Learning, Environment and Sustainable Development

A History of Ideas

William Scott, Paul Vare

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000208023
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book is an introduction to the long history of human learning, the environment and sustainable development – about our struggles with the natural world: first for survival, then for dominance, currently for self-preservation, and in future perhaps, even for long-term, mutually beneficial co-existence. It charts the long arc of human–environment relationships through the specific lens of human learning, putting on record many of the people, ideas and events that have contributed, often unwittingly, to the global movement for sustainable development.

Human learning has always had a focus on the environment. It's something we've been engaged in ever since we began interacting with our surroundings and thinking about the impacts, outcomes and consequences of our actions and interactions. This unique story told by the authors is episodic rather than a connected, linear account; it probes, questions and re-examines familiar issues from novel perspectives, and looks ahead. The book is of particular interest to those studying (and teaching) courses with a focus on socio-economic and environmental sustainability, and non-governmental organisations whose work brings them face-to-face with the general public and social enterprises.

PART I

Past historic

1
HUMANS BEING

“For our prehistoric ancestors all learning was probably environmental and success was measured by survival.”¹

This book highlights individuals and social movements that down the ages, whether for reasons of morality, aesthetics or survival, have sought to remind us of our connections to the natural world. This begs the question of when it was first felt necessary to provide such reminders, which in turn prompts us to consider when it was that we apparently stopped being “natural” ourselves.

This is more than simply humans changing the environment; we can observe many creatures doing that, if mostly unconsciously. The shifting grazing patterns of wildebeest in East Africa supress woody plants thus ensuring that the Serengeti is ideal for, well, grass. Perhaps we can point to our hunter-gatherer ancestors as examples of humans living harmoniously as part of nature. Yet even this is questionable, for as the historian Yuval Harari points out, Homo sapiens may have been responsible for wiping out other human species such as Homo neanderthalensis (Harari 2011), although this “replacement” was not wholesale as recent studies show significant genetic traces in modern humans that suggests some interbreeding took place (Bae, Douka & Petraglia 2017).

Our ability to make fire may be seen as an early “unnatural” breakthrough that no other animal has achieved. Again, archaeological evidence suggests that even our primitive ancestor Homo erectus was making use of fire and thus probably cooking food over a million years ago (Berna et al. 2012). But it would be stretching a point to suggest that these early humans had become as detached from the natural world as we are.

Perhaps it is our very human nature that distinguishes us from the rest of nature. No less an authority than Charles Darwin suggests that it is our moral sense, our ability to care for others whom we do not know, even those from other species, that “affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals” (Darwin 1879:151). But even here we encounter higher-order mammals behaving altruistically, witness dolphins helping beleaguered swimmers to safety. Yet Darwin was on to something: human intelligence, with its capacity for self-awareness and abstract thought, sets us apart from other animals. It is likely that humans are unique in the way in which we are able to live in a dual reality – that is the objective reality of our physical world and a constructed reality based on our imaginations and our interpretations of the world.

Harari argues that it is our ability to both (a) behave flexibly and (b) do so in large numbers that has enabled us to become so dominant, and that this was only made possible by our ability to go beyond basic communication and to tell stories. This unique combination of abilities is a product of our thinking processes and also the way in which we communicate these. In the early 1930s the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky highlighted the role of language as an essential tool in human development. It is this that allows us to convey ideas across time and space so that each new generation can start from where its predecessors left off. While many creatures can communicate with what we might recognise as a basic language, as far as we can tell no other species has a language with such versatility that it can convey abstract thought. For as long as humans have had language, we have been learning cumulatively, not just from our own experiences but from each other’s, including from those whom we could never have met. For humans, therefore, it seems that there is no going back to some pre-aware, more natural state.

As our opening quotation states, for our prehistoric ancestors all learning was probably environmental and success was measured by survival. More recent accounts of learning among indigenous peoples show that many essential skills were acquired through play, and that work and play were not distinct categories (Gray 2013). Social bonds were reinforced through ritual storytelling, no doubt deeply rooted in local environments and providing an interconnected view of the world that included humans in the cycles of life. This may be as close to natural as we will ever get because any possibility of aligning human interactions with the environment alongside those of other intelligent animals came to an end with the advent of agriculture. Occurring some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, agriculture and the domestication of livestock was perhaps the most significant step ever taken by humans in terms of modifying the global landscape. In a timeline of momentous developments that might include language – fire – agriculture – writing – gunpowder – printing – the Industrial Revolution – the atomic bomb – digitisation, it could be argued that agriculture stands apart as the most momentous of all in that it changed our direction rather than simply accelerating an existing process. If humans changed nature through agriculture, then the next most significant leap may be the development of artificial intelligence if that is allowed to change human nature. We return to this in our closing chapter.

The cultivation of crops, first in evidence in the Middle East but occurring independently across Asia and later in South America, allowed societies to establish more complex social structures. While these complex settlements and social structures develop in fixed locations, the anthropologist Hugh Brody (2000) argues that agricultural societies are in fact more mobile and nomadic than hunter-gatherers (who tend to stay grounded in one area) because of the continuous migration to new land driven by population increase among agricultural communities. Maintaining such complexity requires more than verbal communication and so systems of writing emerged based on earlier hieroglyphic forms, again in the Middle East, with writing found in Sinai dating from between 1850 BCE and 1550 BCE, and similarly dated cuneiform script in Mesopotamia. The Phoenician alphabet from around 1100 BCE is the oldest verified alphabet to date and was followed by independent developments of scripts in the Indus Valley and within the Zhou dynasty of China. The significance of writing is that it demands literacy, which calls for some form of structured education, albeit for an elite class of scribes. Henceforth it became a matter of record that learning no longer focused primarily on the objective, bio-physical realities of our environment but on the means by which we convey our interpretations of the world including the myriad human concerns that we deem important at any given time. Indeed, we might frame this book as a history of attempts by people to convey stories to the rest of us that cut through our constructed worlds in order to remind us of the significance of our objective reality.

Note

• 1 John Smyth. (1995). Environment and Education: a view from a changing scene. Environmental Education Research, 1 (1), 1–20.

Further reading

1. Bae, C.J., Douka, K. & Petraglia, M.D. (2017). On the origin of modern humans: Asian perspectives. Science, 358 (6368). Web link: tinyurl.com/w3qjfpm
2. Berna, F., Goldberg, P., Horwitz, L.K., Brink, J., Holt, S., Bamford, M. & Chazan, M. (2012). Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109 (20). Web link: tinyurl.com/qp8tq3p
3. Brody, H. (2000). The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World. London: Faber & Faber.
4. Darwin, C. (1879). The Descent of Man. 2nd edition. London: John Murray.
5. Gray, P. (2013). Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. New York: Basic Books.
6. Harari, Y.N. (2011). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. London: Penguin.

2
PLAYING AND LEARNING IN THE MESOLITHIC

“As knowledge was cumulative, specialised and could be stored, even maintenance of the status quo required its transmission between generations.”¹

For our prehistoric ancestors all learning was essentially environmental and success was measured by survival, and Gough (2017) argues that education in some form or other (i.e. structured learning) became both possible and necessary because of this. Wilson (2019) makes much the same point. She examined a methodological framework for identifying how young people in the Mesolithic Period (c. 10,000 BCE) spent their time in post-glac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Past historic
• PART II Present imperfect
• PART III Future possible
• Appendix 1: A brief history of environment and learning in England
• Appendix 2: A brief history of environment and learning in the USA
• Appendix 3: A brief history of environment and learning in Germany
• Appendix 4: The 17 Sustainable Development Goals
• Index