The educational initiative being promoted here is what will be called “education for ecological discipline”—education which will prepare students for a world in which ecological concerns will have the highest priority. Education for ecological discipline will be appropriate for a world in which the fragility of Earth’s ecosystems will suggest new ways of life, involving and transforming elements of ecological concern with which we are familiar today: conservation, recycling, and working with nature.

What follows is a general program for creating educational institutions oriented toward ecological discipline—eco-schools and eco-universities. The transformation advocated in this essay will involve a general “reimagining” of educational institutions, a change in the social imaginary of “education,” such that its innovative aspects are allowed to triumph over its disciplinary ones. Doing this would require that we re-imagine the structural aspects of education: the teachers, the educational goals, and the schools. Each section of the essay below will deal with each of these structural aspects.

But, before we understand the sort of educational initiative which is needed, we should understand what education is, what role it performs in the world society, and to what extent it can be transformed to play a positive role in a future of ecosystem crisis. This will be discussed in the preliminary section below.

From an understanding of educational initiatives, we can imagine the creation of an educational movement, leading to an initiative for social change, progressing ultimately to the transformation of world society’s relations with the natural world. But at some point the process becomes the creative masterpiece of all of its participants, and so the narrative of alternative, environmentally proactive education must yield to the work of multiple authors. This essay, in short, is a start.