by Mike Seymour
What we have called the “environmental crisis” is the most significant challenge humanity as a whole has faced in its recorded history. How we understand and frame this crisis—and how we summon the political courage to change—will determine the extent to which we are able to continue existence on Earth in a way that is worth living.
The enormous significance of this issue demands that it come to the forefront of our thinking in all spheres (political, religious, commercial, and legal) and at all levels (individual, family, community, national, and global)—especially within education. How and why humans are undermining their ecological support—and what can be done about that—make a vital, complex, interdisciplinary area for inquiry at all levels of education. Not to educate with the earth and future generations in mind would be an unimaginable moral folly, much like saying we would rather continue to party on the Titanic’s foredeck while refusing to deal with the upcoming iceberg which is in full view.
First, we must understand that the crisis we are talking about is more appropriately understood as a cultural crisis and, specifically, a spiritual crisis. What is happening to the environment is a symptom of something fundamentally awry with the way humans think of themselves and their relationship to Earth—this place which is our home, but which we don’t think of as such because we see ourselves living in a world made of human imagination and labor. Thinking of environmental destruction as an environmental problem is another form of disassociative, nonsystemic thinking in which we define the symptom (like a child who runs away) as the problem—without considering the larger context in which we, ourselves, have a role.
So, we must first recover an integral way of thinking and the courage to accept the responsibility back in our own human lap. When we do this, we are less likely to retreat into simple technological, legal, and other instrumental actions which, while absolutely necessary, tend to get us off the hook from having to make those difficult, searching, inner changes which are the only basis for real transformation to a peaceful, just, and sustainable world.
Years of well-intended environmental education have sensitized us to the problems and the needs for environmental awareness and stewardship. But as we have employed education, science, advocacy, conservation, and laws to save the land, we have been distracted from more clearly seeing the root cultural issues involved. Thus, we have learned and done meaningful things in environmental education, but have not galvanized the broad public and political will for significant cultural change. As evidence, over 80 percent of people in industrialized countries claim to care and be very concerned about the environment, but most of those same people lead a lifestyle that would take, perhaps, six earth-type planets to sustain if the poorest humans lived similar lifestyles.
What we must do now is look at our deeply rooted perceptions, beliefs, values, institutions, and ways of living that have contributed to a separation from the earth community and our resulting destructive impact on life. We must challenge our assumptions about what has value and dethrone the human as supreme in the order of things, along with the notion that the human economy and its ethic of making and having more is both unquestionably good and inevitable.
Rethinking What Education is for
Understanding our role in nature differently will call for the most fundamental and radical transformations in the way we think of, and practice, education. This begins with our notions of ontology and epistemology, from which our assumptions about education and learning are drawn.
Prevailing ideas on the nature of being and the essential properties and relationships between things (ontology) must reveal the integral nature of reality not only as scientific fact, but also as the empirical mandate for an ethic of care. Only seeing the world as made of separate objects will never locate humans in a reality of mutual obligation with nature. We must have a system of knowledge that nurtures obligation to that which is known in revealing the interdependence between all things. Equally, with an integral view of life, we must counterbalance the myth of objectivism as path to the highest truth and reclaim the power of subjective, symbolic, and intuitive ways of knowing.
For eons, these participatory ways of knowing sustained indigenous peoples in a web of mutual obligation with their surroundings. These societies experienced animals and nature as kin and part of larger web of life to which they owed great debt. Today, we know the world without feeling a part of it—and that is inhuman. This disconnected way of knowing has led the most educated people to visit unimaginable atrocities upon fellow humans and other life. Without participatory ways of knowing and being, knowledge too easily falls prey to human arrogance, power, and rationalization unchecked by the moral restraint inherent in the experience and ethics of interdependence.
Moreover, we can no longer pursue knowledge and technology for their own sakes, as if the unending possibilities of human imagination deserve to be reified and not held accountable to larger considerations supporting the whole community of life. Not everything we can think of or invent should be made a reality. E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered) argued persuasively, for example, on behalf of earth- and human-friendly, intermediate technologies that a small farmer might use, as opposed to the massive technology that might disenfranchise sustainable living. We must grow out of our adolescent enchantment with innovation, growth, and progress, and mature into the wisdom of self-restraint.
