IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEMS OF STANDARD SCHOOLING

A School with No Walls

On the Alouette River’s edge, a teacher and a group of younger children follow a fresh set of bird tracks. They talk thoughtfully about tracking, movement, silence, and who left these messages in the sand. Meanwhile, older children sit on fallen logs and write in weathered journals. Some reflect on an evening exploration with their families, others are reworking yesterday’s poetry, and still others are drawing the scene before them. The benefits of this way of educating can be measured, observed, and appreciated not only by children’s educational achievements but also by their sheer enthusiasm for learning and care for those around. Parents and caregivers report that children don’t want to miss a day of school, even for a holiday. The humans at this school are coming to understand themselves as being in community with each other and with the flora, fauna, and River of this place.

The sensory environment of this school engages students and provokes their curiosity. Gone are the shuffle of papers, loud bells, and the scrape of chairs on tiled floors. These children study without the low-grade buzzing of electric lights, projectors, and computers. Here, Moss springs underfoot. Chickadee, Crow, Mourning Dove, and other birds trill, caw, and coo from all around. River churns, shushes, and trickles, a rhythm that changes depending on seasons and storms. Dappled light patterns the wet ground. When the children talk, cry, yell, or laugh, their voices are softened by the expanse of trees and sky. Nature speaks with a resonant voice, and everyone is learning to listen.

It doesn’t smell like a standard school either, where classrooms are infused with the scent of styling gel, art projects, old lunches, and off-gassing linoleum. These pervasive smells are punctuated by the odor of books, whiteboard markers, and various cleaning products. In other words, the air in a regular classroom is filled with the scents of human-made substances. But at this school, this school with no walls, the scents of rich, damp dirt; rotting leaves; and verdant Fir combine with the cold twinge of winter. The heady tang of oxygen blends with the mineral scent of moving water and the earthy fragrance of Moss steaming in the light.

And hold, dear reader, before throwing the naive, privileged, overly romantic book at us. For you are right: there are ancient and ongoing stories of deep injustice here, ones that these schools continue to reckon and wrestle with. There are failures, problematics, and ongoing difficult learnings that all must engage with—and we will get to them in short order. Yet there are successes, celebrations, works being done, quiet moments of rich learning at River’s edge, and small ripples of potentially seismic change. And it behooves us to notice these as well, for to judge a book by its opening is to possibly miss its complex contents.

Picture “the standard North American school.” What do you see? Typically, it’s an unimaginative rectangular box set on a patch of level ground, surrounded by manicured grass. Inside the box sit other boxes. In these classrooms, students might learn about plants, animals, and weather, even while the building itself physically separates them from those things. A child who gazes too long through the window at a passing crow or cloud might be considered “distracted.” Construction of the standard school likely required the ejection of birds and animals and the eradication of many plants. In some cases, wetlands were filled, creeks diverted, and rocks exploded. As a by-product of these processes, not only are local flora and fauna lost but so too are human—in particular, Indigenous—histories, including those that archived ecological knowledge and the shared narratives of humans, plants, and animals. Often, evidence of these losses is erased, while at the same time the colonial processes of construction and “standard education” itself are made invisible.

In contrast, the ecologizing school seeks to name and respond to these erasures and to facilitate sensory, relational flourishing between humans and the myriad other beings that make up this world, promoting well-being for all. For children, the complex aesthetic experience of being outdoors—wind, water, falling leaves—is a pleasure to be enjoyed, learned from rather than a mundane experience to be tolerated, survived.

Parents and caregivers report that the outdoor children tend to be calmer and happier than they were when “in” school. This is not a surprise. A sense of discovery, of possibility, and of activeness helps children thrive. The more academic among them can chase their own interests and are challenged and supported by place and teachers. Rana, a bright, inquiring spirit, found the repetitive style of classroom lessons difficult to endure. Here, she is immersed in a discovery project related to Fungi and has already located twenty-seven different species she wants to track. More rambunctious students can find rich and productive outlets for their abundant energy. Adrian, with boundless energy and passion, has become an important gatherer and builder in the village, often moving what seem to be cords of wood every day, and their skills with lashing are second to none. Those children with myriad and diverse needs tend to find connection, support, and therapeutic possibilities. Jamie is a neurodiverse child who used to run out of the classroom because of auditory overload. Quiet time was equally hard because of the unbearable silence. At the outdoor school, he self-regulates his delicate auditory needs by positioning himself closer to the white noise of the river or the hush of the woods. This diverse locale supports his subtle needs without setting him in contrast to his peers.

