Aristotelis S. Gkiolmas - Towards Critical Environmental Education: Current and Future Perspectives

Will We Be Still Here to Share the Land?

During a May Day trip into the Canadian Rockies, my daughter Meghann texted me that she was on the lookout for wild animals. Living near the mountains, we often see critters make their way from the hills, mountain goats, white tail deer, and on occasion a mooseindeed, deer are murderous predators in Albertathe smashers and grabbers of gardens, the trouncers of landscape. Her search did not seem significant to me until she noted that the park rangers reported a sighting of a white bear. The woman who spotted the bear remarked, For us, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Which is probably the only reason we decided to slow down and take a little bit of video of itWe took the opportunity to sort of educate him [her son] on, you know, bears and hibernation and berries and them keeping safe it was great to talk about our environment and where we live and how we relate to them. And what better way to explain to him what it means to live with wildlife than to be able to see it, the mom was talking about environmental education and the unique opportunity to share the white bear (Gibson, 2020). While a sweet and encouraging story, the underlying theme is that we do not have acceptable environmental education and we do not have the words, the background, the examples, nor the scholastic resources to create an environmentally savvy populace.

The uniqueness of this nature scene unravels into the everyday and expands onto a global mural when we contextualize why the family was able to see wildlife in the wild. May 1, 2020, was somewhere close to day 61 of the coronavirus pandemic, and the urban wild was in its infancy (The Guardian, 2020). The Guardians lead article covered mountain goats marching single file in Llandudno, Wales; joggers carefully avoiding possibly rabid coyotes during the day in Hayarkon Park in Tel Aviv, Israel; others passing jackals howling on the same trail that evening; a sea lion wailing in front of a closed store in Mar del Plata Harbor in Buenos Aires; and packs of sleek, gray langurs dancing in the middle of a highway in Ahmedabad, Indiacoincidence? Not at all

In our little local world, we have been searching the neighborhood for our enormous jack rabbits. These are not Easter bunnies; these are dog-sized beastschameleons who by winter are pure white and by spring molt into brown. In normal life, I walk outdoors and am greeted by seven or eight of these feral lagomorphs, remembering the 1970s sci-fi film,