ABSTRACT
Over the past few years, the field of environmental education (EE) has begun to develop strong connections between socioecological crises and the radical neoliberal restructuring projects that have taken hold of the public education system in the US (Gruenewald and Manteaw 2007; Jickling and Wals 2008; Kahn 2010; Hursh and Henderson 2011; Martusewicz 2011). What this path-breaking work in the field of EE has made clear is that thinking about socio-ecological crises and neoliberal models of schooling separately is tantamount to talking about fire without smoke. Thought of in this way, the expansion of the charter school system, merit pay protocols, and new-fangled measurement devices such as value-added metrics attached to policies like Race to the Top are not dissimilar to free market responses to ecological crises. The governing of crises like deforestation and ‘drop out factory’ schools in neoliberal society are met with similar ways of thinking about people and plants as mismanaged forms of life.
