Smart By Nature: Schooling for Sustainability

What can educators do to foster real intelligence?...We can attempt to teach the things that one might imagine the Earth would teach us: silence, humility, holiness, connectedness, courtesy, beauty, celebration, giving, restoration, obligation, and wildness.
—David W. Orr

There is a bold new movement underway in school systems across North America and around the world. Educators, parents, and students are remaking K–12 education to prepare students for the environmental challenges of the coming decades. They are discovering that guidance for living abundantly on a finite planet lies, literally, under their feet and all around them—in living soil, food webs and water cycles, energy from the sun, and everywhere that nature reveals her ways. Smart by Nature schooling draws on 3.8 billion years of natural research and development to find solutions to problems of sustainable living, make teaching and learning more meaningful, and create a more hopeful future for people and communities.

School gardens bloom in wintry climates and on former asphalt lots. Students learn good nutrition while eating healthy lunches of farm-fresh food. At independent schools in New Jersey, public schools in California, and charter schools in Wisconsin, education comes alive as children discover the wonders of nature while restoring rural landscapes, protecting endangered species, and creating city habitats. Classroom buildings in schools on the South Side of Chicago, in central Arkansas, and in suburban Oregon become living laboratories for energy conservation and resource stewardship.

Schools from Washington to Florida have transformed into model communities. Utilities, governments, and educators have become partners in designing energy-efficient, safe, and healthy schools that promote the welfare of students and school staff while teaching wise resource use and care of the Earth. In small towns and large cities, students practice the arts of citizenship while improving the lives of their neighbors.

This movement responds to the realization that the young people in school today will inherit a host of pressing—and escalating—environmental challenges: threats of climate change; loss of biodiversity; the end of cheap energy; depletion of resources; environmental degradation; gross inequities in standards of living; obesity, diabetes, asthma, and other environmentally linked illness. This generation will require leaders and citizens who can think ecologically, understand the interconnectedness of human and natural systems, and have the will, ability, and courage to act.

The movement goes by many names: green schools, eco-schools, high-performance schools. We call it schooling for sustainability to underline its kinship with other global movements reshaping the relationships between human societies and the natural world. At the same time, we acknowledge that “sustainability” is problematic to some people.

“The word ‘sustainability’ has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness,” wrote Michael Pollan in late 2007. “Everybody, it seems, is for it—whatever ‘it’ means.”2 Paradoxically, many people remain unaware of the concept, while others have already concluded that it is on its way to joining “natural” and “ecological” as words that can simultaneously mean anything and nothing. “If a man characterized his relationship with his wife as sustainable,” wrote architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart, “you might well pity them both.”3 After reviewing the alternatives, though, writer and consultant Alan AtKisson concluded, “As a name for the future of our dreams, sustainability may be ‘the worst word, except for all the others.’”

To stay useful, however, sustainability must mean more than merely surviving or trying to keep a degraded world from getting worse. Otherwise, why bother? Invoking nature’s capacity for sustaining life, as physicist and system theorist Fritjof Capra suggests, is critical. A sustainable community worth imagining is alive, in the most exuberant sense of that word—fresh, vital, evolving, diverse, and dynamic. It cares about the quality as well as the continuation of life. It is flexible and adaptive. It draws energy from its environment, celebrates organic wholeness, and appreciates that life has more to reveal than human cleverness has yet discovered. It teaches its children to pay attention to the world around them, to respect what they cannot control, and to embrace the creativity with which life sustains itself.