biota, land and season.

As educators and writers we choose to express our biophilia by sharing our love for the land and sea. We resonate with healthy and diverse natural communities. Yet, increasingly, we are alarmed by the degradation of our local landscapes and the habitat changes that threaten species diversity and human security. Today, we find ourselves steeped in the 21st century assault on nature. We witness the continued loss of basic knowledge of ecosystem components and functions to the extent that dramatic changes seem to go unnoticed by our students, friends and neighbors. “One of the penalties of an ecological education,” warned Leopold (1987), “is that we live alone in a world of wounds.” To heal these wounds we choose to live and act decisively as purposeful educators in favor of ecological, economic and cultural integrity.

The more we read and think about the implications of what is taking place now on this planet, the more we are convinced that human civilization is facing a deepening ecological crisis that has never been faced before. If we want to create a culture, environment and economy that are viable in the longer term, we must learn to promote an ecologically sustainable, socially equitable and bio-culturally diverse planet (Bowers, 2010). We believe the central question for educators is how do we engage our students in a consideration of the degradation of earth’s ecosystems and their ability to support us in our current lifestyle in a way that engenders something other than despair? In an interview with Bill Moyer, Barry Lopez states “the kind of expertise we need is not a facile grasp of policy, but a deeper love of humanity. The kind of love that can help us resist the temptation to despair” (Moyer, 2010). As environmental educators, we hold the belief that this capacity for love can and must be cultivated through shared experiences that help people discover value in the natural world, experiences that encourage the exploration of what we believe and who we are and how we intend to live in the world.

“Troubling” the concept of sustainability

One of the well-known issues with “sustainability” is that the term is rarely if ever clearly defined. What are we trying to sustain – our lifestyle, economy or surrounding natural communities? Walls and Jinkling (2002) warn that “sustainability talk can, when used by advocates with radically different ideas about what should be sustained, mask central issues under the false pretense of a shared understanding, a set of values and common vision of the future” (p.2). For example, in Hot, Flat and Crowded, Freidman (2008) suggests that sustainability literally means that we must learn to think and behave in a way that sustains the natural world and our cultural relationships for generations to come. Are we hoping to sustain conditions as they are now or actually improve conditions through ecological restoration and resource conservation? Certainly our human well-being depends on a vibrant economy, healthy environment and equitable society (Nolet & Wheeler, 2010). Do we therefore mean “sustainability” of an industrialized country or are we betting that a less economically developed country will have more staying power? Moreover, if one country’s lifestyle is essentially dependent, as it is in America, on natural resource “subsidies” from other countries, especially from countries far less well off than this country and its citizens, can that lifestyle in any measure really be “sustainable?” It is essential to think globally with sustainability arguments. Yet, the issues of “sustainability” are intimately related to the local “carrying capacity” of the land which has been greatly diminished through resource exploitation, pollution and poor land and water stewardship.

Capra and Stone (2010) enlarge a common operational definition of sustainability from simply meeting material needs and avoiding ecological degradation, to include all the natural and social dimensions of the web of life. To make matters worse, the recent literature on sustainability education and education for sustainability (EfS) includes comprehensive lists of practitioner tips, principles, skills, dispositions, competencies, realms, theoretical frameworks, elements, portals, perspectives and big ideas. Some educators use “sustainability education” and “environmental education” interchangeably while others argue that sustainability differs from environmental education by focusing on broader social and economic issues (Higgs & McMillan, 2006). To highlight human connections that stretch from local to worldwide levels, Church and Skelton (2010) deemphasize environmental education’s focus on place-based nature study and adopt the inclusive term “global sustainability.”

Nowhere in these emerging notions of sustainability education do we see a substitute for the curricular activities applied in environmental education to cultivate feelings for humanity or value for healthy ecosystems in the natural world, the foundation from which any true change must grow (Wilson, 1984, 1994, 2006). To pursue ecosystem-based resource management or gain insights into functional ecosystem processes requires the cultivation of intimate knowledge of one’s homeground, of paying close attention to one’s surroundings and exploring one’s values and feelings based on the relationship of people to nature, yet many argue for the separation of sustainability education from the big ideas of environmental education in a desire to distinguish one field from the other. We argue that to inspire people enough to make changes in their perceptions and behaviors, sustainability education must embrace the central role of acquiring ecological knowledge through direct and shared experience in the natural world.

Conversely, leaders in environmental education describe as a characteristic of their field an interdisciplinary approach, with the unifying theme being a study of the relationship between people (which by definition includes economics and social issues) and the environment. This relationship is best explored through multiple disciplines including science, literature, history, civics and the arts. As naturalists and educators, we are concerned that the importance of cultivating love for nature and humanity is diminished as sustainability education seeks to define a separate domain and promote it’s “newness” in contrast to environmental education’s implied “oldness.” We have watched sustainability education grow and define itself in contrast to place-based, nature-centered, experiential environmental education and see this as a detriment to the emerging discipline’s ability to accomplish its stated goals. Now more than ever we need a strong connection to nature forged through direct experiences in the natural world as the basis from which the ability to consider broader connections and imagine alternate futures can unfold.

The desire to distinguish sustainability education as something new or substantially different from environmental education often results in the perhaps unintended marginalization of educational practices that seek to instill ecological awareness and knowledge through direct experience in nature. By focusing on more abstract learning about economics and social issues sustainability education attempts to create “green” schools and practices without building underlying curricular foundations tied to experiencing the natural world. While we agree that the concept of a triple bottom line should be included in the study of economics, and the relationship of people to environment considered in the study of social and cultural issues, it is our human relationship to nature that remains the best big picture integrator. There has long been a need in environmental education to develop and expand curriculum in social studies, and sustainability education could well fit this need, but the goal should be to create a broader integrated curricular foundation built on teaching children to value and understand their relationship to nature. That is best done in place and through direct experience in order to allow students to consider and form their own relationship to nature (Sobel, 2008).

