Democracy and the (missing) politics in environmental education

Our work as educators does not match the scope, scale, and urgency of the challenges we presently face and that our descendants will confront through the centuries of the "long emergency." There are many reasons for this, but most important is our tendency to overlook the hard reality that the use and disposition of land, air, water, forests, oceans, minerals, energy, and atmosphere are inevitably political having to do with "who gets what when and how." In other words, we do not have an environmental crisis as much as massive failure of political institutions and governments to foresee and forestall what has grown into the "long emergency."