Almost all the parents and caregivers have reported to our researchers that their children now love school. “They explain things to me about insects, slugs, and snails that I didn’t even know,” one comments. “She doesn’t realize she’s learning because it’s all fun to her,” another remarks. “Last year he hated school. This year, he said school is the thing he’s most grateful for,” says a third. Deep immersion in the natural environment supports, restores, and promotes the child’s instinct for relationship with all beings. These relationships nurture the child and support the ecological health of the area while at the same time allowing rich learning to occur and the prescribed content to be covered. After all, this is not a laissez-faire, kids-running-in-the-woods schooling. Without human teachers working in partnership with place, community, learners, and the mandated curriculum, none of this would come to fruition. Responding to the possibilities offered by the place and its denizens, witnessing and recording the learning outcomes as they appear amid the action, facilitating experiences in robust directions, asking good questions that further wonder and curiosity, listening to and including the variety of teachers who exist in an given place, all while scaffolding, growing, and deepening learning and enacting a curriculum that is responsive, equitable, expansive, experiential, and robust—these can only be achieved through the deliberate, mindful, thoughtful efforts of dedicated and devoted educators.

More critically, ecologizing education fosters a culture where the plants, animals, and wild beings of the world are actively and respectfully engaged. Cranefly maneuvering long legs across Moss stalks might teach an observant third-grader more about self-awareness, goal setting, and the mathematics of motion than a teacher with a chalkboard could manage.

The Seeds of Change

When parents and other adults first hear about these ecologizing schools, their reaction, voiced or not, is often: “That’s not a school.” For most, a school is a building, an institution, a set of organized rooms with tables and desks. It’s bells, timetables, exams, carefully crafted work leading to learning, and lineups. It means doing what you are told, giving them what they want, and waiting for adulthood. This sentiment is so engrained that many of us reflexively resist the idea of a building-less school. We struggle to picture how it functions. We have difficulty imagining our way into such a different form for schooling. As such, the actuality of ecologizing schools seems to teeter at the edge of reason and possibility. Skepticism ignites. We can’t just stage Lord of the Flies and call it “education.” Children are supposed to go outdoors at break time, for fun and play, and come inside to settle down, to turn to the hard work of learning, and to become educated. How can children learn to write and study with no desks? And more deeply, more subconsciously, we may be wondering: Why do these children get to go outdoors when we did not? We too yearned to run in the grass, climb trees, and balance on river stones, but we stayed inside because classroom education is better. It must be, or else what did we suffer for?

While visions of education remain intransigent, institutions cannot easily be changed either, largely because of the powerful metaphors, languages, ideas, and imaginings upon which they are built. We and our imaginings are shaped by our experiences, our culture, and the contexts—including buildings—in which this all happens. The Brazilian educator and liberation theorist Paulo Freire explains, “The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend to become oppressors.… The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped.”¹ Thus, if change is to happen, we are going to have to consider the contexts in which education occurs. In fact, in our experience, abandoning the physical bricks and mortar of the school is the easiest task of ecologizing education. Disassembling hierarchical, professional, psychological, structural, and epistemological barriers is the much harder job.

After all, what does it mean to teach when knowledge is understood to be a shared endeavor and not the sole purview of expert humans? How do we decide what and how to teach? What is the scope and sequence of this work? How does one teach in ways that honor the learner and the world around as having knowledge and a stake in our shared future? And how does one aid the development of children into becoming deeply relational and ecologically connected adults when there are precious few examples and theories to support this work? Exceedingly few ecological educators have escaped standard schooling themselves, and we know that the experience of one’s own schooling embeds deeply in the psyche. Even when the conscious layers have been shed, the subconscious still carries implicit structure, weight, and, for many, trauma.

