Teaching Environmental Literacy: Across Campus and Across the Curriculum

Overview

Overview Heather L. Reynolds Biology ‘‘What should an environmentally literate person know?’’ Our group addressed this question from the perspective of environmental literacy as a basic competency for all graduates. We therefore sought to identify the core elements of environmental literacy (also referred to as ecological literacy, e.g. Orr 1990, 1994) and examine how these could be approached from a wide range of disciplines. Most definitions of environmental literacy emphasize the distinction between knowledge, skills, and motives (the latter is more often expressed as values or as a√ective goals) and a focus on environmental problem solving and sustainability (Orr 1990, Moseley 2000, Coyle 2005). Environmental literacy is also understood to encompass knowledge about the natural environment (e.g. laws of thermodynamics , ecological principles) as well as human economic and social systems (e.g. Berkowitz et al. 1997, Orr 1994, 2004), reflecting a growing appreciation that in a sustainable world, ‘‘the environment’’ cannot be separated from such social and economic concerns as human health, social justice, national security, and economic vitality (Lubchenco 1998). We merged these prior definitions of environmental literacy into one succinct statement (see box part 2.1), adding emphasis on personal actions motivated not only by information and skills, but by an ethics informed by a ‘‘sense of place’’ both natural and cultural, and over both space and time. This reflects our belief that citizens and their everyday life choices, rooted as they are in local communities and local ecological webs, but 18 ⭈ heather l. reynolds Box 2.1 Environmental literacy: An understanding of the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of human–environment interactions, and the skills and ethics to translate this understanding into life choices that promote the sustainable flourishing of diverse human communities and the ecological systems within which they are embedded. with connections that ripple out over the globe and to the future, are the foundation of a sustainable society. With its strong emphasis on environment, society, and economy, environmental literacy is decidedly multi- and interdisciplinary. While this is appropriate given the college-wide literacy that we are aiming for, it also poses the special challenge of balancing breadth and depth. It has been argued that achieving detailed scientific, political, or economic understanding for all citizens is not possible, and that the focus should instead be on teaching critical thinking skills, such as the skill of evaluating the credibility of decision-making processes (Schneider 1997). Detailed expertise in all disciplines is certainly an unrealistic academic goal for an individual; thus critical thinking skills are key to ongoing assessment of emerging information and contexts. Indeed, the ability to integrate across disciplinary paradigms is itself a form of critical thinking increasingly demanded by the complex challenges faced in our globalized and multicultural twenty-first-century world. We propose a level of environmental literacy—both possible and desirable for all graduates—that integrates across disciplines the knowledge produced in specialized disciplinary domains. Every citizen can and should be equipped with this core level of environmental literacy in order to contribute to the healthy functioning of society. At the Core: Three Central Organizing Themes Multidisciplinary knowledge is by nature complex, but complexity can be made tractable with central themes by which diverse information can be organized, connected, and made sense of. We identified three central organizing themes for environmental literacy: ecosystem services, ecological footprint, and sustainability . We propose that, collectively, these three themes represent three essential elements of the human–environment interaction that every citizen should know: that humans ultimately depend on the environment for essential ecosystem ser- Overview ⭈ 19 vices that support the human economy and social well-being; that the scale and scope of human activities makes humanity the dominant biological force on earth, and this domination must be appreciated at least in part for the risks it poses to the ecosystem services on which humans depend; and that a powerful alternate paradigm to domination is sustainability, through which human alliance with the environment can permit enduring and resilient human and natural economies. These three themes have a parallel in the three fundamental stages of ecological consciousness identified by Uhl (2004): awe, alarm, and empowerment . Uhl makes a compelling case that people must first be grounded in the wonder and awe of earth and its ecological systems in order to have the strength to face the alarming extent of damage that humans are causing to these...