Without healthy ecosystems all life suffers. To ensure that living beings can thrive on Earth, we must learn and teach about environmental issues, bringing a solutionary lens and intersectional theory to the conflicts that arise between human needs and desires and the environment that sustains life. Because climate change, the escalating rate of extinctions, habitat destruction, resource depletion, and pollution are growing threats, humane education includes environmental restoration and sustainability among its core topics and prepares people to transform unsustainable and unjust systems into ones that enable all life to flourish.
While human rights have been expanding and deepening over time, environmental degradation has also been expanding and deepening (often in direct proportion to growing human prosperity). The more resources we use, carbon dioxide we add to the atmosphere, and waste we create, the greater the threat to humans and nonhumans alike. Species extinction rates are increasing, and we may lose half of all species on Earth by the end of this century.
Human rights and environmental sustainability also interconnect within the intersectional issue of environmental racism – wherein marginalized communities living in poverty and subject to forms of racial and other institutionalized oppressions bear the brunt of environmentally-destructive, dangerous, and unhealthy systems that disproportionately affect them. These include global warming impacts that cause desertification and flooding leading to climate refugees, as well as higher cancer rates caused by industrial pollutants dumped in high-poverty and racially-segregated areas.
Is it possible for humans to prosper within ecologically restorative and sustainable systems? Is it possible to slow the rate of global warming and create sustainable energy, production, and transportation systems? Is it possible to replace factory farming with regenerative and healthy food systems? Is it possible to end racist systems and therefore environmental racism?
We believe the answer to these questions is yes. Our humane education graduate program will help you educate people to be solutionaries who build new and healthier systems. Solutionaries are developing ideas for restoring ecosystems, creating clean energy systems, and building a green economy that helps both people and the environment. We need more of solutionaries, which means we need more humane educators.
To Advance Environmental Protection, Restoration, and Sustainability, Humane Education Explores:
- Initiatives to create clean, renewable energy and transportation systems that also provide well-paying jobs
- Approaches to resource extraction and production that are sustainable and just
- Ideas to avert the worst case scenarios arising from global climate change
- Systems that are good for all people, animals, and nature
- Educational approaches that help people of all ages to become solutionaries
Solutionaries Create Environmental Sustainability and Environmental Justice
Since one of the most powerful ways that we can create change is to become a solutionary, able to identify unjust, inhumane, and unsustainable systems and then create solutions that do the most good and least harm for people, animals, and the environment, our programs begin with ensuring you have the knowledge and skills to be a solutionary yourself. Then you’ll learn how to bring a solutionary lens to environmental and intersectional issues that concern you so you can educate others. This kind of learning is positive, energizing, and hopeful.
Here’s a 90-second video to provide a taste of what solutionaries can and will achieve.
If you find yourself despairing about environmental destruction and injustice, we invite you to learn with us and develop the skills and ways of thinking to build a healthy future.
