The purpose of this paper is to identify what appears to be such a protocol, a perspective called sustainability education. Related questions include: How does this kind of education differ from the traditional educational paradigm? What theoretical elements nourish this emerging, educational perspective? How does this perspective serve adult learners in either formal higher education settings or in the larger community? Does sustainability education sufficiently address the human-nature connection to generate integral relationship with and care for ecosystems? Does this perspective serve leadership education? Finally, are there examples of sustainability education in practice that demonstrate its effectiveness in moving people to equitable relationship with other humans and the natural world on which all humans depend?

Contextual background for sustainability education

There is little question among learned people of this era that the relationship between humankind and the natural world is tenuous at best and toxic at worst. Natural scientists, political theorists, and social ecologists assert that the future well-being of the human species is inescapably rooted in human dependence upon the health and continuance of natural systems of planet Earth (Dresner, 2003; Bormann and Kellert, 1991; Meadows, Randers, and Meadows, 2004; and Odum, 1997).

The consequence of the deepening disconnection with the natural world and its systems is dire, as indicated in this characterization by the biologist, E.O. Wilson (2002). "An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity" (p. xxiii).

For skeptics who dismiss such pronouncements by single scientists, there is this declaration-World Scientists' Warning to Humanity-issued in a joint communiqué by more than 1,500 scientists, including half of the living Nobel laureates in science:

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about (1992, p. 1).

An over-arching perspective that promises to be one of the most effective means of that collision avoidance is referred to as sustainable development, or, more broadly, sustainability. There is considerable variation in how sustainability is defined, or even on its essential elements. Many theorists do agree, however, that the sustainable path to restoring humankind's proper relationship with the natural systems of the biosphere will necessarily involve interrelationships among the "big three" components of ecology, sociality, and economics (Dresner, 2003; Edwards, 2005; Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2004; Harrison, 2000; Henderson, 1999; and Meadows, Randers, and Meadows, 2004).

A fourth component is offered frequently as the means by which sustainability consciousness will be carried to the human world in its many configurations. This element is education, or, more precisely, sustainability education (Corcoran and Wals, 2004; Sterling, 2002; Rohwedder, 2004; and Tilbury, 2004). Conversely, sustainability education is expressed typically as an inevitable integration of the "big three" components, as Allen, Tainter, and Hoekstra (2003) write: "The problem of sustainability is as much a matter of understanding social dynamics and human nature as it is an environmental crisis...some instances of social injustice come from an inviable (sic) economy...economic inadequacies take a toll on the biogeophysical systems as overcropping or pressing marginal ecological systems into service destroys soil and extirpates species" (p. 9).

Sterling (2002) suggests that sustainable education involves "whole paradigm change, one which asserts both humanistic and ecological values. By contrast, any ‘education for something,' however worthy, such as for ‘the environment,' or ‘citizenship' tends to become both accommodated and marginalized by the mainstream." Sterling asserts that while " ‘education for sustainable development' has in recent years won a small niche, the overall educational paradigm otherwise remains unchanged" (p. 14).

Inadequacies of mainstream higher education

It is useful, then, to examine some of the precepts of mainstream education. This serves both to identify features that cause education to sustain unsustainability (Sterling, 2003), and to identify those elements that may be effective for the challenge at hand. That good challenge, among other things, is to generate a perceptual transformation among the learned and learners alike that guides the way to a day when "every human population center finds ways to live in harmony with its greater community of all life" (Shorb, 2005, p. 11).

Educational theorists and psychologists point to the insufficiency of our dominant educational model, and the focus here will be on higher education. Kolb (1984) describes a trend toward "specialization and vocationalism" that has been much in evidence following the realities of post "baby-boom" demographics. Included in this phenomenon are "pressures toward specialization [which] feed on themselves." This sets up an intractable cycle in which institutions of higher learning are asked to deliver the specialized "knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed for students to find their niche in society, and to service that niche as well. Institutions...become increasingly dependent on these ‘social niches' for their own survival." The consequence is continued emphasis on knowledge specialization, usually "at the expense of integrative education" (p. 162).

An additional impact of higher education's focus on specialization is an emphasis on a "unitary linear trend of human growth and development at the expense of acknowledging and managing diverse developmental pathways that exist within different disciplines and professions" (p. 163). Finally, Kolb writes, mainstream higher education's focus on specified content areas often leads to "fundamental mismatches between learning styles and the learning demands of different disciplines...Disciplines... show sociocultural variation-differences in faculty and student demographics, personality, and aptitudes, as well as differences in values and group norms" (p. 163).

