97 Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement Vol. 9, No. 2, 2018 A New Alliance for Service-Learning and Community Engagement: Cultivating Citizens with an Ecocentric Vision of Justice Catherine Wright Melanie Keel Allison Kellar Wingate University Abstract A core conviction that should inform service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) courses is that we cannot have thriving human communities, robust democratic citizenship, and authentic community/civic engagement when the ecological systems upon which all life depends, now and in the future, are ignored and ruined. When institutions of higher education use sustainability as an organizing tenet for SLCE, a new alliance can occur between SLCE and a sister discipline: sustainability in higher education (SHE). Harnessing the synergy from this collaboration can help students and faculty form the attitudes, goals, and learning outcomes sought by both disciplines in creative ways. When SLCE seriously attends to ecological sustainability, institutions of higher education can better contribute to the cultivation of place-engaged, ecologically literate, planetary citizens who value eco-social justice and generate new partnerships to achieve this goal. Today, students are living in a complex world. They face issues of racism, sexism, poverty, addictions, inaccessibility to healthcare, patriarchy, and ableism—just to name a few. But they are also enmeshed in specific ecosystems and landscapes which are in crisis. Unprecedented atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, acidification of oceans, diminished soil fertility, and pollution contribute to the disruption and destabilization of Earth’s life systems (IPCC, 2013). The nature and magnitude of these ecosocial crises demand a polyvalent response that addresses more than technological fixes and singular linear actions. For example, merely divesting from Exxon, an extractor of fossil fuel, does not address the contributions to water pollution, food scarcity, or smog-filled skies made by the transportation, manufacturing, and sales sectors. Forming new academic alliances could create innovative programs, courses, and partnerships where the five core constituencies (students, community organizers, faculty, administrators and community residents) could co-generate creative solutions for transforming our communities and healing our natural world (Bringle, Clayton, & Price, 2009, p. 5). A primary cause of Earth’s degradation is ecological illiteracy that includes both a precarious ignorance born of a pragmatic separation from nature and a willful “unlearning” of knowledge previously known in order to promote Enlightenment thinking and extractive agendas to fuel the industrial revolution (Tuana, 2006). We have forgotten how to appreciate our biological, social, cultural, and psychic enmeshment in and interdependency with the ecological communities where we dwell. At the physiological level, the iron carried by our hemoglobin, the water in our tears, and the calcium in our bones are the same elements that constitute mountain ranges and seascapes, moving in perpetual cycles between and among our bodies and the rest of the planet. We are entangled in an ancient continuum of matter and energy and are alive thanks to organic partnerships between iron and hemoglobin happening every day within and between our bodies. This story of interconnectivity and collaboration must inform who we are so that we may “reclaim knowledges that have been denied or repressed” (Tuana, 2006, p. 2) and construct new knowledge that will help us structure and maintain our economies, political life, and education systems. Whether referred to as “landscape” (the symbolic environment created when physical spaces are transformed by the conferral of human values and meaning onto them (Greider & Garkovich, 1994); or as “place” (a particular assemblage of humans and their multiple “others”) (Duhn, 2012)—or with some other term—ecosystems deserve more respect as unique partners within service-learning and community engagement (SLCE). Ecosystems are not only where social change occurs, but these webs of life are also unique stakeholders contributing to social change. This article explores how strategic collaborations among SLCE practitioners and those working in the field of sustainability in higher education (SHE) could cultivate citizens who value ecosocial justice and develop innovative partnerships. The complementary nature of the foundation, knowledge, personal, and integrative assets that inform the attitudes, goals, and learning in both SLCE and SHE will be examined in detail. The final narratives describe SLCE-SHE aligned pilots and courses that offer a glimpse of the benefits of harnessing the synergy from an SLCE-SHE alliance to inspire new conversations in SLCE concerning future conceptualization work and studies in SLCE-SHE partnerships and practice.