ABSTRACT
Teachers are vital in the nurturing of environmental stewardship of children. Teachers should reflect on their own values and behaviors in the context of Western culture. Non-Western cultures tend to understand human's relationship to nature and each other differently than we do in the West. We can learn much from non-Western cultures about alternatives to our individualistic and isolating ways of life. The author encourages teachers and children to study other cultures that live in more harmonious relationships with nature. She joined an environmental club in US during her first year of college. She understands how politics around energy drove the destruction of the environment and those politics were sustained by the profitability of certain political and economic agendas. After engaging in these political actions to protect the environment, she began to search for deeper understandings as to why we are in this state of environmental crisis in the first place.
