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Center for Ecoliteracy Essays

Through its newsletter and website, the Center for Ecoliteracy offers concise essays presenting the perspectives of leading thinkers, educators, and policy makers. Contributors probe the connections including links between school food and combating childhood obesity, environmental issues and public policy, the interdependence of human and ecological communities, and education for sustainability.

Many of these essays have been written specifically for the Center. New essays are added regularly.

Essay
Franics_Morre_Lappe_After Boston, Eyes-Wide-Open Hope?
Frances Moore Lappé

How do we know the difference between head-in-the-sand hope and eyes-wide-open hope? One is a killer; the other, a life-giver.

Essay
An Abiding Ocean of Love: A Conversation with Artist Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan
Lisa Bennett

Reconnecting with our reverent love for the incomprehensibly beautiful miracle of our world.

Essay
Not Your Ordinary First-grade Ocean Project
Lisa Bennett

First-grader students learn deep and lasting lessons about nature and themselves through this unusual ocean project.

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Titlesort icon Description Author
Uncertain Peril

Is industrial agriculture, with its focus on chemical and genetic technologies, the best choice for ensuring a healthy future?

Claire Hope Cummings
Toward a Beauty-centric Education

We must address the relationship between sustainability and beauty to give emotional honesty to our ecological work.

Sandra B. Lubarsky
Three Sisters: An Ancient Garden Trio

The "Three Sisters" — corn, beans, and squash — provide a meaningful context for school garden education.

Sara Marcellino
Thinking Like an Ecosystem

Frances Moore Lappé on how cutting one tree is never about just cutting one tree. Every act has multiple effects.

Frances Moore Lappé
There

A new poem dedicated to Zenobia Barlow and the Center for Ecoliteracy.

Susan Griffin
The School in Every Garden

School gardens teach children the balance between living and merely surviving.

A.G. Kawamura
The School Garden Debate: To Weep or Reap?

The Atlantic article lambasted school gardens by stirring up charged emotions. But what are the facts?

Lisa Bennett
The Pleasures of Eating

Much of the pleasure of eating is in consciousness of the world from which food comes. This pleasure may be the best available standard of our health.

Wendell Berry
The New Facts of Life

Matter flows continually through a living system while form is maintained. Systems thinking includes a shift of emphasis from structure to process.

Fritjof Capra
The New Design Revolution

A spirit is emerging, like what we see in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, but global and much more pervasive.

David W. Orr
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