Educators, legislators, and students themselves recognize weaknesses in the current higher educational model. Evidence of this may be found in comparative analysis (Smith, MacGregor, Matthews, and Gabelink, 2004) of a number of major reports issued in recent years on the subject of undergraduate education reform. The Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in Research Universities includes findings that such institutions need to pursue more undergraduate research, integrative programs, inquiry-based teaching, and faculty development. A study commissioned by the American Association of Community Colleges found that such institutions need to "respond to massive societal changes and create learning-centered changes relevant to the twenty-first century" (p. 11). A commonality of the reports (Smith et al) suggests failure of colleges and universities to respond adequately to the challenges facing learners of this time necessitates an "unprecedented level of commitment, collaboration, and holistic thinking that in many ways goes against the grain of our habits and structures" (p. 12).

Traditional higher education is flawed in yet another, deeply significant way. "Toward the natural world it too emphasizes theories, not values; abstraction rather than consciousness; neat answers instead of questions; and technical efficiency over conscience. It is of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read" (Orr, 1994, p. 8).

Is sustainability education up to the challenge?

Will higher education continue to be part of the problem? Or can it recreate itself in a way to become part of the solution. Corcoran (2004) expresses it this way: "Higher education can play a pivotal role in turning society toward sustainability. We must rediscover and teach indigenous and ancient truths, generate new concepts and ways of thinking, and we must inspire students with a hopeful vision" (p. 3).

This will not be an easy transition. By its nature, sustainability education is necessarily interdisciplinary, as it must pay attention to psycho-social, economic, and ecologic aspects, among others. But disciplines define the structure of most universities to such an extent that Oelschlaeger asserts (2005) "it is a virtual miracle that there are institutions where, occasionally, in spite of a cultural trajectory built around "disciplinolatry," there are interdisciplinary thinkers" (p. 4).

This is confirmed by notions of social relevance and a recognition that "issues facing the world and the planet today are not neatly organized according to disciplines...The problems of polluted rivers or urban homelessness...can only be understood and addressed through a broad interdisciplinary approach that draws on diverse disciplines and practices" (Smith et al, 2004, p. 116).

Some have suggested that with huge numbers of the professional faculty retiring in the U.S. in the immediate past and current decade, the paradigm would begin to change due to arrival of young teachers no longer loyal to the prevailing paradigm. That has not been the case. Educational researchers have found that "despite years of national attention on improving teaching and learning...the new cohort is even more research-oriented than their predecessors...relying on traditional lecture-based pedagogies" (Smith et al, p. 8).

This does not surprise those who study the phenomenon of accentuation. That has been described as a form of self-fulfilling prophecy related to a college student's choice of a field of study that is recognized as consistent with the student's learning style. Kolb (1984) writes that students' "developmental pathways are a product of the interaction between their choices and socialization experiences in academic fields such that choice dispositions lead them to choose educational experiences that match these dispositions, and the resulting experiences further reinforce the same choice disposition for later experiences" (p. 164).

Said another way, students are more likely to choose a career path, for instance, that is in accord with their own preferences of both content and personal process, rather like they might shop for a pair of pants that accommodates both their waist size and their stylistic taste. Universities and their faculties, on the other hand, continue to market their preferred products such as curriculums, research focuses, and training or instructional processes. Student and teacher thus operate within a sphere of interactivity that is safely bounded, and there is typically little incentive to move outside this protective paradigm.

Practitioners of mainstream higher education do at times question their purpose and methodology (Sterling, 2002), but seldom do they think to question that they are living a reality of "subparadigms, more or less conditioned by the ghosts of mechanism, positivism, and dualism" (p. 50). The key challenge for sustainability education, then, is to "create and articulate an educational ethos, eidos, and praxis, based upon the emerging ecological paradigm in wider society...a simple, ‘whole systems thinking' model, which offers a profound way to help us reorient our worldview" (p. 51).

Sustainability education as part of an emerging paradigm.

As noted, the perspective of sustainability answers first to the need for humans to reconnect their lives with natural systems. Kellert (1996) notes that members of modern society are largely ignorant of the degree to which their existence depends on "varying interactions with biological diversity to achieve lives of physical, emotional, and intellectual meaning." Biodiversity education must "dispel this deep disconnection from the natural world...[and] must instill the feeling, knowledge, and belief of how much human sustenance and spiritual enrichment depends on maintaining a rich variety of relationships to nature and living diversity" (p. 211).