A more advanced curriculum may ultimately outgrow sustainability all together (Rowland, 2010) by embodying the underlying principles of “ecology, coupled with the values, ability, and fortitude to act on that understanding” (Capra & Stone, 2010). Where does this leave us as we embark on the important work of understanding and implementing sustainability education? To effectively educate for change and sustainability, we have to define clearly what we value in good educational practices.

Big Ideas for Sustainability Education

Environmental Education has often been described as not a necessarily a unique subject area but a call to embrace the best practices in education such as integrated, learner centered and experience based approaches. In the process of curriculum design as it is currently being taught, teachers are asked first to identify the big ideas of the topic. We propose that the big ideas of sustainability education overlap with those of environmental education in many significant areas, including but not limited to those listed below. Strategies like teacher training and the development of curricular scope and sequence for sustainability education should reflect these ideas.

Big Idea 1: Biophilia and conservation of natural resources

We are losing touch with the natural world that sustains us. In order to be successful, education for sustainability has to first and foremost answer the questions: what do our children need to be healthy and engaged in learning, and how do we instill respect for self and others that will form the basis for a positive future? As a starting place our children need intimate connection with nature in order to develop a sense of empathy, caring and interdependence (Lopez, 1988; Pyle, 2002; Sobel, 1996, 2002). This is a critical issue today since children are increasingly living in a world where nature is inaccessible (Kellert, 2002; Pyle, 2002). If children are losing their sensitivity and connection to the natural world, what role, if any, can education for sustainability play in helping children develop a personal sense of value for the natural world? The central question remains: what are the elements of a curriculum that provide children with experiences that awaken and nurture care, concern and love?

Sustainability educators recognize that nature and nature’s myriad life forms are not commodities to be exploited without cost. We must differentiate between Nature’s “interest,” its surplus, and not continue to draw down its “capital” as though there were no tomorrow. We have to consciously move towards “downsizing” modern culture, to live “bioregionally,” and to factor in “carrying capacity” in all our policy decisions. Until we do, any conversation about “sustainability” will be little more than an academic exercise.

Leopold (1966) simplified the definition of conservation by suggesting, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering” (p. 190). We translate this to our children by providing opportunities to understand that just because you have the ability to use all of something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Acts of restraint like releasing the smaller fish back into the lake, not cutting all the trees or diverting all the water requires an ethical construct based on caring for something beyond your own immediate desires. Natural resource-based conservation education, from which environmental education emerged, is regarded by some as an outdated idea. In a world where a growing population consumes ever more limited natural resources, conservation is an essential value that we must pass on to our children. Standing in stark contrast to modern consumption habits, land and water conservation is an important part of our heritage, rooted in traditional values and described by some of our best American writers. Its most meaningful lessons are best learned through interdisciplinary approaches to the study of natural resources.

Big Idea 2: Making connections between ecosystems, economies, people and place

Central to environmental education’s proven success in improving student learning is its interdisciplinary nature. By looking at the relationship between humans and their environment through scientific study, literary exploration, artistic expression, and cultural history, a multi-faceted way of knowing is cultivated, critical thinking is enhanced and student’s enthusiasm for learning is improved (Lieberman & Hoody, 2002). This includes the opportunity for students to evolve their own thinking rather than being asked to merely accept the idea that a certain set of actions will “save the earth” and relying on fear to motive them toward action. Interdisciplinary education results in an increase in higher level thinking skills which impact the development of personal ethics. But, we argue, the environment is the best integrator, not the abstract concept of sustainability.

Big Idea 3: Constancy and changes

Our children must also come to understand ideas associated with constancy, specifically conservation and equilibrium, as well as ideas about change (AAAS, 2007). We must help our children develop adaptability and resilience to the accelerated biological and social changes that are produced by a warming planet (Smith, 2010). We must also help them develop the ability to see the changes taking place in the landscape around them. Their resilience can be supported by the development of a sense of global interdependence based on their study of social decision-making, social conflict and political and economic systems (AAAS, 1994; Wheeler, Wheeler, & Church, 2005). Since much of technology centers on creating and controlling change, it is critical for children to study the designed world including agriculture, communication technologies and computers (AAAS, 2007).

Big Idea 4: Sustainability education is not possible without social cohesion (race, gender, ethnic, religious, political and wealth)

Shared experience creates cohesion and is the foundation for community. Our educational focus must include issues of access to the natural world and experiences that engender empathy, tolerance and constructive social interaction. Spending time together in nature is a great equalizer, providing opportunities for teachers to see students, and students to see each other, in a different light. Walls and Jinkling (2002) promote the merits of taking a more participatory, democratic, pluralistic, and emancipatory approach to education and sustainability, particularly in higher education. Access to nature should be a part of these educational efforts.

Big Idea 5: Sustainability is not a destination (but rather an aspiration) based on precedent (we create it)

Without an endless supply of energy to support our cultural needs we will be forever aspiring toward sustainability. As environmental education practitioners, we have always believed that the most important thing we can instill in our students is the ability to envision a future that is different from the one that they see laid out before them. Time and time again we have heard students describe the future as overbuilt, crowded and polluted. Our task, then, is to involve them in a personal and ecological healing that opens up the possibility of something other – a future born of love rather than fear. Can a curriculum based solely on the study of the definition and/or principals of sustainability and lacking opportunities to form a relationship with nature engender this love?

Conclusion: It doesn’t matter what you call it, it’s how you do it

With the growing anthropogenic pressures on the earth’s biotic communities and our increasing concern over children’s diminishing affiliation with nature (Louv, 2005), it is now essential to embrace a comprehensive educational transformation that is attentive to an ecological and practical wisdom of place. If education for sustainability embraces the best qualities of good environmental education (experiential, place-based, interdisciplinary and nature-centered) and embraces the big ideas that the two disciplines share, then as naturalist educators we are eager to participate and have much to offer. But if the field continues to differentiate itself by what it does not include, intentionally excluding the importance of connecting students to nature in deep and meaningful ways, we feel it represents a step backwards. A larger umbrella is needed, not a smaller one, and developing scope and sequence based on a foundation of hope and love is where the real work of education for sustainability lies.