It seems that we might begin by reminding ourselves that education is a tool for replicating culture, a way of instilling and cultivating adult values in children. Indeed, the word culture derives from the word cultivate, with all the agrarian connotations of seeding, growing, and harvesting for the benefit of the community. But what cultural “ways of being” are imparted therein? Modern North American schools typically emphasize the mind over the body, thoughts over senses, rationality over emotion, factuality over imagination, truth over uncertainty, stasis over change, independence over connection, and human over all else. These values link to Western ideologies that prioritize competition, a particular form of rationality, factuality, independence, progress, and an unshakeable belief in human supremacy. And these are the values that underpin the current industrialized culture that has brought the world to the brink of environmental ruin. Our view, then, is that education offers both perilous and hopeful possibilities for a world facing ecological devastation: it can remain a normalizing mechanism for the status quo, or it can move to redress the harm that has been caused and help transform culture, returning to the idea of culture/cultivation for the benefit of the whole community.

Indeed, this transformative role is what we envision for our ecologizing education project. Contrary to some misconceptions, however, we do not indulge in the fantasy that North Americans can live in a preindustrial past—such a mission is undesirable to most and impossible anyway. Nor is the goal to merely imitate beliefs and actions of more ecologically sustainable cultures—although, certainly, Western cultures can learn much from many, particularly local, Indigenous cultures. While we may engage with, be challenged by, see possibilities in, and learn from certain processes and concepts, dominant North American culture—like all cultures—must evolve from its own unique and complex interactions among history, geography, genetics, and the world around.

Culture is inherently, though not easily, transformable. Western culture has repeatedly illustrated that fact as assumed ways of being, such as imperialism, genderism, racism, ableism, and classism, have come under scrutiny and been slowly devalued. The current juncture in history presents another crisis-opportunity for deep cultural assessment and positive transformation. We can imagine our way into a healthier social, emotional, and environmental future. By dismantling humancentric ideologies, we can evolve into a more ecologically conscious, more equitable culture. The path ahead is lit with an environmental and social ethos and greater justice for all.

Ecologizing Education

This book is about ecologizing education, a term that positions education differently, not only from mainstream schooling but also from outdoor adventure education and “green” schooling programs often contained within the boundaries of standard classrooms or understood as minor addendums thereof. Those programs offer improvements to standard pedagogy but usually fall far short of the root-level cultural change that we understand is needed at this time. They may, for example, focus solely on building student confidence in the outdoors and increasing physical fitness. Or they may allow children to roam and run free, to be led by their curiosity, and to discover their own education but without attending to deeper cultural biases.

Ecologizing education is a project that places education at the center of the radical transformation of culture toward a more eco-socially just world. Ecologizing education recognizes that the very foundation of the globalized, industrialized culture is environmentally and socially problematic and unjust. It must change. Humans within these cultures must be differently in the world, and ecologizing education is about teaching in concert with that goal. Change needs to occur at the cultural level and not simply at the individual and/or behavioral levels, and education is central to that project. The process is creative, active, unfolding, and always in process rather than complete.

Ecologizing education moves toward richer, more diverse, mutually beneficial flourishing. By pushing against the colonial viewpoint, it works to right the wrongs of implicit and ongoing marginalizations, such as those created by anthropocentrism, species elitism, binaries, and individualism. Ecologizing education is in alliance with the natural world, understanding nature as filled with a myriad of vibrant, agential, and intrinsically valuable beings. Our kin. These beings have been and continue to be systematically marginalized and destroyed for the sake of a certain way of being human in the world, a way that current systems of education often continue to encourage, both explicitly and implicitly. Ecologizing education is about taking greater responsibility for redressing the eco-social tragedies of the past as well as greater responsibility for the future we gift to our descendants.

Ecologizing education is not a quixotic attempt to return to some imagined, idyllic past. While valuing the beauty, abundance, diversity, and relationships the more-than-human world offers, it also acknowledges that same world’s potential for danger, discomfort, and apathy. Ecologizing education is not a process that requires the dismantling of all school walls. It is not meant only for those with privileged access to forests and oceans and other wildernesses. It is not a one-size-fit-all formula, where boxes can be checked on a form and—voilà!—education is ecologized! Rather, this process responds to the needs of particular locations and circumstances, including those of the local ecosystem and of the individuals involved. Furthermore, the capacity for ecologizing education doesn’t begin with a chunk of wild land. It begins with a radical shift in orientation, values, and understandings, and from that shifted perspective, education unfolds differently, regardless of the locale.

