by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability By Michael K. Stone and Zenobia Barlow Adapted from Michael K. Stone and Center for Ecoliteracy, Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2009), pp. 3–15, 122–127. Copyright © 2009 Center for Ecoliteracy. 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. E... posted on May 21 2016 (15,390 reads)

Ahmad is solving what she calls the "most unnecessary problem of our time." Photo: Facebook Komal Ahmad was a student at UC Berkeley when she experienced a life-changing moment. She had just returned from summer training for the U.S. Navy when she met a homeless veteran on the sidewalk. He hadn’t eaten in three days. Yet, across the street, thousands of pounds of uneaten food was being thrown away by her school. This was unacceptable to Ahmad, so she did something about it. “Those who have and are wasting and those who need and are starving — and they’re both living quite literally right across the street from each other,” she ... posted on May 22 2016 (20,323 reads)

I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind, there would have been no reason to write”. ~ Joan Didion I was at my parent’s dinner table. Before me was a worn journal of thin and discolored pages and a neat script that was gently fading away. It was my grand fathers journal and now belonged to my father. I never knew my grandfather. He had died in the months leading up to my birth, and had named me in his final days even though there was no proof that the baby to come would be a girl. In the expat life I grew up in, I never got to visit the home he had lived in, the places he had frequented and the people who had been a part of his life’s... posted on May 23 2016 (14,910 reads)

and Howard* had always gotten along well. They’d worked on several projects together and considered each other friends. So when Robert discovered that Howard held a strategy meeting and hadn’t included him, he felt betrayed. He immediately shot off a text to Howard: “I can’t believe you didn’t include me in that meeting!” Howard was in the middle of a client meeting when his phone pinged with a new text. Stealing a look at his phone, he felt a jumble of things: concern, anger, embarrassment, frustration, defensiveness. The text distracted Howard, and his meeting didn’t go as well as he had hoped. His anger grew as he thought about the fact ... posted on May 26 2016 (27,894 reads)

a time of great drought, a Taoist master was asked by members of a village if he could help bring rain to their dry fields. They confessed trying many other approaches before reaching out to him, but with no success. The master agreed to come and asked for a small hut with a garden that he could tend. For three days, he tended the garden, performing no special rituals or asking anything further from the villagers. On the fourth day, rain began to fall on the parched earth. When asked how he had achieved such a miracle, the master answered that he was not responsible for the rain. However, he explained, when he came to the village, he had sensed disharmony within himself. Each day, ... posted on Dec 29 2020 (44,137 reads)

those great scenes in Westerns where the good guys race after the bad guys at a roaring gallop across the plains with their pistols drawn? Well, they are big fakes. Any self-respecting cowboy knows that the ground is pocked with gopher holes, and pushing a horse any faster than a trot is sure to catch a hoof and break a leg. That’s what went through my mind this week as I landed in one of those infernal ankle-twisting gopher holes, breaking my ankle – a tiny break, but you’d think I’d know better by this time. So here I sit in exile, yet again, this time with the other foot elevated. Fortunately, I’m rather bemused by my situation and wonde... posted on Jun 6 2016 (11,962 reads)

is not wishful thinking. It's not a temperament we're born with. It is a stance toward life that we can choose . . . or not. The real question for me, though, is whether my hope is effective, whether it produces results or is just where I hide to ease my own pain. What I strive for I call honest hope. And it takes work, but it is good work. It is work I love. I began this book suggesting that it starts with getting our thinking straight. Since we create the world according to ideas we hold, we have to ask ourselves whether the ideas we inherit and absorb through our cultures serve us. We can only have honest, effective hope if the frame through which we see is an accurate rep... posted on Jun 3 2016 (12,811 reads)

have always had an interest in living a good life – perhaps a natural attraction towards positive psychology. An experience early on in life eventually taught me the value of seeing the self as far deeper than the finely curated fragments of body and mind that we spend a lifetime trying to conquer. It showed me, albeit exclusively, the faint and subtle yearnings of the soul that often went unheard in the noise and clamour of daily life. The Journey to Finding Meaning On an annual trip to my parent’s home in Pakistan, I decided to honor its call and spend my 2 weeks identifying a needy cause to which to contribute a portion of my time and finances. I did not have to look f... posted on Jun 5 2016 (14,050 reads)

August of 2015, Yusra Mardini and her sister, Sarah, fled Syria after their home was destroyed in the country’s civil war. The sisters traveled on land through Lebanon and Turkey, eventually boarding a boat with 18 other refugees. When that boat’s motor failed in the Aegean Sea,Mardini, her sister, and another woman jumped out and pushed the boat for three hours to the island of Lesbos. Mardini would later tell a press conference in Berlin that “it would be a real shame if I drowned in the sea.” Many refugees do drown attempting to reach safety in Europe—2,500 died this year alone—but that is not what Mardini meant. Mardini is a competit... posted on Jun 10 2016 (12,448 reads)

calls “the agents of the soul,” withdrawing the attention from what the senses bring you, from what thought brings you, thereby bringing yourself back into yourself. I felt a taste of that inner work with Descartes. It was very exciting to realize that I could doubt all this. It wasn’t disillusioning at all. It was fantastically interesting! I could separate myself—in a very healthy way, I thought—from being taken, from being swallowed by thoughts, emotional images and the external world. That had a great influence on me. There was no sense of alienation from nature or the life around me—there was only a new sense of a mental, personal capacity I di... posted on Jun 11 2016 (17,450 reads)

