Ecology.

In the West Indies, ecology is not a unit in a science textbook. It is the weather that decides whether the bus runs, the soil that decides whether the crop comes in, the sea that decides whether a child becomes a fisherman, an engineer, or a migrant.

A pedagogy that takes the island seriously cannot treat ecology as enrichment. It is the substrate on which every other subject sits.

The Caribbean has been read by outsiders as a landscape for two centuries. The internal pedagogical task is to read it as an inheritance — something passed on, something owed, something that can be lost in a single generation if the curriculum forgets.

We propose climate literacy not as a checklist of facts about parts per million, but as a habit of mind: the capacity to hold long time horizons next to short political ones without flinching.

That habit is the same habit that produces good citizens, good engineers, and good poets. The case for ecology in the West Indian classroom is, finally, a case for citizenship.