In the new book Ecoliterate, authors Daniel Goleman, Lisa Bennett, and Zenobia Barlow argue that integrating emotional, social, and ecological intelligence leads to more effective environmental education and more effective activism. Here’s an excerpt from the book about one inspiring activist.

Teri Blanton. (Photo by iLoveMountains.org.)

Teri Blanton grew up on a dirt road in Harlan County, Ky. The daughter of one coal miner and sister of another who died in a mining accident, Blanton left briefly to marry, and then returned at 25 as a single mother of two. She bought a few acres of land behind her parents’ house and settled into a mobile home with her children and two big dogs. For years, she didn’t think twice about coal — until her kids, who waited for the school bus on the same road traveled by coal trucks, started complaining.

“You know, my son would say, ‘Our shoes get dirty before we get to school,’” Blanton recalls. “And, one morning, he told me, ‘Somebody has to drive us across this part of the road every day, because the coal muck is there.’ I went down there, and I’d seen it,” she says, “and it was just disgusting.”

Blanton called the county highway department to ask that they clean up the sludge, even by simply digging a ditch so it would run off to the side of the road rather than pool near the school bus stop. Instead, a coal truck appeared outside her mobile home and circled it all day.

“I called the road department dude back,” she recalls, “and said, ‘By any chance, did you call the mining company?’”

When he said yes, she asked to speak to his supervisor, whose only response was, “Lady, you have to learn to live with this if you live in a coal mining town.”

“I beg to differ,” she said. “My kids aren’t wading through muck to get on the school bus.”

Then she told the mining company that if they thought sending a coal truck to circle her home all day would intimidate her, they had another thing coming. “I don’t know why I felt so fearless,” she notes. “I probably should have been afraid, you know, but I wasn’t.”

Blanton eventually convinced the highway department to build a new road. But then her children began breaking out in rashes after taking baths, and she discovered that the groundwater feeding her well was poisoned with toxic chemicals from a nearby coal plant. She joined forces with two other women to educate her community and asked state and federal authorities to test their water. The women were portrayed as hysterical housewives in the local newspaper, she recalls. But they succeeded in getting the water tested, which led to the EPA declaring their community a Superfund site.

Some 5,000 pounds of contaminated soil were excavated (and trucked to Alabama to be stored next to a poor African-American community). But before the government took the next step — of extracting the contaminated groundwater through a pump-and-treat system — Blanton decided she’d had enough.

“In my mind, I knew that they were going to poison me and my kids all over again,” recalls Blanton, a cancer survivor. So she loaded her mobile home onto a flatbed truck and moved it, her children, and her dogs to western Kentucky. Leaving Harlan County, however, did not mean leaving behind her commitment to address mountaintop mining. She had come to understand all too well its impact on the people, land, and water. And she felt too much empathy for the people of her hometown — many of whom had died in their 50s and 60s.

Blanton has dedicated her life to fighting mountaintop mining ever since — standing up to coal companies; becoming a leader in Kentuckians for the Commonwealth; lobbying in Washington, D.C.; speaking to thousands of people at rallies; being arrested; and challenging her state senator on MSNBC.

In the process, she developed an instinctive sense of emotional, social, and ecological intelligence — enabling her to effectively educate and inspire others about environmental issues. Among her most essential lessons learned, she says, are these:

• Don’t communicate from a place of anger. “I started out expressing anger. I was angry. But that was not going to reach anybody.” You must be aware of your own feelings, have the ability to control them, and develop the facility to interact effectively with others.

• Reach people on the human level through stories. “I could tell you one statistic after another. But that isn’t going to reach you.” Effective leaders have empathy toward others and make connections for people by focusing on the human impact.

• Foster dialogue instead of debate. “I always try to find a place in conversation where you and I agree on something. And once we agree on something, then we can go on to have a dialogue.”

• Speak from the heart. Blanton learned this from a friend, Patty Wallace, who told her at a rally years before, “Put down the damn speech …”

• Make ecological connections clear to others. Blanton and her friends have been known to sing to make their point about the consequences of mountaintop-removal coal mining: “If you blow up the mountains, Push it in the valley, You gonna reap just what you sow.”

