Green Tsunami Rising: Environmental Education’s Third Wave
by Mike Weilbacher W
E INHABIT A CURIOUS TIME, a time of great crisis and yet extraordinary opportunity, a time of ecological yin and yang.
The yin you know all too well: the climate is changing,
species are vanishing at record rates, glaciers melting, sea levels rising, rainforests burning, coral reefs bleaching and dying, deserts spreading, population rising. Clearly, the world is approaching a day of environmental reckoning. And yet if you place your finger on the pulse of popular
culture, the flip side of the environmental coin is utterly palpable. The word green is suddenly everywhere: green roofs on green buildings, green products on websites, U.S. presidential candidates debating “green collar jobs,” a new phrase that entered the lexicon only this year. Madonna graces Vanity Fair’s annual “Green Issue”, while crooning with Justin Timberlake “only got four minutes to save the world”. Meanwhile, Al Gore, fresh off his Nobel Prize, has launched a $300 million “We can do it” ad campaign about climate change. Science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells wrote in 1920:
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” Most environmental educators
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tend to assume that catastrophe is coming; but if we pay close attention, we will see numerous streams of activity that are quietly and quickly converging into a tsunami of unparalleled environmental activity. Hold on tight, keep your head up: we are about to enter a golden age of environmental education. Which raises two critical questions: Will we be ready?
And will we be able to make changes fast enough to save ourselves and the world that we know and love?
The first two waves
Environmental education is at a crossroads — on the thresh- old of either a new era or oblivion. But then environmental education has always been at a crossroads, has never really grabbed its place in either the educational or the cultural firmament. Its roots stretch back into the nature study move- ment of Victorian times (a movement paralleled by the birth of the Sierra Club and Theodore Roosevelt’s startlingly environmental presidency), then into mid-century’s conser- vation education, with outdoor education weaving in and out of the story. But the beast we now call environmental education really began as a response to a wave of environ- mental concerns that captured public and media attention in a magical decade extending from the mid-Sixties through the mid-Seventies.
GREEN TEACHER 83
Illustrations: Tom Goldsmith
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