There are obvious content considerations in sustainability education, therefore, which Orr (1994) suggests include the laws of thermodynamics, ecology principles such as carrying capacity and energetics, least-cost, end-use analysis, appropriate technologies, steady-state economics, and environmental ethics, among others. A well-rounded liberal arts curriculum offers a good start on such a content foundation, though it is estimated (CollegeNews.org, 2005) that less than three percent of American college graduates receive their education at a liberal arts institution.

Content must be contextual, however, and it is fitting that sustainability education offers such context through a perspective of systems theory that itself is rooted in our understanding of the natural environment. Capra (1996) reminds that systems thinking originated in the work of theorists from fields of organismic biology, Gestalt psychology, quantum physics, and ecology. In those fields, theorists explored "living systems-organisms, parts of organisms, and communities of organisms (p. 36)." Key factors of systems thinking involve a shift from focus on parts to wholes. Living systems are "integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts." A systems perspective, however, involves moving the field of inquiry or vision between systems levels because "throughout the living world we find systems nesting within systems...and...by applying the same concepts to different systems levels-for example, the concept of stress to an organism, a city, or an economy-we can gain important insights" (p. 37).

Capra writes that systems thinking is indeed contextual thinking, and that explaining physical elements and processes in terms of their context means "explaining them in terms of their environment" (p. 37). When it is assumed that the environment is both the ecological matrix and the social spheres within which humans live, systems thinking as a theoretical framework is well suited to sustainability education.

Sterling (2002) offers an elaboration on systems frameworks when he speaks to four, interwoven strands of sustainability education: extended, which invites characteristics of appreciation and holism and is future-oriented in a purposeful, values-conscious way; connective, which is in touch with the real world, grounded in locality, pays attention to systemic awareness of relationships and feedbacks patterns, is relational by exploring patterns of change in, for instance, human-nature connections, and is pluralistic by seeking to value diverse perspectives; integrative, through process orientation, balance, and synergism encouraged in a community learning setting. Sterling finally calls attention to the need for education to be more inclusive through alliance with "parallel changes toward sustainability in wider society" (p. 88).

Andragogical implications of sustainability education

The invitation to and engagement with learners on behalf of a more holistic form of adult education (also known as andragogy) calls for a methodological process consistent with the strengths and needs of adults. Evolutionary psychology (EP) is an emerging, interdisciplinary study of the human mental landscape that invites findings from cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience. The EP methodological lens allows scientists to explore the phenomenon of "natural competencies" (Cosmides and Tooby, 2005) that potentially aid the processes of sustainability education. Those competencies include "our abilities to see, to speak, to find someone beautiful, to reciprocate a favor, to fear disease, to fall in love, to initiate an attack, to experience moral outrage, to navigate a landscape, and myriad others" (p. 2). The evolutionary psychology perspective offers sustainability educators the important insight concerning the human mental landscape:

All normal human minds reliably develop a standard collection of reasoning and regulatory circuits that are functionally specialized and, frequently, domain specific. These circuits organize the way we interpret our experiences, inject certain recurrent concepts and motivations into our mental life, and provide universal frames of meaning that allow us to understand the actions and intentions of others. Beneath the level of surface variability, all humans share certain views and assumptions about the nature of the world and human activity by virtue of these human universal reasoning circuits (Cosmides and Tooby, 2005, p. 3).

The implications of evolutionary psychology, then, are evident in terms of a biologically-based human competency to understand the relationship with other humans and other-than-humans-the foundation of sustainability. Wilson (1998) adheres to the theory of epigenetic learning rules and notes that they operate on two levels, the first in the form of automatic processing that "extend[s] from the filtering and coding of stimuli in the sense organs all the way to perception of the stimuli by the brain" (p. 164). Second level epigenetic rules are "regularities in the integration of large amounts of information" and draw from "selected fragments of perception, memory, and emotional coloring," leading the mind to "predisposed decisions through the choices of certain memes [units of culture] and overt responses over others" (p. 164).

