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Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability
by Michael K. Stone/Center for Ecoliteracy
I am proud to have cofounded the Center for Ecoliteracy and to serve as the chair of its board. I can think of no more important mission than helping students acquire the knowledge, skills, and values to participate effectively in creating sustainable communities. The Center's 2009 book, Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability describes the conceptual foundations of the Center's work, offers numerous strategies and resources, and features inspiring success stories from schools across the country.
— Fritjof Capra
Selected from the Introduction:
There is a bold new movement underway in school systems across North America and around the world. Educators, parents, and students are remaking K–12 education to prepare students for the environmental challenges of the coming decades. They are discovering that guidance for living abundantly on a finite planet lies, literally, under their feet and all around them — in living soil, food webs and water cycles, energy from the sun, and everywhere that nature reveals her ways. Smart by Nature schooling draws on 3.8 billion years of natural research and development to find solutions to problems of sustainable living, make teaching and learning more meaningful, and create a more hopeful future from people and communities.
This movement responds to the realization that the young people in school today will inherit a host of pressing — and escalating — environmental challenges: threats of climate change; loss of biodiversity; the end of cheap energy; depletion of resources; environmental degradation; gross inequities in standards of living; obesity, diabetes, asthma, and other environmentally linked illness. This generation will require leaders and citizens who can think ecologically, understand the interconnectedness of human and natural systems, and have the will, ability, and courage to act.
To stay useful, sustainability must mean more than merely surviving or trying to keep a degraded world from getting worse. Otherwise, why bother? Invoking nature's capacity for sustaining life, as Fritjof Capra suggests, is critical. A sustainable community worth imagining is alive, in the most exuberant sense of that word — fresh, vital, evolving, diverse, and dynamic. It cares about the quality as well as the continuation of life. It is flexible and adaptive. It draws energy from its environment, celebrates organic wholeness, and appreciates that life has more to reveal than human cleverness has yet discovered. It teaches its children to pay attention to the world around them, to respect what they cannot control, and to embrace the creativity with which life sustains itself.
This book — the fruit of two decades of work by the Center for Ecoliteracy, a public foundation in Berkeley, California, dedicated to education for sustainable living — presents Smart by Nature, the Center's framework for schooling for sustainability. It documents the accomplishments of many schools, shares the lessons they have learned, and furthers the discussion that has begun among the many parties to this movement.