academic cycle of cramming for tests and forgetting a great percentage of the material immediately afterward becomes the cycle of their academic life. It’s the grade that’s important, not what they actually learn. Therefore many students refine their talent for bullshit: perfecting the discussion of books they’ve never read, cranking out five hundred words about anything or nothing, writing a response paper ten minutes before class, and pounding out a ten-page expository essay (with footnotes) in a day. “Good students” learn what the professor wants, which buzzwords she likes, and how to give her both in bulk.
Of course, some students learn more substantial stuff in academia. These students learn to love ideas and the art of a well-crafted sentence. They learn to work harder than they ever imagined, and to play harder, too. Some students learn several of life’s important questions, and one or two of the answers. They learn a little more about the self beneath the surface, and what they’re good at and good for.
Most students take a foreign language, but many discover that slang is taken more seriously by their peers. So students learn how to call out a tool, troll, nerd, slush, or sorostitute, and they know synonyms for “liquid courage” and “beer goggles.” A lot of college slang involves natural endowments, natural functions, and the call of nature, but almost none of it enhances students’ love or understanding of the natural world.
Students learn college culture (mostly from other students—certainly not professors) and pass the patterns and practices of everyday life on campus from one graduating class to the next. But as they find a place in campus culture, they also define their place in the world, both socially and ecologically.
College is a place where students could think twice about American culture and ecosystems, but most students still don’t, despite the fact that people are causing climate change—transforming the good Earth into a different planet. We love to joke about global warming. Warming sounds like something familiar, and, especially in the North, it sounds good. But we’re facing what Hunter Lovins calls—more accurately—“global weirding.” Global weirding is radically different from anything human beings have ever experienced. Earth is not just getting warmer, it’s warming and cooling, getting wetter and drier, becoming stormier and increasingly unstable. To make matters worse, “weirding” is a feedback loop, responding in ways that reinforce these problematic tendencies. As ice melts, more heat is absorbed into oceans. As tundra melts, more methane leaks into the atmosphere, accelerating the greenhouse effect. At current rates of change, in the year 2100 New York will have as many 100-degree days as Miami does now, and coastal colleges and universities maybe underwater in more than just a financial sense.
Students learn a lot in college, but most students aren’t learning what they need to create a restorative society, a hospitable earth, and a future with college campuses securely above water. Colleges now need to provide the knowledge and practices humans need for the future, to show in word and deed how a sustainable society might work. A college that wants to remain relevant to its students will teach them how to be leaders in the ecological transition of the twenty-first century. If it works right, a college education will teach students to develop what David Orr calls “designing minds,” minds that are prepared to design a good society in harmony with nature. Orr suggests that higher education should be designed “1. to equip young people with a basic understanding of systems and to develop habits of mind that seek out ‘patterns that connect’ human and natural systems; 2. to teach young people the analytical skills necessary for thinking accurately about cause and effect; 3. to give students the practical competence necessary to solve local problems; and 4. to teach young people the habit of rolling up their sleeves and getting down to work.” Institutions of higher education have always prepared students to succeed in the so-called real world. Our colleges and universities now need to teach students how to live responsibly on the planet as well.
Today’s colleges aren’t yet ready for this challenge, but students can pressure them to live up to the promise of mission statements that claim to prepare people for the future. In the 1960s, Paul Goodman challenged students: “Think about the kind of world you want to live and work in. What do you need to know to help build that world? Demand that your teachers teach you that.” Much of the time, sadly, this advice is ignored. Most of us know, deep down, that we need an ecological revolution to build a new world that is sustainable—ecologically, economically, socially, and personally. Too often, however, students take courses to complete requirements instead of requiring that their courses help to build this better world. They hardly ever demand enough from their professors or their education. That’s what this book is for. Uncovering the intellectual and emotional patterns that connect us to the degradation of nature, we’ll discover new patterns of thinking and acting to create the world we want to live and work in.1
Introduction: A Reader’s Guide
I went to (college) because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (amended)
Think about the kind of world you want to live and work in.
What do you need to know to help build that world? Demand
that your teachers teach you that.
Paul Goodman, “The Duty of Professionals”
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.
Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
There are all sorts of books advising students how to read, but not a lot on how to engage an author in a constructive dialogue. Colleges have courses in creative writing, but not in creative reading, which is the art of reading in conversation. At its best, a book is one voice in an ongoing conversation, contributing corrections and corroborations, new ideas and insights, and waiting for a response. Because any conversation works best when the questions and conceptual frameworks are fully understood, I offer them here in the clearest form possible:
The Questions
• What are the key components of American college culture?
• Why do we act the way we do?
• What do we really value and why?
• Why do we act in ways that contradict our values?
• Why do we consume so much?
• Why isn’t our common sense sensible anymore?
• How much of our lives is intentional, and how much merely habitual?
• Why is it so hard to talk about things that really matter to us?
• What are the roots of hope and change?
The Frameworks
1) The Culture of Nature
Because this book plays at the intersection of American studies and environmental studies, a basic assumption is that we always experience nature through cultural frames, that the American eye
