WiserEarth Editors

The Center for Ecoliteracy (CEL) is a public foundation, located in Berkeley, California, whose mission is education for sustainable living. It has been a pioneer in providing tools, ideas, and support for combining hands-on experience in the natural world with curricular innovation in K–12 education.

The Center administers a grant program, presents at regional and national meetings of educators and change makers, and publishes extensively online and in print through its own imprint (Learning in the Real World) and other media. The Center offers seminars and technical assistance in support of systemic change, convenes networks of its grantees, sponsors projects, and administers donor-advised funds.

The Center was established in 1995 by Peter Buckley, Fritjof Capra, and Zenobia Barlow to apply systems thinking to education for sustainable living. CEL follows Fritjof Capra's definition of sustainable communities as those designed so that their ways of life, thinking, and social institutions honor, support, and cooperate with nature's ability to sustain life. CEL believes that we can learn from societies that have lived sustainably for millennia and by emulating the processes and patterns of nature's ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms.



"Ecological literacy," for the Center, includes competencies of head, heart, hands, and spirit that children will need in order to contribute fully to sustainable communities. The projects that the Center has supported include habitat restoration, watershed exploration, art and poetry, school gardens and cooking classes, partnerships between farms and schools, school food innovation, and environmental justice.

Ecological Literacy: Educating our Children for a Sustainable World, edited by CEL senior editor Michael K. Stone and executive director Zenobia Barlow, presents the Center's conceptual foundations and chronicles some of the best work supported by the Center that puts those concepts into practice.



Rethinking School Lunch (RSL), a major current Center strategy, uses a systems approach to teach ecological knowledge, provide nutrition education, and address the crisis in childhood obesity, RSL offers a planning framework for food service and curriculum innovation that connects classroom studies with experiences in instructional gardens, kitchen classrooms, and school lunchrooms.

Rethinking School Lunch resources include a downloadable online guide; an ongoing essay series, "Thinking outside the Lunchbox"; a model wellness policy guide; a visual guide, "Linking Food, Culture, Health, and the Environment"; and outreach efforts, including presentations to professional organizations and NGOs, technical assistance, workshops, and seminars in the CEL Seminars Series. CEL is engaged with Teachers College Columbia University (TC) in a partnership based on RSL and Linking Food and the Environment (LiFE), an inquiry-based science and nutrition curriculum developed by TC that focuses on food and food systems and is aligned with the big ideas of science.