Plenaries & Keynotes

A New Vision for Environmental Learning

Based on his groundbreaking new book, To Know the World, Mitchell explains how and why the environmental movement is undergoing a profound transformation to meet the challenges of our times. In this talk he explains the tides of change, what they mean, and how they can serve as the foundation for environmental learning, framed as a series of questions:

• The rapacious exploitation of the biosphere and its life systems continues unabated. How do we best communicate the necessity of ecosystem thinking?

• There is an increasing disparity between rich and poor. How do we promote economic equity and social justice in cultures of materialism and entitlement?

• There is great apprehension concerning the integration and separation of global cultures. How do we promote intercultural understanding and cosmopolitan thinking in the midst of national responses and ethnic tribalism?

• Violence, weaponry, and terror compete with deliberation, diplomacy, and collaboration. How do we settle our differences through community democracy, service, and compromise in the midst of conflict, autocracy, extreme behavior, and fear?

Constructive Connectivity: Perceiving Ecological and Social Networks

Network thinking is crucial to personal and professional success. Yet how to understand and engage in networks is rarely covered in educational settings. Mitchell explores the concept of constructive connectivity and how to promote learning that enhances an understanding of social and ecological networks, demonstrates the relationships between the two, and stimulates creativity and innovation by building relationships among diverse network clusters. He explains the parallels between observing networks in the biosphere and social sphere, and provides several roadmaps for teaching about network visualization. Understanding the interpenetration of ecological and social networks shows how as well as why cultural diversity and biodiversity are a foundation of environmental learning.

Understanding Migration: An Ecological and Cultural Perspective

The issues of global migration, refugees, and immigration are prominent worldwide controversies. Climate change, environmental insecurity, and political uncertainty catalyze global migration movements, and these concerns will reverberate for many years to come. The global migration crisis is one of the most important environmental issues of our times, and will challenge our most profound ethical and moral beliefs. In this address, Mitchell explains how we can expand our view of human migration by better understanding its context in multigenerational time, as a fundamental ecological and evolutionary component of human residency in the biosphere. He explores why migration is intrinsic to biosphere processes, why globalization is characteristic of human history, and how contemporary migration issues are redefining the relationship between cities and the countryside. He covers several inspiring projects that seek to welcome immigrants, and suggests these are templates for schools and communities. He introduce mapping activities that help teach about migration.

Is the Anthropocene Blowing Your Mind?

As frame rates increase and screens proliferate, our world becomes a spirited and frequently anxious competition between compulsion and intention. This isn’t unique to the internet era. You can walk through an ancient marketplace in an old city and experience a similar tension. It’s the intensity and ubiquity of the challenge that now matters. We all recognize the overwhelming influence of social media, tangled webs of interactive connectivity, and changing perceptual prospects of unwitting attachment to those processes. The Anthropocene represents the acceleration of two mutually conducive trends: the global extraction of natural resources and intensity of electronic connectivity. Few spaces on the globe are spared.

As we experience these trends, Mitchell asks, “Is the Anthropocene Blowing Your Mind?” This 1960s’ metaphor, originally referring to psychedelics, brilliantly envisioned the future. It connotes the rapid pace of perceptual change accompanying globalization. It conjures both an enthusiastic embrace of this change, especially regarding expanded consciousness, while acknowledging the risks of taking on such a challenge. The ecological ramifications of the Anthropocene reflect the accelerating pace of human impact on the biosphere. The psychological ramifications reflect the accelerating pace of human electronic connectivity. Our challenge is to better understand how these trends impact our psyches. Mitchell’s concern is that the pace of connectivity casts a spell on our attention spans, widening the gap between our psyches and the biosphere, depleting both our ecosystems and direct experience of the nonhuman. Our educational agenda is to narrow that widening gap. In this address, Mitchell suggests how we can step back and reflect on our immersion in screens, and consider that immersion as the residing perceptual experience of the Anthropocene. How do we sustain balancing processes that provide reflective guidance for this engagement?

Cosmopolitan Bioregionalism: Local and Global in the Twenty-First Century

Now more than ever, it’s crucial to explore the unfolding dynamics of the local and global—how place-based actions connect to global environmental challenges, and how global issues impact our local communities. In this address, Mitchell elaborates on the concepts of borders and boundaries, from both ecological and political perspectives, stressing that sovereignty claims—adjudicating the challenges of tribes and territories—remains a powerful hold on personal as well as cultural identity. He suggests that the concept of place has always been fundamental to environmental learning, and bioregionalism remains a thoughtful, vibrant, visionary, and practical policy application of that perspective. He shows that global urban sustainability initiatives and the growing field of urban ecology represent a vital and influential movement, understanding the necessity of connecting the city to the biosphere. There’s an emerging recognition that with one out of every twelve planetary citizens a migrant, refugee, or immigrant, a place-based perspective must entail a broader view, accommodating an enriching complex of planetary identity narratives. So many stories must be spoken and heard! Now more than ever, we require such narratives as well as educational strategies that welcome newcomers, promote tolerance and respect, allow for uncertainty, and facilitate adaptation and resilience while teaching us all how to live with difference.

Improvisational Excellence for Environmental Learning

Improvisation is the essence of adaptive learning, sparking the imagination, stimulating creativity, flow, innovation, and simulation, supplying the inspiration for ideas and solutions, emerging from spontaneity, play, vision, and the unconscious. Improvisation encourages learners to create, experiment, converse, apprehend patterns, encourage collaboration, and most important, adapt to ever-changing boundaries and circumstances. Yet improvisation also relies on structures (knowledge) and skills (practice) that ground learning in tradition and craft.

Improvisation is crucial to environmental learning, as it provides a path for perceiving and interpreting the extraordinary uncertainties of planetary change, and it is a conceptual foundation for the rapidly expanding field of environmental change science, providing new ways to think about human adaptation and resilience. In this address, Mitchell discusses the joys and challenges of improvisational learning and how it leads to insights regarding environmental change, adaptive flexibility, and teaching excellence.

The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus

Mitchell outlines a comprehensive strategy for campus sustainability that connects all aspects of campus life. Themes include how to use sustainability as the basis of institutional turnaround and branding, using organizational leadership as the basis for planning and change, and the profound ethical questions that drive sustainability thinking. He connects sustainability to global environmental change, natural history, place-based learning, educational philosophy, and human flourishing.

In addition to the plenary, Mitchell will work with the senior leadership of your institution to help catalyze and promote sustainability initiatives, facilitate meetings, and connect your campus to his national networks. When you bring him to campus for a full day he will work with any groups that are suitably engaged: from the board of trustees to faculty and staff to student clubs.

Rachel Carson: Finding the Wisdom & Insight for Global Environmental Citizenship

Rachel Carson traveled a long and harrowing path from the publication of Under the Sea Wind (1941) to Silent Spring (1962). Her journey has been central to our awareness that the environment that sustains us is essential and fragile, characterized by mutual dependence.  Carson’s legacy is the perspective, wisdom, and insight that help us understand the challenges of global environmental citizenship. How can we balance creation and extinction, wonder and indifference, hope and foreboding? This question remains absolutely pertinent to scientists and citizens alike who are concerned about climate change, threats to biodiversity, and altered biogeochemical cycles.