Many educators find that in creating an ecologizing pedagogy, they are, in fact, working alongside nature as an active and able co-teacher. The human educators are coming to understand themselves as being part of a cultural change project. These educators recognize that if people are to be differently in the world, they must be supported in the endeavor. They must be helped and challenged to move from where they are, how they currently exist, to somewhere different. This is a learning process, one that requires different kinds of educators with a diverse and divergent range of skills.

This book does not approach the subject of pedagogy lightly. Rather, it views education as a process for reenvisioning culture. We take the stance that Western culture requires a seismic shift and that a radical new approach to education may be the most meaningful chance we have for real change. No reworking or reimagining of culture can occur without degrees of discomfort, reassessment, and realignment. But ultimately, the ecologizing education project is profoundly hopeful. Reenvisioning culture may mean sacrificing some comforts, conveniences, and material goods, but those sacrifices will make possible significantly improved social, psychological, and ecological health for all.

Ecologizing education is a promising growth process that includes both past and future into a more complete present. The industrialized world’s current agenda, by contrast, looks suicidal. Yes, we’ll need to make sacrifices, recognize traumas, and reevaluate responsibilities, but the ultimate vision is that of a healthier, more balanced world. This evolving culture will be better harmonized with the needs and rights of the natural world. Its citizens will refuse to perpetuate the environmental atrocities of the past. As Stan Rushworth, an activist for Indigenous rights and an educator of Indigenous literature, notes, “We begin to be liberated from the pain by seeing it, not by denying it.”²

Ecologizing Education: Schools and Research

At the outdoor school, low-hanging clouds release a cool rain in pattering ripples across River, sand, and the children’s raincoats. Raindrops bend moss capsules covering a log. Moss on another log is being systematically ripped off by an eight-year-old boy who balls it up and throws it at another boy. Another student interrupts, explaining that moss is an important habitat for spiders and insects and that the capsules provide food for mice. One child shrugs, but he does stop and then wanders off. The other, head down, hesitates and then tries to press Moss back onto the bark. He has been at the school longer, has been reminded more often. But he won’t need reminding again. His understanding of and relationship with Moss, the ecosystem, and himself have deepened, along with his sense of responsibility.

This book draws from several schools but two in particular that have emerged from, engaged with, worked with, and walked alongside the ecologizing educational theorizing work done by a team of researchers at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. The first school, now twelve years old, is a kindergarten to grade 7 school consisting of almost one hundred and fifty students. This school has no building at all and moves among several forested, meadowed, and riverine sites on the edges of a suburban community. The second, another K–7 school, started ten years ago as a school within a school. Here, the ninety students spend significant amounts of time engaged in curriculums of the nearby Ocean, estuary, and forest. Both schools have come to see themselves as sites of activism and resistance—places of cultural change. They recognize that part of their work is to respond to the colonization and oppression of people and nature while working alongside a dynamic natural world with agency of its own. Here, the human teachers are decentering themselves and allowing the students to be co-taught by the world around.

At its core, this book is a call to action. Many people already recognize the urgency for environmental action on all fronts and will turn to this book for resources to support and challenge their practices going forward. We hope the many others who open these pages will be convinced along the way that ecologizing education presents an opportunity for more joyful, authentic, connected education for children and is essential for the depth of cultural transformation necessary to restore planetary and, by extension, human health.

Our book is framed around five central chapters. Each chapter is titled with a single gerund—that is, we have chosen for each a moving title, not in regard to its emotional content but because everything about ecologizing education is processional. Things are in flux, spreading out, turning in, spilling over, enfolding, and so on rather than complete, static, resolved, or determined. Chapter 1 describes the origins of the ecologizing schools and then focuses in particular on the Maple Ridge Environmental School and the Nature Education for Sustainable Todays and Tomorrows (NEST) program.

Chapters 2 and 3 explore two of the biggest pieces of the change conversation that we in ecologizing education have encountered over the past ten years. In chapter 3, we respond directly to some of the aspects of the modern Western world that challenge and block our ability to connect with one another and with the natural world—alienation, isolation, individualization, colonization, resourcism, privilege, and human elitism. Rather than spending time elaborating on these problems, we point in their direction through these responses. It has become clear that eco-social cultural change is not going happen without building rich, diverse, and more trusting relationships, and that will require much healing. Chapter 3 explores how mainstream culture undermines our own health and that of the planet and offers hope in the gifts of healing that the natural world provides.

