User:Rikaiah/Center for Ecoliteracy

CENTER FOR ECOLITERACY
The Center for Ecoliteracy (CEL) is a Berkeley, California-based nonprofit dedicated to education for sustainable living. It offers a theoretical framework and practical resources to support the sustainability movement among K-12 educators, parents, and other members of school communities nationwide.

About
The Center for Ecoliteracy aims to help young people gain the knowledge, skills, and values essential to sustainable living through seminars, consulting, books, teaching guides, and other publications. Through its initiative, Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability, they work to combine hands-on learning in the natural world with curricular innovation in K–12 education.

CEL has initiated and supported projects at the school, district, and regional level, including habitat restoration, watershed exploration, art and poetry, school gardens and cooking classes, partnerships between farms and schools, school food innovation, and environmental justice.

CEL was cofounded in 1995 by Zenobia Barlow, Peter K. Buckley, and Fritjof Capra. As Executive Director of CEL, Barlow leads the organization’s grant making, educational, and publishing programs. She has designed strategies for applying ecological and indigenous understanding in K-12 education, including the Food Systems Project, Rethinking School Lunch, and Smart by Nature.

Peter K. Buckley was formerly CEO of Esprit-Europe and Esprit-International and an attorney in San Francisco. He is cofounder (with his wife Mimi) and chair of Greenwood School, a K-8 school with an environmental emphasis in Mill Valley, California, and serves as president of the David Brower Center in Berkeley and as a member of CEL’s board of directors.

Capra is chair of CEL’s board of directors and author of The Tao of Physics, The Turning Point, The Web of Life, and The Hidden Connections, among other titles. He serves on the faculty of Schumacher College and lectures to audiences in Europe, Asia, and North and South America.

Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability
The Center for Ecoliteracy’s Smart by Nature initiative is based on four guiding principles:

Nature Is Our Teacher. To envision sustainable human communities, we turn to nature, which has sustained life for billions of years. Designing communities that are compatible with nature's processes requires basic ecological knowledge, one of the key components of ecological literacy. Ecological literacy fosters a perspective essential to sustainable living: that human needs and achievements are both supported and limited by the natural world. In schooling for sustainability, students are introduced to basic ecological principles and systems thinking — helping them achieve an understanding of the natural world's processes and the ability to think in terms of patterns, relationships, and contexts.

Sustainability Is a Community Practice. Sustainability depends on a healthy network of relationships that includes all members of the community, as students experience when the school functions as an apprenticeship community. When educators, parents, trustees, and other members of the school community make decisions and act collaboratively, they demonstrate sustainability as a community practice. School communities also have the opportunity to model sustainable practice through the ways in which they provision themselves with food, energy, and other basic needs, and how they relate to the larger communities of which they are a part.

The Real World Is the Optimal Learning Environment. As cooking is best learned in the kitchen, sustainability is best learned in the real world. Whether restoring the habitat of an endangered species, tending a school garden, or designing a neighborhood-recycling program, students learn best from active engagement in which their actions matter and have meaning.

In schooling for sustainability, students connect with the natural world and human communities through project-based learning, which inspires them to learn more because they recognize that the knowledge is essential to something they care about. They also learn that they can make a difference, which lays a foundation for responsible, active citizenship.

Sustainable Living Is Rooted in a Deep Knowledge of Place. When people acquire a deep knowledge of a particular place, they develop a sense of caring about what happens to the landscape, creatures, and people in it. When they understand its ecology and diversity, the intricate web of relationships it supports, and the rhythm of its cycles, they also develop an appreciation for and sense of kinship with their surroundings. Place-based education is fundamental to schooling for sustainability. Places known deeply are more deeply loved, and well-loved places have the best chance to be protected and preserved, so that they will be cherished and cared for by future generations.

Publications
Michael K. Stone/Center for Ecoliteracy. Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability. California: Watershed Media, September 2009.

Big Ideas: Linking Food, Culture, Health, and the Environment. Berkeley: Center for Ecoliteracy/Learning in the Real World, 2008.

Michael K. Stone and Zenobia Barlow, eds. Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2005.

[http://www.ecoliteracy.org/programs/rsl-guide.html Center for Ecoliteracy. “Rethinking School Lunch Guide.”]