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If people come together adhering to these precepts, it will help them prepare and plan for living in this new world. The biblical quotation, “Without a dream, the people perish,” may not have been intended for this purpose, but it fits our need in this century. We must reconcile ourselves to an ecologically dying planet and move on in a purposeful way to participate in fashioning a new one.
REHABILITATION
~ returning someone to an optimal state by training or therapy
It should be obvious by now. Traditional education has not been successful in saving the earth. The idea that teachers could insert an environmental perspective into all the courses of the curriculum was not a workable educational response to our environmental problems. Most teachers did not do it. Of course, they were given little training; no carefully-crafted instructional materials, just collections of hit or miss activities (often incorporating subtle management messages); and no time to prepare. After a half-century, this educational approach has produced societies that still do not understand ecological realities, and are ill- prepared to make the sacrifices necessary even to save themselves.
In the institute’s Sunship Earth program, devised in the 70s, we suggested that our young participants (10-11 year olds) were not only the passengers on this vessel of life in space, but also its crew. Their task was to help their fellow human passengers understand how life works here ecologically before it was too late. Clearly, we failed. The forces of environmental education infusion and outdoor education confusion overwhelmed us. In the space of a couple of generations, the planet moved from being an eco-centric world to a techno-centric one, and serious education about our environmental problems was swept away.
Rehabilitation is what we do in working with someone to return them to an optimal, healthy state in our society. If we are now the actual crew on this new technological “spaceship” we have created, then we need to do some serious training for that role. Yes, training, and in some cases, it will have to be therapy. If we are living on a human-engineered planet, what kind of people do we want operating it? It’s the people that must be restored here. It will not do us much good to spend our energies trying to preserve the planet when the humans and their systems made such preservation necessary. We need to rehabilitate an entire species of life: us. If we can rehabilitate the people, they will take care of the place.
When we were talking about asking young people in the Sunship Earth program to think about their environmental habits, some of our colleagues did not want to suggest that people had “bad” environmental habits, preferring instead just to ask them to form some “good” ones. They did not want to tell people their behavior was wrong. Throughout history, fundamental, far-reaching change has occurred most often when enough people have been willing to stand up and say: “This is wrong.” But a lot of our fellow travelers in the educational side of the environ-
mental movement have been unwilling to do so. Need I point out the result?
A “habit” is a customary way of being or doing. In common usage, it is a behavior that we engage in almost unconsciously.
21st Century Questions
What are the human qualities that make us a species worth saving?
What is the optimal new “earthling” we seek for our vision of the future?
4/Annual Report