Looking around for something fairly short and crisp as a briefing on SD basics I found this item from China. It's not the answer to 'short and crisp' but it is tasty. To our ears some phrases sound odd but I find that this helps! Take it away Du Feng-guang  and Jia Hao:-

“Circular economy is a new concept which started more than ten years ago. It is the abbreviation of the closed material circular economy. Essentially, it is a kind of zoological economy and it requires people to use ecological rules but not mechanistic rules to instruct human economic activities.

Circular Flows with Energy and Recycling. (Source: GDAE, Tufts University)

Since the industrial Revolution in 1712, people have developed in such a traditional way: mass-exploiting resources __producing mass__consuming mass__producing mass waste. Its characteristics are high exploitation, low utilization and high discharge and it is a kind of oneway-flow linear economy. It uses resources carelessly and it achieves increase in quantity through changing resources into waste continuously. This economic model has lasted for about 300 years. In the late 20th century, resource shortage and environment pollution, the two major obstacles, appeared and became a great threat to human life and development.

On the opposite, circular economy proposes a kind of economic development pattern, which is in harmony with the environment. It demands organizing economic activities into a feedback flow ‘resources__products__renewable resources’. Its characteristics are low exploitation, high utilization and low discharge. All the materials and resources will be used reasonably and continuously in the economy circulation in order to reduce the impact produced by economic activities to the lowest degree. In this way, we can save a lot of natural resources for our descendants. At the same time, we can reduce the discharge of waste and lighten the burden on environment. That is to say, circular economy is realized by continuous circulation of materials, which is also called sustainable development. For a producing enterprise, circular economy is realized by the continuous circulation of its products.

Circular economy provides a strategic canonical form of theory to change traditional economy into sustainable economy and eliminates the long-lasting and acute conflict between environment and development.”(1)

It does not address social equity but it does give the basic functionality around which this can be addressed. What is intriguing is why there is so much pussyfooting around this “strategic canonical form of theory.” What else is on offer? Education is supposed to avoid one answer propositions yet that is exactly what most ESD does while being uncomfortable with formulations such as these from Du Feng-guang and Jia Hao. This is done by leaving unquestioned the concept of a linear economy which has brought so much wealth and advantage to elite nations and millions within these nations (and to the growing middle class worldwide). It offers only that in future it should be less harmful. Children can discuss the choices about less harmful and this is supposed to be liberating and helpful ( 'its all about lifestyles and values...') Yet the challenge is that if people, prosperity and planet all matter then logically a sustainable economy has to be modeled as “a kind of zoological economy”  and ESD should be a vigorous debate about how to get there and how other elements, like social equity, like population or consumption; like money and debt might fit.

This avoidance of  accepting a circular economy can be quite subtle. While I am a supporter of initiatives around a  "low carbon economy" this phrase  can be interpreted as a carbon clean up for the economy rather than a fundamentally changed one, something which is implied in the word "sustainable". There is a world of difference between the two assumptions. (The first has no chance of lasting, is the primary observation!)

This then is my 2009 ESD challenge. If you don’t intend exploring the how to of a sustainable (circular) economy would you possibly consider calling your work something else, please?

Ken Webster

(1) Circular Economy Model - Taking Fuel Ethanol and Bio-gas as its core
Du Feng-guang / Jia Hao
International Conference on Bioenergy Utilization and Environment Protection – 6th LAMNET Project Workshop, 24 - 26 September 2003, Dalian, China