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A Common Understanding? Not yet... One of the country’s leading teacher training institutions is still waiting for this phone call from a school. ‘Have you any trainees skilled up for education for sustainability?’ As an anecdote it might mean very little but there is a sense that the general perception of sustainability is, yes, its something we do; especially the environment bit; especially in terms of managing the school buildings and building green awareness and responsibility. A few schools are purpose built with energy and resource saving in mind, with daylighting and the use of benign paint and furniture choices, and of course there are green shoots popping through the tarmac of the curriculum all over the place these days, There is guidance too: DCSF’s doorway themes to Sustainable Schools or WAG’s A Common Understanding and targets for school carbon emissions to contend with. Ho hum… its really not setting imaginations aflame. Sustainability as a word has a rather dour character to it in English. Just getting by… Is your income sustainable? Or your relationship? So-so. Musn’t grumble… Other associations are less kind. To Michael Braungart, the industrial designer it is annoying. ‘We still have people talking about “sustainability”! Nothing is more boring. Are you proud if your marriage is “sustainable”? We feel guilty, and cut our hair to use less shampoo. It’s guilt management and celebrating mediocrity.’ He has a point. Deduct, mentally, all the activities which have any aspect of guilt, or connotations of belt tightening and doing with less, of making an extra individual effort - for example to ‘do your bit for the planet’ (don’t waste food, especially meat!) and what is left in the filing cabinet? Deduct the purely explanatory – what is climate change? What are demographics? What does biodiversity mean? They are straightforward science and maths questions. Finally, deduct green slogans which are not at the same time questions or plain old doom and gloom scenarios – because they are not about sustainability - by definition. What’s left? What might be left is rather thin and skeletal, and it might still be a long way from answering Braungart’s criticism. More than this however, these activities so many schools undertake in the name of sustainability are supposed to be ‘for the environment and development’ or at least about this, yet for the most part, they reveal no understanding how nature actually works or how development on a finite planet might come about. Nature does not have injunctions against consuming, it has no concept of waste, it has virtually no toxics, it has abundance, it works with a huge surplus of current (solar) energy, and judging from the number of blooms on a flowering tree in spring or the weight of fruit in the autumn, almost a celebration of productivity. "The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way man thinks" Gregory Bateson, ecologist The point Braungart makes is that we have an industrial system which is based around take-make-and-dispose arrangement and that as a result it is strategically tragic, it doesn’t bring sustainability, it can’t do, its linear. Sustainability is a loop concept, its about going around and around, about the snake that eats its tail. Most education for sustainability makes the assumption that all that can be done is to ‘reduce harm’ make consuming less excessive. Hence all the guilt and consumer stuff. Less inputs or less outputs quantitatively and/or qualitatively. At the same time it assumes that increased development will come about as a result of economic growth which will then pay for a clean up of the burgeoning economies of the South, despite the fact that under the take–make-and-dispose economy resource limits are now a clear and present danger. In effect, the education for sustainable development as currently conceived and practiced is actually ‘education for a slightly less bad world’ which has a bias towards individual responsibility and a strong faith component: the faith is that something will turn up, a technical fix, to allow life to continue as expected. Nuclear fusion anyone? It also carries some rather strange intellectual non-starters along with it. Faith and absurdity. Having persuaded all and sundry to accept that sustainable doesn’t actually have to mean ‘goes on for ever’ it then pretends that the same sort of partial, linear thinking can be applied to some of the activities it most approves of. Take recycling. It sounds like a loop concept and looks like a loop concept but it is a leak concept. Take a tonne of aluminium made into drinks cans and these cans have a lifecycle of 3 months from manufacture, to use, to return, and lets be gloriously successful in recycling – 90% is returned. How long before half of the aluminium is dispersed into landfill? How long before its almost all lost? Respectively 21 months and about 42 months (*). It bought some time. A car radiator which leaks always overheats in the end. Take efficiency. Doing more with less. Famously (at least it feels that way from the amount of retelling it endures) a family in the Midlands is filmed working really hard on saving energy, resources, food and money. £800 in two months, brilliant. Interviewer to mother: ‘And what are you going to do with the money?’ Mother replies, ‘Oh, fly to Greece I think!’, she looks around her family for approval and support. It comes in the form of enthusiastic nodding. Take the aspiration that ‘if every one did this then…’ Then what? Then pretend that the particular can be added up to make the general case without the rules changing? If everyone decided to cut their consumption by 10% this year with the current infrastructure… there would be angry protests and consternation all round as the economy slumps, its happening involuntarily in the recession at present and that is with far less than a 10% drop – so far. But back to being volunteers. Some sustainability educators nod away approvingly when voluntary acts of reduced consumption are reported in class or staffroom without acknowledging that game theory (the Prisoner’s Dilemma) revealed long ago that while it is voluntary and social obligation is not a big factor, self interest will prevent everyone from joining in. So if cutting consumption is involuntary it has unintended systemic consequences and if voluntary it won’t get there anyway. What is missing from all of these examples, and ESD is replete with these and others, is the enabling context: recycling, efficiency, ‘joining in’ can all make sense if the system is reinforcing virtuous cycles. It depends on the context, the rules of the game. So can we discuss the context please, the meal not the small potatoes? And if not then why not? Incrementalism at some stage has to give way to transformation. Sustainability assumes, demands; will only come about; will only mean something; will only be worth ringing up the initial teacher education college for, when we are ready to include the possibility of a changed perspective which can crystalise transformation.  Schools and colleges surely have their main role at the top of the waste hierarchy pyramid. Rethink and redesign. This perspective is simple to understand but its ramifications are extensive. In essence a sustainable economy will be a circular economy, in imitation of ecology where waste = food and natural capital is restored. Products and services will be designed to contribute to this. Amory Lovins, the business and efficiency leader put it this way “Successful companies will take their design from nature, their values from their customers and their discipline from the market place.” The Chinese government put it -the circular economy- in their five year plan. An authentic education for sustainability must engage with this bigger picture, especially the economy. The good news is that leading businesses like InterfaceFLOR and GE are well aware of the challenges of climate change and the end of the era of cheap oil (recession notwithstanding) and are actively exploring the methods and opportunities of such a closed loop economy. Moreover, as an economy which is non-toxic, effective, and based on current energy it is an economy which could enable development and material well being to be much more widely available than at present – as consumption is eventually benign, and indeed part of a virtuous circle and increased natural capital (enriched soils, forests etc) increases production- it gives a fillup to the imagination. Sustainability now becomes an aspirational context, part of a debate about a ‘bright green’ future and how young people can benefit themselves and others by being a part of it. Indeed they will be a part of creating it. Ken Webster |