“The name of things”: Lexical ecological literacy as Bildung in environmental and sustainability education

Something important has been forgotten in environmental and sustainability education: teaching ecological literacy. The concept was introduced as an educational field by David Orr, who argued for systemic thinking as well as educating for a sense of place. However, Orr's ecological literacy did not include the basis for understanding functions of the ecosystems: the names of species and other nature phenomena. This knowledge has generally fallen out of education, so that detailed knowledge regarding nature is currently endangered. In this essay, I revisit Orr's educational programme, and reconceptualise its importance in a Bildung for environmental and sustainability education. In doing so, I emphasize the importance of naming as a tool for relating to nature and communicating about ecology. A conceptual framework for a lexical ecological literacy is constructed around the human-ecological triad of nature, society and person, combined with a classical Didaktik typology of what, why and how to teach.