Can We Teach the Earth Charter Anymore? A Critical Examination of the Earth Charter’s Role in Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Earth Charter has become a dated guiding document for the field of environmental education. When the document debuted in 2000 as the global “framework to guide the transition to a sustainable future” (Earth Charter Initiative, n.d.-a, para. 2), the writers promoted it as a solution to environmental problems that incorporated voices of a wide spectrum of diverse communities from across the globe. The Earth Charter is a broad and ambitious document, designed to encourage action at local, national, and international levels (Earth Charter Initiative, 2009). Using critical discourse analysis methodology and social justice lenses, this paper examines the value of the Earth Charter as an educational tool as we enter the Anthropocene, a new geologic period in which our species is the largest force influencing and changing the planet (Olvitt, 2017). We argue that the Earth Charter reinforces dominant oppressive myths of sustainable development and excludes concerns voiced by marginalized populations. In perpetuating problematic narratives, we question the Earth Charter in its current form as a relevant and useful framework for informing environmental education 20 years after its publication. We suggest a method for updating the Earth Charter with social justice framing, using democratic, co-creative tools that are accessible to communities around the world, in their own languages. Resume Publiee en 2000, la Charte de la Terre est aujourd’hui depassee en tant que document-guide en education a l’environnement. Presentee a l’epoque comme un cadre mondial qui guiderait notre transition vers un avenir durable (Earth Charter Initiative, s.d., paragr. 2), elle apportait, selon ses auteurs, une solution aux problemes environnementaux qui conjuguait les voix d’une pluralite de groupes dans le monde. Document large et ambitieux, la Charte se voulait un moteur d’action a l’echelle locale, nationale et internationale (Earth Charter Initiative, 2009). La valeur de la Charte de la Terre en tant qu’outil educatif a l’aube de l’Anthropocene, cette nouvelle periode geologique ou, de toutes les especes, c’est l’humain qui exerce la plus grande influence sur la planete (Olvitt, 2017), est revue a la lumiere d’une analyse critique du discours et sous l’angle de la justice sociale. Nous avancons que la Charte de la Terre renforce non seulement les mythes oppressifs dominants du developpement durable, mais exclut aussi les preoccupations exprimees par les populations marginalisees. Or, sachant qu’elle perpetue des discours problematiques, nous remettons en question sa pertinence et son utilite sous sa forme actuelle, vieille de 20 ans, pour orienter l’education a l’environnement. Nous proposons une methode de mise a jour du document qui integrerait un cadre de justice sociale et des outils democratiques et cocreatifs accessibles aux societes du monde entier, dans leur langue.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.040 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.084 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".