Ecological literacy

I'm reading an amazing book called, Earth in Mind - On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect, by David Orr, and thought I'd share a bit from the intro, and maybe more later on. Basically the book is a commentary on societal, educational, and economic forces and traditions, and their interaction with the natural world (including us), and invokes us to go on a journey of our minds and beliefs about what it means to be alive on planet earth.

"The essays in this book...are joined by the belief that the environmental crisis originates with the inability to think about ecological patterns, systems of causation, and the long-term effects of human actions. Eventually these things are manifest as soil erosion, species extinction, deforestation, ugliness, pollution, social decay, injustice, and economic inefficiencies. In contrast, what can be called ecological design intelligence is the capacity to understand the ecological context in which humans live, to recognize limits, and to get the scale of things right. It is the ability to calibrate human purposes and natural constraints and do so with grace and economy. Ecological design intelligence is not just about things like technologies; it also has to do with the shape and dimension of our ideas and philosophies relative to the earth. At its heart ecological design intelligence is motivated by an ethical view of the world and our obligations to it. On occasion it requires the good sense and moral energy to say no to things otherwise posssible, and for some, profitable. The surest signs of ecological design intelligence are collective achievements: healthy, durable, resillient, just, and prosperous communities.
I believe that educators must become students of the ecologically proficient mind and the things that must be done to foster such minds. In time this will mean nothing lwss than the redesign of education itself."

More to come later.....

Happy June!