In chapter 4, we turn directly to the question of education by exploring philosophical perspectives in order to examine the structural challenges of ecologizing education and potential responses to these challenges. In chapter 5, we set aside the theoretical and return to practice, thinking through some of the “hows” related to actually ecologizing education with real students in real places alongside nature.

The conclusion, rather than offering a sense of finality, focuses instead on change itself and on the skills and orientations needed to begin an ecologizing education venture—for the project is in no way completed. Here, we come back around, in a way, to our discussion of culture/cultivate by offering the metaphor of a small-scale, sustainable farm and the seeds needed to make it all work. The idea here is to provide a form and some potential places for readers to start the project of ecologizing education. Start wherever you are, in whatever way makes sense and works for your community.

What follows hereafter is a little more setup on relating, healing, and changing in order to prime the pump, grease the wheel, or—perhaps more apropos—prepare the ground. But first, a brief note on language.

It is challenging to find appropriate language for the range of beings that exist outside the human. This is because that language often “others” (used as a verb here)—consider, for example, the terms “nonhuman” or “other-than-human”—which is problematic if we are trying to build equitable relationships. Sometimes we test out these terms by applying them in human situations: for example, what would it feel like to be referred to as “nonwoman”—or “nonman”? Then again, it seems that certain words confirm an artificial separation between humans and all else (for example, nature or the environment), which in turn leads to ignoring, backgrounding, then hierarchizing, and more. And yet the fixes—such as “nature/culture” or “we are all nature” or “post-nature”—don’t really work because the language itself doesn’t undo the politics of the divide/binary that currently exists and in fact can obscure it. Again, if we try it out in the human context, does it work? Would we be comfortable with “we are post-race” or with the term “genderless”? Such terms may be aspirational (although it seems they are most often uttered by the more privileged side of the binary), but they certainly are not in line with the lived reality.

Consequently, in this book we have made two choices regarding language. First, we tend to use the term “more-than-human,” a turn of phrase suggested by David Abrams when he wrestled with these same challenges.³ This term seeks to undo both anthropocentrism and human alienation from all other beings by suggesting that humans are part of something bigger than themselves. The term “more-than-human” is not, then, a reversing (and thus a reiteration) of the hierarchical binary; instead, it sees humans as incorporated as an equal part into this larger group called more-than-human. The term is certainly not perfect, but it does attempt to negate the hierarchy, and it not only honors the physical “others” but also can be seen to go beyond the physical to include spiritual and emotional elements. Second, we have messed a little with how members of the more-than-human are named. When possible, we have focused on the particular, to undermine the general categories so common to colonial frames of mind, and we have capitalized their given English human names. So, when we are speaking about known particular individuals or small groupings, those we are working with or have spent time alongside, they are capitalized (for example, Cedar, Crow, and Moss), just like our own names, as a sign of respect. Groups of particular species we also try to name, but without capitalization, as with the word “humans” (for example, birds, trees, clouds, and sand). These linguistic shifts are largely symbolic, but they are an attempt to push back on invisible biases within language, and we hope and anticipate that future educators, students, and nature’s many other beings will present new suggestions.

The Need for Relationship

Before children begin their formal education, their actions appear to be guided mainly by internal curiosities and impulses, with caregivers stepping in only as needed to moderate dangerous or unsociable behavior or to pattern the day with meals and sleep. These internal impulses include all the destructive, unbounded, and brilliant instincts and intuitions associated with young children. For most preschool-age children, the curious self is still mostly whole and vivid, and the relational self is still active. A sense of wonder and of being part of the world guides the child to follow Butterfly, trying to imitate and communicate with her. It leads the child to commune with and understand Tree while sitting on its limbs. It leads the child to walk into a room and, before even glancing at their mother, ask why she is sad. In other words, young children seem to have an instinctive connectedness to themselves and others. Many have not yet fully adopted the detached individuality and rationality-above-all attitudes promoted by the culture and often sustained by the education system despite teachers’ best efforts.

