Many individuals such as Julia Butterfly Hill performed radical acts to call attention to our need to connect with nature. In Hill’s case she climbed a 1500-year-old Californian redwood tree to make a point and ended up staying in the tree for 738 days. Her vigil ended with an agreement to leave a 200 foot buffer of trees in the logging operation and a US$50,000 donation to Humboldt State University to research sustainable forestry.
Religion remains an essential institution in shaping WorldViews, and many religious people work within the church to connect church ideology with environmental problem-solving and citizen action. Examples include Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies creating in 2006 the Forum on Religion and Ecology; the United Church of Christ commissioning a study in 1987 on environmental justice in the US; the Earth Ministry hosting a web page featuring creation care sermons; and Warren Wilson College holding an ‘eco-sermon challenge’ in 2008 to highlight the role of the church in the environmental movement.
Humans have the capacity for moral thinking and some people do not follow the herd, as exemplified by postconventional (Rest et al., 1999) thinkers and doers such as Mother Teresa and the four students from the all-black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, Clarence Henderson, Frank McCain, Josepha McNeil, and Billy Smith, who sat at the all-white Woolworth lunch counter (Woolworth changed its segregation policy to serve everyone at the counter after 6 months and a one-third drop in total overall sales), beginning a lunch counter movement that lasted years. The notion of independent moral thinking and therefore behavior is supported by neural research demonstrating that there is a great deal of diversity in how individual brains are wired and supporting the concept of multiple intelligences (Medina, 2008). Interfacing with philosophy, Hume (1739) cautioned people not to confuse ought with what we see as is. Just because warfare has been part of humanity for the past 7000 years or so does not mean that it ought to be part of the human experience or that it is natural or inevitable. It means that humans have to use the strength in their frontal cortex and executive functions to consciously make other choices of behavior that lead to a sustainable paradigm. Rooted in the circuitry of the brain is the ability to care for the well-being of self, offspring, mates, kin, and kith (Medina, 2008). In fact, recent research flies in the face of the flight or fight stress response in humans being the primary option.
As we moved from being hunter–gatherers to farmers, to city-dwellers, our relationship with the natural world changed. However, we need to reconsider what type of relationship with the natural environment would be beneficial to human health, development, and well-being. From the past we see the psychological benefits of kinship with nature and connection with our ancestral heritage. Because humans have denied this close relationship with nature, we have alienation and anger with the accompanying psychosomatic illness and aggression.
Korten (2006) says we have been living in the mechanical universe cosmological story that some people term the ‘Empire story’; in this story people are hardwired for greed, competition, and violence. He says we need a different story; such a story seems to be emerging and it is supported by recent scientific findings, the ageless teachings of the great religious prophets and wisdom traditions, as well as our daily experiences. It is that human beings are born to connect, care, learn, and serve (Korten, 2006). Research has shown that since the mid-20th century, there has begun to be a cultural shift embodied by both changes in individual values and behaviors, and the emergence of social movements that focus on the creation of a progressive and sustainable human culture. Yearning for Balance, a 2004 study by The Harwood Group, found many possible postconventional moral thinkers not following the crowd. They found that ‘people from all walks of life share similar concerns about a culture of materialism and excess, and the consequences for future generations’. Many expressed excitement when learning that others shared their concerns about misplaced values, children, and the environment and their longing for a more balanced life (Harwood Group, 2004). Supporting research confirms that high material wealth does not correlate with happiness (Speth, 2009) and that economic growth no longer contributes to the happiness of most people (McKibben, 2009). Validating the idea of cultural change, a study of people in the US and several European nations between 1970 and 2001 found a pronounced shift from materialist to postmaterialist values (Inglehart et al., 2004). Additional studies reveal that 35% of Americans are ‘cultural creatives’, people who have a made a comprehensive shift in their WorldView, values, and way of life to emphasize relationships, communities, spirituality, and ecological sustainability (Ray, 2008). This notion of the ability to choose a course of action, and research about current choices gives great hope for new stories and WorldViews.
To create a new WorldView in which both nature and people are valued and sustained and our profound interdependence is recognized, we need to create sustainable education that extends beyond formal schooling toward ‘a vision of continuous re-creation or coevolution where both education and society are engaged in a relationship of mutual transformation’ (Sterling, 2001). Through community building and education we need to connect with our ancestral heritages to awaken and value our indigenous consciousness and our multiple intelligences, including naturalistic intelligence. Buddhist philosopher, environmental activist, and systems theorist Joanna Macy (2006) has an optimistic view of humans’ ability to reconnect with the values-of-belonging. According to Macy, on one hand we face ‘the great unraveling’, in which our environment, social structures, and species are collapsing under the weight of current stresses, and on the other is ‘the great turning’, where humankind will learn how to reconnect strongly with nature because we can—and must—live in harmony with all life. While the unraveling is expressed through destabilization and degeneration, the turning is made visible by the largest social and ecological justice movement the planet has ever known (Hawken, 2007), in which numerous small, medium, and large organizations address various dimensions of human activity, revealing ever more clearly the interrelationship between diverse areas of concern (Marques, 2011).
Natural systems are providing a rich source of ideas and wisdom for how we can approach the challenge of creating schools that have the capacity to successfully transition to a new living systems-based paradigm. Natural systems and processes work everywhere, no matter the culture, group, or person, because they are basic dynamics shared by all living beings (Wheatley, 2005). The underpinning philosophy and approach of the ecological paradigm is whole systems thinking in which the dominant analytic, linear, and reductionist forms of thinking are replaced by holistic thinking that reference natural systems to be understandable, accessible, and practicable. Supporting Macy and Hawken, Wheatley and Frieze (2007) assert that the way in which all large-scale change happens in the natural world is the process of separate, local efforts connecting and strengthening their interactions and interdependencies, which they refer to as ‘emergence’. In our effort to transition to the new, whole systems thinking-based ecological paradigm for both our society and our education system, this natural concept of change through emergence is motivating.
As Duane Elgin, founder of the Great Transition Stories project, emphasizes, ‘it is vital that the human community come together and consciously co-create visions and stories of a sustainable and thriving relationship with the earth and one another’. The ‘great transition’ is a vision of how humanity could turn the planetary phase of civilization into an opportunity to create a global society that reflects egalitarian social and ecological values, affirms diversity, and defeats poverty, war, and environmental destruction (Raskin et al., 2002). The defining feature of the great transition is the ascendancy of a new suite of values—human solidarity, quality of life, respect for nature, and interconnectedness.
Sterling (2001) argues that ‘the fundamental tension in our current age is between the mechanistic and organicist way of viewing the world’. In harmony with the hope of a great transition, Kenny (2001, in Eckersley, 2004) posits that we are on the threshold of a fifth cosmology: the creative universe in which the universe is understood to be a self-organizing and creative process in which ‘the human species is given the opportunity to take full control of our future’. Duane Elgin (2009) states that such a cosmology must understand the universe to be fundamentally alive in order to radically transform how humanity relates to
