It is time that universities reexamine what is meant by globalization. Contemporary scholars in the humanities, such as Peter Critchley, Noam Chomsky, Lewis Mumford, Elinor Ostrom, Charles Eisenstein, David Orr, Vandana Shiva, Naomi Klein, Lynn Margulis, Mustafa Tolba, Martha Nussbaum, Henry Giroux, Carolyn Merchant, Paulo Freire, Fritjof Capra, and Pier Luigi Luisi have aptly redefined the concept of “world” as a biological and cultural ecosystem. This paper seeks ways to integrate the theory and practice of eco-citizenship into various cross-disciplinary aspects of higher education, with a focus on curricular adjustments steered by World Languages and Cultures programs. It vests universities with a mission to engage themselves both as places of resistance against the neoliberal privatization of the commons and as the interactive, practical, analytical, and creative grounds needed for a healthy rebuilding of our global community. Through an assertive commitment in favour of eco-citizenship, universities will help clarify and resolve the strong conflict we are witnessing today between neoliberal orientations and an ecological exigency clearly delineated by scientific and humanistic scholarship.

It is time that universities reexamine what is meant by globalization. Contemporary researchers in science and the humanities (Critchley, Chomsky, Mumford, Ostrom, Eisenstein, Ferry, Orr, Shiva, Klein, Margulis, Meadows, Capra and Tolba, just to name a few) have aptly redefined the concept of « world » as a biological and cultural ecosystem. This paper seeks ways to integrate the theory and practice of eco-citizenship into various cross-disciplinary aspects of higher education, with a focus on curricular adjustments that may be steered by World Languages and Cultures programs. While "global citizenship" is still often understood today as a form of supranational citizenship that may find its actualization through the valuable, yet often arrested efforts of the United Nations, or as the individualistic result of a neoliberal economic emancipation of markets and capital throughout the world, this notion must rather be embedded within a radically cultural, natural and ethical bedrock from which a more potent world citizenry will stem. Departments of World Languages and Cultures and cultures are ideally positioned in the academic landscape to foster the development of a greater eco-civic and biospheric awareness that can permeate new curricular orientations of universities in the US and abroad.