I am a professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Windsor. My scholarly interests revolve around the notion of health, dynamics, and learning organizations. In particular, I wonder how many of the current structures of education and the formal project of learning (called school) contribute to and are prompted by particular "toxic" views of life, illness, and disease. That is, what ought we be doing to improve society's sense of well-being and health?

 To be sure, an ecological sensibility is required where not only would society come to pay greater attention to environmental issues (which implicitly places human beings outside and disconnected from the rest of the world as if we could stand outside of the rest of the world and control it in particular ways) but see itself as an implicit part of the world. Human beings are implicitly connected with and to the world. What results from such an apparent disconnect is, in terms of society, culture and learning, a kind of "clear-cutting" of the spirit. Surely, there is no distinction between clear-cutting of a forest and a chopping down of a child's spirit. Society has much to learn from Nature on a range of matters that should give us some cause for thought on society's assumptions that a command-and-control, mechanical approach to the world actually work. Indeed, such a view is failing and only creating further concerns and problems.