Ecoliterate

How Educators Are Cultivating Emotional, Social, and Ecological Intelligence

Daniel Goleman, Lisa Bennett, Zenobia Barlow

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118104576
• eBook ISBN: 9781118237205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

A new integration of Goleman's emotional, social, and ecological intelligence

Hopeful, eloquent, and bold, Ecoliterate offers inspiring stories, practical guidance, and an exciting new model of education that builds - in vitally important ways - on the success of social and emotional learning by addressing today's most important ecological issues.

This book shares stories of pioneering educators, students, and activists engaged in issues related to food, water, oil, and coal in communities from the mountains of Appalachia to a small village in the Arctic; the deserts of New Mexico to the coast of New Orleans; and the streets of Oakland, California to the hills of South Carolina.

Ecoliterate marks a rich collaboration between Daniel Goleman and the Center for Ecoliteracy, an organization best known for its pioneering work with school gardens, school lunches, and integrating ecological principles and sustainability into school curricula. For nearly twenty years the Center has worked with schools and organizations in more than 400 communities across the United States and numerous other countries.

Ecoliterate also presents five core practices of emotionally and socially engaged ecoliteracy and a professional development guide.

Chapter One

Lessons from a Coal Miner's Daughter

Teri Blanton and Wendell Berry, Kentucky

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This story reveals how a group of everyday citizens—committed to protecting the health of their community and the Appalachian ecosystem—find strength, influence, and friendship by embracing sustainability as a community practice: one of the five practices of socially and emotionally engaged ecoliteracy. As you read, notice the diverse backgrounds of the individuals and the ways in which mountaintop removal mining has affected their lives.

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At 9:45 on a cold February morning in 2011, a dozen Kentucky residents—including educators, writers, retired coal miners, and one rather determined coal miner's daughter—gathered in the parking garage of the state capitol. Each carried a red lunch bag containing sandwiches, chips, and apples, along with their driver's licenses in their pockets for identification. Some carried supplies of prescription medications. The best known among them, acclaimed seventy-six-year-old author and farmer Wendell Berry, had a toothbrush tucked in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. After decades of opposition to mountaintop mining in Appalachia, one of the most biologically important regions in the United States,¹ the group had arrived at the capitol to confront the governor. And because they considered mountaintop removal mining both a human rights and an environmental issue, they were prepared to be arrested.

As an unidentified man left the building, fifty-four-year-old Teri Blanton ran ahead to catch the door. Then the group walked in, through a pedestrian tunnel, and up the stairs, pausing a few yards from Governor Steve Beshear's office.

“Ready?” Blanton asked.

“Ready,” they answered.

Inside the governor's office, someone informed the receptionist that they had sent a letter announcing their intention to visit but had received no response. The receptionist went behind a closed door and then returned to say that the governor was busy, but she would see if someone else could meet with them.

“Will that be all right?” she asked.

“I think we'll just wait here to meet with the governor,” Blanton replied, as others settled in on couches and chairs.

A few minutes later, the receptionist asked if they would move down the hall to a conference room.

“I think we'll just stay here and wait for the governor,” repeated Blanton.

Ten minutes later, Chief of Staff Mike Haydon offered to meet with them.

“I think we'll just wait for the governor,” Blanton said for a third time.

Blanton, who received a 2010 Rainforest Action Network award for outstanding leadership to protect the environment, lost a brother to a coal mining accident and friends to cancer that she believes was coal-related. In her hometown of Dayhoit, Kentucky, she watched her children tromp through coal muck every morning to catch the school bus.

But, she insists, “I ain't nobody's damn victim.” Indeed, Blanton has stood up to coal companies, addressed hundreds of people at rallies, challenged a United States senator on MSNBC, and helped inspire an investigation that led to the designation of an EPA Superfund site.

Called “the Erin Brockovich of mountaintop mining,” Blanton has educated people about this issue on the local, state, and national level, displaying a homegrown brand of emotionally and socially engaged ecological intelligence.² She especially seeks to help those of us who do not live anywhere near Kentucky or other coal mining states to recognize our personal connection to the Appalachian region. She reminds us that every time we flip on the lights in our home, office, or school, the electricity we use is often generated from burning coal.

