LEARNING AND SUSTAINABILITY :

RECOGNISING THE MIRAGE

John Foster

j.foster@lancaster.ac.uk

• In a sustainable world, … society would celebrate cultural diversity and increase the biological diversity and complexity of the ecosystems on which we all depend. Simultaneously, we would have stabilized population and resource consumption at a level that is within the carrying capacity of Earth's ecosystems. A sustained, long-term effort to transform education at all levels is critical to the change in mindset necessary to achieve this vision. (Second Nature)

• The overall goal [of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development] is to integrate the principles, values, and practices of sustainable development into all aspects of education and learning. This educational effort will encourage changes in behaviour that will create a more sustainable future in terms of environmental integrity, economic viability, and a just society for present and future generations.

(UNESCO)

• We are facing major and unprecedented challenges to moderate our previously unsustainable patterns of development. Climate change is the most urgent and pressing example of this. Scotland will not be able to meet these challenges unless people - whatever their age, status, occupation and lifestyle - have the necessary knowledge, awareness, understanding and skills to play their part.(Intro to Choosing our future: Scotland's sustainable

development strategy)

• Education is an essential tool for achieving sustainability. People around the world recognize that current economic development trends are not sustainable and that public awareness, education, and training are key to moving society toward sustainability.(Intro to Education for Sustainable Development Toolkit

developed by Dr. Rosalyn McKeown, University of Tennessee Energy, Environment and Resources Centre)

• Stephen Sterling Sustainable Education: Re-visioning Learning and Change (Dartington: Green Books, 2001)

• Sterling, S, (2005) Whole Systems Thinking as a Basis for Paradigm Change in Education: Explorations in the Context of Sustainability, (PhD thesis), Centre for Research in Education and the Environment, University of Bath, www.bath.ac.uk/cree/sterling.htm

The Sustainability Mirage: Illusion and Reality in the Coming War on Climate Change (London: Earthscan,

forthcoming Autumn 2008)

“Sustainable development thinking got environmental issues onto the agenda but it may now be stopping us from taking serious action on climate change and other crucial planetary issues.

Sustainable development's attempted deal between present and future will always collapse under the pressure of 'now' because the needs of the present always win out. Inevitably, this means floating standards, movable targets and action that will always fall short of what we need. Ultimately, sustainable development is the pursuit of a mirage, the politics of never getting there.”

Learning

• First-order : adaptive learning , takes place within accepted boundaries – leaves basic values and beliefs unchanged.

• Second-order: critically reflective learning, when we examine the assumptions according to which we proceed in first-order learning.

• Third-order: when this reflective examination leads to a transformative perspective-shift.

(Sterling, op.cit.)

9 4 3

2 7 7

8 1 5

“Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after facts and reason…”

John Keats, letter to George and Thomas Keats dated Sunday, 22 December 1817

“We come quite fresh to the different stages of life, and in each of them we are usually quite inexperienced, no matter how old we are.”

La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

Negative capability – the strength to not be what we are

The learning virtues are those which support our capacity to not be, but always to become.

“People cannot live in the world as it is…They have always been incapable of just reproducing what is given and of accepting their place within it…they have tilted their imagination against the oppressive givenness of the present…”

Bill Williamson, Lifeworlds and Learning (Leicester: National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, 1998)

“the strength to not be what we are”

• honesty of self-appraisal / self-critique: to stand back from what one is and recognise that it is lacking / inadequate / needing to be changed and developed;

• courage of commitment : the leap from a familiar towards an unfamiliar self, or aspect of self, that nevertheless calls one onward;

• strength for uncertainty : for living in possibility, enduring the uncompleted transition to what we are becoming.

“A congressional mandate permits the United States Forest Service to cut no more lumber than is renewed by annual growth. Since that law was put into effect, growth rates have been greatly enhanced, at least in the Forest Service accounts, by new herbicides, pesticides and tree varieties.”

Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: the Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)

Contraction and Convergence“…global greenhouse emissions need to be reduced by 60% in less than a hundred years.

When governments agree to be bound by such a target, the diminishing amount of carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases that the world could release while staying within the target can be calculated for each year in the coming century. This is the contraction part of the process.

The convergence part is that each year’s tranche of this global emissions budget gets shared out among the nations of the world in a way that ensures that every country converges on the same allocation per inhabitant by, say, 2030…Countries unable to manage within their allocation would, within limits, be able to buy the unused parts of the allocations of other, more frugal countries.”

Aubrey Meyer, Contraction and Convergence: the Global Solution to Climate Change (Totnes: Green Books, 2000).