Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci — EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse, Democratic, and Sustainable Communities

213 published claims from this book.

• A culture’s real internal problems do not negate the sustainability lessons it offers.
• A logic of domination justifies ruling nature via culture-nature hierarchy.
• A public school can place the environment at the center of its whole curriculum
• A ranked thinking about beings underlies racism, sexism, and anthropocentrism alike
• Abstract scientific language cannot replace the particularizing language of love and reverence
• Accusations of romanticizing can mask a refusal to credit Indigenous ecological knowledge.
• Affluent parents pursue segregation while sincerely believing they favor equality
• An interdisciplinary senior seminar can focus an entire course on food systems and sustainability
• Animal species loss inflicts spiritual and psychological harm on Indigenous peoples
• Anthropocentric homogenization denies individual beings’ integrity and moral standing
• Anthropocentrism frames nature as dead and manipulable, outside ethical responsibility
• Apache moral education works by encoding ethical lessons into place-based stories told as needed.
• Assimilationist anti-racism both erased black-white difference and homogenized black peoples
• Autonomous thinking self is a fiction; mind is relational communication
• Believing blacks were animal-like masked the contradiction of slavery with equality.
• Beyond a threshold, income and GDP growth no longer increase human happiness.
• Biodiversity protects systems from collapse while monocultures die wholesale under disease.
• Black boys are overclassified as disabled and underplaced in advanced courses.
• Black drivers are routinely stopped without cause in a pattern whites never experience.
• Boarding schools aimed to extinguish native culture by manufacturing consumer desires
• Broad inclusion in decisions improves outcomes and fairness
• Childhood lead exposure impairs cognition and raises aggression and dropout
• Children’s protective actions in degraded neighborhoods can reveal overlooked community knowledge.
• Citizenship as uncritical law-obedience is ethically indefensible when states harm communities.
• City Repair’s Depave program reclaims paved land for gardens and community space.
• Class mobility in the U.S. is low and falling
• Classroom interactions act like root metaphors, transmitting power-laden assumptions students internalize.
• Colonial law deliberately manufactured racism to divide poor whites from enslaved blacks.
• Color blindness claims deny systematic racism while erasing cultural difference.
• Community theatre transforms isolated audiences into creators of original work
• Controlling water supplies enables control over the people who depend on them
• Cooperative generosity cascades through social networks and triples in effect.
• Corporate privatization of water and seeds erodes local communities’ decision-making power
• Corporate water control persists through lawsuits and quietly seizing sources after grassroots wins
• Corporations patent community-bred seeds by altering a few genes, an act communities call biopiracy
• Crack cocaine sentencing disparity is racially discriminatory in practice
• Critique of modernist discourse does not presume one right way of seeing
• Cultural deprivation theories blame family values for what are really symptoms of economic deprivation.
• Cultural identity for hunting peoples is defined by kinship relations with specific animals
• Cultural practices can be reformed from within their own traditions rather than by outsiders.
• Cultures differ over whether the world is a living whole or a machine
• Curricular omission teaches all students that queer people have done nothing worthwhile.
• Decentralized decision-making by those directly impacted is intrinsic to democracy.
• Deficit explanations deflect analysis of structural barriers like low-wage jobs
• Deficit explanations shift between genetics and laziness without changing their logic
• Deficit frameworks like Ruby Payne’s let schools shift blame onto poor families
• Deficit labels persist under new names like ‘at risk’ after old terms fade
• Desegregation created a double bind by trading communal bonds for competitive individualism
• Detroit’s 1,000+ urban gardens trace their food-commons roots to African and slave agricultural traditions
• Detroit’s incinerator concentrates toxic harm on poor communities of color
• Difference is a generative relationship, not a fixed property of things
• Direction names in native languages encode the sun’s motion and embed persons in place
• Discourse critique of progress does not condemn all change as bad.
• Discourses are systems of shared cultural meanings built from interlocking root metaphors.
• Discourses rationalizing sexism parallel and depend on those justifying harm to animals
• Doing well in school can be coded by minority peers as betraying one’s culture
• Dominant groups deny their dependency on those they exclude
• Early racial science ranked African women between humans and orangutans
• Early racial scientists classified species downward from humans without any theory of evolution.
• Early women’s education advocates kept reason masculine and only expanded the feminine sphere
• Earth Democracy rests on ten principles centered on intrinsic worth and local economies
• Eco-ethical consciousness requires analyzing cultural roots of ecological harm
• Eco-justice programs must be tailored to each community’s particular history and ecology
• Ecojustice educators must honor indigenous knowledges without appropriating or speaking for them
• Economic abandonment forced Detroit residents to revive commons practices of barter and mutual care
• Economically marginalized people bear disproportionate air pollution and asthma burdens
• Ecosystem resilience increases with species diversity against species loss
• Elite distrust of ordinary citizens shaped America’s representative form of governance.
