EcoJustice Dictionary

Words, as Wolfgang Sachs has demonstrated in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge and Power (1982), take on different meanings depending upon the assumptions of the cultural group using them. From the perspective of Third World cultures, words that in the West are associated with progress and development represent the language of colonization. When these same words are understood in terms of the assumptions and vital interests of Third World cultures, they take on an entirely different meaning.

The meaning of words used by educational reformers who have as their goals universal emancipation, a linear form of progress, and the continuation of an anthropocentric understanding of human/Nature relationship is, from an ecojustice and revitalization of the commons perspective, part of the language that continues the tradition of Western colonization.

An EcoJustice dictionary is intended to clarify how the words used by emancipatory educational theorists take on an entirely different meaning when used in a discourse that addresses the importance of conserving linguistic and biodiversity, the commons as sites of resistance to the further spread of the West’s industrial culture, and the need to introduce reforms in the universities and public schools that contribute to achieving ecojustice for the world’s diverse peoples.