Education for Sustainability

Becoming Naturally Smart

Paul Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136487675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this book, Paul Clarke argues that in order to live sustainably we need to learn how to live and flourish in our environment in a manner that uses finite resources with ecologically informed discretion. Education is perfectly placed to create the conditions for innovative and imaginative solutions and to provide the formulas that ensure that everyone becomes naturally smart; but to achieve this, we need to recognise that an education that is not grounded in a full understanding of our relationship with the natural world is no education at all. In other words, a total transformation of schools and schooling is needed.

While acknowledging that the ecological crisis is global in scale, Paul Clarke maintains that many of the solutions are already evident in our local communities. Drawing on innovative sustainable living programmes from around the world, including Sweden's Forest Schools, China's Green Schools programme, the US Green Ribbon Schools programme and his own school-of-sustainability project, Paul Clarke offers practical solutions about how schools and communities can make their contribution.

This book examines how we might proceed to empower and actively develop schools and communities to connect hand, heart and mind for an eco-literate future. It is thought provoking, timely and challenging, and should be read by school leaders, community and business leaders, as well as anyone grappling with the problems of transition from an industrial past to an ecologically sustainable future.

Exploration Four

Open source living: when sustainability
is the way of life

There is no middle path. Do we join together to build an economy that is sustainable? Or do we stay with our environmentally unsustainable economy until it declines? It is not a goal that can be compromised. One way or another, the choice will be made by our generation. But it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.

Lester Brown, Eco-economy 2002

As our discussion has developed, we have been examining some basic themes of sustainable thinking, which concern:

• scale – planetary
• scope – centuries
• stakes – civilization,

and we might add

• speed – we need to act with intelligent haste,

to establish new conditions to sustain long term for community resilience and stability. We have also seen how these first two agendas feed to the third, a reappraisal of the stakes if we do not undergo the transition, the costs to our civilization. To get there, we need to adopt new models of knowledge transfer, and one interesting option lies in open-source practices, where ideas are free to users, with a proviso of feedback and participatory support. In all their many guises, these experiments with sustainable solutions add up to a renaissance of urban community, it forms the foundation for a new cultural and social movement.

In a recent article on the Time magazine website, Bryan Walsh (2011) wrote an interesting article on contemporary consumerism. Walsh says that after thousands of years during which most human beings lived hand to mouth, in the twentieth century the industrial economies of the West and eventually much of the rest of the world began churning out consumer goods – refrigerators, cars, TVs, telephones, computers and this changed our expectations of daily life, from one of scarcity, to one of plenty. George W. Bush won re-election as President in 2004 in part by proclaiming an ‘ownership society’. The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America.

The ownership question is significant here, and the distinction between what we own and what we do not own, and what such ownership represents. Walsh suggests that even as Bush junior was announcing the birth of the ownership society, it was already rotting from the inside out. We might look at the start of its demise when the Internet company Napster began operating. The digitalization of music, and the ability to share it online through bit-torrents, made owning CDs superfluous. The Napsterization phenomena spread to nearly all other media, and by 2008 the financial architecture that had been built to support all that individual ownership – the sub-prime mortgages and the credit-default swaps – collapsed on top of us all. Ownership hasn't made the US or the UK or Germany, or Australia or South Africa vital; it had just about financially ruined everyone.

Walsh observes what we have already indicated earlier, that people were realizing that something was amiss with the economic model, and that a credit-fuelled economy was not a long-term proposition. By making new choices as a consequence, choices which are not mainstream responses and sometimes seem to be just plain counter-intuitive, they have begun to establish a very different way of consuming goods and services. He says that what is interesting is that some people are learning these lessons very quickly and changing their habits as a result. Instead of buying products and services outright, they are looking for new and different economically viable solutions. This is especially true for the young who will continue to bear the brunt of the recession, with a youth jobless rate in the US and the UK of about 20 per cent, and who have little available money to spend. Instead of individualizing purchases, they are pioneering a form of collaborative consumption: renting, lending and even sharing goods instead of buying them. You can see it in the rise of big businesses like Love Film and NetFlix, whose more than 20 million subscribers pay a fee to essentially share DVDs; or Zipcar and Liftshare, which gives more than 500,000 members the chance to share cars part-time.