In this vein, we must rethink what body of knowledge we canonize as worthy of study. This will call on keen insight into the studies and perspectives that do (or do not) contribute to the continuance of life, as opposed to perspectives that feed the tendency to exceed our human boundaries and to reinforce a system of philosophies, human ethics, and laws that are blindly human-centered, at the expense of the larger whole. For example, most history books that present an uncritical picture of human exploration and territorial conquest would be considered antithetical to a social and ecological justice commitment—immoral as well.
Losing our the Oneness with Nature
Beneath the cultural crisis lies a spiritual crisis that might be described as a loss of attunement with, and respect of, nature.
Indigenous cultures reveal how early human societies experienced themselves as part of the natural world, not as owners of it. At one time, humans realized they belong to nature—and not the other way around—as has been the case with our own Native American cultures. Streams, rocks, trees, and animals were felt to be alive with spirit in a world that was often fearsome and unpredictable, but not beyond human capacity to propitiate, communicate with, and hold sacred within a delicate partnership of care that kept everything going.
Cultural anthropologists, historians, and ecopsychologists may differ in their explanations of why humankind became psychically disconnected from its fragile kinship and communication with other animate and inanimate life. Perhaps it was the inevitable result of human evolution from medullary to cortical man, in which humans lost a participation mystique—which Levy-Bruhl defines as “embeddedness of human consciousness in nature”—through the process of becoming self-conscious. Genesis and other creation stories would certainly support this picture of a fall from unity with the advent of self-awareness.
On the other hand, for long periods of time, indigenous societies maintained their reciprocal, familial relationship with nature, a way of living and being that remained until the growth of agrarian cultures, cities, territoriality, and the conversion of the “forest” from a place where we once lived into something remote and the subject of our fearful or romantic imaginings (Roger Harrison).
With this recession of nature into human imagination and a loss of our relationship of necessity with nature, perhaps it was a root human fear that propelled humans to seek a once-and-for-all advantage over nature. To answer the anxious unpredictability of nature and to be forever secure in our human-made world would be a triumph of great proportions. Thus, the monster-slaying hero was born in the human psyche as the conqueror of natural forces (now depicted as evil) and as the ideal for a human-centered culture in which norms made by and for humans replace those derived in reference to nature.
Resolving human ambivalence within the precarious relationship with nature came at both great gain and cost. The Promethean energies of inventiveness (symbolized by fire, which Prometheus stole from Zeus and gave to humans) and technology were unleashed, which allowed humans to harness nature and master technology to levels as boundless as the human imagination. But, as we know from the story of Prometheus, the gift of fire to mankind brought with it Pandora’s curse. This was a way to counterbalance the arrogance and hubris of heroic culture, much in the same way that God’s wisdom in Eden, once stolen, required toil and suffering to bring Adam and Eve down to Earth, humble and “human” after tasting powers beyond their capacity to use wisely.
With the ascendancy of human creative fire and expanded dominion over earth also grew civilization’s shadow of suffering, despair, war, and chaos in the subjugation of all things (nature, women, the feminine, children, others not like us) that were of lower order in the heroic culture. Thus, we have the basis of the ecofeminist argument that the subjugation of the feminine and nature are of one whole cloth when seen in terms of the larger symbolic patterns in heroic, male-dominated societies. This has inevitably led to our modern, technoscientific civilization in which we are (literally) burning up with an excess of Promethean energy and being cut off from both feminine and earth wisdom. Like Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and fell into the ocean, our burning is once more calling forth the floodwaters.
But where is the ark?
The Reunification of Humans Within the Natural Order
The ark to bridge the troubled waters of our time will only come with a transformation to integral consciousness in which humans are reunited in heart and mind with nature. Therefore, questions we must ponder seriously include: How can we regain a felt communion with the natural world? How can this be done in a way that needless harm to any one part of nature is felt personally? How can we educate so that the fruitfulness of Earth elicits a sense of gratefulness and an ethic of responsibility to preserve the abundance of Earth for future generations? The emerging dialogue around this kind of inquiry is an evolutionary process that is as much about questions as it is answers.
In that spirit, I would like to propose several broad areas of inquiry that exemplify what would be at the heart of an ecologically sound form of education.