As emissaries of the natural world, we see sustainability education as heightening environmental literacy with the goal of creating a sustainable relationship between people and the environment. Inherent in this view is the assumption that environmental education is education for social and environmental change through a process of collective action (Elder, 2007). We assume that environmental education can improve relationships among humans and between humans and their environment (Wals, 1994). We also view environmental education as a potent means for educational reform rather than as a tool to modify children’s behavior with a predetermined endpoint in mind (Elder, 2007; Orr, 1991; Wals, 1994). Only by giving children the resources (i.e., environmental knowledge, experiences in nature and time to reflect), can they begin to engage in a wider participatory process of societal and environmental change.

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About the Authors

Donald J. Burgess is assistant professor in the Secondary Education Department and the Science Education Group at Western Washington University. His research interests are science education, college readiness and children’s perceptions of nature.
Tracie Johannessen has worked in the field of environmental education for over 20 years. She was education director at North Cascades Institute (www.ncascades.org) for 10 years and currently works as an independent consultant on environmental education program design and evaluation.

This article was reprinted from the Journal of Sustainability Education http://www.journalofsustainabilityeducation.org/wordpress/

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If you haven’t seen the advertising on this website, or seen reference to this document before, you should check it out… the best articles, activities, and reviews from past issues of Clearing compiled and published together on a CD-ROM. “The Best of Clearing, Volume VI” is a way to get the best of back issues of Clearing at a very low price (even less than the previous cost of a one-year subscription!).

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Preparing students with 21st century skills

Reviewed by Ella Inglebret and CHiXapkaid (D. Michael Pavel)

The salmon serves as an indicator species reflecting the overall health of the natural environment in the Pacific Northwest. For Native American tribal members, the salmon has played a central role in sustaining communities both historically and in contemporary daily life. Based on the importance of the salmon to all people living in this region, tribal leaders, environmental organizations, government agencies, and educators formed a partnership to create curriculum resources that bring awareness to the status of the salmon population as it interconnects with the broader ecological system. The outgrowth of these efforts is the Shadow of the Salmon curriculum, designed to prepare eighth- grade students with 21st century critical thinking, problem solving, and communication skills as they address environmental issues.

Building partnerships for education

The recently completed study, “From Where the Sun Rises: Addressing the Educational Achievement of Native Americans in Washington State,” (http://www.education.wsu.edu/nativeclearinghouse/achievementgap/) identified the formation of partnerships between tribes and schools as critical to promoting the educational achievement of Native students. The report echoed the Millennium Agreement signed by state and tribal leaders in 1999 by recognizing the contributions that tribes can make to education for all students in Washington State. The Shadow of the Salmon curriculum serves as an example of how Native cultural knowledge can help inform problem solving and development of potential solutions regarding environmental concerns.

Tribes contributed to the development of the Shadow of the Salmon curriculum through the leadership of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission who brought together multiple partners. Additional contributors who saw the possibility of enhanced education opportunities through partnership included the environmental organizations: Salmon Defense, the North- west Straits Commission, Environmental Education Association of Washington, Hood Canal Coordinating Committee, and Adopt-A-Stream Foundation. Washington State agencies also assisted, including the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Department of Ecology. Educational organizations and institutions involved were the Washington State Indian Education Association, Washington State University, University of Washington, and the Pacific Education Institute. Further assistance came from the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians and the Boeing Corporation.

A partnership product

A key component of the curriculum-development partnership involved communication with members of local tribes to learn about and portray the perspectives of Native people. The outcome of this partnership, the Shadow of the Salmon curriculum, is a multi-media product consisting of a docu-drama and a curriculum guide. The docu-drama tells the story of Cody Ohitika, a 15-year old boy from Pine Ridge, South Dakota, who comes to the Pacific Northwest to visit his Coast Salish relatives. He learns about the importance of caring for and respecting the natural environment through stories, observation, and hands-on experiences shared by youth, elders, and other community members. More specifically, he participates in an environmental studies class with peers, observes the consequences of an oil spill, and watches his relatives take measurements to monitor the health of a stream near a hatchery. The curriculum guide provides a variety of materials and activities to complement presentation of the docu-drama. These include traditional stories of the salmon with suggested discussion questions and follow up activities. A section on stewardship presents watersheds, as part of an ecological system heavily impacted by human use. Challenges to the sustainability of the salmon population are discussed, focusing on hatcheries, hydropower, harvest, and habitat. Suggestions are made for related information sources that can be explored through the internet. Communication skills are enhanced as students and teachers explore diverse communication modes, such as storytelling, art, music, and dance, in addition to meeting with local tribal members to hear their perspectives regarding the natural environment.

Building critical thinking and problem solving skills

Real life interactions between humans and the natural environment are portrayed in the Shadow of the Salmon curriculum as they relate to the decline of the salmon population. Students are provided with opportunities to build their critical thinking and problem solving skills as they analyze the challenges faced by salmon through- out their life cycle. The curriculum guide provides opportunities to explore potential solutions and to take action through being a “doer” and not a “worrier.” For example, after viewing the docu-drama, students are encouraged to research news articles regarding environmental issues of relevance to their local community. They then critique suggested solutions and identify ways they can personally take action to address identified concerns, such as through removing litter or planting trees along a stream.

Additional suggestions are provided for activities that promote the development of critical thinking and problem solving skills that align with Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALRs) in various content areas, such as science, math, reading, writing, and communication. Implementation of the curriculum might involve tribal and non-tribal experts serving as guest speakers to talk about what sustainability means, to provide information on local challenges, and to lead a discussion on the pros and cons of strategies being used to address these challenges. Students might gather information by taking a field trip to a fish hatchery or to a salmon habitat restoration project. As an alternative, students might explore the land and water resources located on or near their own school grounds and produce a “Schoolyard Report Card.” These activities then provide the basis for planning an “Action Project” to be carried out by the class. This might involve adopting a stream for cleanup or reintroduction of salmon. Students can then develop a presentation for a local government, tribal, or educational group to gain support that can then lead to implementation of their “Action Project.”

