Conclusion

Hands-On Hope

Our greatest hope in writing this book is that we have intrigued you with the idea that integrating emotional, social, and ecological intelligence lends the “secret sauce,” if you will, to academic achievement and ecological well-being.

Socially and emotionally engaged ecoliteracy offers a wise and gentle process through which educators can positively join with their students to understand the reality of the ecological problems we now face—and creatively reimagine solutions. It allows school communities to transform topics that are too often presented as immobilizing or seemingly distant threats into highly relevant and worthy challenges that give young people the experience of working to make a difference in their particular part of the world.

Through socially and emotionally engaged ecoliteracy, educators can help create a safe container for exploration, effectively guide students in inquiries that reveal the connections that might otherwise remain unseen, and know when to push and when to pull back. Above all, it permits teachers to contribute to important, meaningful education that builds—in vitally important ways—on the social and emotional learning skills that decades of research have now shown foster student achievement, inspire better attitudes, and cultivate improved behavior. It also plants the seeds for a positive relationship with the natural world that can sustain a young person's interest and involvement for a lifetime.

As you travel this path, we hope you will take as guideposts the five practices of socially and emotionally engaged ecoliteracy:

• Developing empathy for all forms of life
• Embracing sustainability as a community practice
• Making the invisible visible
• Anticipating unintended consequences
• Understanding how nature sustains life

We also want to leave you with a reminder of the belief that sustained every leader we met as he or she confronted myriad challenges, from trying to stop mountaintop mining to remaking a food system. In the face of great challenges, you can never know whether you will succeed. As Wendell Berry has said, whether you succeed is not even the right question; what matters is that you try to do the right thing. Whether big or small, the act in itself counts.

Exactly how much those acts count can be thought of as our “handprint”—the positive alternative to our ecological footprint—or the sum total of all the things we do that benefit the planet. In fact, just as this book was going to press we learned of a new resource we'd like to recommend as a final offering. The website www.handprinter.org allows a student or group to calculate their handprint from all their ecologically beneficial activities. This includes not just their own activities, but also those of people they persuade. So if students go door-to-door with a tire gauge and pump, convincing neighbors to fill their tires to the proper level as a simple gas-saving and carbon-reducing move, that raises the handprint of those students, that class, and the entire community.

To embrace our relationship to the natural world fully is to know that although some of our actions have negative impacts, we also have boundless potential to create a positive effect. That effect might be helping students to reduce their school's dependence on oil, discover how their lives are connected to people who live near mountaintop removal sites, build resilience in a watershed, or increase equitable access to healthy food. Or, it might be what you do one day. In the end, it comes down to what caring educators do best: creating the conditions for learning that nurture hands-on hope.