Ecoliteracy is the understanding of how the natural environment works, enabling more informed decisions and interactions with the land and sea around us.

When the people designing systems are ecoliterate, the systems will be more integrated with their environment. 

The term has evolved from an idea spawned in mid-century science fiction to a pinnacle of today’s environment-focused farming movements. In the 1965 novel Dune, Frank Herbert writes about “…teaching [the children] ecological literacy” in order to give them an awareness of the order of the natural world. In the 1990s, David W. Orr and Fritjof Capra wrote about the “well-being of the Earth” and the literacy required to understand and cultivate it. Later, Capra went on to cofound the Center for Ecoliteracy. His co-founder, Zenobia Barlow, wrote a book called Ecoliterate in 2012 with Lisa Bennett and Daniel Goleman. This book set out to further define the term ecoliteracy for a new generation. 

Before modern Western cultures industrialized our agricultural systems, people were required to have a closer relationship and knowledge of the landscapes around them. The only way to grow food successfully was to be in constant contact with the systems at work in the environment. This traditional ecological knowledge and the relationships that indigenous people have with the places they are local to were largely superseded in the 20th century by industrialization, as farms became corporatized. As we learn more about humans’ impact on the climate and work towards a less destructive way of living in connection with the land, we can turn to ecoliteracy to bring this knowledge back into public consciousness and cultivate better practices in our agricultural systems.

According to the Center for Ecoliteracy, the aims of ecoliteracy are to foster empathy for all forms of life; to foster sustainability as a community practice; to make the invisible visible; to anticipate unintended consequences; and to understand how nature sustains life. When these ideals come together, a deeper understanding of the world around us is formed. 

Let’s take a look at how Ocean Hour Farm is putting these ideals into action!

Ecoliteracy Initiatives at Ocean Hour Farm

Ocean Hour Farm is a teaching farm. As part of our initiative to build ecoliteracy in our local community, we collaborated with the Environmental Science class at Rogers High School. During the fall semester, students kept a “tree journal.” They each chose a tree near their home or school and took notes and sketches as they visited it repeatedly throughout the semester. By recording their observations, these students were able to track the changing seasons, witness shifts and movements in the surrounding environment, and connect with the natural world. 

The students also learned about how the natural environment affects practical design choices; practiced paying attention and curiosity by sitting with plants; foraged for native edible and medicinal plants; and applied their new skills to a permaculture design project in which they designed, built, and planted an educational garden as a group. 

We also collaborated with Rogers High School’s ninth-grade Climate Resiliency project for the second year. The entire ninth grade came to visit Ocean Hour Farm, and learned about water cycles, watersheds, and how water moves through landscapes as part of a larger conversation of the land-sea connection. The farm demonstrated how water moved through three different ground surfaces: concrete, bare earth, and planted soil. Students were able to observe and understand how these different surfaces affect runoff and infiltration rates, and why this is important for the health of our waterways. 

Ecoliteracy in your life

By building ecoliteracy initiatives into your life, you can gain awareness of how the systems of the natural world around you work. Active participation in your local ecosystem will make you more attuned to how it changes over time. Some ways you can put ecoliteracy into action in your life include:

• Keeping a journal and recording environmental changes as you notice them
• Learning to identify the native plants that grow in your area
• Introducing yourself to other people in your community and inviting them to participate in learning about the local environment
• Incorporating native plants and pollinators into your landscaping

Inviting ecoliteracy into our lives cements learning as a lifelong practice. Growing awareness of how our individual and community choices affect the environment around us makes us better stewards of it. 

Further Reading

• History and Aims of Ecoliteracy 
• The Center For Ecoliteracy