Our Story
In 1968, an astronaut on the Apollo 8 Mission, Bill Anders, took a famous photo. For the first time, we saw Earth rising over the moon and floating in space. Our planet looked like a bright blue marble swirling with white clouds. This photo changed how people think about Earth. We could see that we’re all one community sharing the same planet. Designer Buckminster Fuller called our shared journey on this blue marble Spaceship Earth.
Earthrise Commons comes from this idea. We work best when we come together around what we share. We live in Earth as part of nature, not on Earth, separate from it.
We think sustainability means living well with ourselves, each other, and nature. We see this in that perspective-changing photo of our planet. Our project is a prototype, a response to this call for education and action, to create harmony and peace within ourselves, others, and the more-than-human world.
What We’re Building
Earthrise Commons comprises two main projects that work together. Think of this as a community space, not just a place to store files. A community garden, not a warehouse of resources. Everything is free to use, remix, and share.
First, we made a free book called Sustainability Learning for Action and Community Engagement (published by Palgrave Macmillan Springer Nature in 2025). This book is about how people do sustainability education, and also how to be a sustainability educator. It shares ideas from teachers and community practitioners around the world. Most of our book authors work at colleges.
Second, we built this website as a platform with teaching materials. It has lesson plans, videos, and activities that teachers can use and change. We want these ideas to reach schools from kindergarten to college. Sustainability should be part of education at every level.
Free Book
Browse the book
The entire contents of the book are available for free open access via SpringerLink. Read more than 60 case studies on sustainability education in all subject areas from college faculty around the world, see related resources, and find lesson plans and submit your own.
Our Open Access book, Sustainability Learning for Action and Community Engagement (Palgrave Macmillan Springer Nature, to be published in 2025), brings together 50 people who teach sustainability in better and different, hands-on, and enlivening ways. Most work at SUNY schools. We also include voices from South Africa, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and Switzerland. Good ideas come when different people share their thoughts across cultures and disciplines.
Books like this usually cost around $128. Companies put them behind paywalls. We think good ideas should be free and easy to share. We’re deeply grateful for generous support from grant money from two SUNY IITG OER Impact Grants and Primary Source, a Massachussetts educational non-profit. These grants helped us make the book free on SpringerLink. This website gets 285 million visitors each year. You can read online, print pages or chapters, or listen to music and watch videos here.
Learning Website
Our website, earthrisecommons.org, is more than a place to get the book. It’s a living space where teachers find resources, lesson plans, videos, and activities that wouldn’t fit or feel alive in a book. The best part? You can change what you find here just along as you acknowledge the heritage of your work. Take someone’s lesson plan or resource, remix it, and make it work for your students and your community. Then share your remix.
But most importantly, credit those who worked on this before and with you! Our platform will allow you to see the different versions of the same teaching material.
A Place to Share & Remix (& Share Again)
We want Earthrise Commons to be a ‘third place.’ An idea coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, a third place is an environment that’s not home (our first place) or work (our second place). Instead, it’s where people meet and build community. Think of coffee shops, parks, libraries, and community centers.
These places help communities grow. They welcome everyone. Your background doesn’t matter. You can come and go freely. You can talk with friends and meet new people.
The best third places are free, like piazzas, parks, and libraries. They help people feel connected to their community. Third places matter for our well-being. They help people feel less alone. They help communities stay healthy. More people work from home now and spend time online. We need more real and digital meeting places. We hope Earthrise Commons can bring sustainability learning into your home and classroom.
Our Foundation & Growth
We believe in SUNY’s commitment to the pillars of student success, research, diversity, inclusion, and sustainable development. But we hope to reach beyond any single school system.
Our Team
This project grew from caring people in diverse disciplines working together. Again, we are grateful for grant money from SUNY OER IITG Impact Grants and Primary Source (a Massachusetts nonprofit) that helped make it possible. We also work with a student intern who learns about Open Scholarship and Sustainability with us. These two ideas connect in the idea of a commons, where people are stewards of shared environments.
Why This Work Matters
Knowledge is sunlight, which flows energy into green leaves, blossoms, and fruit. When one person learns about clean energy, better farming, or alleviating poverty, it doesn’t take away knowledge from someone else but rather pollinates and grows our wisdom. When more people understand and act on these ideas, our future gets brighter.
Too often, schools keep knowledge walled into separate subjects. We’re overcoming these walls. We envision a place where a scientist’s ideas can imprint an artist’s imaginative lesson plan. Different types of learning can connect and grow together. Just because fields of study are different doesn’t mean they can’t relate to each other.
What We Hope to Do
Make Learning Come Alive
We post free lesson plans and resources that work in classrooms, community centers, and online spaces. Everything uses Creative Commons licensing. This means sharing and building on each other’s work isn’t just allowed. We encourage it.
Build Learning Communities
The best learning happens with other people. We connect teachers and community practitioners across grade levels, subjects, and schools. We call this a cohort model. We learn from and help each other.
Help Improve Teaching
We pay attention to research and experience about what really helps people learn how to be sustainability change agents. Then we share those ideas so all of us can help others learn better. We advocate for an embodied, creative, and constructivist learning through place-based projects rather than solely the passive transmission of knowledge.
Expand Learning Beyond Classrooms
You might teach in the quaint town of New Paltz, NY, where this project started, or in Cape Town, South Africa, where one of the book’s contribtuors lives and works. You might teach high school students or adults. We want to provide ways for people everywhere to engage with sustainability.
Help People Think and Create Change
We don’t just want people to understand environmental problems. We want to help them develop thinking, making, and reflecting skills. This helps people become agents of positive change, students and teachers alike.
Keep Everything Open
All our project code and content stays free and public on GitHub. We build accessibility into everything from the start. Good ideas should be available to everyone, no matter how they access information. We hope other communities will copy and adapt Earthrise Commons for their own needs.
We also focus on Inner Development Goals. These are inner qualities like empathy, working together, and courage. These qualities make outside change possible.
Our Impact
In our first years, based on our networks, we think we can help 1,000 to 2,000 students each year. This number could grow much more as teachers adapt and share what they find here.
That famous Earthrise photo reminded us that we’re all traveling together on this small blue planet. Earthrise Commons invites us to learn together as passengers and caretakers of Earth on a shared journey around the sun.