• Elite foreign schooling can intensify arrogance and self-contempt toward one’s own country
• Elite resort to armed force signals the breakdown of globalization’s assumed inevitability
• Enclosure extends beyond land to privatization of formerly shared services like water.
• Enclosure makes private property from what was freely shared
• Engagement-based teaching may raise test scores better than test-driven coverage
• Enlightenment liberal democracy defines freedom negatively as freedom from interference.
• Environmental content must be balanced with other subjects to be palatable in place-based education.
• Environmental problems require cultural analysis, not just scientific study
• Environmental racism includes exclusion from ecology movement leadership
• Essential questions structure community-based eco-justice learning projects.
• Even an instructor teaching microaggressions can perpetrate them unawares on a colleague.
• Fairer human rules cannot fix the ecological catastrophe inherent to industrialization.
• Feminism analyzes how women were inferiorized and connects sexism to other dominations
• Free trade treaties free capital flows while criminalizing the displaced people they create
• GATT tariffs locked former colonies into exporting raw materials only
• Gender is constructed meaning assigned to sex, not given by biology
• Globalization converted subsistence wellbeing into new mass poverty and social breakdown
• Globalization is externally imposed and benefits globalizers over its victims
• Healthy living systems circulate collaborative intelligence that fails when beings see themselves as superior.
• Homogenization renders others interchangeable resources to be managed
• Housing discrimination, not just law, produced northern school segregation
• Human fallibility justifies democratic decision-making over imposed certainty
• Human marginalization and ecological exploitation share one root of value-hierarchized thought
• Illich frames generous shared practices as blessings whose worth bypasses monetary value.
• Imagining cultures built on alternative root metaphors teaches students that current ones are chosen.
• Indigenous hunting frames taking animal life as an honored ceremonial kinship sacrifice
• Indigenous knowledge is simultaneously practical and immanent, not transcendent, in its spirituality
• Indigenous oral records can span centuries beyond Western scientific statistics
• Indigenous storytelling develops creative and metaphoric thinking capacities across the lifespan.
• Individual-focused holistic education hides culture’s shaping role
• Individualism treats humans as autonomous accumulators detached from community.
• Industrialization converted women from producers to consumers and opened teaching to them
• Internalized gendered definitions remain nearly invisible yet still violent in schools today
• Interrupting the logic of domination must pervade every classroom choice, not just content
• Land-based cultures tied their survival ethics to maintaining the land’s carrying capacity.
• Language loss threatens biological diversity they encode
• Learning paths must engage students’ hearts, minds, and hands to end apathy
• Local alternative currencies reward one hour of work with one hour of community credit
• Local food efforts respond to urban health crisis and industrial agriculture’s harm
• Local organizing successfully overturned city bans on backyard hens and bees
• Manifest destiny deployed civilization-savagery metaphors tying racism to anthropocentrism
• Medieval Europeans did not view dark-skinned Africans as naturally inferior.
• Mere existence entitles every being to equal community standing
• Merely resisting school can reproduce the class system it aims to escape
• Microaggressions leave their targets humiliated while aggressors feel satisfied.
• Mixed-race IQ patterns refute claims of inherited racial intelligence differences.
• Moderners can reclaim sustainable practices from their own ancestral traditions.
• Modernization pressures systematically marginalize Ladakhi women
• Municipal water privatization victimized and blamed already-impoverished Highland Park residents
• NAFTA’s corn flood devastated Chiapas small farmers and triggered the Zapatista uprising
• Neocolonialism controls southern economies through money and trade rules rather than armies
• Nestlé bottling took public Michigan water for under $100 a year in licensing fees
• Nestlé disputed local water impacts the courts later found real
• North American produce travels an average of 1,500 miles to consumers.
• Northern-educated Southern leaders internalize the view that their own cultures are inferior
• One form of anti-globalization politics reforms the system’s rules without questioning industrialization itself.
• People still sustain cultural commons daily despite hyper-consumer society
• Place-based environmental schooling can exist without critiquing modernity’s assumptions
• Post-war farm subsidies favoring big farms destroyed the small-dairy economy.
• Public art revitalizes community by giving voice to silenced groups
• Public schools should cultivate ethical thought about cultural patterns harming life
• Quechua ecological feeling is sensual and continuous with landscape, weather, and the dead
• Race has no genetic basis yet produces real material consequences.
• Race is a culturally invented discursive category used to inferiorize groups.
• Racism depends logically on the prior devaluation of animals.
• Racism logically depends on the prior belief that animals and nature are inferior.
• Racism uses value hierarchies framed as natural to control and exploit
• Resource extraction and native dispossession proceeded as one linked process
• Rich sustainable knowledge already exists and does not require reinvention by experts.
• Root metaphors are buried cultural assumptions reproduced unconsciously across generations
• Root metaphors combine into culturally inherited discourses and discursive practices
• Schooling has historically perpetuated social and ecological violence despite appearing benign.
