Abstract
It was 1992. Laurette Rogers, a fourth-grade teacher in San Anselmo, California, had shown her students a film about rainforest destruction. Distressed, they asked what they could do about it. “I just couldn’t give a pat answer about writing letters and making donations,” Rogers recalls. Instead, she took the advice of a trainer for a former Adopt-a-Species program: “Pick any species. Find out all about it, and you’ll fall in love with it.”
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Notes
- 1.
Michael K. Stone, “Solving for Pattern: The STRAW Project,” Whole Earth (Spring 2001): 78.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Quoted in Laurette Rogers, The California Freshwater Shrimp Project: An Example of Environmental Project-Based Learning (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1996), 31.
- 4.
As Michael Pollan has observed: “The word ‘sustainability’ has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it—whatever ‘it’ means” (Michael Pollan, “Our Decrepit Food Factories,” New York Times Magazine, December 16, 2007). For a discussion of ongoing efforts to develop standards for education for sustainability, see the Journal of Sustainability Education, especially Jaimie Cloud, “Education for a Sustainable Future: Benchmarks for Individual and Social Learning,” Journal of Sustainability Education, April 14, 2016. For more on the Center for Ecoliteracy, see www.ecoliteracy.org.
- 5.
Fritjof Capra, “Preface: How Nature Sustains the Web of Life,” in Michael K. Stone and Zenobia Barlow, eds., Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 2005), xiii.
- 6.
Cited in Michael K. Stone, “Applying Ecological Principles,” www.ecoliteracy.org/article/applying-ecological-principles.
- 7.
David W. Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect, tenth anniversary edition (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004), 94–96.
- 8.
Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land (New York: North Point Press, 1982), 134–48; National Farm to School Network website, www.farmtoschool.org.
- 9.
London Sustainable Development Commission, Children and Nature: A Quasi-Systematic Review of the Empirical Evidence (London: Greater London Authority, 2011).
- 10.
“Meet Anna and Carolina from Nature Schools in Sweden,” Inspiring School Grounds brochure from 2015 International School Grounds Alliance conference, available at www.inspiringschoolgrounds.com.
- 11.
Michael K. Stone, Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2009), 123.
- 12.
Sustainability Academy at Lawrence Barnes website, http://sa.bsdvt.org.
- 13.
Stone, Smart by Nature, 122–27.
- 14.
Stone, “Solving for Pattern: The STRAW Project.”
- 15.
Zenobia Barlow, “Confluence of Streams,” Resurgence, no. 226 (September/October 2004): 6.
- 16.
Center for Ecoliteracy, Cultivating 20 Years of Ecoliteracy (Berkeley, CA: 2015), 7.
- 17.
David A. Gruenewald and Gregory A. Smith, “Creating a Movement to Ground Learning in Place,” in David A. Gruenewald and Gregory A. Smith, eds., Place-Based Education in the Global Age (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008), 347.
- 18.
Quoted in Center for Ecoliteracy, “Forging the Justice Path,” www.ecoliteracy.org/download/forging-justice-path.
- 19.
Michael K. Stone and Zenobia Barlow, “Living Systems and Leadership: Cultivating Conditions for Institutional Change,” Journal of Sustainability Education 2 (March 2011).
- 20.
Center for Ecoliteracy, Cultivating 20 Years of Ecoliteracy, 19–21.
- 21.
International School Grounds Alliance, “About,” www.internationalschoolgrounds.org/about.
- 22.
“Chapter 36: Promoting Education, Public Awareness and Training,” in United Nations Conference on Environment & Development, Agenda 21 (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: June 1992); Jennifer Seydel, Executive Director, Green Schools National Network, personal communication with author, July 21, 2016.
- 23.
The ten themes are biodiversity and nature, climate change, energy, global citizenship, health and well-being, litter, marine and coast, school grounds, transport, waste, and water. Eco-Schools, “Seven Steps Toward an Eco-School,” www.ecoschools.global/seven-steps. Figure 3-1 from Brid Conneely, Director, International Eco-Schools, personal communication with author, July 1, 2016.
- 24.
Sustainable Caerphilly County Borough, “Eco School Case Studies: Ynysddu Primary School–Incredible Edible Project,” http://your.caerphilly.gov.uk/sustainablecaerphilly/schools-and-esdgc/eco-schools/eco-school-case-studies; Eco-Schools Indian Ocean, “Mauritius Hosts Its First Eco-Schools Award Ceremony,” eco-schools.io/news/mauritius-hosts-its-first-eco-schools-award-ceremony.
- 25.
Box 3-2 from the following sources: Bruce Stokes, Richard Wike, and Jill Carle, “Global Concern About Climate Change, Broad Support for Limiting Emissions,” Pew Research Center, November 5, 2015; Richard Wike, “What the World Thinks About Climate Change in 7 Numbers,” Pew Research Center, April 18, 2016; Diego Román and K. C. Busch, “Textbooks of Doubt: Using Systemic Functional Analysis to Explore the Framing of Climate Change in Middle-school Science Textbooks,” Environmental Education Research (September 2015): 1–23; Roger Beck et al., Modern World History: Patterns of Interaction (Austin, TX: Holt McDougal, 2007) (the 2012 edition eliminates the line “Not all scientists agree with the theory of the greenhouse effect”; however, many schools continue to use older editions of the textbook); Portland Public Schools, “Resolution to Develop an Implementation Plan for Climate Literacy,” Board of Education Resolution No. 5272 (Portland, OR: May 17, 2016); Bill Bigelow, “Nation’s Largest Teachers Union Endorses Teaching ‘Climate Justice,’” Common Dreams, July 19, 2016; Our Children’s Trust, “Landmark U.S. Federal Climate Lawsuit,” www.ourchildrenstrust.org/us/federal-lawsuit; classroom activities from Bill Bigelow and Tim Swinehart, A People’s Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis (Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, 2015).
- 26.
Global Action Plan International, “ESD in Action, Ukraine: Phase 2,” www.globalactionplan.com/esda2.
- 27.
Biomimicry 3.8, “Life’s Principles,” http://biomimicry.net/about/biomimicry/biomimicry-designlens/lifes-principles.
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Stone, M.K. (2017). Ecoliteracy and Schooling for Sustainability. In: EarthEd. State of the World. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-843-5_3
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