Divided We Stand, United We Fall: Challenging how we think about environmental education

In the lead-up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, Stephen Lewis laments in this issue of Our Schools/Our Selves that it may be too late to prevent a climate catastrophe.

Stepping up to the challenge, some of the country’s leading environmental educators and education critics paint a picture of the very concrete steps needed to give humanity a chance. Collectively, they put forward a provocative narrative suggesting that conventional attempts at reducing, reusing and recycling are not nearly enough. Rather, what is required is a fundamental disruption in the way we think about the environment, focusing on how a range of issues including race, class, and gender are inextricably linked to our environmental outcomes.

Table of contents

  • Introduction  (Erika Shaker)
  • Editorial – Divided We Stand, United We Fall: Disrupting environmental education’s grand messages (Tor Sandberg)
  • Viewpoints – A Practical Environmental Education Shrinking ecological footprints, expanding political ones (Elizabeth May)
  • The Health Impact of Global Climate Change (Stephen Lewis)
  • No Flowers in the Dustbin: Why we need collaboration, not competition, in education (Andrew Hunter)
  • The Illusory Solution: Is commercialization the “future” of education at the Toronto District School Board? (Trevor Norris)
  • From Food Waste to Forced Relocation: Making connections (Jocelyn Thorpe)
  • Stories About Place: Community mapping is a powerful tool for environmental education (Hannah Lewis)
  • Forty Years of Struggle and Still No Right to Inuit Education in Nunavut (Derek Rasmussen)
  • Education, Native Languages and Supporting Indigenous Knowledge (Priscilla Settee)
  • Teaching, Preaching and Trying to Be Fair: Environment issues, environmentalists, and mainstream journalists (Susan Newhook)
  • Environmental Education in Ontario: To be or not to be (Leesa Fawcett)
  • University Front – Living and Learning on the Edge: Class, race, gender, animals and the environment in a university community outreach program (Constance Russell)
  • Promoting Environmental Education at the University: The campus as a sticky wicket (L Anders Sandberg)
  • Introducing the New University Cooperative (Wilma Van Derveen)
  • International – To Know is to Cherish? Learning from Swedish environmental education (Ebba Lisberg Jensen)

Attachments

Table of Contents, Introduction, Editorial – Erika Shaker and Tor Sandberg