• A new myth and worldview which make meaning of life within the natural world, as opposed to transcending Earth;
• A reverence for life arising from a perception of the sacred “otherness” in all things.
• The essential role of nature in the reenchantment of life and the human capacity for aesthetic appreciation and beauty;
• Reinhabiting a richly storied, simpler life with less distraction, fewer “things,” and more meaning so that we can experience the reality of “less is best”;
• Breaking the myth of materialism, progress, and its latest incarnation—a culture and economy of globalization—and moving toward earth-friendly practices and technologies that enable a sustainable world;
• Social justice (covered previously); and
• Sense of place and ecological literacy.
A New Myth-An ecology of Heaven and Earth
We need a new worldview in which the spiritual and material are brought together—an ecology of heaven and Earth, so to speak.
In The Dream of Earth, Thomas Berry has written:
It is all a question of story, we are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not yet learned the new story. Our traditional story of the Universe sustained us for a long period of time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purpose and energized action. It consecrated suffering and integrated knowledge. We awoke in the morning and knew where we were. We could answer the questions of our children. We could identify crime, punish transgressors. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. It did not necessarily make people good, nor did it take away the pains and stupidities of life or make for unfailing warmth in human associations. It did provide a context in which life could function in a meaningful manner.
Prior to the scientific revolution, people in the West lived by the Christian view of the Great Chain of Being in which plants, animals, and man were understood as part of a great, interconnected hierarchy culminating in the ultimate perfection of God. This story made sense of man and nature within a larger picture, but gave way during the scientific revolution that required only one cosmological level, the physical, and detached human activity from its higher, moral purpose.
Today, a significant movement on several fronts seeks to rejoin material and spiritual outlooks in order, to forge a new ecologically sound belief system and ethic. One such effort is supported by Harvard and Bucknell Universities and is called The Forum on Religion and Ecology—an inter-religious, multicultural, interdisciplinary initiative engaging in scholarly dialogue on the environment. The Forum recognizes the role of religious traditions in fostering worldviews, moral frameworks, and narratives regarding the relationship between humans and the natural environment.
Parallel to this work is the new paradigm from twentieth century science that reveals an interconnected world similar to that portrayed in religions and wisdom traditions. A promising story to emerge in this vein is that of the universe itself, as rendered with depth by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry in The Universe Story.
The Universe Story revisits what we know about all of life, from the “big bang” through billions of years of evolution, but it does so in a way that enchants the heart and mind. Bringing together the viewpoints of poet, saint, and scientist, Berry and Swimme help us to understand that the becoming process, the genesis process, the evolutionary process, is spiritual/psychic as well as material/physical. The Universe Story helps us view these two aspects of life as inseparable, and to see that our living is drawn out of the universe itself, which is primary. In Swimme and Berry’s hands, what might otherwise be a purely scientific account of life becomes a cosmic drama charged with awe and mystery. Such rendering lies at the heart of great storytelling that elicits a depth of experience far beyond the literal narrative.
Their storytelling elicits a reverence for life.
A Reverence for Life
If I am a thinking being, I must regard life other than my own with equal reverence, for I shall know that it longs for fullness and development as deeply as I do myself. (Schweitzer 1987)
Ethics consist in my experiencing the compulsion to show to all will-to-live the same reverence as I do my own. A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives. (Schweitzer 1936)
Reverence is defined as a feeling of profound awe and respect, often love or veneration, which is precisely the magic elicited by Berry and Swimme’s mode of narrative in The Universe Story. It was the keen insight of Dr. Albert Schweitzer which fathomed that the world’s suffering and inhumanity could be reversed if only each person had a “reverence for life,” a feeling of respect so profound for other living beings that an intrinsic ethic of nonharm and joy in life would flourish.
Experiencing a reverence for life requires seeing and feeling beyond ordinary physical reality into its hidden mystery and beauty. It entails an experience of a sacred otherness in all life and a profound sense of moral obligation to give respect and care to that Other. Contemplative modes of observation, seeing the larger patterns in reality, and imaginative and intuitive perception open awe-inspiring worlds closed to the literal mind. Let me provide an example from my own experience.