Those consumer trends, while successful, are essentially Internet-era upgrades of earlier car-and video-rental businesses; they are revised and updated versions of an earlier idea. Walsh reports the underbelly of these responses, the abandonment of individual ownership, when he says that the really innovative spirit of collaborative consumption that is breaking the mould can be found in businesses like Snap-Goods, which helps people rent goods via the Internet. Or Airbnb, and we might add to this the couch-surfing and house-swapping schemes which allow people to rent and even travel free of charge. It does not stop there – people are beginning to recognize that renting is much easier than buying, and so schemes that let you rent a power drill via Snap-Goods or a local equivalent store for one or two days means less long-term storage problems and more flexibility of use. This is extremely useful in the urban context where storage space can be limited, and might explain why projects like the internationally successful Freecycle, where people post on-line items that they no longer want to keep for others to take away for free and use themselves, has become a massively popular local networking scheme.

While the individual projects are themselves very interesting, it is the underlying trend that is most noticeable. The real beneficiary of collaborative consumption phenomena, as opposed to the previous individualized consumer culture, is society as it mutates to what I will suggest is an open-source model of living. We will learn to give it away, share it for free or at least establish conditions on a ‘neighbourhood deal’ of trust and cooperation in exchange for a more resilient community base. In an era when families are scattered and we may not know the people down the street, sharing things – even with strangers we've just met online – allows us to make meaningful connections. Peer-to-peer sharing ‘involves the re-emergence of community’, writes Rachel Botsman, co-author of What's Mine Is Yours: The rise of collaborative consumption. ‘This works because people can trust each other.’ If we do not believe this to be the case, then consider ebay, the online shopping and trading scheme. We bid on ebay and we pay in advance of getting the goods, only a minute fraction of 1 per cent of all trades on ebay are defaulted, and yet we are buying from people we have never nor will ever meet, from all parts of the world, and paying them before they send us any goods, it is completely counter-intuitive to the established logic of transactions that the old system was hard-wired to maintain.

What Walsh illustrates is that we are trusting social beings, we yearn to trust and be trusted, and that this is a core feature of a community mind at work. He says, ‘That's the beauty of a sharing society – and perhaps the reason it might prove more lasting than one built on ownership.’

Walsh's article emphasizes how communities can flourish through new micro-technologies of connectivity. Some of these enable people to generate an economic livelihood, some are practical solutions to the contemporary problem of urban living such as having little physical space, or simply not wanting the burden of numerous seldom-used resources and products (Leadbeater 2000).

Incredible Edible

In my own work, I have been able to experiment within a community project (Incredible Edible) to see how the simple idea of making a resource free to everyone (in this case free food grown in public places) can serve as a vehicle for radical thinking about design and regeneration of an entire community.

The findings from this work have subsequently prompted other projects, School-of-Sustainability and Pop-Up-Farm¹, which functions as a connector between local and global activities on the theme of sustainable living. Both projects have a set of small-scale solutions that are guiding day-to-day activity, and each functions to a greater or lesser extent upon open source and participatory development.

Incredible Edible is a deceptively simple initiative. It maintains a determined focus on food, through growing, cooking, eating and celebrating the food we can produce. However, to get to and from this focus we have learned that there is a need to encounter a whole set of relationships, of people, places, interests and activities that can be examined, and these can be used to illustrate a new way of living, ‘treading more gently’ as Thomas Berry (1996) says, on the earth.

The Incredible Edible mantra is ‘if you eat you are in’; the approach we adopt is provocative and participatory, we anticipate participation but do so without exerting pressure – simply by existing as a project, people have migrated towards involvement. We begin to reconnect with our own relationship with nature, through food, and with others through the communion of food that exists in every person, in every place on the planet, but we do it with serious intent.

Our starting point for this food project comes in the redefinition of the use of public space, and recognizing that space is abundant in schools, in playing fields, playgrounds, parks and pathways. These are the starting points of an urban food-centred revolution. They serve as symbolic examples of how to reinvent the spaces around us for different use, drawing attention to such space and enabling people to participate in practical ways with visible outcomes and a revitalized sense of the possible (Arnold 1994).

We use a focus on food, food growing, food preparation, food preservation, food consumption and food waste management as a metaphor for our reconnection with the local space we encounter in our daily lives, and also to illustrate how divorced we have become from the food we eat. This is a simple, yet powerful sustainability story. It is through food that we flourish, yet we mostly place trust in the production of our food in the hands of very few producers and providers. This demonstrates in turn, how that dislocation, and the rebuilding of a reconnection, enables us to reinterpret our relationship with the earth, with natural seasons and with the track of time.

