Addressing “Plant Blindness” Through Reflective Reading and Creative Writing
The main focus of the learning activity is to combat “plant blindness,” a cognitive bias where people tend to overlook plants in their environment. By engaging students in reflective reading, creative writing, and hands-on plant care, the activity aims to foster empathy for plants and enhance their appreciation of the natural world.
The Natural World Speaks: Writing for the Rights of Nature
This creative writing activity prompts students to explore the Rights of Nature movement, which seeks to give natural entities legal personhood. By writing short stories or poems from the perspective of a natural entity, students will give nature a voice, reflect on environmental ethics, and consider the complex dimensions of granting nature legal rights.
Exploring Affect and Emotion: Doing a Care and Value-Based Ecomedia Analysis
This learning activity seeks to enhance ecomedia literacy by integrating critical thinking and emotional connections to media, emphasizing value-based literacy and care, fostering the creation of “brave spaces” for diverse perspectives, and promoting thoughtful media engagement through reflective practices and discussions on the alignment of media values with participants’ own.
Chobani Ad: Dear Alice
This short animated Choboni ad about the future of food production can be useful for exploring different environmental discourses, including pastoral, food, and sustainability. It can be used to generate a discussion about food, agriculture, eco-modernism, and mechanism.
Keep America Beautiful: The Crying Indian (1970)
This is a great media example for discussing environmental discourses and ideology. It utilizes the eco-utopian discourse (often represented by indigenous and First Nations peoples) to promote conservationist environmentalism, which aligns with anthropocentric environmental ideology.
How An Indigenous Worldview Can Preserve our Existence
This video offers a strong discussion on comparing the dominant worldview that is driving the world system with an indigenous view of life. Synopsis: “Our dominant ways of life are guided by an underlying worldview that has been the main driver behind climate change, pandemics and extinction rates. Overwhelming evidence reveals that our original Indigenous, nature-based worldview is an antidote. Supporting and Re-embracing this interconnected way of living is the most urgent course of action we must take.”
“Earthrise” by Amanda Gorman
Amanda Gorman demonstrates the power or art and poetry to reflect on the state of the environment and what we can do about it.
Chipotle Ad: Can a Burrito Change the World?
Chipotle asks, Can a burrito change the world? What kind of environmental discourses are used to answer this? How does it describe farming practices? How does Chipotle back its claims? Can Chipotle legitimately claim they are changing the food industry? Discuss the meaning of the phrase at the very end: How we grow our food is how we grow our future.
Indigenous Cosmology: The Honorable Harvest
This short video is part of a series called “Seeding the Field: 30 Years of Transformative Solutions,” which celebrates some of the best moments of the Bioneers conference through the last 30 years. “Indigenous peoples worldwide honor plants, not only as our sustainers, but as our oldest teachers who share teachings of generosity, creativity, sustainability and joy. By their living examples, plants spur our imaginations of how we might live. By braiding indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with modern tools of botanical science, Robin Kimmerer, professor of Environmental Science and Forestry, of Potawatomi ancestry.”
Indigenous-led Permaculture Brings Resilience And Food Sovereignty to Pine Ridge Reservation
This short 2020 documentary show how the Oglala Lakota are promoting food sovereignty through permaculture. This video is good to show the positive use of media to promote ecological values and also to demonstrate a transformative, ecocentric environmental ideology.