Kahn response

In Richard Kahn’s Towards Ecopedagogy: Weaving a Broad Based Pedology of Liberation for Animals, Nature, and the Oppressed People of Earth Kahn notes the ongoing problem of people not realizing the effect we are having on the world. People are not conscious of how close to global ecological catastrophe we are.  Kahn in his article points to  his idea of Eopedagogy, defined as a movement and an approach to education to teach children literacy in the environment.

Recently the earth has been experiencing a mass extinction of many species. This extinction being the greatest in the last sixty-five million years. All of this in the past 30 years with no trend of slowing down. This is all do to the massive growth of humans. Take the rainforests for example. We are rapidly clear cutting those forests for our own purpose with no care for the many different organisms we are driving to extinction, many left never to even be discovered. Also some of these might hold keys to the cures for modern diseases and even diseases that are yet to arise.

Kahn gives note to how the human race is actually very ignorant to the environmental issues and problems we are enacting to the earth. Some facts stated about Americans on page 6, which I believed to be very well educated, 45 million Americans s think the ocean is a fresh source of water, 125 million Americans think that aerosol spray cans still contain

stratospheric ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) despite the fact

that they were banned from use in 1978, 123 million Americans believe that disposable diapers represent the

leading landfill problem when they in fact only represent 1% of all landfill

material and 130 million Americans currently believe that hydropower is the country’s

leading energy source when, as a renewable form of energy, it contributes

only 10% of the nation’s total energy supply.

These numbers are very troubling as we our one of the most educated societies on earth and we are this ignorant. This means that it’s even worse for other countries where people have little to no access to education, even on the elementary level.

I believe that Kahn is right in that we must make a move towards Ecopedagogy and is necessary for our future and the future of the earth as we know it. We need to better inform the public of what our effect and consequences are on the earth. Schools such as the “Zoo School”, would be a great way to teach students the necessary knowledge for a new environmentally conscious society.