Meeting the Challenges of Existential Threats through Educational Innovation

A Proposal for an Expanded Curriculum

Herner Saeverot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000467833
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Meeting the Challenges of Existential Threats through Educational Innovation is the first book of its kind to provide an educational and systematic analysis of problems and solutions regarding the most pressing threats that humankind is facing.

The book makes a case for the importance of education responding to significant threats; including climate change, pandemics, decline in global biodiversity, overpopulation, egoism, ideologies, nuclear, biological and chemical warfare, inequality, artificial intelligence, and ignorance and the distortion of truth. Written by leading experts in their field based on cutting-edge research, the chapters explore these issues and offer suggestions for how education can address these problems in the future.

This groundbreaking and highly topical book will be an essential reading for academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of education research, environmental studies, educational politics and organizational management.

1 Basic constructs in the science of sustainability education

Herner Saeverot and Glenn-Egil Torgersen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003019480-1

The title of this volume—Meeting the Challenges of Existential Threats through Educational Innovation: A Proposal for an Expanded Curriculum—opens up several questions that will be addressed in this chapter. Why should we meet or act upon the challenges of existential threats? What are the most pressing threats to humankind today? As for the challenges of the threats, which will be elaborated in more detail in the other chapters of this volume, we ask whether the threats should be seen separately or in connection to one another. Furthermore, what signifies the concepts of existential threat and educational innovation, and why do we use the concept of threat instead of risk? How may we categorise the existential threats in terms of scope, severity and timing, and what is the role of education when it comes to existential threats? The latter question leads us to the subtitle of the volume and is addressed in Chapter 2. Therein we argue that education can contribute with the academic discipline of curriculum theory; more specifically, we envisage a global curriculum which can serve as a guide to designing national and local curricula in different countries and regions. But first, what do we mean by the concept of the science of sustainability education (SSE)?

The science of sustainability education

There are hardly anyone, neither politicians, researchers, teachers nor educational institutions, who today deny that the concept of sustainability (elaborated in Chapter 2), in one way or another, has an impact on the development of knowledge and the preservation of the earth’s resources in all their forms. The educational institutions have an important task in this regard (Caeiro, Filho, Jabbour, & Azeiteiro, 2013; Filho, 2018; Taylor, Quinn, & Eames, 2015). The question is, however, how knowledge about sustainability can be disseminated, so as to safeguard as many interests as possible, and without creating any conflicts. This is where the science of education and other disciplines can contribute. Within the science of education, curricula function as a basic means for organising knowledge and different ways of communicating. When such competence is to be organised and connected to specific, as well as comprehensive and broad professional topics and scientific approaches, conflicts of interest may arise. Topics and solutions related to sustainability have the potential for such challenges. We would therefore underline that the science of education has developed models, concepts and methods that are both balanced and inviting (Saeverot & Kvam, 2019). These are the kind of approaches we introduce in this volume, specifically in Chapters 1, 2 and 10. We call this area of education for the Science of Sustainability Education (SSE), which we define thus:

SSE = An educational-scientific approach as to how knowledge and research on sustainability can be organised and disseminated in a balanced and inviting manner without the risk of activating conflicts of interest.

What this means in practice can be seen throughout the volume.

Justification, identification and interconnectedness

When this book was written, the world was highly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Daily we also receive news about other tragedies and atrocities, be it terror, riots and so on. A lot of the existential threats are human-made. Not least, global warming, which is a threat to humanity—although not everyone agrees with the scientific evidences (Berkhout, 2019). For example, the IPCC Special Report (2018) informs that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 40–50% by 2030 to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees compared to pre-industrial time (IPCC, 2018). In addition, nature shows disturbing signs of breakdown due to human interference. The Living Planet Report (2018) reveals evidence of biodiversity losses which is highly disturbing as the diversity of nature is crucial to the living conditions of humanity (Grooten & Almond, 2018). A non-functioning ecosystem will reduce the quality of life and may also lead to a crisis of civilisation.

Justification

Is it then justifiable to be existential pessimist? The opinions are divided. In the book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli draws a very gloomy picture of humanity.

I believe that our species will not last long. […] All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. […] I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.

(Rovelli, 2016, p. 77)

Considering that our species, Homo sapiens, has only inhabited Earth for a relatively short period of time, and that other human species are already extinct, whilst we continuously do damage on Earth, Rovelli’s assertion may not sound unrealistic (cf. Oreskes & Conway, 2014). However, calculations from the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centre for the Study of Existential Risks at Cambridge University and others show that the likelihood of human extinction or civilisational collapse is very low at the moment (Halstead, 2019). Even so, that does not mean that we should be content and passive (Fazey et al., 2018; West & Worliczek, 2019). If we do not act upon human-made threats, the existential conditions of humankind will most likely be worse (Anderson, 2019). Therefore, the existential threats should be taken seriously, so that they may be reduced and, if possible, prevented.

