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It is one good challenge to try to understand what it means to lead a more sustainable life. It is yet another worthy challenge to understand how to educate others about the promise and peril of nudging our society to more sustaining ways. This website is a way for Terril Shorb, a professor of sustainable community development, to share with educator colleagues and their students, some ideas, resources, and case studies that encourage us all to deepen and expand our engagement with sustainability in the sphere of higher education.
What you will find on this ever-growing site is the symbolic equivalent of a Southwestern desert grasslands savannah, which means there are intense bursts of living ideas—some in full flower and some in early stages of growth—and patches of open ground where the living soil of potentiality has yet to flower. Terril Shorb, who is faculty founder of the sustainable community development program at Prescott College’s Adult Degree Program, sees sustainability education in that way: many educators are offering up nourishing ideas and projects from their disciplinary plots of soil, but there are large expanses between and among these fertile flowerings that may leave our students and other learners wondering how it all connects up. Now it is true that in a desert biome the bunchgrasses and other “clumps” of life grow that way in part because arid lands do not provide enough consistent moisture for a continuous carpet of plant growth. So it is with sustainability education. Our intellectual watershed is vast but only periodically hydrated by storms of consciousness that cover the whole territory. Authentic interdisciplinary thought and collaboration, and growing connections between academe and the communities it serves are just two of the forms of connection addressed here.
In a small way, this website is meant to be a place where sustainability educators, students, and others interested in how our society can support education about ways to sustain and restore the health of the natural environment and the vigor of social bonds in our many communities can find nourishment in the perspectives, ideas, and projects each of us has to share. In that spirit, Terril Shorb invites you to reflect on the ideas presented here for your private use, but to please contact Terril at
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for permission to use any portion of the content of this website. Thank you and welcome to our good, great task of educating ourselves and others to truly live in harmony within the community of all beings.
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