The constructivist perspective (Kahn, 2001), on the other hand, assumes that development is not sufficiently accounted for in either exogenous factors such as behavior, social learning and transmission, and cultural learning, or in endogenous factors such as those genetic tendencies illuminated by evolutionary psychology or sociobiological perspectives. Much of Kahn's empirical studies focus on children, but his discussion of the constructivist perspective resonates with theories of adult learning, as will be seen later. Constructivists place "a priority on the processes of assimilation, accommodation, and disequilibrium...and the ways in which children construct increasingly more adequate ways of understanding and acting upon their world" (pp. 212-13). Constructivist education involves experimentation and problem solving, curriculums that support and extend students' own interests, encouragement of autonomy so students have more confidence to not be unduly influenced by others, and focus on cooperative and peer relationships.

Sterling considers (2002) the promise and challenges of sustainability education as a developmental learning process that may serve to link genetic competencies with those constructed through conscious effort. These are described in the Batesonian sense of a tri-level sequence of learning that goes beyond merely self-correction to a form of generative learning. In this model, the entity or group is not bound by traditional assumptions and, in effect, makes a new meaning and thus a new reality to move to a state of greater adaptation to a dramatically changed environment. Sterling informs that the guiding principle of such learning is wholeness, and that, further, this implies a shift to "developing critical and systemic understanding and pattern recognition." Key to this approach is the second and third level of learning, described as the need to "‘see' differently if we are to know and act differently, and that we need learning experiences to facilitate this change of perspective" (p. 52).

Just as epigenetic learning rules imply the encoding of adaptive life "lessons" in our species' unconscious memory, stories are a way for significant and successful adaptations to life to be transmitted across individual members of our species, including those members of the younger generations. Luckner and Nadler (1997) describe the function of narrative, through stories, as a "way of capturing the complexity, specificity, and interconnectedness of an experience and linking them into coherent, meaningful, unified themes" (p. 15). Stories therefore become essential to sustainability education as carriers of insights that suggest the continuing nature of our transformative processes.

In the spirit of personal transformation, the author invites (Shorb, 2005) his undergraduate students who have newly begun the continuation of their higher education to write a "personal vision statement." The activity describes the statement as a "consultation with your head and your heart" that speaks to the "essence of what you perceive to be your life's work" (p. 1). This statement is the necessary precursor to students beginning to draft their program of study. Students often comment that of all the college's expectations of them-including writing and mathematics proficiency-creation of this authentic map of their life's work and how their higher education integrates with it is the most difficult early challenge of their college experience.

This is consistent with Mezirow's (1990) description of "psychic distortion" that occurs along the continuum of transformative learning and related critical reflection when adult learners attempt to regain lost functions. The learner must be assisted by a knowing educator to "identify both the particular action that he or she feels blocked about taking and the source and nature of stress in making a decision to act" (p. 17).

Gestalt theory similarly identifies stages of experience (Luckner and Nadler, 1997) in which learners flow energetically toward desired effects. Educators can help learners to "understand their natural flow towards closure...identify where and how they typically interrupt the stages...[share] awareness, tools, and experience to move through their interruptions [and help learners]...use this learning to focus their energy within other aspects of their lives" (p. 62).

The model of transformative learning is useful to sustainability educators because it helps to frame factors implicated in resistance to change, and to facilitate the necessity of change that many adults experience at points throughout their life development. This is especially so in the case of sustainability consciousness because it calls into question what for many has been assumed to be true. A person may be thrust into critical reflection due to a challenge to "established and habitual patterns of expectation, the meaning perspectives with which we have made sense out of our encounters with the world, others, and ourselves" (Mezirow, p. 12). The sphere of sustainability itself presents a "disorienting dilemma" because it suggests that "old ways of knowing cannot make sense" (p. 14). As has been discussed elsewhere, the very foundation of the sustainability perspective challenges long-standing American ideals. These include the masterful, bounded, self (Cushman, 1995), and neo-classical economics tenets of infinite substitutability (Dresner, 2003) in which lack of natural resources, for instance, can always be compensated for by labor or capital (sweat and savings accounts, in the vernacular).

Sustainability educators, then, perform two important functions. First, they help a community awaken to inevitable problems associated with unsustainable living patterns. Second, they offer a kind of facilitation that encourages curiosity, creativity, and action towards adapting to habits of daily life that conserve the local community of all life. This is necessarily a social process and obliges participants to collaboration. The Adult Learning Project (ALP) in Scotland, modeled on the work of Freire, held as its core responsibility "the attempt to involve as many people from the locality as possible." This included direct recruitment of residents of economically depressed towns to a process of "identification and exploration of themes" that were meaningful to them; of a declaration of "taking responsibility and exercising authority (with) stress on intentionality and shared purpose" (Kirkwood and Kirkwood, 1989). The ALP model uses Freire's methods in a process of "facilitating people's emergence form their isolated position in the crowd, and their struggle to create a good society" (p. 138).

