Teaching Ecological Imagination with David Orr

MP3 Download "Imagine a national effort to remake every school in the country so they're powered by renewable energy. Have young people engaged in that process from the earliest grades right on through Ph.D. Use the campus not just as a place that looks decorative and has to be mowed and sprayed, but as a place for gardens, so that the food in the school cafeteria is grown largely on site. Imagine schools designed to spark ecological imagination in young people." This is the vision of ecologist and educator David Orr. In a world on the brink of ecological disaster, he is hopeful that we can still turn the tide if we recognize that the people who will create the sustainable society of the future are sitting in our classrooms today. However, if we hope to be educating the Rachel Carsons and Aldo Leopolds of the twenty-first century, he cautions, we must design our schools and our curricula accordingly. His strategy for doing that, and his musings on the value - or lack thereof - of passi