The essays in this volume represent grassroots restoration work in higher education
for sustainability. Over the last five years, faculty in the humanities and social sciences
at a wide range of institutions across North America have individually and together
begun to do what David Orr called for in the 1990s in Earth in Mind. They have
gone back to their respective disciplines and, with intellectual agility, courage, and a
sense of adventure and responsibility, begun to rethink old assumptions, ask the big
questions, and readjust their own narratives about what it means to educate, to learn,
and to know - with the challenges of sustainability in mind.
Sustainability educators have had to engage entirely new disciplines, work
closely with non-academic institutional and community partners, take pedagogical
risks, invent new courses and entirely reconfigure old ones, and learn anew how to
draw on cultural wisdom from their own experience and disciplinary training. They
have inspired, cajoled, and tended individual change, institutional change, and social
change. They have come together in conferences, working groups, and networks to
reflect on pedagogical theory, learning outcomes, and assessment for sustainability.
The curricular innovation these essays describe, then, is restoration - not as refurbishing
an older reality - but as restitution and renewal of teaching that requires creativity,
intuition, constant negotiation, and thoughtful, sustained cooperation between diverse
partners.

The main purpose of this volume is to provide a snapshot of this curricular
restoration for sustainability within U.S. higher education. The impetus behind this
collection of essays was the sense, gathered from regional and national conferences
and networks, that descriptions of ?brown” curriculum lagging behind ?green”
building and infrastructure miss out on the range of innovations and the institutional
significance of sustainability curricular change currently underway.
Sustainability education is, in fact, increasingly taking a lead role in transforming
the landscape of higher education, serving as a catalyst for the integration of cutting
edge pedagogical practices, including project and problem-based learning, multidisciplinary
learning, and transformative and collaborative education. If, as Arjen
Wals and John Blewit have suggested, we are in what could be called a ?third wave”
of sustainability in higher education, curricular innovation is key to the movement of
this wave.
As institutions reorient teaching, learning, research, and university-community
relationships to make sustainability ?an emergent property” of their ?core activities,”
sustainability’s place in higher education curricula is ?shifting from one of campus
greening and curriculum integration to one of innovation and systemic change across
the whole university” (56, 70). As these essays make clear, curriculum, rather than
lagging behind, is often driving these ?third wave” efforts.
A second major impetus behind this collection was the desire to capture the
distinctive flavor of sustainability education in the humanities and social sciences.
Our answers to the challenges of sustainability cannot be primarily data-driven,
technological, or resolved from within current perceptions or paradigms. To sustain
what is worth sustaining we must re-examine values, draw on cultural wisdom, and
re-energize spiritual and philosophical traditions.
The essays in this volume represent creative answers to these calls for nontechnological
solutions. They attest to the enormous fruit borne from intersection
of problem-based, project-based interdisciplinary learning and liberal arts reflective
practices. As Neil Weissman has suggested, sustainability and the liberal arts are natural
partners. The