Center for Ecoliteracy

The Center for Ecoliteracy was founded by Fritjof Capra, Peter Buckley, and Zenobia Barlow in 1995 to promote ecological understanding in primary and secondary education. The organization emerged from Capra's growing conviction that systems thinking could not remain an academic pursuit if it was to make a civilizational difference; it had to reach the schools where children were being shaped into citizens of whatever world the twenty-first century produced. The Center pioneered the integration of ecological principles into school curricula, the development of school gardens as living classrooms, the reform of school food systems, and the training of teachers in the pedagogical practices that ecological literacy requires. Its influence has extended globally through books, curricula, and teacher-training programs adopted in thousands of schools. In the AI era, its mission takes on new urgency: the ecological literacy it promotes is precisely the cognitive orientation required to navigate the intelligence-ecosystem transition.