Looking at my garden from the deck of our house, I noticed that a leaf from a tulip in a far corner was wavering intermittently. I became aware that every other plant or shrub in the immediate vicinity was absolutely still, suggesting an absence of air current. My curiosity was now peaked to the point that I looked at the tops of all the surrounding Douglas firs and Western red cedars and found that none were moving even the slightest bit. Upon returning to the still-moving leaf, a most profound and certain conviction emerged spontaneously in my mind: It’s waving at me! At that point, I broke into tears and felt a distinctly enhanced sense of affinity and communication with everything around me, including so-called inanimate things such as rocks, mountains, dirt, water, and so forth.
The profound effect this perception had on me is far more significant than any question about whether or not the leaf was actually waving at me. The former absolutely did happen; the latter is hard to explain with traditional science. However, we do know from Dorothy Mcclean’s work with plants and vegetables in the Findhorn community in Scotland (and much earlier work with measuring plant reactions to human behavior via electronic sensing devices)—that all matter does have some capacity to sense other presences. This is a knowledge humans once had, but which has been lost in the modern world.
The Reenchantment of Life
The eyes of wisdom and the heart of compassion experience nature as a source of joy and numinous revelation. This brings us into the whole dimension of imaginal and aesthetic ways knowing. Here, we enter into an enchanted world and leave behind the disconnected, ordinary world of everyday, literal reality. The difference lies in our way of seeing and capacity for openness and being moved.
In Care of the Soul, author Thomas Moore, writes (The Reenchantment of Everyday Life) of nature as the quintessential opening to spirit and a sense of connectedness. The beauty and majesty of mountains, rivers, flowers, the wondrous complexity of living systems, the incredible intricacy of cell structures, the fascination of quantum physics can—when fully apprehended—bring a sense of awe, spirit, and the largeness in life.
“Nature is not only a source of spirit: It also has soul. Spiritually, nature directs our attention toward eternity, but at the same time, it contains us and creates an intimacy with our own personal lives that nurtures the soul. The individuality of a tree or rock or pool of water is another sign of nature’s soul. These intriguing natural beings not only point toward infinity; more intimately, they also befriend us. It’s easy to love groves of trees or mountain ridges, to feel related to them as though by blood, and to be secure in their familial protection” (Moore, 5).
The awe and beauty in nature speaks to us, for we are constituted of the same stuff, the same soul. We can speak of an ecology of mind wherein the human soul resonates with the world soul from which we came. Ecopsychologist Theodore Roszak writes: “[E]copsychology proceeds from the assumption that at its deepest level the psyche remains sympathetically bonded to the Earth that mothered us into existence.(1995, 5) . . . the psyche is rooted inside a greater intelligence known as the anima mundi, the psyche of Earth herself that has been nurturing life in the cosmos for billions of years through its drama of complexification.”(1995, 16).
Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson parallels these thoughts with the notion of biophilia, an inherent human love of life and the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. This is likewise echoed in Howard Gardner’s eighth intelligence—the naturalist intelligence. Naturalist intelligence designates the human ability to discriminate among living things (plants, animals) as well as sensitivity to other features of the natural world (clouds, rock configurations).
Thus, we have been deeply tuned into the matrix of nature from which we grew. Nature is an inspiration for language formation, our source of mathematical sense, and our capacity to imagine and think. Nature casts her spell on us all from the youngest age. We are wise to nurture our children’s inherent curiosity and love of nature and to regard Earth as first among our teachers in teaching us a reverence for all of life.
Simplicity: Living in a Storied World
I have taken this route to the subject of simple living because a simpler, sustainable world is possible only with the kinds of inner mental, emotional, and spiritual transformations I have just described. The rich inner life arises in a world whose story makes sense at a personal level and whose daily experience is full of enchantment. When we are full of authentic life, the things of a materialistic, man-made culture seem paltry by comparison and quickly lose their power over us.
A life of fullness and meaning forms the heart of what is now known as the voluntary simplicity movement. Frugality, human-scale living, a view of work as service to others, and a strong communal ethic have always existed in American life. But such simple, ethical living has been declining steadily for centuries—at no time more disturbingly and precipitously than in the present era of our megahomes, flashy cars, and shallow, advertising-saturated culture.