Adapted with permission of the publisher, Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint, from Ecoliterate: How Educators Are Cultivating Emotional, Social, and Ecological Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman, Lisa Bennett, and Zenobia Barlow. Copyright © 2012 by the Center for Ecoliteracy.

Look closely — what can you learn?Photo: Steve Wall

The first guiding principle of our work at the Center for Ecoliteracy is “nature is our teacher.” Taking nature as our teacher requires thinking in terms of systems, one of nature’s basic patterns. Systems can be incredibly complex, but the concept is quite straightforward. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, for example, defines a “system” as “any collection of things that have some influence on one another.” Individual things — like plants, people, schools, communities, and watersheds — are all systems of interrelated elements. At the same time, they can’t be fully understood apart from the larger systems in which they exist.

Living systems have their own dynamics. Observing systems reveals recurring properties and processes. They resist change, but they also develop, adapt, and evolve. Understanding how systems maintain themselves and how they change has very practical consequences that go to the heart of education for sustainable living.

Lesson #1:  To promote systems change, foster community and cultivate networks.

Most of the qualities of a living system, notes Fritjof Capra, are aspects of a single fundamental network pattern: nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities. Lasting change frequently requires a critical mass or density of interrelationships within a community. For instance, we’ve seen from research and our experience that curricular innovation at a school usually becomes sustainable only when at least a third of the faculty are engaged and committed.

“If nothing exists in isolation,” writes famed essayist Wendell Berry, “then all problems are circumstantial; no problem resides, or can be solved, in anybody’s department.” Even if problems defy solution by a single department, school districts are often structured so that responsibilities are assigned to isolated and unconnected divisions. Nutrition services may report to the business manager, while academic concerns lie within the domain of the director of curriculum. To achieve systems change, leaders must cross department boundaries and bring people addressing parts of the problem around the same table. For example, we’re currently coordinating a feasibility study with the Oakland Unified School District. It requires looking simultaneously at 10 aspects of school food operations (from teaching and learning to finance and facilities) identified in our Rethinking School Lunch framework.

In the push to make decisions and produce results quickly, it’s easy to bypass people — often the very people, such as food-service staff and custodians, who will have the task of implementing changes and whose cooperation is key to success. It’s necessary to keep asking: “Who’s being left out?” and “Who should be in the room?”

Lesson #2:  Work at multiple levels of scale.

“Nested systems” is a core ecological principle. Like Russian “matryoshka” dolls that fit one into the other, most systems contain other systems and are contained within larger systems: cells within organs within individuals within communities; classes within schools within districts within counties, states, and the nation.

Changing a system affects both the systems within it and the systems in which it is nested. The challenge for change agents is choosing the right level, or levels, of scale for the changes they seek. The answer is often working at multiple levels: top down, bottom up, outside in, and inside out.

The Center for Ecoliteracy is applying this strategy in Oakland. We’re supporting a pilot school, Cleveland Elementary, on garden and classroom projects that can be accomplished on a single campus. We’re helping to facilitate the Oakland Food Web, which is a network of teachers, parents, and staff members from several Oakland schools, the district’s food service, and the County Department of Public Health. The Oakland Unified School District feasibility study, meanwhile, is taking on changes that depend on centralized administration, facilities, economies of scale, and coordination possible only at the district level.

Lesson #3:  Make space for self-organization.

Fritjof Capra writes, “Perhaps the central concept in the systems view of life” is that the pattern favored by life “is a network pattern capable of self-organization.” He adds, “Life constantly reaches out into novelty, and this property of all living systems is the origin of development, learning, and evolution.”

Networks that can effect systems change will sometimes self-organize if you set up the right conditions. Our seminars and institutes are designed for teams representing schools and districts rather than for individuals. Parents, teachers, administrators, and community volunteers — sometimes including people who had not met before the seminar — have organized themselves into effective ongoing collaborations, such as the Oakland Food Web, which still continue.

