The Future of Sustainability: Have Your Say!

Week One - “Global Challenges to Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century”
Comment / Comentario / Commentaire

Paul Vare, Regional Developments Manager, Learning South West, Australia

Moderating team: Paul Vare discusses the concept of education for sustainable development (ESD) to explain how sustainability itself is a learning process that should inspire interest, engagement and critique, as well as enable people to deal with hope and despair.

Paul Vare presenta el concepto de educación para el desarrollo sostenible (ESD por sus siglas en inglés) con el objetivo de explicar como la sostenibilidad misma es un proceso de aprendizaje que debería tanto inspirar interés, motivación, crítica como permitir el manejo de la esperanza y la desesperación.

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In any debate about the direction or future of sustainability, the demand for education for sustainable development (ESD) is never far from the surface. What many mean by this is promoting environmentally positive skills and actions (e.g. reducing waste; saving energy). However, people do not share a single rational view of the world and we do not always make the decisions that social marketers would have us make (thank goodness). For one thing, as Sanjeeva Pandey reminds us, these campaigns often overlook critical human attributes such as spirituality.

I was interested to see that Jeff mentioned Amartya Sen’s concept of ‘development as freedom’ as ‘transforming concepts of development’. Personally, I see Sen’s view of development as akin to sustainability itself, a state where people have the freedom “to choose a life one has reason to value” with the proviso that this is within a society where values (including those of sustainability) are explored and periodically critiqued. This open-ended, critical approach is what I would call ESD – but it is very different from the ESD that mentioned above.

One can clearly identify an ‘ESD1’ (promoting responsible behaviours) and ‘ESD 2’ (exploring and critiquing the concept of sustainability). I see these as complementary. Indeed too much of one without the other could be counter productive. To save space, I have attached a brief note that explains these two ESDs further.

ESD 2 recognises that sustainability is in fact a learning process; as John Foster of Lancaster University puts it: sustainability is learning. Even the UK Government’s Sustainable Schools Strategy contains the observation that, “sustainable development is an agenda for innovation rather than slowing down” (although we might add that ‘slowing down’ in some areas may well be one outcome of our shared analyses).

So when I read Jeff McNeely and Gillian Martin Mehers discussing the merits or otherwise of spreading hope or despair, as an educator I think, “that’s not my job”. Faced with the big issues of sustainability as potential subject matter, I should be straining every sinew to inspire interest, engagement and critique – as well as the ability to handle one’s hope and/or despair.

The concept of sustainability will not become stale, as Jeff fears, if it is constantly explored. Rather than telling people how to behave, ESD 2 recognises ‘sustainability as exploration’ (or the US psyche might prefer ‘sustainability as frontier’).