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(Island Press, 2004)
Reviewed by Donald Green, AIA, THW Design
 This is the
10th anniversary edition of Earth in Mind: On Education,
Environment, and the Human Prospect, with the addition of a
new introduction and essay by the author. The overall content of
this book embraces the ideal that we as a society must change the
way we educate, to quote Orr, “we are failing in our duties to
the young, not least because we are failing to equip them to deal
with the consequences of what we are leaving behind.”
Earth in Mind is a must read for anyone interested in environmental
education. Orr presents the relationship between the nature of
education and how the environment is treated by the very
professionals that are the future. The original introduction began
with a list of facts and statistics that will shake the foundation
of ones belief system, to put them in the context of being ten
years old and to know that things have only become worse begs one
to investigate the balance of the text.
The book is a series of essays organized in four parts. The first
of which deals with the problem of education with regard to the
lack of environmental awareness and the problems that will persist
with a new generation of efficient vandals of our biosphere. Part
two delves into guiding principles for education reform, those
relationships of the human condition that are being lost through an
increasingly specialized education process.
After raising the issues to be addressed by education, Orr then
collects a series of essays within part three that propose
standards of measure for educational institutions. Accountability
from the universities and their graduates is a concept worth noting
as society to often rewards those that defile and exploit the
biosphere. The fourth part offers up alternatives to the current
direction of education, that innate part of us that draws us to
nature; what E.O. Wilson calls biophilia. The concept of local
knowledge and understanding our limitations is also relative to our
regaining environmental awareness.
In conclusion, Orr offers that there is still hope, with a
re-education and changes in current education we can realize what
the problem is and begin the transformation that is within all of
us.
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