Ecological Literacy Analysis - David Orr

A response to David Orr’s Ecological Literacy

David Orr’s “Ecological Literacy” is a well written piece on ecological literacy and is an admiration of the mutual relationship between physical and social environments. Orr is one of the professors at Oberlin College in the field of Environmental Studies. His article was written in 1992 to the general public about how ecological literacy is no longer taught and how this could be changed. Orr is also arguing with the general public about their way of teaching and what they are teaching. Orr feels that ecological literacy needs to be taught more because the attitudes in education are geared towards economics and specialized fields instead of looking at the world as a whole and noticing the problems occurring in it. My personal opinion on Orr’s article is that I agree with that education should be more geared towards the natural world and that education needs to be more outdoors than indoors. Although I do disagree with that we are becoming too specialized and we are only geared towards one subject.

Orr starts by with defining what Ecological Literacy is according to Garret Hardin. Hardin described it as the phrase “What then?” (1992, p.299). He feels that much more attention is given to mathematics and reading than ecological literacy (p. 299). He also feels that the question, “What then”, has been hard for us to answer (p. 299). The question applies to when the last rainforest that will disappear or when the planet will have warmed up to a point we can no longer tolerate (p. 300). Orr then continues to mention that we are failing to educate about the basics of the earth or teach people about the things that are wrong (p. 300). It seems that since ecology is not included in our education, that we feel that ecology is not important to the world (p. 300). He mentions that the result of these failures is a “generation of ecological yahoos” that do not know why the earth is changing (p. 300). This generation will...