• Schools sustain low expectations through a silent bargain among teachers, counselors, and parents
• Science presents itself as universal and culture-free but is itself a cultural discourse
• Seeing the farm as a factory erases living interdependence from perception
• Segregation’s core harm was discursive inferiorization, not separation itself
• Settler schooling functioned deliberately as deculturalization of native peoples
• Sexism, racism, and anthropocentrism all share a value-hierarchized logic of domination
• Shifting metaphors can shift thought and behavior toward sustainability.
• Simulated auctions can teach students how capital exploits inter-country competition
• Skin color alone marked chattel slaves regardless of other social position
• Social Darwinism projected industrial class competition onto evolution, not Darwin’s idea.
• Social justice silos must yield to analysis of intertwining hierarchies’ shared logic.
• Social progress has hidden, not ended, the modern discourses causing domination.
• Socialist states have been as ecologically destructive as capitalist ones
• Soil composition emerges from relationships among elemental differences
• Southern debt payments function as a silent war against the Third World
• Standard schooling taught the Enlightenment as rescue while hiding commons destruction.
• State officials reversed a court win for commoners under industry influence
• Street theatre performance can make hidden water systems visible again
• Students internalize class position so deeply they choose lower tracks voluntarily
• Subsidized U.S. corn flowing into Mexico under NAFTA displaced millions of Mexican farmers
• Sustainability can mean transforming, not adding to, education
• Sustainable communities must weigh every change against community and local nature
• Sustainable communities never interfere with natural systems’ self-regeneration
• Taken-for-granted belief patterns are politically invented human products, not natural or inevitable
• Taken-for-granted language reproduces value hierarchies and centric thinking
• Teachers must validate students without validating the discourse that oppresses them
• Teachers reinforce cultural analysis by embedding it in every assignment rather than isolated lessons.
• Teachers’ metaphor choice can include or exclude students from discussion.
• Teaching explicit analytic concepts dissolves the illusion that current social norms are natural.
• The 2008 economic crisis triggered a massive surge in bartering in the U.S.
• The Amish practice controlled change by deliberatively testing innovations
• The commons are unowned and require no money to access.
• The commons concept names shared practices protecting seeds, water, forests, and soil worldwide.
• The concept of trash itself is a product of modernization
• The Cult of True Womanhood redeployed subordinating metaphors to justify women’s education
• The cultural commons are shared practices and goods never requiring monetary exchange
• The development metaphor hides developed nations’ largest share of ecological damage.
• The ecological crisis is fundamentally a crisis in learned patterns of thought
• The English Enclosure Acts forced peasants off commons land into factory labor.
• The entire human conceptual system operates metaphorically, not just literary language.
• The female body functions as a metaphor for inferiority used to police male gender.
• The Great Chain of Being framed all beings in a fixed value hierarchy.
• The Green Revolution’s yield gains depend on monocultures that destroy local farming knowledge.
• The idea of universal human rights is one culture’s tradition, not a self-evident creed.
• The ideal of meritocracy rationalizes social inequality as natural individual failure.
• The myth of meritocracy makes Americans deny class differences
• The prom ritual regulates heteronormativity and white class privilege.
• The top one percent’s income share more than doubled from 1975 to 2005
• The US Supreme Court’s Milliken ruling barred suburban-wide desegregation remedies
• Thematic curriculum can unite every subject around a local environmental place
• Those deemed most virtuous in early US politics were also the largest landowners.
• Title IX covers all federally funded educational opportunities, not just athletics.
• Tracking was created in the 1900s to socialize working-class students for factory jobs
• Traditional African slavery was often time-limited and permitted full social integration
• Transition initiatives host reskilling workshops that reteach self-sufficient skills.
• U.S. class mobility is lower than many European countries despite its anti-aristocratic myth
• U.S. forces slaughtered buffalo deliberately to starve Native peoples into submission
• U.S. treatment of Native Americans constituted genocide through varied means including education
• Unconscious racial bias measurably degrades medical treatment for black patients.
• Underfunded segregated black schools often still matched white schools in quality
• Understanding material disparities requires tracing historical inferiorizing discourses
• Unintentional racial microaggressions flow from well-meaning whites who deny their own bias.
• Universalizing Western norms is colonizing and reproduces racism.
• Value hierarchies become second-nature through historically embedded discourse
• Valuing one being over another invites discrimination against others
• Well-intentioned curiosity can reduce people of color to objects for white examination.
• Western education severed knowledge from its narrative context, making disciplines domains of status.
• Western-educated Southern elites end up belonging to no culture at all
• What Hardin called the tragedy of the commons is really the tragedy of enclosure
• White flight, redlining, and factory relocation created Detroit’s brownfield-laden food desert
• White privilege consists of unearned daily assets invisible to those who hold them.
• Whiteness is a privilege gained by excluding blacks from one’s occupations
• Whites dismiss individual microaggressions because they cannot see the accumulated pattern.