Fields of Green: Restorying Culture, Environment, and Education,
edited by McKenzie,
Hart, Bai, and Jickling (Hampton, 2009) is now available at
www.Hampton.com and
www.Amazon.com. The book is also available this week in the exhibit
hall at the World
Environmental Education Congress in Montreal.
"This book is about hopeful daydreams and their implications for
action in the interwoven
spheres of culture, environment, and education. In spite and because
of the recent
significant shift in concern for the environment around the globe,
there remains the
urgent task of restorying the ways we live on this earth. Cultural
understandings that
value the individual over the collective, humans over other species,
concept over
experience, and progress as globalizing growth and change, are
examples of the sorts of
imaginaries that can be traced in the ecological and cultural losses
we are currently
experiencing and participating in around the world. This collection
works across various
fields of green, drawing together poetry, philosophy, journalism,
sociology, curriculum
studies, Indigenous scholarship, feminist and social justice work,
environmental ethics,
and a range of other fields of inquiry and practice. Individually and
cumulatively, the
contributors search for, theorize, and practice approaches that probe
education as an
endeavor that imperfectly, yet hopefully, walks the blurred line
between cultural
determinism and resistance."
Contributors: Tommy Akulukjuk, Daniel Araya, Heesoon Bai, Sean
Blenkinsop, Michael
Bonnett, Rosa Nidia Buenfil-Burgos, Peter Cole, Kieran Egan, Claudia
Eppert, Leesa
Fawcett, Edgar Gonzalez-Gaudiano, Noel Gough, David A. Greenwood, Paul
Hart, Yuill
Herbert, David Jardine, Bob Jickling, Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Milton
McLaren, Marcia
McKenzie, Patricia O'Riley, Phillip Payne, Michael A. Peters, Leigh
Price, Derek
Rasmussen, and Lucie Sauve. Primer by Rishma Dunlop; Foreword by
Vandana Shiva.
--
In the spidery, interwoven webs of environmental education,
sensuality, politics, and
poetry, Fields of Green took root in my life. This is a delicious
volume that joins
daydreams and nightmares; composting liberatory education and
interrogating environmental
crises; where theory and affect snuggle; poetry and critical theory
embrace; where
flowers grow among trauma. In this volume the notion of a field grows
rich, colorful, and
generative; refusing to be disciplined, constrained, and bounded. What
a relief.
Fields of Green should be read full body; the essays, art, and poetry
invite readers to
think, feel, smell, listen, re-view, and imagine educational justice
and responsibility.
The collection asks us to engage theoretically, artistically,
ethically, and politically,
the radical possibilities of educational intentionality. Gathering
together elders and
babies (of all species) to be born tomorrow, the text appreciates
fierce commitments and
worries our petrified autisms, to nature and each other. In community
with love bugs,
salmon, cicadas, mosquitoes, and coyote, auntie Susie and Paolo
Freire, in conversation
about Auschwitz, global warming, flooding, and the WTO, around kitchen
tables in Detroit,
Greece, and the Arctic, Fields of Green provokes a radical imaginary
for education and
activism; a "nature guide" that helps us to see how progress masks
loss; a textual
masseur that asks us to consider, sensually, the stakes for today and our
responsibilities to tomorrow.
Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Urban Education
The Graduate Center at the City University of New York
--
Can we envision an education that stirs a new astonishment in relation
to other
earth-born beings, whether spiders or swallows or lichen-encrusted
rocks? Can we imagine
a way of thinking enacted as much by the body as by the mind, a style
of reflection
informed by the air and the ground and quality of one's breathing, and
by the intensity
of one's contact with the other animate shapes that surround? Here is
a luminous
anthology of insights and dreams from many of the liveliest thinkers
in environmental
education - a necessary compendium of tools, both poetic and
practical, for the
transformation of culture.
David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous
--
For change to occur, we must be open, ready, and willing to imagine a
different reality
and then be bold enough to story it into being. These artists,
activists, and scholars
from in and outside of education are taking these bold broad steps in
this diverse
collection of essays. Bridging environmental education, Indigenous
knowledge and
perspectives, and social justice concerns, the collection signals a
necessary shift
towards "environment" being more centrally considered in the broader
field of education.
Through their sensory prose and poetics, theories, and experiences,
these authors offer
compelling thinking and alternative possibilities for living and
learning with all our
relations - human, plant, animal, and a universe of energy. This is a
"must read" book
that helps us to find our own story for animating ecological and
social justice in and
through education.
Marie Battiste, Professor, Aboriginal Education Research Centre, University of
Saskatchewan
Co-author of Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge
--
I read Fields of Green during a recent visit to Venezuela and saw
tremendous potential in
its important messages for the Bolivarian Revolution as well as for
social justice
struggles around the entire planet. I would like to see fields of both
social and
ecological justice, and this book constitutes a wonderful contribution to this
possibility. The issues raised by these timely - and urgent - essays
speak to both the
historical moment and the future of life on this planet. This is an
important book and I
highly recommend it.
Peter McLaren, Professor, University of California, Los Angeles
********************************************
Marcia McKenzie
Department of Educational Foundations
& School of Environment and Sustainability
University of Saskatchewan
28 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK
Canada, S7N 0X1, 306.966.7551
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