role of the academy

Thomas Berry (1999) suggests that his generation has been autistic to the voices of animate Earth (see also, Abram, 1996, 2006). He also offers the hopeful claim that through their insight, freedom, critical capacity, contact with the younger generation and influence over society, universities have special capacities to "reorient the human community towards a greater awareness that the human exists, survives, and becomes whole only within the single great community of the planet Earth" (pp. 79-80). Yet while conceptual reasoned consciousness remains the dominant and privileged way of knowing and linear text the primary accepted way of representing research, the boundaries of what constitutes legitimate environmental education research may be making this reorientation more difficult to enact. In some instances, the stretching of these boundaries is already happening (see, for example, Abram, 2006; Cole, 2002; Cole & O'Riley, 2009; Nolan, 2001, 2007; Meyers, Brody, Dillon et. al, 2007).