Danger and opportunity: the antinomies of environmental education.

When we set out to edit this cluster of articles on environmental education, our more curmudgeonly colleagues gave us one prime directive: Make sure that it is sufficiently gloomy. Though we have done our best to be depressing, pessimistic, or at least downcast, we find that being hopeful and even optimistic is often a prerequisite for radical teachers of all stripes. Radicals often imagine ourselves as occupying the unenviable (even impossible) position of wanting things to get bad enough for the masses to recognize the need for systemic reform, but not so bad that people just throw up their hands and give in. In discussing the current crisis we face, that champion of the environment Al Gore invokes the cliche that the Chinese character for "crisis" is a combination of two other characters: "danger" and "opportunity." A truism perhaps, but useful for framing the topic of environmental education. We have tried to walk the line between despair at the various indicators of ecological danger (global warming, species extinction, agribusiness monoculture, epidemics and health hazards, to name just a few) and belief in the opportunities for a radical renewal of the environmental movement that have grown in response to such threats.

In analyzing the causes for despair, we asked contributors to explore how and why markets are poor media for thinking ahead democratically and rationally, so that capitalism itself has been tough on the natural world. And why "actually-existing socialism" did a poor job, too, for different reasons. With regards to environmental education, one cannot follow the radical dictate to get to the root of the problem without accounting for the role of global capitalism and consumer culture in promoting overproduction, overconsumption, and environmental degradation. Nor can one ignore the debilitating impact of largely unregulated extractive industries (mining, timber, agribusiness, etc.) and the role of economic disparities and underdevelopment in creating uncontrolled urbanization, overpopulation, and artificial scarcity.

It's not enough, of course, to point to the damaging effects of widespread disregard for the environment on the natural world (if such a world even exists independent of human action and the built environment). Indeed, separating the destruction of the environment from the effects of that destruction on people has led many mainstream environmental groups into unreflective racism and sexism. The call by many environmentalists for more restrictive immigration laws to reduce urban sprawl and overuse of natural resources is an egregious example of this phenomenon: it ignores the ways in which global capital and corporate agriculture have severely compromised rural farming in Latin America or underwritten the construction of shantytowns, favelas and maquiladoras around the world, as well as the fact that the poorest and least able to defend themselves are most often the ones dealing with contaminated water, polluted air, and irradiated soil.

Similarly, a radical environmentalism that does not take into account the centrality of feminism to understanding what has happened to the environment can too easily fall into a kind of gender essentialism that conflates femaleness with a greater connection to the earth while paying scant attention to the ways in which actual women are particularly affected by both sexism and environmental degradation. Moreover, as Lawrence Buell points out, the kind of "deep ecology" embraced by many radical environmental groups can sometimes be structurally indistinguishable from traditional representations of the land as female, either "virgin" or "despoiled" by "rape": hardy a solution to the complex problems we face in thinking and teaching about the environment.

Environmental consciousness is certainly finding its way back into the mainstream, following a fairly long hiatus after the "Earth Day" revival of the early 1990s. The popularity of hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius and the increasing focus on renewable energy sources after gas prices skyrocketed in the wake of the Iraq War suggest that change is happening, although whether temporary or permanent only time will tell. The impact of global warming has also been hard to ignore during the hottest decade on record. These developments are high" lighted in two of the most talked-about documentaries of 2006: Who Killed the Electric Car? and An Inconvenient Truth.

As well as resuscitating Al Gore's political career, the latter film made a surprisingly compelling case for the seriousness of climate change and the immediate need for greenhouse gas emission reduction. Gore warns that there is a ten year window of opportunity to deal with global warming, which (otherwise) will lead to intolerable levels of C[O.sub.2] in the atmosphere within 45 years. The evidence and graphics that An Inconvenient Truth compile to support this assertion are astonishing: melting glaciers, floods and drought, wildfires, increasingly strong tornadoes and hurricanes, rising oceans--all leading in the foreseeable future to dramatically disappearing coastlines in Antarctica, Greenland, Florida, San Francisco Bay, Beijing, the Netherlands, Shanghai, Calcutta, New York City, and other parts of the world, which would create hundreds of millions of "climate refugees." On the one hand, the problem is so serious that even Al Gore sometimes sounds like a socialist, as when he quotes Upton Sinclair on the ideological blinders that prevent business and industry from taking meaningful action: "You can't make somebody understand something if their salary depends upon them not understanding it." On the other hand, most of the solutions Gore offers are privatized consumer choices that hardly challenge the rule of capital. He asks his audience to shop for environmentally friendly products: programmable thermostats, outdoor solar lighting, compact florescent lightbulbs, better air filters, blankets for electric hot water heaters, and energy star appliances. In the light of the problems the film documents, its solutions seem, at best, inadequate.

It is not surprising that the much more radical ecological analysis of Who Killed the Electric Car? proved to be much less successful at the box office: grossing $2 million as opposed to the $63 million worldwide take of An Inconvenient Truth. The former film examines how the car culture of the United States is the result of collusion between government, industry, and consumers addicted to conspicuous consumption, which led to the death of the first effort to mass produce electric cars and the defeat of the Zero Emission Vehicle mandate that would have ensured the success of this earlier initiative to promote ecologically friendly transportation alternatives. Showing ideology in action is certainly different than just talking about it. Despite the disparities between the two documentaries, public interest in these films is heartening. However, amid a "startling forecast" (in the words of the usually staid British Meteorological Office) that 2007 is shaping up to be the warmest year on record, starting with a January half a degree centigrade warmer than the previously warmest year, 1998, many environmentalists cannot be faulted for seeing these developments as too little too late.

Despite the somberness of the news, the contributors to this issue, though warning readers about these various hazards, have not wanted their students, colleagues, and fellow activists to get mired in the slough of despond that is all too often the territory of left environmental thought. Instead, the essays that follow offer various paths through or around the wilderness that might lead us to the celestial city, or forest, of ecologically progressive habitation. In soliciting articles for this duster, we asked contributors to consider various efforts to combat the problems listed above through ecological activism, social planning, environmentally-friendly pedagogy, and participation in movements for distributive justice. In response, the essays that follow take up the topics of sustainability, local foods, and community gardens; public policy and radical critiques of its limitations; student ecological activism and the environmental justice movement; as well as ecofeminism and green teaching. Implicit in this analysis are certain tensions between the environmental "establishment," working-class interests, and radical movements.

We also asked contributors to emphasize creative approaches to engaging students in these issues, including methods that reach beyond the boundaries of the classroom to environmental education and activism in non-school environments. Thus, Deborah Adelman and Shamili Sandiford take us to the community garden that they and their students planted near the College of DuPage, where the ideas students discussed in their coordinated literature and biology dames were literally brought to fruition. Ashley Dawson analyzes the efforts of student environmental activists to bring not just green gardens to their college campuses but to found them on Green political principles. Though the article by Marlia Banning and the essay coauthored by Catherine Gardner and Jennifer Riley remain in the classroom, this is a space transformed by Banning's participatory learning through the construction of genealogies of environmental policy or by Gardner's and Riley's interdisciplinary and dialogic ecofeminist learning community. Taken as a whole, these essays remind us of the

dangers of the ongoing environmental crisis, but they also show the opportunities for radical teachers to do what we do best: work for meaningful change in partnership with students as we develop a vision of a more equitable and ecologically sound world.