Introduction to this Issue

In the final days of assembling the mass of words you now hold between your hands, my mind kept returning to Nanao Sakaki's poem:

If you have time to chatter
Read books
If you have time to read
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean
If you have time to walk
Sing songs and dance
If you have time to dance
Sit quietly, you Happy Lucky Idiot

As I kept returning to the computer in the last couple weeks to put this all together (in lieu, sometimes, of walking, singing songs, dancing, or sitting quietly), I would modify the poem. In place of "Read books," I would substitute "Read or edit Talking Leaves," remembering that as soon as this was off to the printer I'd be doing something completely different, and it would be time for others to absorb what's in this magazine. Occasionally, too, I would add two additional couplets:

If you have time to learn from someone else's experience
Have your own

and (to temper Sakaki's somewhat solitary perspective)

If you have time to be alone
Join a circle

This issue of Talking Leaves is something of a University Without Walls. To best benefit from its "curriculum," you'll need to spend a lot of time doing things other than reading, writing, or experiencing the world through words. You'll need to do what our authors have done: put down your books, put down even this magazine, and experience the world directly. The common theme running through all our articles is that "Education for an Ecological Society" is an engaged education, a cultivation of our relationships with the natural world, with one another, and with ourselves. It involves the hands, the heart, and all of our senses, as well as the mind. It is practical, aesthetic, sensory, emotional, and often spiritual--not just intellectual. It is not abstract, compartmentalized, dry, irrelevant, or boring. (If your "education" has ever seemed that way, that's a good sign that it was not a particularly powerful force for the creation of a holistic society.)

The teachers in this "University" are the two-dozen-or-so contributors who share personal experiences of education, ideas about what "education for an ecological society" looks like, and stories of projects which promote ecological awareness and model ecological living. But in tallying those involved we must also consider the teachers of those teachers (who were and are also students), and their teachers as well...and all the non-human teachers too...so the actual number of faculty in this University Without Walls is quite large and theoretically almost infinite. We hope the courses live up to their potential.

We at Lost Valley were very gratified by the response to our solicitation of articles for this issue. The magazine nearly compiled itself, thanks to the contributors' enthusiasm for the subject. OK, we did need to do a little work to put this issue together. Several community members were seen writing and copy-editing feverishly in the wee hours of the morning, and one of the editors submitted to a lengthy interview in which he became surprisingly eloquent or long-winded (choose one). But for the most part this was a very easy, natural, unforced project for us to complete, because it reflects our own passions.

It's difficult to single out any of the articles in this issue without implicitly slighting the others. But I can't help but be thrilled that the likes of Dolores LaChapelle, Ocean Robbins, Joseph Cornell, Michael Ableman, Satish Kumar, and other lesser-known but equally compelling educators (and students) were willing to so freely share their insights and experiences in the pages of Talking Leaves. I've always thought that paraphrasing others, summing up what they are about to say--whether in speech-introductions at conferences or in tie-all-the-pieces-together editorials--can lessen the impact of hearing or reading them firsthand, and can even be presumptuous and insulting. So I hope to whet your appetite simply by saying that each of the pieces in this issue represents a world waiting to be discovered, and I'm not going to spoil it for you by giving you preconceptions about what you'll find there. No matter who you are, at least several articles here should excite you. If not, you're reading the wrong magazine.

We want to thank Carolyn Moran, for creating Talking Leaves nine years ago, shepherding its growth from a regional tabloid into a nationally- and internationally-distributed magazine, propelling it to the point where even after several publishing hiatuses it still elicits strong enthusiasm from a devoted, ever-expanding readership, and, finally, so graciously handing it over to us now that her alternative-fiber paper business is demanding most of her time and energy. Though all of the current editors have volunteered with Talking Leaves for several years, we are appreciating anew all the hard work that goes into producing a magazine like this one.

Thanks again for joining us in the rebirth of Talking Leaves!