Systems+of+sustainability

Education for Sustainability: the need for a new curriculum
//"There were more than a thousand distinct cultures, a thousand mutually unintelligible languages, a thousand ways of knowing. How can one compare intimacy with the facets of this knowledge to the possession of gold? How could we have squandered such wisdom in that search. It would take a lifetime to list the trees and flowers, the butterflies and fish, the small mammals, the kinds of deer and cats, the migratory and resident birds; and to say the most rudimentary things about their relationships, how they know and reflect each other. This, along with the people, we ignored. it was a wealth that didn't register until much of it was gone, or until, like the people, it was a tattered, diluted remnant, sequestered on a reservation."//

Inspired by the essay of Barry Lopez * reflecting on the impact of the voyage of Christopher Columbus, "//The Rediscovery of North America//" University Press of Kentucky, (1990).

The first humans had to know their land as a survival kit. As they grew slowly into cultures by developing its natural economy, they looked upon the land not as its possessor but as a companion. To achieve this, they cultivated intimacy with their immediate environment as with a fellow human. They remembered their daily progression through a limited small world; they walked it, ate from its soils and from the animals that ate its plants. They knew its winds, they smelled its biology, observed the sequence of its flowers through the seasons, and the places where particular animals could be found. Making little impact they were inscribed gently into their surroundings.

These early inscribed cultures have now become constructive cultures, changing their environment by digging and building, time and time again, out of all recognition. Constructive cultures have a way of life that ostracises the land. The consuming visions that drove them were of merchandisable timber, ploughable forest, grazable prairies, recoverable ores, dammable water, nettable fish.

We can now only read descriptions of the worlds of the inscribed groups they displaced. The lands of inscribed communities have been totally destroyed in the name of constructive natural economy, often to increase the wealth of people who don't live there.

The first historians of preindustrial societies saw landscapes with a less acquisitive frame of mind. However, their extensive first-hand knowledge was ultimately regarded as a kind of decorative information for academic study or entertainment only. It was taken as a series of puzzles for specialists to elucidate and isolate in university subjects. The information was never taken to be what it in fact is - a holistic, practical description of a "home" where we could be at ease with the planetary forces. To be inscribed into the land is to enclose it in the same moral universe we occupy and so include it in the meaning of the word 'community". For constructive groups to have a sense of community they must have, at the very least, knowledge of what is inviolate about the relationship between themselves and the place they occupy and how the destruction of this relationship, or the failure to attend to it, wounds people.

It is to help the next generation in this task that consumermatics is proposed as an appropriate, flexible and holistic knowledge system, orientated towards studying the natural economy of local environments and the relationships between communities and their natural resources. World leaders left the Rio Environment Summit with the task of resolving the conflicts between economic competitiveness, social welfare, and care for the environment. The premise is that the only true wealth that can turn exploitation into residency and greed into harmony comes from the cultivation and achievement of local knowledge about ourselves as consumers partaking of a limited global cake. Governments can set guidelines but the environmental crisis is not a crisis of policy, or of law, or of administration, but one of self-education. We cannot turn to institutions, to environmental groups, or to government. We must turn to each other to discover what is locally possible, and participate in the formation of plans for sustainable development.

Human economies are nested in natural systems, and from this point of view 'human economics' is a subordinate sub-division of the 'biophysical economics' of nature. The term 'biophysical economics' is an economic metaphor to encompass the flows of energy from Sun to Earth, and its expressions in seasons, climate, weather, and living things. People are part of nature, and the economies of communities are the dominant factor in determining a society's interaction with the rest of nature.

Increasingly, through 'industrial development', human economies typically reward ecologically destructive practices. To sustain human economic development a knowledge system is needed that deals with all the ideas we use to understand ourselves and our relations with the rest of nature. It should cross subject boundaries and trace all linkages between economies of human production and their resources. It should draw together:

//(a) physical laws (the inanimate economy)// - governing interactions between the Sun and the rotating Earth; - governing interactions between the Earth's molten core and its surface; metaphorically, these interactions are expressed, respectively, in the 'planetary economy' and the 'solar economy';

//(b) biological laws (the animate economy)// - governing the evolution of food chains and webs, which includes humans within its scope.

Flows of resources from the 'planetary', 'solar' and 'animate' economies into a local monetary economy defines its 'natural economy'. As a subject, natural economy traces the materials and energy flows in societies from resources existing in, or produced by nature, which are transformed into commodities; the surplus being brought to market, purchased, consumed and discarded. This is a single educational matrix for humanity and its uses of the rest of nature. It maps nature as a tightly integrated system, and provides reasons why economic expansion cannot go on indefinitely.

Nature conservation is a counterbalancing response of governments and individuals to make markets more harmonious with the dynamics of biophysical economies. To this end, we protect and manage the rest of nature. We do this in order to match markets with ecosystems, which provide the natural resources for economic development, and are sources of the non-marketable environmental goods emanating from scenic beauty, and nature study.

Natural economy deals with the technological regulation of natural resources, and its environmental impact. It is a complementary body of knowledge to 'political economy'. The latter deals with the legislative regulation of rewards for labour, the outlawing of extremes of mistreatment of people, and the functioning of markets, and the social consequences.

The principles of sustainability are best taught by applying methods of environmental appraisal to the local consumer network of the investigator in order to:-. - develop of skills required to use the neighbourhood as an educational resource to gain knowledge and understanding about local consumer systems; - introduce experiences and responsibilities of active citizenship related to curbing the needs and wants of consumers; - connect individuals and communities to their chains of consumerism with the aim of reducing the environmental costs of day to day actions.

In summary, environmental appraisal involves:- - identifying the problem; - producing a vision of the future when the problem has been resolved; - defining the issues which are the main obstacles to producing a solution; - creating strategic objectives which overcome the obstacles; - producing operational management plans to meet the strategic objectives; - monitoring the outcome of the operational plans in relation targeting the vision of the future.

Education for sustainability thereby encourages confrontation with the problems, issues and challenges of neighbourhood consumerism. If the findings of environmental appraisal are applied by a person, group or community to plan, and manage, the consumption of environmental resources, environmental education actually works for the environment.