Extending existing educational efforts

The Shadow of the Salmon curriculum is designed to build upon environmental education efforts that already provide out- door education experiences for students in schools. For example, 600 schools currently participate in the Salmon in the Classroom Project, sponsored by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (http:// wdfw.wa.gov/outreach/education/salclass.htm). This project provides students with the opportunity to receive salmon eggs that they raise in the classroom. Salmon fry are eventually released into local waterways that biologists have determined to provide suitable habitat. The Salmon in the Class room Project has served as one focal point for partnership development. For example, the Yakima Basin Environmental Education Program brings together the Yakama Nation, state and federal agencies, irrigation districts, private groups, municipal and county agencies, and individual land owners to offer the Salmon in the Classroom experience to students and teachers in the region. The Shadow of the Salmon curriculum parallels and extends the Salmon in the Classroom Project as students learn about the natural environment through activities, such as mapping and monitoring the status of their local watersheds, participating in environmental fairs, communicating with local community members, recording cultural histories associated with the waterways, and exploring potential responses to the dilemmas encountered.

Concerns pertaining to environmental issues and sustainability of natural eco-systems in the Northwest have resulted in the formation of additional partnerships developed to enhance educational opportunities. The Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group partners with the Skokomish Nation and the Port Gamble S’Klallam Nation to provide educational opportunities for students enrolled in schools in the Hood Canal watershed. The Stillaguamish Tribe has formed a relationship with nearby schools to provide hands-on educational opportunities at its fish hatchery. Through the Dungeness River Audubon Center, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, the River Center Foundation, and the Audubon Society come together to provide river-monitoring field trips and other educational opportunities regarding watershed management. The Shadow of the Salmon curriculum provides an additional and readily accessible resource to enhance the educational efforts of these collaborative groups.

Conclusion

Environmental issues pose one of the greatest challenges for humans across the world today. In the Pacific Northwest, the salmon serves as an indicator species reflecting the health of the overall natural environment. Recognizing the significance of the salmon to all people across the region, Native American tribes partnered with environmental organizations, government agencies, and educators to develop the Shadow of the Salmon curriculum. This curriculum provides a tool for promoting the development of critical thinking and problem solving skills for eighth-grade students as they learn about and address real-life environmental concerns. The curriculum is designed to build on existing environmental education efforts and serves as a tool to promote cross- cultural communication and relationships.

Availability of the Shadow of the Salmon curriculum

The Shadow of the Salmon video and curriculum guide are available, upon request, from the Indian Education Office of the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction (P.O. Box 47200, Olympia, WA 98504, 360-725-6160). The video can also be viewed online at http://www.Salmon Defense.org and the curriculum guide can be accessed at http://www.education.wsu. edu/nativeclearinghouse/achievementgap/. A document displaying the alignment of the Shadow of the Salmon curriculum with state standards can be accessed at http:// libarts.wsu.edu/speechhearing/overview/ native-american.asp.

Ella Inglebret is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Washington State University. Her research examines factors associated with Native American student success.

CHiXapkaid (D. Michael Pavel) is an enrolled member of the Skokomish Nation and Professor of Higher Education at Washington State University. He specializes in promoting American Indian and Alaska Native educational access and achievement.

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The Sustainability Education Initiative is a program of professional development coursework and activities for K-12 teachers in the West Linn-Wilsonville School District. During three courses offered in 2009, Smith prepared 50-60 teachers to incorporate sustainability issues into their classrooms and help them implement school or community projects that will enhance local natural and social environments. Participants will be eligible for small seed grants to fund start-up projects. The grant aims to increase the number of teachers implementing sustainability projects in schools, and increase student and educator awareness of local natural systems, ecologies, and social needs.

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By Clifford E. Knapp

The exploration of the educational potential of communities through direct experiences is not a new idea.  In 1912 naturalist, John Burroughs, wrote: “. . . The way of knowledge of Nature is the way of love and enjoyment, and is more surely found in the open air than in the schoolroom or the laboratory” (Burroughs, In Finch and Elder (Eds.), 1990, p. 275)  In 1915 educator and philosopher, John Dewey, re-published some earlier speeches in his book, The School and Society.  He wrote: “We cannot overlook the importance for educational purposes of the close and intimate acquaintance got with nature at first hand, with real things and materials, with the actual processes of their manipulation, and the knowledge of their social necessities and uses” (p. 11).  Why has it taken so long for educators to expand their concept of classrooms to include community outdoor laboratories?

Today, many innovative educators are venturing into the community to enrich the curriculum and to energize the instructional program and their own teaching lives.  Why are they doing this?

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What we have called the “environmental crisis” is the most significant challenge humanity as a whole has faced in its recorded history. How we understand and frame this crisis—and how we summon the political courage to change—will determine the extent to which we are able to continue existence on Earth in a way that is worth living.

The enormous significance of this issue demands that it come to the forefront of our thinking in all spheres (political, religious, commercial, and legal) and at all levels (individual, family, community, national, and global)—especially within education. How and why humans are undermining their ecological support—and what can be done about that—make a vital, complex, interdisciplinary area for inquiry at all levels of education. Not to educate with the earth and future generations in mind would be an unimaginable moral folly, much like saying we would rather continue to party on the Titanic’s foredeck while refusing to deal with the upcoming iceberg which is in full view.

First, we must understand that the crisis we are talking about is more appropriately understood as a cultural crisis and, specifically, a spiritual crisis. What is happening to the environment is a symptom of something fundamentally awry with the way humans think of themselves and their relationship to Earth—this place which is our home, but which we don’t think of as such because we see ourselves living in a world made of human imagination and labor. Thinking of environmental destruction as an environmental problem is another form of disassociative, nonsystemic thinking in which we define the symptom (like a child who runs away) as the problem—without considering the larger context in which we, ourselves, have a role.

