Editor's Note: Jaimie P. Cloud, founder and director of the Sustainability Education Center, is currently enrolled in a doctoral program in the Department of Environmental Psychology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Jaimie has been a leader among educators nationwide in promoting sustainability-related issues and materials – including sustainable food systems, ecological economics and the "ecological footprint." Doctoral study is providing Jaimie with a challenging context to explore important ideas in sustainability education, but it has also reminded her of the ways in which academic discourse can reinforce outdated and unhelpful notions of human control and the alleged divisions that separate human structures from natural processes. Below is an excerpt from an essay in which Jaimie wrestles with the ideas of a prominent Harvard social psychologist from earlier in the century, George Herbert Mead.

Mead believes we select our environment and short of a cataclysmic natural disaster or geological change, we control our environment. The environment in this scenario is passive. It is a backdrop, for all intents and purposes lifeless. But what if the environment were understood as a complex web of living systems that are acting and reacting reciprocally at all times? If the organism in this scenario is sensitive to the reciprocal nature of its relationship with its environment then it would know that it is not in a position to control the environment, but rather to interact with it. We would acknowledge that physically (and perhaps even subconsciously and in many other ways), we are reacting and acting all the time to the ecosystem whether we are sensitive to it or not.

As an example of this interaction, the plant systems on our planet create structure and order by using energy from the sun. The moist surfaces of plants and soil sequester material in the air, concentrating the dispersed particles. But what if we lay a great deal of concrete over those moist surfaces in our cities? What happens then? The next best moist surfaces in town, our lungs, take on the role of absorbing the aforementioned particles. We do not control that. Whether we are psychologically sensitive to it or not, we are acted upon and we are reacting.

Says Mead, "Our environment is made up of physical things/objects that we can get hold of, manipulate and break into parts. We thus break up our world into physical objects into an environment of things that we can manipulate and can utilize for our final ends." Mead does not take into consideration that by "getting hold of, manipulating and breaking into parts" our environment, without understanding how it works, what our relationship is to it, and what consequences follow from that manipulation, we can easily overwhelm/crash ecological systems and eventually destroy the environment's ability to sustain the conditions for our own life.

Mead insists that, "The development of human society has led to a very complete control of its environment. It is this control of its own evolution which is the goal of the development of human society". Mead uses as examples of our "very complete control" the fact that "the human form establishes its own home where it wishes; builds cities; brings its water from great distances; establishes the vegetation which shall grow about it; determines the animals that will exist; gets into the struggle which is going on now with insect life, determining what insects shall continue to live; is attempting to determine what micro-organisms shall remain in its environment. It determines by means of clothing and housing, what the temperature shall be about it...."

I will respond to these examples one by one. 1. The human form does not always have the choice or the access to build its own home, let alone build where it wishes; and even when we have a case such as the one he describes, other human forms, not to mention natural disasters-can and often do displace the aforementioned human form in question if the "common good" requires it i.e., if a highway needs to be built there or the city downstate needs the water supply the human form's house happens to be sitting next to... We do not have to extend our boundaries to the ecosystem to recognize that even our more immediate social, political and economic environments do not support this view. We are not in control. 2. The cities we build have turned out to be major contributors to health problems in both humans and the ecosystem because they have not been built to function successfully within the means of nature. We are not in control. 3. Bringing our water from great distances affects people and ecosystems both near and far in ways we both do and do not understand, and with consequences we certainly did not intend (including huge expenditures to maintain and "protect" our pipelines). We are not in control. 4. By establishing the vegetation that shall grow about us without understanding the complex, interdependent natural systems upon which that vegetation depends, we have altered complex processes, depleted top soil, suffered a loss of bio-diversity and ironically contributed to the hunger of farmers and their families all over the world. We are not in control. 5. By determining the animals, insects and micro-organisms that "should" exist, we have altered predator/prey relationships and set loose a host of biological nuisances, altering the complex natural systems upon which our own lives depend in ways we don't understand and cannot predict with certainty. We are not in control. 6. By determining, through clothing and housing, what the temperature shall be without taking into consideration the means of nature in our manufacturing processes and our production of energy, we have chaotically altered (but not determined) weather patterns (including temperature) on the planet. We are not in control.

In light of our current ecological literacy, it is clear that Mead's concept of the environment is limited and in many ways inaccurate. If a realization and achievement of a "higher self" is predicated on our superiority to and exploitation of the living systems upon which we depend, and if fundamental to the development of the self is the feeling of superiority over the natural systems despite evidence of negative repercussions, then what does that say about our perceived identity in this world? Will our very understanding of who we are be the death of us?