More Than Being Green: A Response to Mike Mueller's Review of Transforming Environmental Education: Making the Cultural and Environmental Commons the Focus of Educational Reform

In this article, the author offers a response to Mike Mueller's review of "Transforming Environmental Education: Making the Cultural and Environmental Commons the Focus of Educational Reform." Mueller's review, although limited in the way all reviews are limited, makes a genuine contribution by not imposing interpretations that reflect the environmentally destructive modernizing paradigm that so many critics still take for granted. The author contends that one should avoid turning new concepts into slogans by ensuring that the discourse is based on an in-depth understanding of the relationships between cultural issues and possibilities and their environmental impacts, as well as an in-depth understanding of the assumptions that the other takes for granted. Science and environmental educators also will need to understand the cultural issues if they are to recognize when they have strayed into the area of scientism, and the nonscience teachers and professors need to understand how the challenges facing scientists and environmental educators are being magnified by the cultural assumptions they are reinforcing in their classes.