So, we must first recover an integral way of thinking and the courage to accept the responsibility back in our own human lap. When we do this, we are less likely to retreat into simple technological, legal, and other instrumental actions which, while absolutely necessary, tend to get us off the hook from having to make those difficult, searching, inner changes which are the only basis for real transformation to a peaceful, just, and sustainable world.

Years of well-intended environmental education have sensitized us to the problems and the needs for environmental awareness and stewardship. But as we have employed education, science, advocacy, conservation, and laws to save the land, we have been distracted from more clearly seeing the root cultural issues involved. Thus, we have learned and done meaningful things in environmental education, but have not galvanized the broad public and political will for significant cultural change. As evidence, over 80 percent of people in industrialized countries claim to care and be very concerned about the environment, but most of those same people lead a lifestyle that would take, perhaps, six earth-type planets to sustain if the poorest humans lived similar lifestyles.

What we must do now is look at our deeply rooted perceptions, beliefs, values, institutions, and ways of living that have contributed to a separation from the earth community and our resulting destructive impact on life. We must challenge our assumptions about what has value and dethrone the human as supreme in the order of things, along with the notion that the human economy and its ethic of making and having more is both unquestionably good and inevitable.

Rethinking What Education is for

Understanding our role in nature differently will call for the most fundamental and radical transformations in the way we think of, and practice, education. This begins with our notions of ontology and epistemology, from which our assumptions about education and learning are drawn.

Prevailing ideas on the nature of being and the essential properties and relationships between things (ontology) must reveal the integral nature of reality not only as scientific fact, but also as the empirical mandate for an ethic of care. Only seeing the world as made of separate objects will never locate humans in a reality of mutual obligation with nature. We must have a system of knowledge that nurtures obligation to that which is known in revealing the interdependence between all things. Equally, with an integral view of life, we must counterbalance the myth of objectivism as path to the highest truth and reclaim the power of subjective, symbolic, and intuitive ways of knowing.

For eons, these participatory ways of knowing sustained indigenous peoples in a web of mutual obligation with their surroundings. These societies experienced animals and nature as kin and part of larger web of life to which they owed great debt. Today, we know the world without feeling a part of it—and that is inhuman. This disconnected way of knowing has led the most educated people to visit unimaginable atrocities upon fellow humans and other life. Without participatory ways of knowing and being, knowledge too easily falls prey to human arrogance, power, and rationalization unchecked by the moral restraint inherent in the experience and ethics of interdependence.

Moreover, we can no longer pursue knowledge and technology for their own sakes, as if the unending possibilities of human imagination deserve to be reified and not held accountable to larger considerations supporting the whole community of life. Not everything we can think of or invent should be made a reality. E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered) argued persuasively, for example, on behalf of earth- and human-friendly, intermediate technologies that a small farmer might use, as opposed to the massive technology that might disenfranchise sustainable living. We must grow out of our adolescent enchantment with innovation, growth, and progress, and mature into the wisdom of self-restraint.

In this vein, we must rethink what body of knowledge we canonize as worthy of study. This will call on keen insight into the studies and perspectives that do (or do not) contribute to the continuance of life, as opposed to perspectives that feed the tendency to exceed our human boundaries and to reinforce a system of philosophies, human ethics, and laws that are blindly human-centered, at the expense of the larger whole. For example, most history books that present an uncritical picture of human exploration and territorial conquest would be considered antithetical to a social and ecological justice commitment—immoral as well.

Losing our the Oneness with Nature

Beneath the cultural crisis lies a spiritual crisis that might be described as a loss of attunement with, and respect of, nature.

Indigenous cultures reveal how early human societies experienced themselves as part of the natural world, not as owners of it. At one time, humans realized they belong to nature—and not the other way around—as has been the case with our own Native American cultures. Streams, rocks, trees, and animals were felt to be alive with spirit in a world that was often fearsome and unpredictable, but not beyond human capacity to propitiate, communicate with, and hold sacred within a delicate partnership of care that kept everything going.

Cultural anthropologists, historians, and ecopsychologists may differ in their explanations of why humankind became psychically disconnected from its fragile kinship and communication with other animate and inanimate life. Perhaps it was the inevitable result of human evolution from medullary to cortical man, in which humans lost a participation mystique—which Levy-Bruhl defines as “embeddedness of human consciousness in nature”—through the process of becoming self-conscious. Genesis and other creation stories would certainly support this picture of a fall from unity with the advent of self-awareness.

On the other hand, for long periods of time, indigenous societies maintained their reciprocal, familial relationship with nature, a way of living and being that remained until the growth of agrarian cultures, cities, territoriality, and the conversion of the “forest” from a place where we once lived into something remote and the subject of our fearful or romantic imaginings (Roger Harrison).

With this recession of nature into human imagination and a loss of our relationship of necessity with nature, perhaps it was a root human fear that propelled humans to seek a once-and-for-all advantage over nature. To answer the anxious unpredictability of nature and to be forever secure in our human-made world would be a triumph of great proportions. Thus, the monster-slaying hero was born in the human psyche as the conqueror of natural forces (now depicted as evil) and as the ideal for a human-centered culture in which norms made by and for humans replace those derived in reference to nature.

Resolving human ambivalence within the precarious relationship with nature came at both great gain and cost. The Promethean energies of inventiveness (symbolized by fire, which Prometheus stole from Zeus and gave to humans) and technology were unleashed, which allowed humans to harness nature and master technology to levels as boundless as the human imagination. But, as we know from the story of Prometheus, the gift of fire to mankind brought with it Pandora’s curse. This was a way to counterbalance the arrogance and hubris of heroic culture, much in the same way that God’s wisdom in Eden, once stolen, required toil and suffering to bring Adam and Eve down to Earth, humble and “human” after tasting powers beyond their capacity to use wisely.

