Divided We Stand, United We Fall: Challenging how we think about environmental education

In the lead-up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, Stephen Lewis laments in this issue of Our Schools/Our Selves that it may be too late to prevent a climate catastrophe.

Stepping up to the challenge, some of the country’s leading environmental educators and education critics paint a picture of the very concrete steps needed to give humanity a chance. Collectively, they put forward a provocative narrative suggesting that conventional attempts at reducing, reusing and recycling are not nearly enough. Rather, what is required is a fundamental disruption in the way we think about the environment, focusing on how a range of issues including race, class, and gender are inextricably linked to our environmental outcomes.

Table of contents

  • Introduction  (Erika Shaker)
  • Editorial – Divided We Stand, United We Fall: Disrupting environmental education’s grand messages (Tor Sandberg)
  • Viewpoints – A Practical Environmental Education Shrinking ecological footprints, expanding political ones (Elizabeth May)
  • The Health Impact of Global Climate Change (Stephen Lewis)
  • No Flowers in the Dustbin: Why we need collaboration, not competition, in education (Andrew Hunter)
  • The Illusory Solution: Is commercialization the “future” of education at the Toronto District School Board? (Trevor Norris)
  • From Food Waste to Forced Relocation: Making connections (Jocelyn Thorpe)
  • Stories About Place: Community mapping is a powerful tool for environmental education (Hannah Lewis)
  • Forty Years of Struggle and Still No Right to Inuit Education in Nunavut (Derek Rasmussen)
  • Education, Native Languages and Supporting Indigenous Knowledge (Priscilla Settee)
  • Teaching, Preaching and Trying to Be Fair: Environment issues, environmentalists, and mainstream journalists (Susan Newhook)
  • Environmental Education in Ontario: To be or not to be (Leesa Fawcett)
  • University Front – Living and Learning on the Edge: Class, race, gender, animals and the environment in a university community outreach program (Constance Russell)
  • Promoting Environmental Education at the University: The campus as a sticky wicket (L Anders Sandberg)
  • Introducing the New University Cooperative (Wilma Van Derveen)
  • International – To Know is to Cherish? Learning from Swedish environmental education (Ebba Lisberg Jensen)

Attachments

Table of Contents, Introduction, Editorial – Erika Shaker and Tor Sandberg

About the authors

Tor Sandberg

Erika Shaker

Erika (she/her) became Director of the National Office in 2020, but began her career at the CCPA in 1997 as director of the Education Project. Originally established to monitor corporate intrusion in public education, the project broadened its focus to include standardized testing, social justice and anti-racism education in schools, educational equity, school finance, child care and early childhood education, tuition and user fees, technology, surveillance and privacy, the arts, and community-based education. In 2000 she also became editor of Our Schools/Our Selves, the popular education journal founded in 1988. It provides commentary and analysis on a wide variety of education-related topics. Erika has a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in English (critical literary analysis) from the University of Guelph. Prior to coming to the CCPA, she worked in Washington DC researching the corporatization of childhood, and was one of the founders of UNPLUG (which became the now-defunct Center for Commercial-Free Public Education). She spends far too much time on social media.