ABSTRACT
The crux of environmental crises is human's existential disconnection, from each other, from non-human life, from the web of everything. Recycling is certainly better than not recycling, but it has limitations since in no way does it challenge the dominant paradigm of growth and consumption. The other two recycling, reusing and reducing, as responses to the environmental challenge, are not taken seriously in most public schools. David Selby worries that even as a discreet subject in the curriculum, climate change is relegated to an environmental problem that has technical fixes. This broader response to the environmental crisis means a radical rethinking of the dominant myths that have served to organize human civilization for the last several hundred years: progress, growth, and nature-as-resource. Teachers who have no therapeutic training can play an important role in supporting children's recovery from the trauma and anticipated trauma stemming from environmental crises.