With the ascendancy of human creative fire and expanded dominion over earth also grew civilization’s shadow of suffering, despair, war, and chaos in the subjugation of all things (nature, women, the feminine, children, others not like us) that were of lower order in the heroic culture. Thus, we have the basis of the ecofeminist argument that the subjugation of the feminine and nature are of one whole cloth when seen in terms of the larger symbolic patterns in heroic, male-dominated societies. This has inevitably led to our modern, technoscientific civilization in which we are (literally) burning up with an excess of Promethean energy and being cut off from both feminine and earth wisdom. Like Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and fell into the ocean, our burning is once more calling forth the floodwaters.

But where is the ark?

The Reunification of Humans Within the Natural Order

The ark to bridge the troubled waters of our time will only come with a transformation to integral consciousness in which humans are reunited in heart and mind with nature. Therefore, questions we must ponder seriously include: How can we regain a felt communion with the natural world? How can this be done in a way that needless harm to any one part of nature is felt personally? How can we educate so that the fruitfulness of Earth elicits a sense of gratefulness and an ethic of responsibility to preserve the abundance of Earth for future generations? The emerging dialogue around this kind of inquiry is an evolutionary process that is as much about questions as it is answers.

In that spirit, I would like to propose several broad areas of inquiry that exemplify what would be at the heart of an ecologically sound form of education.

• A new myth and worldview which make meaning of life within the natural world, as opposed to transcending Earth;

• A reverence for life arising from a perception of the sacred “otherness” in all things.

• The essential role of nature in the reenchantment of life and the human capacity for aesthetic appreciation and beauty;

• Reinhabiting a richly storied, simpler life with less distraction, fewer “things,” and more meaning so that we can experience the reality of “less is best”;

• Breaking the myth of materialism, progress, and its latest incarnation—a culture and economy of globalization—and moving toward earth-friendly practices and technologies that enable a sustainable world;

• Social justice (covered previously); and

• Sense of place and ecological literacy.

A New Myth-An ecology of Heaven and Earth

We need a new worldview in which the spiritual and material are brought together—an ecology of heaven and Earth, so to speak.

In The Dream of Earth, Thomas Berry has written:

It is all a question of story, we are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not yet learned the new story. Our traditional story of the Universe sustained us for a long period of time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purpose and energized action. It consecrated suffering and integrated knowledge. We awoke in the morning and knew where we were. We could answer the questions of our children. We could identify crime, punish transgressors. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. It did not necessarily make people good, nor did it take away the pains and stupidities of life or make for unfailing warmth in human associations. It did provide a context in which life could function in a meaningful manner.

Prior to the scientific revolution, people in the West lived by the Christian view of the Great Chain of Being in which plants, animals, and man were understood as part of a great, interconnected hierarchy culminating in the ultimate perfection of God. This story made sense of man and nature within a larger picture, but gave way during the scientific revolution that required only one cosmological level, the physical, and detached human activity from its higher, moral purpose.

Today, a significant movement on several fronts seeks to rejoin material and spiritual outlooks in order, to forge a new ecologically sound belief system and ethic. One such effort is supported by Harvard and Bucknell Universities and is called The Forum on Religion and Ecology—an inter-religious, multicultural, interdisciplinary initiative engaging in scholarly dialogue on the environment. The Forum recognizes the role of religious traditions in fostering worldviews, moral frameworks, and narratives regarding the relationship between humans and the natural environment.

Parallel to this work is the new paradigm from twentieth century science that reveals an interconnected world similar to that portrayed in religions and wisdom traditions. A promising story to emerge in this vein is that of the universe itself, as rendered with depth by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry in The Universe Story.

The Universe Story revisits what we know about all of life, from the “big bang” through billions of years of evolution, but it does so in a way that enchants the heart and mind. Bringing together the viewpoints of poet, saint, and scientist, Berry and Swimme help us to understand that the becoming process, the genesis process, the evolutionary process, is spiritual/psychic as well as material/physical. The Universe Story helps us view these two aspects of life as inseparable, and to see that our living is drawn out of the universe itself, which is primary. In Swimme and Berry’s hands, what might otherwise be a purely scientific account of life becomes a cosmic drama charged with awe and mystery. Such rendering lies at the heart of great storytelling that elicits a depth of experience far beyond the literal narrative.

Their storytelling elicits a reverence for life.

A Reverence for Life

If I am a thinking being, I must regard life other than my own with equal reverence, for I shall know that it longs for fullness and development as deeply as I do myself. (Schweitzer 1987)

Ethics consist in my experiencing the compulsion to show to all will-to-live the same reverence as I do my own. A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives. (Schweitzer 1936)

Reverence is defined as a feeling of profound awe and respect, often love or veneration, which is precisely the magic elicited by Berry and Swimme’s mode of narrative in The Universe Story. It was the keen insight of Dr. Albert Schweitzer which fathomed that the world’s suffering and inhumanity could be reversed if only each person had a “reverence for life,” a feeling of respect so profound for other living beings that an intrinsic ethic of nonharm and joy in life would flourish.

Experiencing a reverence for life requires seeing and feeling beyond ordinary physical reality into its hidden mystery and beauty. It entails an experience of a sacred otherness in all life and a profound sense of moral obligation to give respect and care to that Other. Contemplative modes of observation, seeing the larger patterns in reality, and imaginative and intuitive perception open awe-inspiring worlds closed to the literal mind. Let me provide an example from my own experience.

Looking at my garden from the deck of our house, I noticed that a leaf from a tulip in a far corner was wavering intermittently. I became aware that every other plant or shrub in the immediate vicinity was absolutely still, suggesting an absence of air current. My curiosity was now peaked to the point that I looked at the tops of all the surrounding Douglas firs and Western red cedars and found that none were moving even the slightest bit. Upon returning to the still-moving leaf, a most profound and certain conviction emerged spontaneously in my mind: It’s waving at me! At that point, I broke into tears and felt a distinctly enhanced sense of affinity and communication with everything around me, including so-called inanimate things such as rocks, mountains, dirt, water, and so forth.

