A former college president offers a framework for sustainability on campus, describing initiatives that range from renewable energy to a revamped curriculum to sustainable investment. Colleges and universities offer our best hope for raising awareness about the climate crisis and the other environmental threats. But most college and university administrations need guidance on the path to sustainability. In The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus, Mitchell Thomashow, a former college president, provides just that. Drawing on his experiences at Unity College in Maine, he identifies nine elements for a sustainability agenda: energy, food, and materials (aspects of infrastructure); governance, investment, and wellness (aspects of community); and curriculum, interpretation, and aesthetics (aspects of learning). He then describes how Unity put these elements into practice. Connecting his experiences to broader concerns, Thomashow links the campus to the planet, reminding us that local efforts, taken together, can have a global impact.
This essay explores how the emerging field of ecopsychology might contribute to a greater awareness of the deep ecological and spiritual issues intrinsic to global environmental change. Ecopsychology can cultivate a place-based perceptual ecology as a bridge to connect psyche and ecosystem, and become the foundation of learning how to contemplate spatial and temporal scale-moving seamlessly between worlds-local and global, human and more than human, civilized and wild. I suggestthat ecopsychology explore themetaphorical and symbolic implications of global environmental change, while remaining grounded in the intimacy of local landscape. The essay offers nine experimental pathways to biospheric perception as deliberation for ecopsychology theory and practice.
This chapter considers the concept of sense of place, focusing on how urban environmental education can help residents to strengthen their attachment to urban communities or entire cities and to view urban places as ecologically valuable. Sense of place—the way we perceive places such as streets, communities, cities, or ecoregions—influences our well-being, how we describe and interact with a place, what we value in a place, our respect for ecosystems and other species, how we perceive the affordances of a place, our desire to build more sustainable and just urban communities, and how we choose to improve cities. Our sense of place also reflects our historical and experiential knowledge of a place and helps us imagine its more sustainable future. The chapter offers examples of activities to help readers construct field explorations that evoke, leverage, or influence sense of place, including social construction of place meanings and developing an ecological identity.
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