special child named Binny was the recipient of extraordinary love and care by software engineer Aditya Tiwari. On January 1, 2016, Aditya made history by becoming the youngest single adoptive parent in the country — he adopted Binny. This is the story of his long struggle against the system to bring Binny home. Being blessed with a child with disabilities is an experience that brings unique gifts and challenges. Not all parents are able to embrace both the joy and struggle of raising these special children. Binny was born in a rich family. But they abandoned him because of his special condition. On March 16, 2014, a child was born to a well-to-d... posted on Jun 14 2016 (17,438 reads)

is a great bird resting in the woodlands above the great river with marching bears behind her. A seasoned peace that can only belong to the prairie creates the path on the ridgetop where she can be found. Time—not blood—is the life force animating the bird and these bears. Some 1,500 years ago, these earth mounds were made by the hands of the people who lived here in the Upper Mississippi Valley, ancestors to today’s Ho-Chunk people, also known as the Winnebago. This is the “Driftless Area” where the glacial sheets of ice that stretched across the North American continent during the Pleistocene fell short of this holy site. A Ho-Chunk woman would see these... posted on Jun 17 2016 (8,594 reads)

you’re a parent or an educator, insisting that children apologize is a daily—sometimes hourly—occurrence. Apologizing and naming what we’re sorry for (“I’m sorry…that I called you stupid”) is a major part of our culture’s moral education. We even coach children to really “say it like you mean it” and to “think about” what they’ve done when they’ve harmed someone. However, we may be forgetting a crucial step in the process of atonement: forgiveness. New research suggests that we should consider focusing not just on the offender but also on the injured child’s response to a wrongdoi... posted on Jun 19 2016 (17,449 reads)

from "What Are People For" a collection of essays by Wendell Berry I The grace that is the health of creatures can only be held in common. In healing the scattered members come together. In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world. II The task of healing is to respect oneself as a creature, no more and no less. A creature is not a creator, and cannot be. There is only one Creation, and we are its members. To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see the Creation anew, to welcome one’s part in it anew. The most creative works are all strategies... posted on Jul 18 2016 (33,866 reads)

Moyer was a streetwise, working class white boy from row-house Philadelphia, who — in the turbulence of the 1960s — went to Chicago to work for an anti-racist housing campaign. He wound up joining Martin Luther King Jr.’s national staff as an organizer. I played tag football more than once with Moyer, catching his grin as he mercilessly overwhelmed his opponents through daring and smarts. He might have been the most joyfully aggressive Quaker I’ve known. By the time he died in 2002, Moyer had given significant leadership on multiple political issues, including the national anti-nuclear movement. In California, Moyer went to graduate school to study social m... posted on Jun 27 2016 (16,233 reads)

"vertical" system of justice is one that relies upon hierarchies and power. That is, judges sit at the top presiding over the lawyers, jurors, and all participants in court proceedings. The justice system uses rank, and the coercive power that goes with rank or status, to address conflicts. Power is the active element in the process. A decision is dictated from on high by the judge, and that decision is an order or judgment which parties must obey or face a penalty. Parties to a dispute have limited power and control over the process. The goal of adversarial law is to punish wrongdoers and teach them a lesson. Adversarial law and adjudication offer only a win-lose solut... posted on Jun 30 2016 (22,242 reads)

Lab. One of Computer Aid’s most recent goals is to place another Zubabox in theKakuma refugee camp in Kenya — one of the largest refugee camps in the world with a population of 150,000 people fleeing from 20 different African nations. The group is working with a organization run by refugees within the camp called SAVIC, to deliver IT training and internet connectivity for up to 1,800 young displaced people there. The Lab at night.  All images courtesy SIXZEROMEDIA/COMPUTER AID ... posted on Jul 3 2016 (16,703 reads)

afternoon in Dublin, I found myself running through the airport, convinced I was about to miss a flight for the first time in my life. My anxiety surged at the sight of a long security line, but luckily an airport official ushered me to the front. I didn’t care how the waiting passengers felt about my preferential treatment, and I don’t remember much about the people I encountered during that nerve-wracking afternoon. I was thinking only about my goal: to get home. In short, my empathy for others plummeted as my anxiety mounted—and a recent paper helps explain this phenomenon by linking anxiety to egocentrism. In doing so, it provides yet another rea... posted on Jul 12 2016 (22,479 reads)

Law of Mother Earth (“Ley de Derechos de La Madre Tierra”) holds the land as sacred and holds it as a living system with rights to be protected from exploitation. The law, which was passed by Bolivia’s Plurinational Legislative Assembly in November 2010 is part of a complete restructuring of the Bolivian legal system following a change of constitution in 2009. It has been heavily influenced by a resurgent indigenous Andean spiritual world view which places the environment and the earth deity known as the Pachamama at the centre of all life. Humans are considered equal to all other entities. In accordance with the philosophy of Pachama... posted on Jul 15 2016 (31,822 reads)

recent awe conference, Melanie DeMore led the audience in a group sing as part of the day’s activities. Judging from participant responses, it was clear that something magical happened: We all felt closer and more connected because of that experience of singing together. Why is singing such a powerful social glue? Most of us hear music from the moment we are born, often via lullabies, and through many of the most important occasions in our lives, from graduations to weddings to funerals. There is something about music that seems to bring us closer to each other and help us come together as a community. There’s little question t... posted on Jul 16 2016 (23,366 reads)