The profound effect this perception had on me is far more significant than any question about whether or not the leaf was actually waving at me. The former absolutely did happen; the latter is hard to explain with traditional science. However, we do know from Dorothy Mcclean’s work with plants and vegetables in the Findhorn community in Scotland (and much earlier work with measuring plant reactions to human behavior via electronic sensing devices)—that all matter does have some capacity to sense other presences. This is a knowledge humans once had, but which has been lost in the modern world.

The Reenchantment of Life

The eyes of wisdom and the heart of compassion experience nature as a source of joy and numinous revelation. This brings us into the whole dimension of imaginal and aesthetic ways knowing. Here, we enter into an enchanted world and leave behind the disconnected, ordinary world of everyday, literal reality. The difference lies in our way of seeing and capacity for openness and being moved.

In Care of the Soul, author Thomas Moore, writes (The Reenchantment of Everyday Life) of nature as the quintessential opening to spirit and a sense of connectedness. The beauty and majesty of mountains, rivers, flowers, the wondrous complexity of living systems, the incredible intricacy of cell structures, the fascination of quantum physics can—when fully apprehended—bring a sense of awe, spirit, and the largeness in life.

“Nature is not only a source of spirit: It also has soul. Spiritually, nature directs our attention toward eternity, but at the same time, it contains us and creates an intimacy with our own personal lives that nurtures the soul. The individuality of a tree or rock or pool of water is another sign of nature’s soul. These intriguing natural beings not only point toward infinity; more intimately, they also befriend us. It’s easy to love groves of trees or mountain ridges, to feel related to them as though by blood, and to be secure in their familial protection” (Moore, 5).

The awe and beauty in nature speaks to us, for we are constituted of the same stuff, the same soul. We can speak of an ecology of mind wherein the human soul resonates with the world soul from which we came. Ecopsychologist Theodore Roszak writes: “[E]copsychology proceeds from the assumption that at its deepest level the psyche remains sympathetically bonded to the Earth that mothered us into existence.(1995, 5) . . . the psyche is rooted inside a greater intelligence known as the anima mundi, the psyche of Earth herself that has been nurturing life in the cosmos for billions of years through its drama of complexification.”(1995, 16).

Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson parallels these thoughts with the notion of biophilia, an inherent human love of life and the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. This is likewise echoed in Howard Gardner’s eighth intelligence—the naturalist intelligence. Naturalist intelligence designates the human ability to discriminate among living things (plants, animals) as well as sensitivity to other features of the natural world (clouds, rock configurations).

Thus, we have been deeply tuned into the matrix of nature from which we grew. Nature is an inspiration for language formation, our source of mathematical sense, and our capacity to imagine and think. Nature casts her spell on us all from the youngest age. We are wise to nurture our children’s inherent curiosity and love of nature and to regard Earth as first among our teachers in teaching us a reverence for all of life.

Simplicity: Living in a Storied World

I have taken this route to the subject of simple living because a simpler, sustainable world is possible only with the kinds of inner mental, emotional, and spiritual transformations I have just described. The rich inner life arises in a world whose story makes sense at a personal level and whose daily experience is full of enchantment. When we are full of authentic life, the things of a materialistic, man-made culture seem paltry by comparison and quickly lose their power over us.

A life of fullness and meaning forms the heart of what is now known as the voluntary simplicity movement. Frugality, human-scale living, a view of work as service to others, and a strong communal ethic have always existed in American life. But such simple, ethical living has been declining steadily for centuries—at no time more disturbingly and precipitously than in the present era of our megahomes, flashy cars, and shallow, advertising-saturated culture.

But people are fighting back. All over the United States and in other parts of the world, people are eliminating debt, leaving stressful jobs, getting rid of excess things, and moving into more modest (sometimes communal) housing in efforts to become grounded in something real and alive. This is not new. Thoreau inspired many in the current environmental and simplicity movements when he wrote about his life at Walden Pond:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner. (1971, 91)

We now have a broad, grassroots movement through such organizations as the Simple Living Network and The New Roadmap Foundation, whose books, videos, workshops, and informal discussion groups are empowering young and old to live simply, not just for ourselves but also as a commitment to social justice—realizing Ghandi’s admonition to “live simply that others may simply live.”

When we are freed of being possessed by that which we possess, a whole new relationship with things, man-made and natural, is possible. We can now contemplate and cultivate the significance of the things about us carefully and deliberately. We can begin to live in a storied world in which the boulder in the yard, the beat-up dresser we restored, our mother’s favorite necklace, smooth stones collected from some solitary beach, and pictures of people we admire now inhabit our consciousness and homes as loved familiars. We now become makers of life’s enchantments and not just recipients of nature’s enchantments—assuming that we have learned well nature’s lesson in how to perceive and grow beauty.

We see this lesson lived most fully in indigenous cultures, where everything people have resonates with its own unique meaning and story. Martin Prechtl, Native American and former Mayan shaman, emphasized how making something as simple as a knife caused a great debt to the “holy” from which all things come, and, therefore, required equally great ceremonies, thanksgiving, and other love offerings to fill the void left by what had been taken. The making of every gourd, bowl, knife, or piece of rope involved a vast love relationship with the forces supporting the world of man and nature, and bestowed each thing its own numinous story.

What do we know of the things we own in modern society? Very little. For the most part, our homes and lives are littered with dead things with little life and story. They are things that come from far away, made by people we don’t know and who were disconnected from their handiwork. We live in a “wasteland” which has been defacing our souls long before T. S. Eliot made this word famous. And it was Eliot’s particular genius to see how the trashing of inner life and outer landscape are of one whole cloth.

Care for things and care for nature is also care for self, and vice verse. Let’s begin with the dictum “less is best” and live the storied, simple life of depth in our homes and schools! Let’s see our obsession with curriculum coverage as part of our broader addiction to quantity and not quality. Let’s slow down and go deep in our curriculum, make and collect things with our kids that are memorable and worthy of being cherished. Let’s learn to see the beauty in little things that the world may disregard; for these are echoes of the vulnerable little places of essence within ourselves.