The Role of Coal Today

The United States is the world's largest producer of coal, the most significant source of electricity today. It fuels the generation of 45 percent of the electricity used in this country and 40 percent of the electricity used worldwide, with global coal consumption projected to increase 53 percent by 2035.³

But if coal mining conjures up images of men going down into underground mines, to blast and dig out the sedimentary rock, that's not the way it typically happens today. Sixty percent of coal mined in the United States is now acquired through surface mining, which uses a variety of techniques to remove soil, rock, and entire ecosystems to access the minerals below the surface. This includes strip mining, open pit mining, and mountaintop mining (or mountaintop removal)—the most controversial and destructive form of all.⁴ Significantly, for the coal industry, mountaintop mining is also the most profitable method because it relies more on machinery and explosives than people.

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How to Mine a Mountain

Mountaintop mining—the most profitable albeit most destructive form of coal mining—is carried out in six basic steps:

1. Use bulldozers to clear trees and level the mountaintop.

2. Drill small holes through the dirt and rock and drop in powerful explosives that blow as much as 800 feet off the mountaintop to reveal the coal seams below the surface.⁵

3. Excavate the coal using power shovels or a 2,000-ton, twenty-story-high dragline, one of the largest machines in the world.⁶

4. Bulldoze the remains of the shattered mountains and their ecosystems (what the industry calls “overburden”) into the valleys and streams below.

5. Gather the coal and transport it to a plant to be washed before shipping. Then dump the liquid waste, or slurry—containing arsenic, lead, mercury, magnesium, and selenium—into a hillside dam.

6. “Reclaim” the area. By law, the coal company is required to create “useful landscapes” after a mining operation is completed. This can include, for example, replacing soil, replanting trees, and restoring the basic contours of the landscape that existed before the mountains were blasted and bulldozed away. Put another way, they are obliged to remake nature's design—a feat few find plausible.

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Mountaintop mining is largely confined to the Appalachian Mountains, one of the economically poorest—and ecologically richest—regions in the United States. (If mountaintop mining occurred in more affluent parts of the country, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said, it would likely lead to jail time.⁷) The oldest mountain range in North America, the Appalachian Mountains are home to an extraordinary diversity of flora and fauna, thanks to the legacy of the Ice Age and a generally mild climate.⁸

As a result of mountaintop mining, an estimated 500 mountaintops, one million acres of forest, and 2,000 miles of streams have been destroyed since the mid-1980s.⁹ In 2010, a team of researchers also found higher rates of hospitalizations and deaths due to heart, lung, and kidney problems in mountaintop mining regions than elsewhere in the United States.¹⁰ And a number of mining communities have become ghost towns, as residents have sold their homes to coal companies rather than live amid the noise, pollution, and general devastation of the landscape. In Lindytown, West Virginia, for example, only two occupied houses remain in what was once a small mining town: one belonging to an elderly woman suffering from Alzheimer's, whose family felt it would be too disorienting to move, and another belonging to her son.¹¹

The burning of coal—acquired through mountaintop mining or, for that matter, any other means—also threatens a number of the life-support systems on which we depend. For example, the United States alone produces close to two billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) per year from coal-burning power plants.¹² And CO₂ is a significant contributor to climate change, the increasing acidity of the oceans, and interference with Earth's nitrogen cycle, leading to “dead zones” in oceans and rivers. (Dead zones are areas where oxygen levels are too low to support marine life. The Gulf of Mexico, for example, is home to a dead zone as large as the state of New Jersey.)

“Nobody's Damn Victim”

Blanton, Berry, and a growing number of others have been expressing their opposition to mountaintop mining for years. Berry, in fact, says that he has voiced his opposition to all surface mining for nearly a half century. Reflecting on the destruction inflicted on his home state during that time, Berry wrote, “This is a history by any measure deplorable, and a commentary sufficiently devastating upon the intelligence of our politics and our system of education.”¹³ By way of example, he pointed to a lack of understanding about the difference between the long-term value of a well-maintained forest ecosystem and the short-term gain of coal mining—likening the difference to “using a milk cow, and her daughter and granddaughters after her for a daily supply of milk, renewable every year—or killing her for one year's supply of beef.”¹⁴

Moreover, he has said, our education system plays a role in the perpetuation of ecological destruction, because it is based on the faulty premise of an economy that externalizes health, environmental, and other costs: “The change that is called for is a shift from the economy to the ecosphere as the basis of curriculum, teaching, and learning.” The ecosphere, Berry says, is the true basis and context for any economy.¹⁵

After decades of opposition, Berry announced in 2008 that he was losing patience, and that it was time to invoke civil dis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• More Praise for Ecoliterate
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: From Breakdown to Breakthrough
• Five Practices of Emotionally and Socially Engaged Ecoliteracy
• Section One: Stories from the Field
• Section Two: Professional Development Strategies
• Conclusion: Hands-On Hope
• Resources
• The Center for Ecoliteracy
• The Authors