ABSTRACT
This chapter presents tools for facing head-on the potentially paralyzing forces of hopelessness and denial that so easily accompany awareness of the social injustice inherent in ecological devastation, and that may thwart the power to work for a more ecologically healthy and socially just world. It identifies the vexing pedagogical challenges entailed in linking social justice to environmental sustainability. The chapter shares a paradigm called "critical mystical vision" and accompanying contemplative and reflective classroom exercises that address this challenge. The classes on eco-justice typically begin with opening students' eyes—that is, their hearts and minds—to the structural injustices that link some people's privilege to others' devastation. Teaching white students of relative economic privilege in the United States about climate change as climate debt, climate colonialism, and manifestation of white privilege may be dangerous, at least from a perspective that values hope and moral agency.
