To All Our Friends: This is the 'draft' page for our developing Healing Earth online environmental science textbook that integrates ethics, spirituality, and a call for action. The website is still under construction, to be launched publicly in January 2016. In the meantime, we are inviting college teachers and upper level secondary school teachers teaching environmental science to look o
ver our 'product' and offer your feedback. The Healing Earth Introduction sets the stage; then take a look at one of the drafted chapters. We have a Teacher Guide in draft form too that we would be happy to email to you for your comments and contributions. In late 2011 a worldwide collaborative International Jesuit Ecology Project (IJEP) was conceived—a living environmental science text that provides the scientific basis of the primary environmental threats to the planet, while integrating an ethical analysis of the conflicts, formation in an environmental spirituality, and a call for action. The text is called Healing Earth and is a project developed within the Jesuit Higher Education Directorate in service to teachers and students in Higher Ed, upper level Secondary Ed, students and adult learners who are living in refugee camps around the world, and to all of those at the margins without access to textbooks. During the past three years, 90 Jesuits and Jesuit colleagues including students, university faculty, high school teachers and principals, language translators, scholars, and online production specialists from 11 countries representing all six regions of the world have participated in designing, writing, editing, evaluating, and piloting all aspects of the Healing Earth living text. In fall of 2015 chapters of the Healing Earth text will be used in pilot mode in seven high schools and four universities around the world. January 1, 2016 is the formal living textbook launching date where faculty and teachers in English, Spanish, and potentially Polish speaking countries will have access to use the textbook in its entirety.