This intrinsic connectedness is now evidenced through cognitive and neurobiological research. The Harvard neurologist Matthew Lieberman and the Oxford psychologist Sue Gerhardt have determined that infants and children are predisposed to shared cognition and communal emotion.⁴ While standard schools tend to refocus students on their individualized and rational self, ecologizing education seeks to attend to the ecological self—this more immersed and connected self—by supporting children’s seemingly wonder-full and relational impulses.

After having spent twelve years in mainstream education, most adults in modern Western culture seem to have lost touch with their more relationally able selves. They do not notice and wonder at Butterfly, cannot listen to Tree, and have limited sense of how a loved one feels if they can’t see them (and, sometimes, even if they can). Detached from ourselves, we detach from others. Having lost the taproot to relationship, adults often find the process of connecting and caring for others—human or otherwise—frustrating and time-consuming rather than instinctive and rewarding. For most North Americans, the culture of separation surrounds and permeates daily life. Having succumbed to what Robert Stolorow and George Atwood call the “myth of the isolated mind,”⁵ individuals project their own sense of alienation onto the world, seeing other people as threats or as means to particular ends and looking upon forests, rivers, and mountainsides for shallow personal gain and material advancement. The question then becomes: how do we respond to this alienation, loneliness, and isolation? And can we teach toward and for relation?

The Need for Healing

In the consumer mindset, people look upon stuff, the environment, and other people and ask not “How are we related?” but “What can you do for me?” Such a mindset upsets what Matthew Lieberman calls our deepest and most fundamental need: connection.⁶ This unmet need—this lack of connection—actually causes pain, a sense of loss, and even trauma. And so, as we teach toward and for relation and restored connection, the question of healing has also become an important discussion in the project of ecologizing education. In fact, as we explored this topic in more depth, it became clear that healing needed to be considered from multiple perspectives.

First, healing is needed in the relationship between humans and the earth’s other beings. Second, healing is needed for the pain of severed relations and for the mental and emotional health struggles arising from a range of alienations—from other humans and from the more-than-human. Third, healing is needed in order to recognize the interconnected and inter-influential space between human and more-than and to acknowledge that some of the suffering that humans are incurring is because the earth is hurting. And finally, healing can emerge from the naming and changing of the colonial, oppressive, violent, and destructive ways modern cultures have treated the earth and its myriad denizens. This latter form of healing might, for instance, take the shape of a truth and reconciliation process, where the truth is about privileged humans naming their roles in and the advantages gained from the colonization of peoples and planet.

Today’s children are coping with epidemic levels of mental and emotional health problems. The researcher Jean Twenge reports that, already by the 1980s, the average child was experiencing more anxiety than child psychiatric patients had in the 1950s; since then, the rate has steadily climbed.⁷ The nonprofit organization Mental Health America reports that teen depression is “increasing at an alarming rate,” with one in five teens now suffering from clinical depression.⁸ The psychologist Thomas Verny warns:

The latest research shows that we are creating so many violent children so rapidly that we will never be able to treat or rehabilitate them all. And the alarming statistics of infanticide, delinquency, and criminality are just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath the water are the invisible scars on each child’s soul, subtle changes that will, depending on the presence or absence of certain protective factors, lead to a life assailed by anxiety, depression, failed relationships, lack of motivations, addiction, or suicide.⁹

In classrooms, there is a growing need for support and for the expansion of various social-emotional learning programs just to be able to start on the project of learning. The medical doctor Gabor Maté argues that the deterioration of mental and emotional health among North American children is “a threat as deep and ominous in its future implications for society as the well-recognized environmental/climate change crisis.”¹⁰

In fact, the two—human health and planetary health—are indelibly related, and the mode of thinking that insists they are not is a big part of the problem. Children in ecologizing education programs are more likely to have rich relationships with the places where they live—and successes with a diversity of students suggest that these relationships are important for health and well-being. These children recognize that they are the air they breathe, the water they drink, the food that has come from this earth. These realizations lead to an experienced understanding of their interconnectedness. They understand that their own health is dependent on the wellness of the world they are immersed in. It becomes difficult to see oneself as healthy when the rest of the world is sick.

