EcoJustice Education and
Community-Based Learning
The Southeast Michigan Stewardship Coalition
EcoJustice Education:
A Crucial Kind of Change
Because the assumptions that belong to a
culture are often invisible in their fullest
dimensions and consequences, one must make
them visible before discerning change.
The very process of seeing the structure of
thought is itself a crucial kind of change and
genesis.
Susan Griffin, The Eros of
Everyday Life
An EcoJustice Framework
Social and ecological justice are
not separate.
They share the same cultural roots.
An EcoJustice Framework
Ecology: From the root “Oikos” meaning
“home”
• A strong emphasis on relationships and
interdependence
• Disrupts the managerial model introduced
mid-20th C. where science is applied to
manage and control problems “out there.”
An EcoJustice Framework
Two Primary Strands:
1. A deep analysis of the cultural
foundations of socio-ecological
violence
2.A recognition of beliefs, behaviors,
traditions, knowledge, and skills that
lead to a smaller ecological
footprint/sustainable communities
An EcoJustice Framework
Strand 1: A deep cultural analysis of
how we think
Examining
• “Discursive roots” of culture
--Language matters
• How we come to think and behave in
relation to each other as well as the natural
world as created in our symbolic systems
An EcoJustice Framework
Centuries-Old Cultural Discourses
– Anthropocentrism
– Ethnocentrism
– Androcentrism
– Mechanism
– Individualism
– “Progress” and “Growth”
– Scientism
Dualisms and Hierarchized
Thinking in Western Culture
Basic hierarchized structure leading to
hyper-separated consciousness and a
logic of domination
•
•
•
•
Culture/nature (anthropocentrism)
Reason/ emotion
Mind/body
Man/woman (androcentrism)
The Language of
Mechanism
•
“My aim is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to
a divine organism, but to a clockwork.” Johannes Kepler (15711630)
•
“For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so may
strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the
whole body.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
•
“Like the computer, the human mind takes in information,
performs operations on it to change its form and content, stores
information, retrieves it when needed, and generates responses to
it.” Anita Woolfolk, from Educational Psychology, 1993
•
“The machine that biologists have opened up is a creation of
riveting beauty. At its heart are the nucleic acid codes
which in a typical vertebrate animal may comprise
50,000 to 100,000 genes.”
The Language of
Individualism
The idea that humans are “autonomous individuals”
with the independent capacity to reason outside of
our relationship or shared language with others.
Assumes that the most “advanced” societies are
those that maximize the so-called inherent drive to
accumulate individual wealth and power. Thus,
competition is seen as normal, and hierarchized
social relations are a natural outgrowth of rewards
for individual merit.
The Language of
Individualism
Examples:
“Think for yourself!”
We all construct “our own meaning.”
Social inequality is a result of inherent
genetic or cultural “deficits.”
The Language of
“Progress”
The idea that rapid social or
technological change is inevitable and
necessary to “advance” culture.
The Language of
“Progress”
•
•
•
•
•
•
“You can’t stop progress!”
“unimproved land”
“developed” vs “underdeveloped”
“growth”
“innovation”
“advanced” vs “backward”
What would you expect to see in a
culture organized by an
anthropocentric world view?
“It seems to me that in a culture organized by
an anthropocentric way of thinking, it would
be a short leap to treating some people like
they are inferior.”
Sabrina Clark, 12th grade
Strand 2: Attention to local
communities and indigenous
cultures
Revitalizing the cultural and ecological
“commons”
Practices and traditions, relationships
that have a smaller ecological
footprint
Shared without the need for monetary
exchange
Strand 2: Attention to local
communities
Attention to the relationship among
biological, cultural, and linguistic
diversity as the strength of any
community.
Problem of cultural, linguistic, and
ecological destruction via economic
and cultural globolization
Strand 2: Attention to local
communities
Earth democracy: recognizing the need
for collective decision making by
those who are most affected by the
decision
Recognizing the importance of
decisions that take seriously the right
of other living creatures to renew
themselves.
Strand 2: Attention to local
communities
It is not quite imaginable that people will
exert themselves greatly to defend
creatures and places that they have
dispassionately studied. It is altogether
imaginable that they will greatly exert
themselves to defend creatures and places
that they have involved their lives in.
~Wendell Berry
Developing Citizen Stewards:
EcoJustice and Community-Based
Education
Southeast Michigan Stewardship
Coalition
(SEMIS)
Three Key Strategies
• Communitybased Learning
• K-12
Professional
Development
• Community
Partnerships
SEMIS Professional
Development
What does this all mean for
what we need to do?
Developing the habits of mind
and heart necessary for
stewardship and creation of
sustainable communities.
EcoJustice
Habits of Heart & Mind
Guiding Questions
What are root causes of the social and ecological crises
we face?
How are the projects we are working on contributing
to alternatives (more sustainable alternatives)?
How do we know if our thinking and actions (or their
implications) support or undermine life/living
systems?
How do we reflectively listen/understand the
messages/ communication/ Nature/living systems
are sending?
How do we become ethical participants in an
“Ecology of Mind”?