RADICAL CLIMATE CHANGE AND LEARNING FOR SUSTAINABILITY

 - DAVID SELBYCentre for Sustainable Futures

25 November 2008

 

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.

(IPCC, Climate Change 2007: The physical science basis: Summary for policymakers, 2007, 5).

HISTORY OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 2005-2025 - REAP THE WHIRLWIND

2025-2050 – PLANETARY PURGATORY

2050-2100 – HELL AND HIGH WATER

Joseph Romm, Hell and High Water, New York, William Morrow, 2007.

GLOBAL HEATING: HOW LONG HAVE WE GOT?

Short window to reverse things:

We have a short period – a very short period – in which to prevent the planet from starting to shake us off’ - George Monbiot, Heat, Toronto, Doubleday Canada, 2006, 15.

OR

Too late to reverse things:

Our future is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail – James Lovelock, The revenge of Gaia, London, Allen Lane, 2006, 6.

It is already five minutes past midnight – Elizabeth Colbert, Field notes from a catastrophe: A frontline report on climate change, London, Bloomsbury, 2007.

OR

We can avoid the direst scenarios but there is no ‘business as usual’

’Past and future anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium, due to timescales required for removal of the gas from the atmosphere’ – IPCC, 2007

WELCOME

 REFUTATION

 AVOIDANCE AND DENIAL

 CONCERNED ACTIVISM

GLOBAL HEATING: A SPECTRUM OF RESPONSES 

Psychology as much as science will thus determine the planet’s fate, because action depends on overcoming denial, among the most paralysing of human responses. While it affects most of us in varying degrees, denial runs particularly deep among those with heavy stakes in the status quo, including the political and business leaders with power to shape the global agenda. This kind of denial can be as dangerous to society and the natural environment as an alcoholic’s denial is to his or her own family. Because they fail to see the addiction as the principal threat to their well-being, alcoholics often end up by destroying their own lives. Rather than facing the truth, denial’s victims choose slow suicide. In a similar way, by pursuing lifestyles and economic goals that ravage the environment, we sacrifice long-term health and well-being for immediate gratification – a trade-off that cannot yield a happy ending. (my italics)

 

Sandra Postel, Denial in the decisive decade. In Brown, L.R. & L. Starke (eds.), State of the world 1992, New York, Norton, 4.

But the thought that worries me most is this. As people in rich countries…begin to wake up to what science is saying, climate-change denial will look as stupid as Holocaust denial, or the insistence that AIDS can be cured with beetroot. But our response will be to demand that the government acts, while hoping that it doesn’t. We will wish our governments to pretend to act. We get the moral satisfaction of saying what we know to be right, without the discomfort of doing it. My fear is that the political parties in most rich nations have already recognized this. They know that we want tough targets, but that we also want those targets to be missed. They know that we will grumble about their failure to curb climate change, but that we will not take to the streets. They know that nobody ever rioted for austerity.

• George Monbiot, Heat, Toronto, Doubleday Canada, 2006, 41-2.

THE ADDICTION

(At the heart of) the addictive trap is an illusion of power and control that has become progressively compulsive, acquisitive, manipulative and destructive…In addictive commitment to power, we ourselves have become quite powerless, but like all addicts we vehemently deny and disown that fact.

-Diarmuid O’Murchu, Quantum theology, New York,

Crossroad, 2004.

WESTERN CULTURAL CONDITIONING

FEAR OF PAIN

FEAR OF DESPAIR

FEAR OF APPEARING MORBID

FEAR OF GUILT

FEAR OF CAUSING DISTRESS

FEAR OF BEING UNPATRIOTIC

FEAR OF APPEARING WEAK AND EMOTIONAL

 

BELIEF IN THE SEPARATE SELF

FEAR OF POWERLESSNESS

Each act of denial, conscious or unconscious, is an abdication of our power to respond. It relegates us to the role of the victim, before we even engage and try to change the situation. Joanna Macy & Molly Young Brown, Coming back to life, Gabriola Island (BC), New Society, 1998.

Children will be put on the front line of the battle to save the planet under radical proposals to shake up the way that geography is taught in schools. The plans will ensure that…issues such as climate change and global warming are at the heart of the school timetable …education for sustainable development will be a compulsory part of the curriculum.

Alan Johnson, Education Secretary, 2 February 2007, announcing new school curriculum for 11-14 year olds

Young people need to be aware that languages can make you attractive to employers – and more employable. ‘We need to raise our game in languages in schools if we are to compete in an increasingly globalised economy.

Alan Johnson, Education Secretary, 2 February 2007, announcing new school curriculum for 11-14 year olds

LEARNING AND SKILLS COUNCIL

‘We are living in an unsustainable world…global temperatures are rising faster than previously recorded’

Four objectives of ESD:

•Social progress that recognizes the needs of everyone•Effective protection of the environment•Prudent use of natural resources•The maintenance of high and stable levels of economic growth and employment

‘Experience shows there is a strong business case for sustainable development. Businesses, companies, colleges and learning providers that adopt environmental management systems can make significant financial savings. They can also enhance their reputation, gain access to new markets and better motivate their staff.’

- Learning and Skills Council, From here to sustainability, September 2005 (my italics) .

The Five Capitals Framework of Sustainable Development Natural Capital (renewable and non-renewable resources, sinks and processes that regulate the climate – ‘the basis of life itself’)Human Capital (people’s health, knowledge, skills and motivation – ‘All these things are needed for productive work’Manufactured Capital (material goods and fixed assets which contribute to the production process)Financial Capital (no real value in itself but representative of all other Capitals)Social Capital (means of maintaining human capital in partnership with others, e.g. through communities and families) Forum for the Future, Sustainable Development – the only game in town: Annual report 2004

A sustainability literate person will be equipped with a number of intellectual and practical tools that enable them to make decisions and act in a way that is likely to contribute to sustainable development. They will be able to make decisions on specific matters, such as advising on financial investment, buying food or writing new policy for prisons, by applying the ‘at the same time’ rule – that is, taking environmental, social and economic considerations into account simultaneously, not separately.