Identification

What kind of threats are there to human life? Some threats are quite obvious to the general public, being frequently covered in the media, such as climate changes and pandemics, while others are less obvious to the general public, such as artificial intelligence and overpopulation, which are featured quite seldom in the media. In order to identify the most pressing threats to humankind, we have conducted a systematic search of relevant literature, included in World of Knowledge and Google Scholar, as well as gathering knowledge from Global Challenges Foundation (University of Stockholm) and Centre for the study of existential risk (University of Cambridge). That is how the list of ten existential threats came about (see Table 1.1). In one way or another, and to a certain degree, these ten threats are human-made. We have not included threats from nature, such as comets and asteroids, volcanos etc.

Table 1.1 Pressing threats to humankind

Climate change	Decline in global biodiversity	Overpopulation	Infectious disease	Egoism
Nuclear, biological and chemical warfare	Ideologies	Ignorance and distortion of truth	Artificial intelligence	Inequality

Interconnectedness

The ten threats are treated separately in different chapters of this volume, but that does not mean that they are not related to one another. On the contrary, the different threats are in one way or another interrelated. Nevertheless, a trend today is seemingly to have an eye on existential threats in isolation and with no connection to other threats. For example, the coronavirus pandemic and climate change frequently appear as headline news, with no mention of other related threats. The view in this book on the other hand is that the abovementioned threats are interconnected in different ways. Often the situation resembles a set of dominoes: if one falls, many follow (Butler, 2012, 2018). For example, the natural world is harmed by the release of environmentally active substances—either over-encouraging life, as excessive nitrogen and phosphorus releases do, or suppressing life, as many harmful synthetic substances do (Cornell, 2011; see also Chapter 7). Overall, the natural world is threatened on many fronts, due to climate change (see Chapter 2), overpopulation (see Chapter 5), egotistical lifestyles (see Chapter 8) and other factors; moreover, there is growing recognition that this in turn is a cause for serious concern for the world’s societies (Rees, 2018). What we aim to do in this edited volume is to demonstrate the connections between the different threats, for example, that climate change and environmental pollution of the air, soil and water may cause serious health problems (cf. Chapters 6 and 7). All the threats presented in this book are thus considered equally serious, although each threat has different degrees of severity (see Figure 1.1). That said, some threats may be more fundamental than others, for example, egoism, which is inherent in several of the other threats. Several threats can thus act in parallel and can function synergistically to amplify the effect of each individual threat (see Chapter 9).

Figure 1.1 Existential threat classification system.

The concepts of threat, existence, risk and educational innovation

Overview of the concepts of threat, existence, existential threat and risk

In this context an existential threat is defined as a person or thing likely to cause damage or danger to the existence, well-being and survival of humankind (cf. Stevenson, 2010). This is the shortest definition of the concept, which in itself is both compound and complex. Therefore, the concept needs a more comprehensive examination, including an elaboration of a concept which is often confused with the concept of threat; namely, the concept of risk. Although the purpose is to make the concept of existential threat as clear as possible, there is no intention of reaching a definitive clarification. The concept is simply too complex. Table 1.2 develops the concept of existential threat with the help of related concepts, hence implying why this volume has more focus on the concept of threat rather than risk. The word explanations in Table 1.2 have their origin in the Oxford Dictionary of English, while the examples to the right, and the definition of the concept of existential threat, are based on the Oxford Dictionary’s descriptions of the nouns threat and existence.

Table 1.2 Overview of the concepts of threat, existence, existential threat and risk

Concepts	Explanations	Examples
Threat	A statement of an intention to inflict pain, injury, damage or other hostile action on someone in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Basic constructs in the science of sustainability education
• 2 SSE-based frame of reference: Outlines for a global curriculum—turning existential threats into resources
• 3 Climate change: Foundations for a transformative learning agenda
• 4 Biodiversity: The decline in global biodiversity and how education can be part of the solution
• 5 Overpopulation: A century of debate that deserves re-examination
• 6 Infectious disease, pandemics, and education: From miasms to COVID-19
• 7 Infectious disease threats: Antibiotic resistance, COVID-19, and future pandemics
• 8 Holding oneself in the world: Is there a need for good egoism?
• 9 Inequality: Education, opportunity and existential threat
• 10 Ideologies, threats and sustainability: How can education and knowledge of the unforeseen help reduce the threat posed by ideologies?
• 11 Understanding the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical warfare
• 12 Artificial intelligence: Is the power matched with responsibility?
• 13 Ignorance and truth
• Afterword
• Index