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JCPS Center for Environmental Education Joins the Global Connections Newsletter

by Dr. David Wicks, JCPS Center for Environmental Education    david.wicks@jefferson.kyschools.us

The Center for EE is pleased to join with the JCPS Diversity and Multicultural Education Office in producing the online newsletter: Global Connections: Staying in Touch with Culture and Environment.

The most significant commonality between environmental education and multicultural education is the concept of "global connections." Both environmental issues and multicultural issues have international, national, regional and local components. A good example of this broad reach is illustrated in a speech by Koichiro Matsuura, director General of UNESCO, on "Water and Culture," the theme of World Water Day 2006. In his speech, Matsuura builds the case for connections between culture and the environment. He writes, “The nexus between culture and nature is the avenue for understanding resilience, creativity and adaptability in both social and ecological systems.” This could be applied to all environmental issues that we face, some of which are:  energy, air pollution, biodiversity, brownfields, and urban sprawl.

Keeping with the theme of global and local connections, Kentucky scholar and author Wendell Berry consistently comes back to the theme of "environment and culture." He addresses how our environment shapes our culture and how culture changes our perception of our environment. In The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Berry writes, "there is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth" (p. 124).

By joining together in this publication, Global Connections, the Center for Environmental Education and the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Education will explore, celebrate and promote ideas, teaching strategies and educational opportunities that help us understand and appreciate the environment and the cultural diversity of our community.

I call on the environmental community to support this newsletter by first and foremost reading it and then sending it on to colleagues who are kindred spirits, or those who should or need to think more deeply about the issues discussed here. Secondly, please send in announcements and or articles for publication. We are seeking success stories, descriptions of environmental issues, strategies that you have used, and or creative writing pieces. The target audience is educators, both formal teachers and community-based educators in the Kentuckiana area.

I look forward to contributing, and I hope you do as well.

Multicultural and Environmental Education Matter

by Aukram Burton, Specialist, JCPS Office of Equity, Diversity and Multicultural Education
aukram.burton@jefferson.kyschools.us

JCPS’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Multicultural Education and the Center for Environmental Education are collaboratively producing Global Connections, a newsletter dedicated to connecting Multicultural Education and Environmental Education as a resource to help parents, teachers, and students increase environmental literacy and sustain a knowledge-base for diversity. This collaboration brings together many years of experience serving schools and communities. A goal of Global Connections will be to promote an awareness of other cultures and their environmental experiences and traditions.

In the book The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries, conservationist Aldo Leopold laments:

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very diverse, and the resulting artifacts are very diverse. These differences in the end product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.

Sustaining this diversity in nature will depend on sustaining cultural diversity in our schools, communities, and society. Conversely the public perception of Environmental Education is seen mainly as a white middle to upper class phenomena. However, we are bombarded with media images depicting people of color and/or people in lower-income communities susceptible to environmental threats and degradation. Many of these people come from a lineage of ancient cultures around the world, who gave birth to the first environmentalists. The Yoruba people of Nigeria, addressed the relationship between man and earth in Ifa oral poetry, an ancient repository of Yoruba beliefs and moral values. A chapter of the ancient text entitled Osa Meji illustrates this relationship in a verse entitled, We Are Pleading That The Earth May Not Be Destroyed. In summary, the poem says:

….. we are certainly alive, and we are pleading that as long as we remain on earth, the earth may never be destroyed by its enemy.

To succeed in creating environmentally literate schools and communities, we must begin to learn from other cultures to address the social and environmental disparities in the modern world, so we can all learn to take better care of the earth, as well as each other.

Global Connections: Staying in Touch with Culture and Environment is a monthly publication of the JCPS Office of Equity, Diversity and Multicultural Education and the JCPS Center for Environmental Education. All submissions to the newsletter must be sent to Catherine Collesano, Editor, at catherine.collesano@jefferson.kyschools.us or fax (502) 485-3762 the Friday before the publication date. If you are interest in becoming a subscriber or a contributor to Global Connections, please contact the editor at the above email address.

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