Like Freire, Mezirow (1990) speaks to the seeming paradox of emancipatory adult education as a means by which adult learners free themselves from the often invisible bounds of socio-cultural norms and then use their liberation to foster "communicative competence" (p. 361), often leading to a form of "social action...which can sometimes mean political action" (p. 363).

In many cases, sustainability education will involve adult members of a community and Vella (2002) offers six considerations to enhance effectiveness of learning and teaching for adults: the learning is political because it deals with distributed power; it involves examining potential by evoking affective, psychomotor, and cognitive responses; it is part of a whole because it embraces the entire context of the learner's situation; it is participative in that everyone involved is actively engaged; it is person-centered because the purpose is the development of all involved; and it is prepared, because the learning strategy is designed for a particular group of learners (pp. 77-78).

This invitational process of adult learning is consistent with the model known as Appreciative Inquiry, which extends applications from higher education to larger society, and especially to the field of organizational development. This inquiry model was advanced by Cooperrider and Srivastva in the late 1980s, and its essential perspective is a kind of optimistic perception that seeks first to find "what works in an organization. The tangible result of the inquiry process is a series of statements that describe where the members of an organization want to be, based on the high moments of where they have been. Because the statements are grounded in real experience and history, people know how to repeat their success" (Hammond, 1996, p. 7).

The author's personal experience in such collaborative, community-based learning, serves as an example of the potency of this approach. In the early 1990s, the author initiated a citizen effort to preserve a rare freshwater wetland (Laguna de Santa Rosa) in a small town called Sebastopol, in northern California. The catharsis moment for many citizens came at a Town Council one evening when experts testified for the would-be developer that, environmentally speaking, the piece of property held little significance beyond its value as conversion to residential development. The Council quickly approved the plan with a "negative declaration," meaning that no mitigations were required.

Word spread through town of the Council's decision and a few local residents were outraged. The author assembled a small group of neighbors near Laguna de Santa Rosa to draft an appeal to the Council decision. The appeal was reluctantly granted and an audience with Council members was set for several weeks later. The action framework for our citizen response was to ask each person to write a narrative account of personal experiences with the wild lands and creatures native to Laguna. Each person was asked to contact several other citizens and invite them to do the same. So many citizens called the Town Council to request time to speak, the public hearing had to be moved to the National Guard armory to accommodate the crowd. At that meeting, citizens arose to tell story after story of growing up on the edges of the wetlands and seeing foxes and herons, and falling asleep to singing frogs.

The developer and his panel of experts attempted to refute this "inexpert" testimony by claims that it was anecdotal, emotion rather than fact-laden, and irrelevant because the citizens did not own the property in question. Citizens in attendance that evening felt their narratives had been devalued until one Council member-a real estate businessman-arose to recount his own stories of growing up near the wetland. He spoke for a long time about rafting in Tom Sawyer fashion among the reeds and water fowl, then promptly declared himself to be troubled by the development. Citizens continued to draft petitions, formed themselves into an organization known as Laguna Is For Everyone (LIFE), gave interviews to local media, and encouraged neighbors to write letters about their personal association with the wetlands area. The Council eventually reversed itself and voted to deny the development plan. The wetlands area was incorporated, some years later, into a county-wide system of conservation corridors and public nature education trails.

Nature as tutor in sustainability education

Three useful insights are suggested by the northern California experience that informs the author's awareness of prospects for sustainability education. First, many residents of that community harbored a deep appreciation for the presence of the wetlands as a significant feature of their lives in that community. This speaks to the author's assertion, expressed at the top of this paper, that the foundational tenet of sustainability is the human connection with the natural environment.

Second, in accord with transformative learning theory, the citizens of Sebastopol had to first explore and acknowledge how their existing meaning perspectives limited their understanding of how to respond to a threat to their well-being. Through modest facilitation by the author, the citizens were able to ultimately risk a radical departure from their common assumptions about private-property-rights absolutism, and move toward securing an outcome that benefits the common good. They thus transcended long established individual perspectives and moved to (Mezirow) individual social and group political action. This last effect precipitates the third insight from the Sebastopol-Laguna experience. Another outcome of the community effort to save Laguna de Santa Rosa was the determination of two local women to run for, and, ultimately obtain, seats on the Town Council.

