Cultivating the Ecological Conscience: Smith, Orr, and Bowers on Ecological Education Page: 15
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need to develop in order to avert environmental and social disaster.44 This incompatibility calls
for the radical transformation not only of thought but of culture. Educators, Smith insists, "have
a grave responsibility" to contribute to this effort.45
He would have them transform education radically by changing their course content and
instructional methods with a view toward providing students with what, in his more recent
writings, he (and coauthor Dilafruz Williams) has taken to calling "ecological education."46 This
new philosophy of education may be defined as environmental education widened to incorporate
cultural, ethical, scientific, and policy questions.47 Ecological education accents "the
inescapable embeddedness" of humans in nature and the obligations that obtain from this
condition, and eschews both the conception of nature as "other" and the undue privileging of the
human species, and thus is philosophically biocentric. In its emphasis on the importance of the
connections between people and the local environments in which they live, it takes a bioregional
perspective toward the relationship between nature and human culture.48
Smith sees ecological education as having seven core principles.49 The first is the
expansion of students' "personal affinity with the earth through practical experiences" in nature
and via "the practice of an ethic of care."50 He notes approvingly paleontologist Stephen J.
Gould's contention that (in Smith's words) "human beings are unlikely to protect what they do
44 Smith, Education and the Environment, pp. 10-11.
45 Ibid., p. 11.
46 Smith and Williams, "Ecological Education," p. 162.
47 Ibid., p. 164.
48 Ibid., p. 162.
49 Smith and Williams, "Introduction," in Ecological Education in Action, pp. 6-7; Smith and Williams, "Ecological
Education," pp. 163-64.
50 Smith and Williams, "Introduction," in Ecological Education in Action, p. 6. See also Smith and Williams,
"Ecological Education," pp. 164-65.15
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Hoelscher, David W. Cultivating the Ecological Conscience: Smith, Orr, and Bowers on Ecological Education, thesis, December 2009; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12133/m1/20/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .