Orr - Earth in mind: on education, environment, and the human prospect

H OW ARE minds to be made safe for a planet with a biosphere? One answer is to load students down with more facts and data having to do with the decline of one thing or another. As teachers, educators, and concerned citizens we are obliged to tell the truth as accurately as we see it, which means partially through a glass darkly. But part of the truth cannot be told; it must be felt. It is within us. It would be odd indeed if several million years of evolution had not equipped us for this moment of truth. And the actuality is that, try as we may, we have not and cannot escape the fact that we are, in Stan Rowes (1993) words, highly evolved deep air mammals. We are of the earth; our flesh is grass. We live in the cycle of birth and death, growth and decay. Our bodies respond to daily rhythms of light and darkness, to the tug of the moon, and to the change of seasons. The salt content of our blood, our genetic similarity to other life forms, and our behavior at every turn give us away. We are shot through with wildness. Call it biophilia (Wilson, 1984) or the ecological unconscious (Roszak, 1992), the earth is inscribed in us, we are of the earth. We have an affinity for nature. What do we do about that simple but overwhelming fact?

The short answer is to face it, but we are still caught up in denial. The civilization we have built causes us to spend 95% of our lives indoors, isolated from nature. Being born and raised, as Michael Cohen (1993) stated, bewildered (wilderness-severed) assaults our thinking and our inner nature. We live stress-filled lives full of traffic jams, busyness, noise, artificiality, and substitutes for the real thing. Our culture is riddled with stress and stress-related pathologies: addictions, broken marriages, violence, and greed. More than 70% of our medical problems, costing $250 billion, are believed to be stress related (Cohen, 1993). We are estranged from our sources. We have, in Herman Dalys words, an infinite itch, but we do not know where to scratch.

Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think, is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means to draw out. What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies. Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie largely dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore, the task of education, as Dave Foreman stated, is to help us open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated planet (Roszak, 1993). The good news is that our own nature will help us in this process, if we let it.

How will this awakening occur? Scott Momaday (1993) put it this way:

Once in his life a man ... ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listen to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk. (p. 83)