The essays in this volume represent grassroots restoration work in higher education for sustainability. Over the last five years, faculty in the humanities and social sciences at a wide range of institutions across North America have individually and together begun to do what David Orr called for in the 1990s in Earth in Mind. They have gone back to their respective disciplines and, with intellectual agility, courage, and a sense of adventure and responsibility, begun to rethink old assumptions, ask the big questions, and readjust their own narratives about what it means to educate, to learn, and to know - with the challenges of sustainability in mind. Sustainability educators have had to engage entirely new disciplines, work closely with non-academic institutional and community partners, take pedagogical risks, invent new courses and entirely reconfigure old ones, and learn anew how to draw on cultural wisdom from their own experience and disciplinary training. They have inspired, cajoled, and tended individual change, institutional change, and social change. They have come together in conferences, working groups, and networks to reflect on pedagogical theory, learning outcomes, and assessment for sustainability. The curricular innovation these essays describe, then, is restoration - not as refurbishing an older reality - but as restitution and renewal of teaching that requires creativity, intuition, constant negotiation, and thoughtful, sustained cooperation between diverse partners. The main purpose of this volume is to provide a snapshot of this curricular restoration for sustainability within U.S. higher education. The impetus behind this collection of essays was the sense, gathered from regional and national conferences and networks, that descriptions of "brown" curriculum lagging behind "green" building and infrastructure miss out on the range of innovations and the institutional significance of sustainability curricular change currently underway. Sustainability education is, in fact, increasingly taking a lead role in transforming the landscape of higher education, serving as a catalyst for the integration of cutting edge pedagogical practices, including project and problem-based learning, multidisciplinary learning, and transformative and collaborative education. If, as Arjen Wals and John Blewit have suggested, we are in what could be called a "third wave" of sustainability in higher education, curricular innovation is key to the movement of this wave. As institutions reorient teaching, learning, research, and university-community relationships to make sustainability "an emergent property" of their "core activities," sustainability's place in higher education curricula is "shifting from one of campus greening and curriculum integration to one of innovation and systemic change across the whole university" (56, 70). As these essays make clear, curriculum, rather than lagging behind, is often driving these "third wave" efforts. A second major impetus behind this collection was the desire to capture the distinctive flavor of sustainability education in the humanities and social sciences. Our answers to the challenges of sustainability cannot be primarily data-driven, technological, or resolved from within current perceptions or paradigms. To sustain what is worth sustaining we must re-examine values, draw on cultural wisdom, and re-energize spiritual and philosophical traditions. The essays in this volume represent creative answers to these calls for nontechnological solutions. They attest to the enormous fruit borne from intersection of problem-based, project-based interdisciplinary learning and liberal arts reflective practices. As Neil Weissman has suggested, sustainability and the liberal arts are natural partners. The breadth of the concept of sustainability requires input from virtually all disciplines. The holistic, critical thinking, learning to learn, intellectual flexibility, and ability to translate across disciplinary boundaries that mark sustainability education have long been the central aims of a liberal arts education. The origin and ultimate worth of sustainability centers on "citizenship"--something that the humanities and social sciences study and seek to cultivate ("Sustainability and Liberal Education: Partners by Nature"). The final impetus behind this project was to provide a resource for those wanting to infuse sustainability into traditional humanities and social science curricula. This resource can act as a space for theoretical reflection on the kind of dialogue that happens between sustainability education and disciplinary frameworks. As these essays make clear, integrating sustainability pushes back at traditional disciplinary approaches, re-energizing and re-orienting old frameworks, questions, and patterns of thinking. At the same time, the humanities and social sciences bring much-needed skills and dispositions to contemporary challenges: historical and theoretical depth, complexity and sophistication in analysis, and perspective and creativity in response. Our contributors speak about the dialogue from the perspective of a wide range of disciplines, including art and design, education, English, environmental studies, geography, history, Latin American studies, philosophy, political science, psychology, religious studies, womens' studies, and sustainability studies, and they have formed curricular partnerships with a wide range of professional schools, including Engineering, Law, Business, and Nursing. Our authors also represent a range of institutions, from small liberal arts colleges to major research institutions, with a range of commitment to sustainability, from strategic, institution-wide investment to sustainability education primarily driven by the energy and vision of a few individuals. Our hope is that this volume adds to the recent excellent collections on sustainability and higher education (e.g., Bartlett and Chase, Johnston, and Jones et al.) by providing additional examples of pedagogical innovation that focus on the humanities and social sciences.