Rapacious cultures are ones that attempt to function within imagined categories and prioritize economics above all else. In contrast, for many Indigenous cultures, science, spirituality, gender relations, the environment, and economics are all related. Attempting to function within one of those facets without regard to the others is illogical, immoral, and ultimately implausible. In the same way that standard schools break learning into smaller disconnected pieces—subjects, tests, developmental stages—our approach to environmental problems also tends to be segmented, with saving the sharks, prioritizing climate change, and curbing pesticides comprising separate environmental pursuits. The ecologizing education project recognizes the need for a more contextual, communal approach—a radical shift in the fundamental ways we conceive of the world and our relationship in it.

Many diligent, conscientious teachers and educational administrators recognize that even well-designed standard schools reduce creativity, critical thinking, primacy of experience, genuine personhood, and care for the environment. Due to the constraints of the system’s conception, design, and fundamental assumptions, the sincere efforts of these educators to redress these concerns often amount to no more than a bit of tinkering: the adoption of a school recycling program or student-created skits on sustainability. We worry that this work might actually obfuscate the more significant challenges that exist. In The Cancer Stages of Capitalism, the philosopher John McMurtry argues, “Disconnection of disease epidemics from the social-system determining them is an account blind-spot.”¹¹ In other words, people must recognize the disease-causing systems (for example, lack of relationship, a colonial orientation, the poisoning of the planet, alienation, and propensity toward profit and plunder) deeply embedded within our culture in order to enact effective changes. Rushworth notes that the plagues of medieval Europe came about because humans were living “in filth”—that is, living with their offal thrown in the streets and with infestations of rats—and then he adds, “We’re still living in filth, but the filth is real shiny and pretty, so we don’t see it as filth.”¹²

Like many teachers, parents and caregivers are increasingly frustrated with status quo education. One parent recently lamented to us, “We wanted our children to go into outdoor schools too, but the only ones available were too far away, or private and too expensive. It wasn’t possible.” One of the goals of this book is to provide interested parents, caregivers, administrators, and educators a means of thinking through education from an ecologizing perspective—whatever their current circumstances. Cultural change does not happen overnight. It’s a long, slow process filled with uncertainty, reassessment, and hard, creative reworking. It might begin, for example, by investing in a school vegetable garden instead of another new playground. Trees, songbird shrubs, and a butterfly habitat might be planted to replace one of the school’s fields. Outdoor field trips might become regular events for every class. When building remodeling takes place, creating more natural spaces—or protecting existing ones—might be considered in earnest. And when brand-new schools are needed, some collections of parents/caregivers, teachers, community members, administrators, and representatives of the larger more-than-human world might opt to create a building-less school, like the Maple Ridge Environmental School, rather than digging up and building over another local ecosystem.

Alicia Kear, a high school English teacher in a standard classroom, illustrates the kinds of shifts that occur when one has been deeply engaged with ecologizing education ideas for some years.¹³ She regularly takes her junior English classes outdoors to walk in the nearby nature trails. There, they might practice rhyming (“tree,” “bee”), study alliteration (“bark,” “brook,” “bearberry”), or develop ideas for a short story based on their observations (“The Hungry Beetle”). She also introduces them to the concept of ecological literacy—the skill of understanding the processes of ecosystems that sustain life. Although Kear has received the support of her administration, her students, and the students’ parents/caregivers, she notes that her formal teacher education provided no training in this kind of pedagogy. Consequently, she has few models to turn to and expends significant energy creatively rethinking each aspect of the curriculum.

Can standard schools—with all their physical infrastructure and dominance over the land—ever become truly ecologizing? Perhaps not. Yet the largest barrier is not the physical building but the cognitive infrastructure that persists in its biases toward human elitism, competition, educational hierarchies, separation of nature and culture, and an isolating sense of the self. It is those cognitive barriers that this book works hardest to identify and dismantle. As we point out, since these barriers tend to sever the relational self, they often cause pain to the human as well.

Deep and meaningful pedagogical transformations are a necessary part of addressing these challenges of understanding health and finding ways to heal. But those steps can only happen if we acknowledge and find ways to address the links between environmental degradation, divided and alienated selfhood, truncated relationality, the colonization of nature, and the deep cultural errors of the past. Can education be part of the healing process in all its complexities? What skills, pedagogies, ways of being might the ecologizing educator need to be a part thereof?