Sustainable education and leadership

The Sebastopol, California citizens' determination to carry the common wisdom of the people into the decision-making structure and processes of the community is an apt description of another important application of sustainability education-how it relates to leadership. The Sebastopol example relates to governance, but it also serves to illuminate a larger effect, what is variously called executive team leadership (Kiefer, 1994), principle-centered leadership (Covey, 1992), or servant leadership (Greenleaf, 1977).

Leadership, in the way it may be defined in the context of sustainability education, owes some of its perspective to the idea of servant leadership (Greenleaf, 1977), which is characterized by the "care taken by the servant [leader] to make sure that other people's highest priority needs are being served" (p. 13). This was followed in the early 1990s by the idea of principle-centered leaders (Covey, 1991), who may be identified by these common characteristics: they are service-oriented, continual learners who radiate positive energy, show their belief in the potential of others, lead balanced lives, view life as a constant adventure, act synergistically, and exercise for self-renewal. This more interactive model of leadership has also taken the form pioneered by Outward Bound and its experiential education focus (Luckner and Nadler, 1997). Corporate bodies are beginning to understand the importance of such active education and its focus on "learning that involves the whole person and applies the learning in all aspects of being...[A]ctivities involve...outdoor challenges...which create crises and chaos, similar to work. The team must project their decision-making process and group intelligence onto the experience for the team to be successful" (pp. 332-333).

Indeed, the inclusion of the natural environment in leadership models has created a whole new face for a few corporations. One of the better known examples is Interface, Inc., a wholesale carpet manufacturer, whose founder, Ray Anderson, has overseen a radical restructuring of the way his business is done. The corporate mission statement gives the flavor and significance of this sustainable vision:

We will strive to create an organization wherein all people are accorded unconditional respect and dignity; one that allows each person to continuously learn and develop...We will honor the places where we do business by endeavoring to become the first name in industrial ecology, a corporation that cherishes nature and restores the environment. Interface will lead by example and validate by results, including profits, leaving the world a better place than when we began, and we will be restorative through the power of our influence in the world. (Anderson, 2006, para. 2)

Sustainability education-conclusion

Each of these applications of sustainability education, in turn, can be linked by the sustainability educator to the root of sustainability consciousness, which is that all human activity, including cultural structures such as municipalities, schools, and the like, depend upon the healthful continuation of natural and social resources. Equally important is the phenomenon of resiliency (Allen, Tainter, and Hoekstra, 2003), described as the "ability of a system to adjust its configuration and function under disturbance" (p. 26). That requires of sustainability educators the need to address the ongoing challenge of weaving consciousness of natural and social systems into the daily lives of all citizens.

Recent findings related to the human-nature relationship generally "support the contention that-even in our modern, increasingly urban age-human physical and mental well-being continues to depend highly on the quality of people's experience of the natural environment" (Kellert, 2005, p. 45). Glasser (2004) confirms this when he notes that what is called a deep ecology approach acknowledges that "every living being has value in itself...[and] sees the flourishing of nature and culture as fundamentally intertwined. Nature is viewed as mentor, standard, and partner rather than vassal" (p. 137).

The idea of nature as a tutor is increasingly reflected in various incarnations of sustainability education (Sterling, 2002), whether at the international or nation-state level, such as specified in Baltic Sea Agenda 21; in NGOs such as Learning for a Sustainable Future; in public and private education, such as Expeditionary Learning-based schools; or in high education, with the nature-human connection woven into the mission statements of institutions such as Schumacher College in England and Prescott College in the United States. The human relationship with nature is also emphasized in private foundations of sustainability learning, such as the Center for Ecoliteracy, (Capra, 2006) which declares:

We can also model communities after nature's ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms...and helps children and adults in their respective communities to practice place-based education that teaches students about the people, history, culture, and natural features of their local community and region...[and] practice environmental project-based learning, involving students in local projects that are meaningful and make real contributions to their communities (Center for Ecoliteracy, 2006, para. 2).

The Center's cooperative programs with schools have encouraged students and teachers to be directly involved within their respective communities in sustainable projects that range from growing nutritious plants for school lunches to restoring local creeks.

