Earth Literate

EARTHKEEPING NEWS
A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY

Volume Five, Number Five
May/June 1996

'EARTH LITERATE LIVING' NEEDS NEW EDUCATION

Earth Literacy is an environmental movement in which life on earth is seen to be at a turning point. The turning point is a crisis in our perception of reality. To respond to that crisis, we are beginning to rethink the way we live our workaday lives. The shift to earth literate living requires a radical change in perception — as radical as the change our ancestors made from seeing themselves as part of a flat, earth-centered, unchanging universe. To live at such a moment of change is a gift and an honor.

Earth Literacy grew out of a "communion" agreement made when individuals from three farm-based learning centers, two colleges and a university met to build relationships that would enrich the Earth in the bioregions where they lived.

Earth Literacy is a budding curriculum aimed at freedom. Albert Einstein said that we are prisoners of a delusion. Delusion causes us to endanger our species and our planet.

Our old way of thinking is our prison. We think we are separate. We do not calculate nature's losses as our losses. We imagine we are in control of the natural world. We try to manipulate and fix nature as we would a machine. That is why Earth's capacity to sustain and regenerate life is diminishing. Earth Literacy's curriculum is about awakening from that delusion.

The literacy crisis is most severe in the prestigious universities and colleges. The best educated people are most imprisoned by the delusion Einstein described.

Education gives students great power to manipulate and control the natural world. But it does not give them an ethic for wisely using that power.

Earth Literacy expands the meaning of literacy. It measures our ability to participate constructively in Earth's evolutionary process. The truth we need is inside us. It is a truth that must be felt, not merely analyzed. The root word for education, educe, means to draw out. Education's task is to draw out our affinity for life. It is to open our souls to love this glorious, luxurious, animated planet.

For more on curriculum contents of Integrative Studies, an Earth Literacy program, contact Dan Daniel, coordinator of General Education, Southwestern College, Winfield KS 67156.