Education

I've never participated in a Council of All Beings. Not yet.

Councils of All Beings were designed by proponents of “deep ecology” to give people a direct emotional experience of their profound connection with the rest of the natural world. Deep ecology holds that the world was not made for human exploitation, that all its features have intrinsic value, and that our most urgent task is to re-discover our proper place among the life-forms that share this green and spinning planet.

That task requires that we transform ourselves socially, politically, intellectually, spiritually and emotionally. The toughest part is the spiritual and emotional piece – and that's what the Council of All Beings is about. It is one thing to understand intellectually that we are profoundly interconnected with the features and creatures that we are destroying. It is quite another thing to feel it on your skin and in your hair, and within your heart and spirit.

We recently posted our interview with Bunker Roy, the founder of India's Barefoot College, and an educational thinker of ruthless robustness. He won't educate people who have been spoiled by formal education, and he doesn't think highly of men as students, either. Among his greatest successes have been grandmothers from Africa, Afghanistan and the Himalayas, whom he's trained to be solar engineers and to bring electricity to their remote villages. In many ways, Bunker Roy's ideas turn our concepts of education on their heads.

I am standing atop a narrow ten-storey building in downtown Trois Rivières, Québec., gazing out across the immensity of the St. Lawrence. My companions include Rémi Tremblay, a senior administrator at the Université du Québec à Trois Rivières, and Jeanne Charbonneau, who heads a social enterprise known as Vire-Vert. Jeanne is aglow with excitement. In a few days, when the deal closes, Vire-Vert will own this building, and in close partnership with UQTR, it will convert the old commercial block into Canada's first Écol'Hôtel.

Canada's first what?