Deconstructing the Myth of Progress: Toward a Just and Sustainable World

Along with inner transformation to a more meaningful life, moving into a more just and sustainable world requires that we deconstruct the unquestioned acceptance of social progress through our current market-based, economic model. The United States and the industrialized world has exported much good in the ideals of democracy, rights for women and children, and public education as pathways toward a more humane world. Parading behind these humanitarian ideals, however, greed and power have corrupted our corporate-dominated economic systems and have resulted in economic and social injustices around the world. To the least privileged in developing nations, globalization is simply another face of rampant colonialism.

Worldwide antiglobalization protests and a burgeoning literature on the downside of corporate hegemony (When Corporations Rule the World, David Korten) have recently made it fashionable—even among the world’s financial elites—to critique the economic policies exacted on developing nations by the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank, GATT, now the World Trade Organization). There is a good reason why millions of people have taken to the streets in Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, the Philippines, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the United States, Venezuela, and many other nations of the world. The current economically based model of social improvement is not working, even according to its own criteria. Globalization, its corporate practices and policies, have led to a growing disparity between the rich and poor, the dislocation of indigenous, sustainable livelihoods, flight of the dispossessed to overcrowded cities, corporate piracy of natural resources through patenting native seed and plant technologies, environmental deterioration—a list of ills longer than I can recite here.

With the spread of social, economic, and environmental injustices, the choices are becoming clearer each day that our world is either about fear, greed, and money or it is about humanity—about what brings death or what gives life. If we continue to educate for economic being, that is, for jobs (as we do in schools today), then we side with the forces of oppression that rob us of our own lives as they spread havoc among the community of life around the world. If we do no more than prepare kids to participate uncritically in a system that can strip them of their dignity, then we are handmaidens of injustice.

Teaching for sustainability, then, must take on a top priority at all levels of education. Sustainability involves everything covered in this book: our calling and meaning in life; our sense of community, locally and globally; sensitivity to issues of social justice; knowledge of and love for nature; and commitment to advocacy as well as action to reverse natural and social imbalances. Sustainability is about ourselves, our communities, and the world. It is about souls, soils, and spirit — indivisible locally and globally.

The Earth Charter makes an excellent foundation in terms of ethics, principles, and scope to frame our understanding of a sustainable future for the earth family. The Earth Charter[1] is perhaps the most inclusive, widely consulted, global proclamation of human, economic, and ecological rights ever developed in modern history. It came out of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, and now serves around the world as a guide to communities, local governments, businesses, and educators who are part of a broad, global movement toward a just, peaceful, and sustainable world.

Along with this most important framework, education can engage young people in the study of earth-friendly, sustainable practices and technologies that are lighting the way toward a brighter future. But first, it is important to give young people realistic cause for hope in order to counter the apathy and resignation that are so pervasive today and which contribute to the continuation of destructive policies. Second, kids deserve to know about the new career opportunities that are arising in response to the current crisis. Many fields are showing progressive innovations—renewable energy (wind, solar, ocean), sustainable agriculture, permaculture and ecological design, ecological and local economics, microcredit and other socially responsible lending, green business development (now talking about the triple bottom line as money, people, and environment)—to name but a few. Possible adaptable curriculums range from organic gardens for young children to hydrogen-powered cars for college-age students.

If we really want to leave no child behind, we need to prepare them for a sustainable future worth living.

Sense of Place and Nature Literacy

Care for our neighborhoods and local landscapes springs from rootedness and local knowledge. Too few people, young or old, really know enough about the social and natural history of where they live to ground them in a real sense of place. This problem is, perhaps, most pronounced in urban settings, but it is also evident in rural settings, and especially apparent in the young who want to get out of town and into the big city.

Modern culture is more about getting someplace else than about being where we are. This has created a rootless element at all economic levels, from migrant labor to the deracinated elite of the multinational corporation who are homeless, don’t belong any place, and, therefore, have not entered into a relationship of mutual obligation that place calls forth in us. Without that obligation, what is there to care enough about that one would want to fight for it?

Rootless people may sigh when the new Wal-mart paves over a once beloved meadow, but they are not likely to walk in protest, write letters to the editor, or give up something so that they can contribute money to the cause. Putting caring to action arises out of a relationship to place, its people, buildings, and natural landscapes.

I currently direct the Heritage Institute, a continuing education program for K-12 teachers in the Northwest that has offered place-based field studies on the natural and social history of our bioregion since the mid-1970s. Teachers love our classes not just because they are fun, but because they nurture a sense of connection with their local neighborhoods and landscapes that make them come alive. It is this sense of aliveness and meaning that draws teachers to our program—as well as the fact that what they learn is useful in their own classrooms and intriguing to their students.

In recovering a sense of place, we discover an authentic basis for learning. We learn more deeply when we care about something enough to sacrifice, cry, or get angry when what we love is threatened in any way. In contrast, learning about “the environment” in an abstract way, wherein we distance ourselves intellectually from what is learned, creates an emotional disconnection and superficial interest.

I want the kind of education in which the trees, rocks, rivers, historic areas, and words of our ancestors speak to our young people—who, in this listening, will be transformed.

References

Berry, Thomas. 1990. The Dream of Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club.

Harrison, Roger Pogue. 1993. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Korten, David C. 2001. When Corporations Ruled the World. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Moore, Thomas. 1997. The Reenchantment of Everyday Life. Boston: G.K.Hall.

Roszak, Theodore. 1995. “Where Psyche Meets Gaia.” Pp. 1-17. In Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. By Mary E. Gomes, Allen D. Kanner, Theodore Roszak. New York: Sierra Club Books.

Schumacher, E.F. 1989. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Vancouver: Hartley and Marks.

Schweitzer, Albert. 1936. “Ethics for a Reverence for Life.” Christendom (Winter): 42.

Schweitzer, Albert. 1987. Philosophy of Civilization: Part I: the Decay and Restoration of Civilization. New York: Promethean Books.

Brian Swimme, Thomas Berry. 1994. The Universe Story. New York: Harper Collins.

Thoreau, David H. 1971. Walden. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[1]. For more on The Earth Charter, visit their website at www.earthcharter.org.

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