- Parkin, S. et al., Learning and skills for sustainable development, London, Forum for the Future/Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability, 2004.

Education for Sustainability involves students and educators in a process of active learning and futures thinking, and addresses the generic skill needs of business and industry.Daniella Tilbury, Dimitry Podger & Anna Reid, Change in curricula and graduate skills towards sustainability, Australian Department of the Environment and Heritage & Macquarie University, September 2004

Two hundred years ago, when change was slow or non-existent, we might have had time to establish sustainable development, or even have continued for a while with business as usual, but now is much too late; the damage has already been done. To expect sustainable development or a trust in business as usual to be viable policies is like expecting a lung cancer victim to be cured by stopping smoking; both measures deny the existence of the Earth’s disease, the fever brought on by a plague of people. Despite their difference, they come from religious and humanist beliefs which regard the Earth as there to be exploited for the good of humankind. …Now they travel two different roads that will soon merge into a rocky path to a Stone Age existence on an ailing planet, one where few of us survive among the wreckage of our once biodiverse Earth.

- James Lovelock, The revenge of Gaia, London, Allen Lane, 2006, 3

Education for Sustainable Contraction (ESC]: Nailing Ten Propositions to the Door of the Academy

•Uncritical or tacit embrace of unrestrained growth and globalization, fed by rampant consumerism

•Instrumental and utilitarian view of nature with a correlative denial of intrinsic value and human embeddedness in nature

•Managerialism orientation

•Technological fix absorption (skills prioritized, with values aspects marginalized or shelved at the rhetorical level)

•Conception of change as fundamentally individual rather than individuated

•Exteriority of focus (as against dynamical interplay between interior and exterior)

ESC: Proposition 1

A concerted effort is needed in the light of the radical climate change threat to confront denial by moving learner assumptions, understandings and responses towards disequilibrium (fomenting dissipative structures).

ESC: Proposition 2

Given the likely impending severity of global heating, Education for Sustainable Contraction needs to address despair, pain, grief and loss.

The Calvary Moment

Taken in its universal sense, the Calvary experience is a symbolic encapsulation of the breakdown and disintegration that is endemic to evolutionary unfolding and a prerequisite for a new evolutionary threshold. …Our world today is in the throes of a Calvary disintegration. …It sounds too pessimistic to be taken seriously; so we resort to denial and rationalization. …We are immersed in a cultural death wish of the gravest proportion. …We cannot address the future in a serious or comprehensive way without embracing the dark and perilous threat that hangs over us as a human and planetary species. …We are compelled to assert what seems initially to be an outrageous claim: a radically new future demands the destruction and death of the old reality. It is from the dying seeds that new life sprouts forth. Destruction becomes a precondition for reconstruction; disintegration undergirds reintegration. Calvary is a prerequisite for resurrection.

Diarmuid O’Murchu, Quantum theology, New York, Crossroad, 2004, 190-3.

ESC: Proposition 3

The view of human<>nature relationship needs to shift from the doministic, instrumental and exploitative to embeddedness and intrinsic valuing, from a shallow ecological to a deep ecological paradigm.

ESC: Proposition 4

The poetic dimension of sustainability needs serious cultivation.

Key Principles of Deep Ecology

•The well-being and flourishing of both human and other-than-human life have value in themselves

•Richness and diversity of life forms (and cultures) are valuable in themselves

•Human interference with the other-than-human world is excessive

•Quality of life matters more than standard of living

after Devall & Sessions, Environmental ethics, Belmont (CA), Wadsworth, 1998, 147.

We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.

James Lovelock, The revenge of Gaia, London, Allen Lane, 2006

To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild FlowerHold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour.

William Blake, Auguries of Innocence (1800-1803)

ESC: Proposition 5Marginalized, even overlooked, ‘educations’ within education for sustainable development will be of pivotal importance.

ESC Proposition 6With global heating impending, sustainability education and emergency education need to fold together.

ESC: Proposition 7Formal and informal education programmes need to offer alternative and localized conceptions of the ‘good life’ and ‘good citizen’ (or ‘good denizen’).

ESC: Proposition 8Cozy assumptions about the relationship between education for sustainability and education for democratic citizenship need unpacking

Conservation of the earth’s resources and creation of sustainable livelihoods are most caringly, creatively, efficiently and equitably achieved at the local level. Localization of economies is a social and ecological imperative… In living democracies people can influence the decisions over the food we eat, the water we drink, and the health care and education we have. Living democracy grows like a tree, from bottom up. Earth democracy is based on local democracy, with local communities – organized on principles of inclusion, diversity, and ecological and social responsibility – having the highest authority on decisions related to environment and natural resources and to the sustenance and livelihoods of people. (Ibid.)

Vandana Shiva, Earth democracy: Justice, sustainability and peace, London, Zed, 2005, 10.

ESC: Proposition 9A more radical tilt away from atomistic/reductionist thinking to holistic ways of mediating and interpreting reality is urgently called for, with keener appreciation given in learning to the complex, multiple ramifications and reverberations of actions.

ESC: Proposition 10Everyone has to understand and come to terms with the fact that we are threatening our own existence. To confront this requires a Copernican revolution in aims, structures, processes of education and, perhaps, in the loci of learning.

For the campaign against climate change is an odd one. Unlike almost all other public protests which have preceded it, it is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but also against ourselves.

- George Monbiot, Heat, Toronto, Doubleday Canada, 2006, 215