Teaching Environmental Literacy: Across Campus and Across the Curriculum

Introduction: The Rationale for Teaching Environmental Literacy in Higher Education

INTRODUCTION The Rationale for Teaching Environmental Literacy in Higher Education Heather L. Reynolds, Eduardo S. Brondizio, Jennifer Meta Robinson, Doug Karpa, and Briana L. Gross A view of earth from space makes it abundantly clear that the human presence is a subset of the larger earth environment. Humans depend crucially on natural ecosystem processes for basic life support services such as air purification, climate regulation, and waste decomposition, for the flow of goods such as food, pharmaceuticals, and fresh water, and for recreational enjoyment and aesthetic fulfillment (Daily et al. 1997, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2003). Indeed, the twenty-first century has been dubbed the Century of the Environment in recognition of the importance of the world’s diverse ecosystems for human health, economic vitality, social justice, and national security (Lubchenco 1998). Yet our society perpetuates the myth of an environment that is largely separate from our social and economic concerns (Daly 1996). This myth mattered little when human population size was small and our technology limited, but at nearly seven billion strong and equipped with the power of the agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions, the extent of human domination over earth’s ecosystems is making the intimate interconnections between environment and society increasingly clear. Human activities are causing unprecedented rates and types of environmental changes, from local to global scales. Humans have transformed or degraded one- xiv ⭈ Introduction third to one-half of the earth’s land surface, altered atmospheric chemistry, and accelerated rates of both species extinctions and their invasions into previously unoccupied habitat (Vitousek et al. 1997). We see the results in environmental, social, and economic challenges that have increasingly become part of everyone’s daily lives: climate change, pervasive pollution of air, water, and soil with industrial and agricultural toxins, soil erosion, and declining reserves of fresh water, oil, and metals (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). Even as total resource use may already be at a point of exceeding the earth’s environmental capacity (Wackernagel et al. 2002), a persistent gap exists in how these resources are distributed, leading to extreme social and economic inequities that are expected to intensify with climate change (United Nations Human Development Report 2007/2008). A central challenge of twenty-first-century society is thus to bring the nature and scope of the human endeavor into a sustainable relationship with the biosphere . Indeed, sustainability—meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs—is widely advocated as a shared organizing principle of society (United Nations Agenda 21 1993, Merkel 1998, Sitarz 1998). However, even as interconnected environmental, social, and economic problems have become increasingly prominent in public discourse, the training people receive to understand and address such concerns has lagged behind. Thirty-odd years after the first Earth Day, for example, only one-third of Americans can pass basic tests of environmental knowledge with grades of C or better, and only about a tenth possesses basic knowledge of energy issues and problems (Coyle 2005). In essence, the American educational system has been turning out ‘‘environmental illiterates,’’ ill-equipped to understand emerging information about the environmental, social and economic dimensions of human–environment interactions and make informed choices on the suite of issues, from lifestyles to politics, that will decide whether and how society moves towards a more sustainable economy (Orr 2004). The learning environment itself is a powerful form of pedagogy—a ‘‘hidden curriculum’’ (Orr 1990, Orr 2004). As students move about campus buildings and grounds every day, they receive important messages about human– environment interactions. Typically, these messages reinforce the paradigm that the earth’s resources and capacity to assimilate wastes are infinite and that each individual’s energy and resource use is disconnected from the welfare of other humans, other organisms, and the local to global ecosystems in which they are embedded. Alternatively, the campus environment, including buildings, grounds, energy and resource use, waste production, and academic focus, can foster an understanding that humans are embedded in and dependent upon the web of life, that our personal and collective lifestyle choices have both local and far-reaching impacts on other humans, other organisms, and ecosystems, and Introduction ⭈ xv that sustainable societies must live within the regenerative and assimilative capacity of earth’s biosphere (Orr 1997, Uhl et al. 2000, 2001). In response to global climate change and other increasingly urgent environmental , social, and economic challenges of our day and spurred by...