Calling all Teachers: A New Earth Curriculum
by Guy Dauncey
Common Ground Magazine, January 2007
Let me think aloud about our schools. I was told recently that when a group of children was shown 10 vegetables, they could identify only one: a tomato. When they were shown 10 corporate logos, they identified all 10. It makes you worry.
If we are to stop outstripping our planet’s resources and navigate a way to a sustainable, low carbon-emission world, it is critical that our children learn what it means to live on this crowded Earth, with its growing forests, vast oceans and tiny creeks. So let me cast my thoughts ahead to the year 2015 and imagine that our teachers, parents, school boards and ministries of education have realized the urgency of what’s needed.
Every school now has a garden where children learn to care for the soil, make compost, gather seeds and cultivate the fruits and vegetables they later eat at their own table.
By the time they leave school, students will have learned the harsh lesson of Easter Island: when humans over-consume resources, the result can be hunger, cultural collapse and death.
Every school instills its students with a passion for solutions. There are solar systems on the roofs, electric vehicles charged from the sun, and buildings refashioned to make them a model of clean air, daylight, comfort and efficiency, with a green buildings budget to pay for the changes.
All children learn about the Earth’s carbon cycle, what fossil fuels are, and why their use is causing Earth’s temperature to rise. Every spring, they calculate their personal carbon footprints and work with their schools to become carbon neutral.
Children are no longer ferried to school – learning lazy habits – by their parents. Every student who lives within three kilometres or so of school either walks or cycles, using the Safe Routes to School program (www.saferoutestoschool.ca) or a walking school bus, while the rest travel by alternatively fuelled school buses.
By the time they leave school, every student has spent a week in the wilderness, learning the rhythms of nature, the wisdom of the aboriginal elders, and the resilience to live without email, instant messaging or cell phones.
They have also learned to appreciate Earth’s oceans and the fragility of life within its waters. We are the generation that is driving every commercial fish stock to extinction by 2050, and if our children do not learn otherwise, they will live in a world without fish.
They learn to appreciate water, how it cycles through the drains into the ocean and back through the sky as rain. Schools collect rainwater, and use it to flush their toilets and irrigate their gardens.
By the time they leave school, every child has also visited a landfill where they have seen the mountains of garbage. They’ve connected it to their own behaviour, and learned that there is no place called “away.”
All these lessons are integrated into the curriculum as solar calculations in math, carbon cycles in geography, bicycle efficiency in physics, and toxics reduction in chemistry.
How could we trigger this to happen? It could start with a contest in which one school challenges another to score more points for waste reduction, toxics reduction, trip reduction, energy efficiency, water efficiency, sustainable energy production, food production and healthy catering. Will one school step forward to issue the challenge? There are many skilled people within the environmental movement who could help you design the contest.
Now imagine a college announcing that starting in September 2008, every new student would be required to pass a test called Earth Literacy 101. This would require local schools to integrate eco-literacy into the curriculum, which would get the ball rolling. Reading and writing are fine, but if we lack Earth literacy, we’ll have no civilization in which to practise them.
Teachers, will you write to your principals and school boards, and to the ministries of education, asking for help to make this a reality? Together, we can build a movement for Earth literacy that will change the face of education.
Guy Dauncey is president of the BC Sustainable Energy Association (www.bcsea.org), and author of Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change. (www.earthfuture.com)
