To Know the World

Why environmental learning is crucial for understanding the connected challenges of climate justice, tribalism, inequity, democracy, and human flourishing.

How can we respond to the current planetary ecological emergency? In To Know the World, Mitchell Thomashow proposes that we revitalize, revisit, and reinvigorate how we think about our residency on Earth. First, we must understand that the major challenges of our time—migration, race, inequity, climate justice, and democracy—connect to the biosphere. Traditional environmental education has accomplished much, but it has not been able to stem the inexorable decline of global ecosystems. Thomashow, the former president of a college dedicated to sustainability, describes instead environmental learning, a term signifying that our relationship to the biosphere must be front and center in all aspects of our daily lives. In this illuminating book, he provides rationales, narratives, and approaches for doing just that.

Mixing memoir, theory, mindfulness, pedagogy, and compelling storytelling, Thomashow discusses how to navigate the Anthropocene's rapid pace of change without further separating psyche from biosphere; why we should understand migration both ecologically and culturally; how to achieve constructive connectivity in both social and ecological networks; and why we should take a cosmopolitan bioregionalism perspective that unites local and global. Throughout, Thomashow invites readers to participate as educational explorers, encouraging them to better understand how and why environmental learning is crucial to human flourishing.

Part One: Why Environmental Learning Matters
1 The Past and Future of Environmental Learning
2 Memory Forever Unfolding
Part Two: Environmental Learning in the Anthropocene
3 The Tides of Change
4 Is the Anthropocene Blowing Your Mind?
Part Three: The Future of Environmental Learning
5 Constructive Connectivity (Ecological and Social Networks)
6 Migration (The Movement of People and Species)
7 Cosmopolitan Bioregionalism
Part Four: To Know the World
8 Improvisational Excellence
9 Perceptual Reciprocity“Mitch Thomashow is a preeminent environmental educator, and this book makes clear why: his range of curiosity, insight, and learning is remarkable, and remarkably useful to us all!”
—Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
 
“To Know the World provides a pathway of reconnecting and remembering, challenging us to embrace ecological learning and our connection to place so that we can co-create an equitable and just future in which we don’t just survive but thrive.”
—Amber Pairis, Director, Climate Science Alliance, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego; affiliate of the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center
 
“Using a compass of rich metaphor, deft synthesis, and a lifetime of personal experience, Thomashow envisions a hopeful path to the future of environmental learning, inviting and guiding us through thickets of social and environmental issues shaping our collective lives.”
—Running Grass, Executive Director, Three Circles Center for Multicultural Environmental Education; author of Principles of Multicultural Environmental LearningMitchell Thomashow is the author of Ecological Identity: Becoming a Reflective Environmentalist, Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change, and The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus (all published by the MIT Press).