This is not sentimentality for a bygone age, it is a critical lesson of contemporary survival. Food illustrates graphically the insanity of our time through some startling numbers; in Great Britain, our food travels an average of 18 billion miles each year from farm to plate (HRH Prince of Wales et al. 2010). We are not alone, this is repeated across the developed world. In the USA, the majority of food eaten on a daily dinner plate travels more than a thousand miles from farm to customer. Food shortages have led to riot conditions in many parts of the world in the past five years. Access to good quality food is not just a problem of the south; in the richest country in the world, the USA, there are recorded food deserts (that is areas of housing where people live more than one mile away from any retail unit selling fresh produce) in both Detroit and Baltimore.

What gets this transportation of food to happen on a huge scale is oil. Oil is also the power behind agribusiness. Oil saturates every aspect of our food chain, but oil is a finite resource, and the era of cheap oil is rapidly coming to an end as it gets ever harder to extract from the remaining locations. Oil is also extremely dirty stuff, and as we know, burning carbon is not an intelligent way to see ourselves into a sustainable future. In the process of producing our food for the modern food industry we are polluting our own nest at a phenomenal rate. Our scale of carbon emissions is such that in a matter of 100 years we have managed to pollute the atmosphere with more carbon than at any time since the last ice age – carbon emissions and food are just one of a number of examples of the modern crisis; cheap oil is running out, and what do we do then?

For over a quarter of a century, there has been a slowly growing realization among people from many different social, economic and cultural backgrounds, that the way the human race is living on planet earth is not healthy for us, for other living things and for the earth itself. A recognition that the story we are telling ourselves is no longer suited to the world we live in, and that we face an urgent need for change. The urgency associated with these concerns was examined in the first two Explorations of this book, and we attend to the lessons learned in the form of the potential for change that we have residing in community in the third Exploration, where we have indicated why so many commentators are emphasizing a clear need for local and global action. We begin to see that the renewed interest in what is local is more than the stuff of lifestyle choice; it is the formative period of a new social and cultural movement. The idea of redefining community is therefore an important consideration in any new notion of practice, and it features strongly in many of the discourses of change, empowered community and redefined citizenship. A diverse movement of people and organizations is emerging from the rethinking of community, it often challenges the consumerist narrative and presents practical alternatives to the existing themes. These alternatives converge upon the critical questions of our time, how to learn to live sustainably and as one with our earth, using resources within our means and not depleting the very stuff we need to retain. In pursuing this idea, people construct a narrative of what it means to have a real connection with the world around us; it enables people to re-imagine a future where they play an important part, personally and in connection with others.

The way these narratives develop is through community – the connection of person to person, idea to idea, place to place, action to action – it is carried in the stuff of social networks. It is through shared narrative that we carry our day-to-day realities and understandings. These narratives have over the past centuries carried the rhetoric of tribalism, feudalism, religion, communism, fascism, capitalism and democracy to name but a few. However, in recent times we have been led to believe that one dominant narrative exists, the narrative of consumerism. This narrative carries with it values of affluence, individualism, wealth, lifestyle and industrial progress pursued without conscience or consequence within and between nations. This narrative transcends all of our established ideological boundaries. It restricts, inhibits and influences our capability to explore other ways of living by commodifying all aspects of our lives. It influences and informs how we see ourselves and how we relate to and live and work with others. But, in the end, it is just a narrative that has led us to a particular form of civilization, a story we are telling ourselves about the illusion of certainty of endless resource, continued economic growth at any cost (Orr 2009).

A living, learning example

Clearly, to move these ideas forward requires examples and workable solutions so that they become an antidote to the mainstream narrative, and by making them real and practised they do not fall victim to the accusation that the ideas are in any way idealist, elitist, factional or illusory. That is why it has been a central feature of the Incredible Edible programme to show people ways of achieving practical solutions as starting points to these huge challenges. When people can see examples of sustainable living for themselves, and build their own narrative and rationale behind their actions in the everyday and the mundane aspects of daily life, we know that ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Education for Sustainability
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: Growing communities
• Prologue: Imagine an alternative
• Introduction
• Exploration One Rethinking our relationship with the environment
• Exploration Two Is education fit for purpose if the purpose is sustainable living?
• Exploration Three How can community help schools to live with uncertainty?
• Exploration Four Open source living: When sustainability is the way of life
• Exploration Five Can we create schools of sustainability?
• Exploration Six The urban fix: Sustainable cities, sustainable minds
• Exploration Seven Our great work: education for sustainability.
• References
• Index