Lesson #4:  Seize breakthrough opportunities when they arise.

Living systems generally remain in a stable state. That’s a good thing; otherwise, we’d be living in chaos. But it’s also why systems change can be so difficult. From time to time, however, a system encounters a point of instability where it is confronted by new circumstances or information that it can’t absorb without giving up some of its old structures, behaviors, or beliefs. That instability can precipitate either a breakdown or — due to systems’ capacities for self-organization — a breakthrough to new possibilities.

Remember the adage of former White House Chief of Staff (now Chicago Mayor-elect) Rahm Emanuel: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.“ Take the epidemic of obesity and nutrition-related disease. It’s a serious crisis that could precipitate a public health breakdown. At the same time, authorities who once viewed school food reform as a frivolous issue being promoted by foodies have now become more willing to look at the role that school food plays in an array of related problems ranging from rising health-care costs to disparities in academic achievement. And that willingness in turn has created opportunities to use food as an entrée for introducing a variety of sustainability topics into the curriculum, as we addressed in our book Big Ideas: Linking Food, Culture, Health, and the Environment.

Lesson #5:  Facilitate — but give up the illusion that you can direct — change.

“We never succeed in directing or telling people how they must change,” observes Margaret Wheatley. “We don’t succeed by handing them a plan, or pestering them with our interpretations, or relentlessly pressing forward with our agenda, believing that volume and intensity will convince them to see it our way.”

So what can you do? In the provocative maxim of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, “You can never direct a living system. You can only disturb it.” How do you disturb a system? By introducing information that contradicts old assumptions. By demonstrating that things people believe they can’t do are already being accomplished somewhere (one of the objectives of our book Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability). By inviting new people into the conversation. By rearranging structures so that people relate in ways they’re not used to. By presenting issues from different perspectives.

Meanwhile, you can create conditions that take advantage of the system’s capacity for generating creative solutions. Nurture networks of connection and communication, create climates of trust and mutual support, encourage questioning, and reward innovation. Effective leaders recognize emergent novelty, articulate it, and incorporate it into organizations’ designs. Leaders sometimes lead best when they loosen control and take the risk of dispersing authority and responsibility.

Lesson #6:  Assume that change is going to take time.

“Quick fixes are an oxymoron,” says Margaret Wheatley. “If leaders would learn anything from the past many years, it’s that there are no quick fixes. For most organizations, meaningful change is at least a three- to five-year process — though this seems impossibly long. Yet multiyear change efforts are the hard reality we must face.”

Anticipate that you’ll need time for the education and training required for people to change attitudes, adopt new practices, or use new tools. Set high goals, but take manageable steps. Look for intermediate achievements that allow people to experience — and celebrate — success and to receive recognition on the way to the ultimate goal.

Taking time for stakeholders to understand each other’s concerns and learn to trust each other’s motivations and intentions can be time well spent. The Oakland Unified School District has one of the most comprehensive wellness policies we’ve seen. Writing that policy began with scores of community members meeting in a process marked by debate and often disagreement. When the policy was finally formulated, though, it received buy-in throughout the community.

Lesson #7:  Be prepared to be surprised.

Change in living systems is nonlinear. As they develop and evolve, living systems generate phenomena that are not predictable from the properties of their individual parts, much as the wetness of water cannot be forecast by adding together the properties of hydrogen and oxygen. Systems theorists call these “emergent properties.”

In the late 1990s, we convened a disparate community of activists with a variety of complaints about school meals in Berkeley. A year later, the first district school food policy in the nation emerged. The coherence of the policy, which has had a worldwide impact, was an expression of the group rather than the vision of any single individual.

The art and science of systems change are continually evolving. We encourage people to experiment with these seven lessons — and to expect surprises. Frequently it’s the unanticipated consequences that are the most rewarding and effective results of immersion in dynamic systems.

This post was originally published by the Center for Ecoliteracy. © Copyright 2011 Center for Ecoliteracy. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.