But people are fighting back. All over the United States and in other parts of the world, people are eliminating debt, leaving stressful jobs, getting rid of excess things, and moving into more modest (sometimes communal) housing in efforts to become grounded in something real and alive. This is not new. Thoreau inspired many in the current environmental and simplicity movements when he wrote about his life at Walden Pond:
I went to the woods 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. . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner. (1971, 91)
We now have a broad, grassroots movement through such organizations as the Simple Living Network and The New Roadmap Foundation, whose books, videos, workshops, and informal discussion groups are empowering young and old to live simply, not just for ourselves but also as a commitment to social justice—realizing Ghandi’s admonition to “live simply that others may simply live.”
When we are freed of being possessed by that which we possess, a whole new relationship with things, man-made and natural, is possible. We can now contemplate and cultivate the significance of the things about us carefully and deliberately. We can begin to live in a storied world in which the boulder in the yard, the beat-up dresser we restored, our mother’s favorite necklace, smooth stones collected from some solitary beach, and pictures of people we admire now inhabit our consciousness and homes as loved familiars. We now become makers of life’s enchantments and not just recipients of nature’s enchantments—assuming that we have learned well nature’s lesson in how to perceive and grow beauty.
We see this lesson lived most fully in indigenous cultures, where everything people have resonates with its own unique meaning and story. Martin Prechtl, Native American and former Mayan shaman, emphasized how making something as simple as a knife caused a great debt to the “holy” from which all things come, and, therefore, required equally great ceremonies, thanksgiving, and other love offerings to fill the void left by what had been taken. The making of every gourd, bowl, knife, or piece of rope involved a vast love relationship with the forces supporting the world of man and nature, and bestowed each thing its own numinous story.
What do we know of the things we own in modern society? Very little. For the most part, our homes and lives are littered with dead things with little life and story. They are things that come from far away, made by people we don’t know and who were disconnected from their handiwork. We live in a “wasteland” which has been defacing our souls long before T. S. Eliot made this word famous. And it was Eliot’s particular genius to see how the trashing of inner life and outer landscape are of one whole cloth.
Care for things and care for nature is also care for self, and vice verse. Let’s begin with the dictum “less is best” and live the storied, simple life of depth in our homes and schools! Let’s see our obsession with curriculum coverage as part of our broader addiction to quantity and not quality. Let’s slow down and go deep in our curriculum, make and collect things with our kids that are memorable and worthy of being cherished. Let’s learn to see the beauty in little things that the world may disregard; for these are echoes of the vulnerable little places of essence within ourselves.
Deconstructing the Myth of Progress: Toward a Just and Sustainable World
Along with inner transformation to a more meaningful life, moving into a more just and sustainable world requires that we deconstruct the unquestioned acceptance of social progress through our current market-based, economic model. The United States and the industrialized world has exported much good in the ideals of democracy, rights for women and children, and public education as pathways toward a more humane world. Parading behind these humanitarian ideals, however, greed and power have corrupted our corporate-dominated economic systems and have resulted in economic and social injustices around the world. To the least privileged in developing nations, globalization is simply another face of rampant colonialism.
Worldwide antiglobalization protests and a burgeoning literature on the downside of corporate hegemony (When Corporations Rule the World, David Korten) have recently made it fashionable—even among the world’s financial elites—to critique the economic policies exacted on developing nations by the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank, GATT, now the World Trade Organization). There is a good reason why millions of people have taken to the streets in Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, the Philippines, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the United States, Venezuela, and many other nations of the world. The current economically based model of social improvement is not working, even according to its own criteria. Globalization, its corporate practices and policies, have led to a growing disparity between the rich and poor, the dislocation of indigenous, sustainable livelihoods, flight of the dispossessed to overcrowded cities, corporate piracy of natural resources through patenting native seed and plant technologies, environmental deterioration—a list of ills longer than I can recite here.
With the spread of social, economic, and environmental injustices, the choices are becoming clearer each day that our world is either about fear, greed, and money or it is about humanity—about what brings death or what gives life. If we continue to educate for economic being, that is, for jobs (as we do in schools today), then we side with the forces of oppression that rob us of our own lives as they spread havoc among the community of life around the world. If we do no more than prepare kids to participate uncritically in a system that can strip them of their dignity, then we are handmaidens of injustice.