Another example of sustainable education in action can be found in Lopez Island, Washington, where one of the author's students is working with local farmers to create a farm-to-school project which gives local school children firsthand experience in raising organic food that is healthful for humans and is raised in a way that is more ecologically sustainable. Lessons learned in the land are integrated with the school curriculum framework for natural and social science competencies (Coffman, 2004, p. 11).

Within the author's Sustainable Community Development (SCD) program at Prescott College, community-based adult learners are encouraged to frame their studies, and thus their related community activities, in terms of these questions, among others:

How might we assess the current health of our local ecosystems?; what must we do to restore and sustain this ecosystem(s)?; how would we quantify the ecological footprint required for our daily lifestyle?; when we...understand the necessary elements required to maintain our own good health and the good health of the land, what psychological and social factors may emerge to challenge or support us in the implementation of more sustainable-living ways? (Shorb, 2005, p. 13).

Examples of students in the SCD program putting these principles into practice include: a project in Utopia, Texas where a student leads efforts to enjoin his local congregation in stewardship activities that conserve local natural areas; an effort in Mesa, Arizona where a student has helped to organize a Community Development Corporation (CDC) to re-vegetate a canal right-away for a linear nature trail, and to "green up" the city's building codes; a pair of students in Pennsylvania who are in the process of opening a healing arts center that offers local residents holistic methods of preventive healthcare tied to the health of local ecosystems; a project in which limits imposed by New Mexico's aridity is the focus of a student's community-based efforts to engage neighbors in a community garden. The project includes ongoing demonstrations of the student's gray-water and rain catchment systems, and ways of encouraging re-planting of native food and medicine plants that also serve the needs of local wildlife. The garden has become a gathering place for local residents, thus also nurturing sociality.

It is no exaggeration to say that in both curriculum focus and in practice of education as sustainability, students are finding ways to encourage intimate association between people and their local, natural environment. Cajete (1999) similarly perceives his sustainability efforts in indigenous education as the "recovery of Native peoples' sensibility for natural affiliation and nurturance of this sensibility in their children." He also asserts that for all people, the "education of the twenty-first century must be about healing this cultural and ecological split...the task of all education. Our quintessential educational task is that of reconnecting with our innate sense and need for natural affiliation" (p. 18).

This challenge holds true for urban spheres, too, regardless of the degree to which the human-built environment effaces original nature. Education for a more sustainable world can and must occur within the cultural and natural resources that exist-even in diminished or degraded form. Kellert (2005) asserts:

Contemporary society is no more intrinsically destructive or incapable of living in compatible relations with a healthy environment than previous societies have been...With care, understanding, and a sound ethical compass, we can design and develop even our most populated cities to avoid environmental damage as well as provide people with nurturing opportunities to connect meaningfully with the natural world." (pp. 183-184)

As has been seen in this paper, sustainability education is a new way of thinking about and doing education. It is also a return to a very old way of learning in the great outdoor classroom known as the natural world. What we can learn from nature is an understanding of ecosystems as "autopoietic networks and dissipative structures" and can thus "formulate a set of principles of organization that may be identified as the basic principles of ecology and use them as guidelines to build sustainable communities" (Capra, 1996, p. 298).

Higher education can participate in facilitating that guidance into application in our institutions and our communities. As one group of theorists expresses it (Wals, A. E. J., Walker, K. E. and Corcoran, P. B., 2004), the dialogic nature of sustainability education enables it to serve communities as they necessarily encounter the "importance of contestation of the various perspectives the different stakeholders bring to the institutional change process," whether the institution is public or private, focused on business or governance. The facilitation of "dissonance that is so crucial in social learning processes" presents one of the greatest opportunities for sustainability education to prove itself (p. 348).

In the largest sense, then, sustainability education offers us a chance to reconnect with the natural matrix on which we truly survive. Shepard (1998) has written that "We can go back to nature... because we never left it...It is time to abandon the fantasy that we are above the past and alienated from the rest of life on earth. We truly are a successful species in our own right that lived in harmony with the earth and its other forms for millions of years." That deep competence is the foundation of a curriculum that is inscribed in our genes and suggests that, as Shepard, says, "Possibilities lie within us. Our culture must express what the past calls forth in us but leaves us the freedom to shape" (p. 170). Such a shaping process may also be known by a more recent name, sustainability education.

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