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Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World by M. K. Stone & Z. Barlow (Eds.), Sierra Club Books, 2005, 296 pp., ISBN 978-1-57805-153-3
"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot. Nothing is going to get better. It's not," warned Dr. Seuss in The Lorax (Geisel, 1971). This message is at the heart of Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World. So, what exactly is a sustainable world? What is meant by the words sustainable, stewardship, and ecoliteracy? And what do they have to do with schools and with children? This edited volume helps readers understand these terms and their connections to schools, and it addresses two vital questions: a) How do we cultivate in children the competencies of heart and mind that they will need to create sustainable communities? b) How can we design schools as apprenticeship communities that model the practice of living sustainably?
The accounts shared in this volume are the outcome of an ongoing 10-year experiment with the Center for Ecoliteracy (CEL). Located in Berkeley, California, the CEL was founded in 1995 by Peter Buckley, Fritjof Capra, and Zenobia Barlow, people guided by the belief that:
Education for sustainable living fosters both an intellectual understanding of ecology and emotional bonds with nature that make it more likely that our children will grow into responsible citizens who truly care about sustaining life, and develop a passion for applying their ecological understanding to the fundamental redesign of our technologies and social institutions, so as to bridge the current gap between human design and the ecologically sustainable systems of nature. (p. xv)
Based on the principle that in order to make change in the world people must work together, the CEL engages in collaborative partnerships with organizations sharing their vision for sustainable education. Among the types of projects that have been funded are art and poetry programs, lunch programs built around fresh food, partnerships between farms and...