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R In the US, people used to sum up the primary objectives of education by saying it was all about learning the 3 Rs: Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic. In the institute we have main- tained since the beginning that those objectives were inadequate. There needed to be a fourth R – the most important one of all – representing our Relationship with the planet’s ecological systems and communities, and what responsibilities we bear in that relation-
R ship. Today, we need to move beyond those objectives to focus on a set of new ones: Reconciliation, Rehabilitation, Reorganization. Those should become the educational focus of our relationship with this new world we now inhabit.
Contemporary environmentalists have spent much of their energies for the past half- century trying to clean up and rectify the messes humans have made. Like the Greek myth where Sisyphus spends eternity pushing a stone up a hill only to have it roll back
R down again, we faced an endless task, but untold thousands of environmentally-aware people tried. By Zeus how we tried. It is time to stop now and give serious attention to envisioning and sharing what can be done in an altered reality. Make no mistake: what- ever we do will not prevent what’s coming as the planet’s fever increases. We can amelio- rate that reality perhaps, but not change it. Despair and denial will not contribute much. Many of our political and religious leaders are ecologically illiterate, probably because
they were raised in the methodology of Victorian nature study, and as a result, most people will be like children entering a new world without a parent’s guidance. We need a new educational thrust to provide it.
Tragically, many people in modern societies have come to believe that nature is something “out there” or “far away.” It is not. Nature quenches our thirst and provides the energy for our work. It lights and heats our homes. Nature is at our table every meal. It shelters us while we sleep. We put it on in the morning and take it off at night. Nature is with us always – in our darkest moments and most joyous days. Nature is suste- nance and succor, beauty and bondage. From a baby’s first gurgle to the body’s last gasp, nature is a constant companion in the adventure of life. Nature walks with us on both the wilderness trail and the urban street. When we silence ourselves and wait, its song resonates in the deepest recesses of our psyche. Nature is not an accumulation of pieces to be discovered, identified, collected, and displayed; it is a panoply of processes to be understood, engaged, protected, and loved.
After my speech at the interfaith conference, one participant spoke personally about engaging with people off the beaten track in other parts of the country, and discovering how much we have in common, and thus
we should all share:
⊕ ⊕ ⊕ ⊕ ⊕
feel hopeful. But that’s the point; what we have in common is what is destroying the planet we
We want to hold onto our prejudices, and love our fantasies
We want to have ease and convenience, while being entertained
We want to reproduce, and enumerate our grandchildren
We want to consume and accumulate, even when we have no space for more We want to travel and explore, and be unrestricted in what we consider to
be our private property and pursuits
To make matters worse, many people in the educational side of the environ- mental movement have come to believe that we just need to provide more contact with nature, some unstructured play, and teach the names of things to cure our “disorder.” The problem goes much deeper. It involves a lack of embedded understanding and feeling for how the world functions ecologically. People have lost touch (literally) with what sustains all life, including their own. Nature has become the ghost of a previous world they seldom sense.
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