Education for Sustainability,Not Less Unsustainability

Dr. Paul Morgan West Chester University of PA

AASHE 2010

Good times for sustainability

Then we wake up

Footprints and Consumption

6th Mass

Extinction

The GapFact: most destructive period in 65 million

years Concern: enormous gap between the scale

of the challenge and our response. The most inspiring examples of EFS appear

completely inadequateClaim: tinkering with or even overhauling formal education will never do more than

make industrial civilization somewhat ‘less unsustainable’

Sustainability“the possibility that human and other life will flourish on the planet forever”

--John R. Ehrenfeld

Less Unustainability

“Almost everything being done in the name of sustainable development addresses and attempts to reduce unsustainability. But reducing unsustainability, although critical, does not and will not create sustainability”

--John R. Ehrenfeld, Sustainability by Design

How do we mind the gap?

Less Unsustainability Sustainability

Some Problems

Deliberate worldview change is

1) Unprecedented 2) Not widely desired

3) Fraught with paradoxes

Less Unsustainable

“more sustainable” = less unsustainable

The Underlying Problem

Alcoholics who drink less, smokers who smoke less, and gamblers who gamble

less have still not addressed the underlying addiction.

Buying Time?

“Avoidance”

“Now for the first time in human history, a particular worldview is becoming conscious of its own impending fall (all previous civilizations collapsed probably without ever understanding why) and has the opportunity to consciously re-forge its worldview to confront the threat.”

--Jon Kohl (from www.jonkohl.com)

A Unique Historical Moment

Why do we pursue ‘less unsustainability’?

Because it’s comfortable and familiar and fits our framing of

the problem

from www.mentaloptima.com

The Fundamental QuestionWhat kind of challenge is

sustainability? Normal?

Game Changer?

from www.mentaloptima.com

Normal Problem = does not call into question fundamental cultural assumptions, and so can be addressed with the familiar tools and strategies.Game Changer = calls into question fundamental assumptions (our worldview), and so requires very different tools and strategies.

from www.mentaloptima.com

Normal Problem = Comfortable Tools and

Strategies

Laws TechnologyVirtue

Consumer Choice

When your preferred tool is education, you will see every problem as soluble with the right curriculum or

pedagogy

An Uncomfortable Question:

Might our EFS efforts actually make it less likely that we (all of us) will deal with our

predicament on a scale and with the urgency, courage, and creativity that it

demands?

from www.mentaloptima.com

It decreases the creative tension

“The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them. . . . We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humankind is to survive.”

It is easy to fool ourselves

“Just like the people of the Middle Ages, we’re absolutely sure that people will go on thinking the way we think forever, and people will go on living the way we live forever. The people of the Middle Ages thought this way because it seemed impossible to them that people could think a different way. . . . Of course, we smile at that—but in fact we believe exactly the same thing. We too believe that the history of thought has come to an end with us.” --Daniel Quinn Can we imagine new ways of thinking and

living that aren’t just extensions of the prevailing worldview?

Daniel Quinn

“You could say that if the Middle Ages had been able to predict the Renaissance, then

it would have been the Renaissance.”

-Daniel Quinn, The New Renaissance

Where do educators go from here?

A Creative Leap

Education for SustainabilitySome PrinciplesPrinciple #1:

Cultivate a Big Picture Perspective(stay awake)

Principle #2: Remember: We Learn What We Live(so start where you are)Principle #3: Educate for Real Transformation(personal and cultural)

Principle #1: Cultivate a Big Picture

Perspective“The only real hope of people

today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and, at

the same time, the cosmos.”-Vaclav Havel“The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World” (1994)

A New Universe Story

“It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.”Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth

#2 We Learn What We Live

from www.mentaloptima.com

Educate for Transformation

Stay Awake, Avoid Distractions

Fall in Love with the World

Will we do what is needed to save soils, species, and ecosystems that we do not

know or understand and that, in the end, we do not

really love?

Cultural Transformation

from www.mentaloptima.com

?

Cultural Transformation?

The New Renaissance

“The extraordinary thing that’s going to happen in the next two or three decades is that a great second renaissance is going to occur. Nothing less than that is going to save us.” - Daniel Quinn