Telling into wholeness

Modernity glorifies hyperconsumerism and hyperindividualism, and gives rise to a consciousness of human separation from and superiority to nature. To counter these threats to our biological and sociological ecosystems, higher education in general, and sociology in particular, must adopt postmodern strategies to educate for survival. The metanarratives that served the modern age, such as "science" and "progress," prove inadequate for the postmodern age of ecological crisis. We urgently need a more life-centered vision. The ecological perspective replants our feet on the bedrock of biological and sociological connectedness. Although science has been central to modernity's destructiveness, ecology is a subversive science which can serve us well as both science and story; it is the central transformative image of a new postmodern metanarrative.