Sense and Sustainability

Thoughts from Ken Webster, author of Sense and Sustainability (shared in all schools in the Netherlands).

I don't think that we're serious yet about sustainability - there are 10 jobs in Asia for every job in design - 250,000 people making iPods, iPads - a $62bn years business and we don't even know their name. There are the same number of people - about 160,000, as there were when computers started being made in the US in year 1 of computers.

 We need to get better at understanding the non-linear economy; we only keep 1-2% of the material that we extract - the rest is in landfill within a year. Even if oil demand were to remain flat, at 45mb/d - we'd need roughly four times the capacity of Saudi just to offset the demands from existing fields.

End of the line? Climate Change, Peal Oil, Systemic Stress - biodiversity etc, Money created as debt driving growth.

Principles of a sustainable economy? As found in China's 5 year plan; as criteria for a 40bn Euro procurement in Holland; as an aspiratin of a state of California. If we can't describe what it looks like, how can we achieve it?

If the machine inspired the industrial age, the imag of the living system may inspire a genuine postindustrial age - Peter Senge, Sloan Mgt Review

You don't change things by fighting against the new reality. You create a new one that makes the old one look obsolete. Buckminster Fuller.

We need to turn everything into food - ants don't use laptops and jellyfish don't use iPhones - so we need to separate everything into biological and technical nutrients of the highest quality possible - and bringing them back into use at the highest use possible. Do you want a refrigerator? Not really - shift towards a service based economy.

Ken picked up on biomimcry too:

• Nature as model
• Nature as mentor
• Nature as measure

Bring a biologist to the design table - if the only advantage we have is of intellectual property, then we'd better start building it.

www.asknature.org

Learning (Steven Sterling's ideas)

First order - adaptive - within accepted boundaes

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

Third order - when reflective examination leads to a transformative perspective shift

We need to be basing our education on rethinking and redesigning - sustainability is not about cleaning up. What other job is there for education other than help young people rethink their world?

We need to go from this:

1. Developing learner's insights into how nature works

to

2. Developing insights into how things like Cradle to Cradle work

to

3. Developing insight into thinking by using a particpatory and innovative learning process.

Wish list for all students

1. Understand how non-linear systems work - understanding exponential curves, tha maths of finance - and know that mechanical thinking is only for a special case.
2. To be good at asking questions

Eco-action star Carys Davies from Yale College talked today of the importance of moving on from single story to a new discovery. I guess that's something we all need to do.

Welsh Assembly's view on delivering ESDGC

The ESDGC action plan was completed in December and the new draft was put together by the 25 or so people on the ESDGC panel; the plan's not prescriptive and wants to give individual institutions opportunity to develop their own.

Strategic context includes WAG's One Wales Agenda and the driver behind One Wales One Planet. Strengths - demand for learners, recognised as good practice, evidence of delivery, stakeholder commitment. Tina Hawkins is working with the team in the Dept fo Environment Sust and Health to develop the idea of a young person's charter - could this link to the idea of the '1 Club' - people who give one percent of their time to community and environmental projects? In ESDGC, there is funding available, but not massive amounts - £150k or so.

Five aims: mainstreaming and embedding it, simplify delivery, integration with other programmes, accessibility to learning, and learner participation. Priorities include evaluation, research to define quality and indicators, web based communication tools and engagement with local authorities.

In further education, there's value in creating a Practitioner Network, and looking at potential training for practitioners, projects, materials and events etc.

There's needs to be training for trainers on how to embed this across different areas - we have literacy experts and therefore need an agreed level of expertise on how to create common standards  and a common understanding of what good looks like.

Learning from the future

Spending a day working with the champions of sustainability education from 20 colleges across Wales; these are the folks who are embedding real change into the workplace, and this post captures the ideas - heads of environmental education, business and many other work areas.

Short presentations from Pembrokeshire College and Yale College underpinned the impoetance of good monitoring and reporting of what happens so that the people taking action know what's happening. Yale created a 'green handprint' to stamp on projects where good practice is happening - they've developed a Moodle site with resources and embedded ESDGC into environmental management - using real information from building management systems etc as part of day to day work. The harder stuff, they're finding are topics such as resolving the loss of money from selling Coke to the reduction in plastic waste and dietary opportunities that would develop as a result. "We're also crossing the learning-teaching issue and are going to be working on paper next - realising it's a systems approach that's needed". Learning projects are what gets the students involved.

Gobal exchange programmes have developed using the College's international offices, so that students are now starting to run projects for themselves - one of the best indications that things are starting to work.

climate change is difficult because it's not in our nature to do favours for people who are not born yet.

Understanding relevance and complexity are two of the most important areas - one exercise asked students to cut out articles on climate, wealth SD and other issues and stick onto a flip chart and make the links between the articles on the flip charts with string to see where the connections lie. To understand Fair Trade, give away chocolate according the rules of the 'chocolate game' - the supermarkets get 10 squares, the farmers get one etc.

Eco footprinting exercises are working well - CAT's 'Where's the Impact?" is one good way of communicating this - understanding where the ingredients of my Kinder Egg comes from - plastic - cocoa - milk - sugar - aluminium - and then work out the connections between those products and personal action and choices.