The Need for Cultural Change

Many people are looking around today and questioning the passed-down values of the industrialized world that have led to our current environmental catastrophe. Amid the tsunami of bad-news stories citizens have become inured to, concepts like the Anthropocene have become household language. This term, coined by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000, refers to an epoch when human activity has so dramatically altered the functioning of the entire planet that it will be recognizable forever in the geological record.¹⁴

On the one hand, this term “Anthropocene” and the chilling facts it suggests provide a solid wake-up call—an icy glass of reality splashed in the face. But many theorists identify cultural biases within the term because it suggests that “humans” are the problem, an assertion that doesn’t take into account, for instance, that not all human cultures have participated in and “benefited” from post–Industrial Revolution capitalism and resource use (at the expense of the planet), nor does it take into account that humans lived across the globe very successfully for thousands of years prior to the settler arrivals and colonization.¹⁵ Indeed, the Ika and Kogi peoples of Northern Colombia, the Tarahumara Nation of the Mexican high desert, and the Sami peoples of Norway have not dangerously altered the functioning of the earth. Thus, the term “Anthropocene,” while somewhat helpful in activating attention to the crisis, ultimately perpetuates the cultural myopia responsible for it. Additionally, with this term, humans still get to play center stage. Besides, this nascent and as yet unreliably defined epoch is not the result of human behavior—it’s the result of particular cultural behaviors.

People in industrialized nations have varying reactions to the dreary news about the environment. Admittedly, many have given up. “I know the situation is catastrophic,” an elderly friend recently admitted, “but I won’t be here in twenty years, so—maybe it’s selfish—but I don’t care.” Other people say, “It’s all part of a fated design.” This is the “everything happens for a reason” argument. Still others claim the problem isn’t that bad—even when faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Among the more honest are those who acknowledge, “I care about the environment, I just can’t abandon my whole life—my car, my job, my shopping habits—to go live in a tree. There’s only so much I can do personally.” Others go to exhausting (and expensive) lengths to buy biodegradable dishwasher detergent, an electric car, and solar panels, often sensing the insufficiency of their efforts. Amid corporate and government inadequacies and cynicisms, too much burden has been placed on the individual.

This book resides on the premise that there is a moral imperative to do what we can to change and heal this alienated and rapacious cultural relationship to the earth and to seek greater balance. Indeed, an ecological ethos acknowledges that human relationships to the natural world are woven together through care, responsiveness, and responsibility. Enacting the necessary changes will involve a seismic cultural shift for many, though not all, and, we think, not necessarily for the worse. This means rethinking our place in any ecosystem, our rights to consume the other, and, perhaps most significantly, what it means to be human. In reality, no one knows with certainty how our ecological crisis will unfold. That uncertainty underscores the imperative to prepare young people for greater attunement to their more-than-human kin while developing greater adaptability, creativity, comfort with uncertainty, and diversity in ways of knowing.

In its current form, Western culture’s impact on the natural world is most aptly described by the language of colonialism.¹⁶ Sitka-Sage, Piersol, and Blenkinsop describe urbanization, for example, as a process of “silencing, dehistoricizing, and violently dislocating Indigenous and other marginalized populations.”¹⁷ We believe the brokenness of the environment is experienced on conscious and subconscious, social and personal levels by all of us. Enacting violence upon that which we deem lesser and insignificant results from a mindset of separation and superiority.

Even those who insist they are untouched by the planet’s ill health frequently suffer inexplicable ennui, the malaise of inner vacancy, and a distinct loneliness that may course through the entirety of life, from birth to death. Denying the voice of nature requires denial of personal responsibility, the wellness of being-in-relation, and the privileges and implied violences that come with being human—and it results in much suffering and mutual alienation. Everything within our universe—from water systems to atoms to light waves—evidences connection. Loneliness is, therefore, an illusion. The notion of our personal existence as separate from the varied entities of this earth is also a misconception. The belief that polluting the local river, putting poison in the soil, and extinguishing the wolf habitat doesn’t also affect us is unscientific, irrational, and misguided.

But change is possible and necessary. A movement is bubbling, a vibrancy percolating up through layers of concrete and alienation. Our kith and kin and even our consciences are reaching toward one another and seeking to find ways to be different together, to mitigate suffering, and to increase flourishing and possibility. In order to do this, learning must happen, education must be involved—and this book steps into that project.