Teaching for sustainability, then, must take on a top priority at all levels of education. Sustainability involves everything covered in this book: our calling and meaning in life; our sense of community, locally and globally; sensitivity to issues of social justice; knowledge of and love for nature; and commitment to advocacy as well as action to reverse natural and social imbalances. Sustainability is about ourselves, our communities, and the world. It is about souls, soils, and spirit — indivisible locally and globally.
The Earth Charter makes an excellent foundation in terms of ethics, principles, and scope to frame our understanding of a sustainable future for the earth family. The Earth Charter[1] is perhaps the most inclusive, widely consulted, global proclamation of human, economic, and ecological rights ever developed in modern history. It came out of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, and now serves around the world as a guide to communities, local governments, businesses, and educators who are part of a broad, global movement toward a just, peaceful, and sustainable world.
Along with this most important framework, education can engage young people in the study of earth-friendly, sustainable practices and technologies that are lighting the way toward a brighter future. But first, it is important to give young people realistic cause for hope in order to counter the apathy and resignation that are so pervasive today and which contribute to the continuation of destructive policies. Second, kids deserve to know about the new career opportunities that are arising in response to the current crisis. Many fields are showing progressive innovations—renewable energy (wind, solar, ocean), sustainable agriculture, permaculture and ecological design, ecological and local economics, microcredit and other socially responsible lending, green business development (now talking about the triple bottom line as money, people, and environment)—to name but a few. Possible adaptable curriculums range from organic gardens for young children to hydrogen-powered cars for college-age students.
If we really want to leave no child behind, we need to prepare them for a sustainable future worth living.
Sense of Place and Nature Literacy
Care for our neighborhoods and local landscapes springs from rootedness and local knowledge. Too few people, young or old, really know enough about the social and natural history of where they live to ground them in a real sense of place. This problem is, perhaps, most pronounced in urban settings, but it is also evident in rural settings, and especially apparent in the young who want to get out of town and into the big city.
Modern culture is more about getting someplace else than about being where we are. This has created a rootless element at all economic levels, from migrant labor to the deracinated elite of the multinational corporation who are homeless, don’t belong any place, and, therefore, have not entered into a relationship of mutual obligation that place calls forth in us. Without that obligation, what is there to care enough about that one would want to fight for it?
Rootless people may sigh when the new Wal-mart paves over a once beloved meadow, but they are not likely to walk in protest, write letters to the editor, or give up something so that they can contribute money to the cause. Putting caring to action arises out of a relationship to place, its people, buildings, and natural landscapes.
I currently direct the Heritage Institute, a continuing education program for K-12 teachers in the Northwest that has offered place-based field studies on the natural and social history of our bioregion since the mid-1970s. Teachers love our classes not just because they are fun, but because they nurture a sense of connection with their local neighborhoods and landscapes that make them come alive. It is this sense of aliveness and meaning that draws teachers to our program—as well as the fact that what they learn is useful in their own classrooms and intriguing to their students.
In recovering a sense of place, we discover an authentic basis for learning. We learn more deeply when we care about something enough to sacrifice, cry, or get angry when what we love is threatened in any way. In contrast, learning about “the environment” in an abstract way, wherein we distance ourselves intellectually from what is learned, creates an emotional disconnection and superficial interest.
I want the kind of education in which the trees, rocks, rivers, historic areas, and words of our ancestors speak to our young people—who, in this listening, will be transformed.
References
Berry, Thomas. 1990. The Dream of Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club.
Harrison, Roger Pogue. 1993. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Korten, David C. 2001. When Corporations Ruled the World. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Moore, Thomas. 1997. The Reenchantment of Everyday Life. Boston: G.K.Hall.
Roszak, Theodore. 1995. “Where Psyche Meets Gaia.” Pp. 1-17. In Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. By Mary E. Gomes, Allen D. Kanner, Theodore Roszak. New York: Sierra Club Books.
Schumacher, E.F. 1989. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Vancouver: Hartley and Marks.
Schweitzer, Albert. 1936. “Ethics for a Reverence for Life.” Christendom (Winter): 42.
Schweitzer, Albert. 1987. Philosophy of Civilization: Part I: the Decay and Restoration of Civilization. New York: Promethean Books.
Brian Swimme, Thomas Berry. 1994. The Universe Story. New York: Harper Collins.
Thoreau, David H. 1971. Walden. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[1]. For more on The Earth Charter, visit their website at www.earthcharter.org.