Mmmm, cotton candy. Yummy. Maybe not as tasty as Fairly Nuts or Vermonster, but very good. I am in the “taste room” at Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory in Vermont, USA . It is the last stop (before the obligatory souvenir shop), and the peak of the guided tour of the factory. The ice cream tastes amazingly good, and even better when I take a closer look at the walls of the room. On them hang paintings and posters with the company’s slogan: Peace, Love and Ice Cream. I read: “We strive to minimize our negative impact on the environment, from cow to cone” and “We seek to support nonviolent ways to achieve peace & justice.” It is not only the ice cream that is good—maybe one can become good through eating it? Through something so simple as a conscious choice of ice cream, it seems possible to contribute to saving our threatened environment and to fight against social injustices. Good that we went by plane from Sweden to the USA , drove to Vermont and experienced this!
Ben & Jerry’s is in many ways an exemplary company. Their tasty ice creams are not just organically produced and fair-trade certified. Besides the fact that the company has been involved in a number of social justice projects, in the home state of Vermont as well as in other places in the world. During 2015 they launched the ice cream cone Save our Swirled with the aim of highlighting climate change. While finishing the writing of this book, they engaged in the Swedish and EU political debate about refugees and for more generous rules for asylum. Their trademark is a symbol of the possibility of humane and sustainable business (Edmondson, 2014).
Certainly, the world needs more companies like this. But one can also understand Ben & Jerry’s as a symbol of how the solution to complex sustainability and environment issues has been culturally translated into individual consumption choices. Laws seem out of fashion; instead it is up to you and me to become knowledgeable about problems and solutions and to make sustainable choices, like buying sustainable ice cream. Michel Foucault (1980) wrote that we need to understand power in this kind of society as if the king’s head has been cut off. Governing and exercise of power does not just happen through state government, but through people’s souls and their will to feel and appear normal . As will be discussed later, this means that the individual’s intentions , actions and feelings become entangled with global environmental problems.
Back to the ice cream. The website YouthXChange, which is supported by the United Nations organizations UNESCO and UNEP as well as business corporations, suggests a number of ways for youngsters to contribute to a better world. One suggestion is to buy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream under the heading: Ice Cream with a Mission:
The company has a progressive, non-partisan social mission that seeks to meet human needs and eliminate injustices in local, national and international communities by integrating these concerns into their day-to-day business activities. The company’s focus is on children and families, the environment and sustainable agriculture on family farms. (http://www.youthxchange.net)
In my home country Sweden a 0.5 liter can of this ice cream costs around 60 kronor, which means around 7 US dollars. In other words: the United Nations , as a symbol and an organization, is used to promote an ice cream brand which is as tasty as it is expensive. How can that be possible? To be able to understand this one needs to understand the context. The platform YouthXChange is a part of a global educational reform. In 2014 the United Nations’ decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) 2005–2014 came to an end (https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-sustainable-development/what-is-esd/un-decade-of-esd). After that the Global Action Plan (GAP) was initiated (http://www.globalactionplan.com). This pedagogical discourse and practice, which today mostly is referred to either as Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) or as Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE ) has its roots in environmental education (EE) in the 1960s and 1970s.1 During the early nineties, the environmental debate was widened and put into a context of social and economic factors. The notion of sustainable development became a symbol of our time. In Our Common Future , also known as the Brundtland Report, sustainable development was described as follows: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (UN , 1987). To put it briefly, it is a matter of using the earth’s resources responsibly, and striving for a more equal society. Social and economic development for “everyone”—with ecological sustainability —is an important goal. There is criticism both against the development paradigm and against the way that social and economic factors are assessed as ecological, particularly in the research field of education for sustainability (e.g. Jickling & Wals, 2008; Kopnina , 2012). As a result, people talk of ESE rather than ESD , stressing Education and Environment rather than Development. This brings in the broad sustainability perspective, while simultaneously emphasizing the ecological problems and toning down the development discourse . In this book, I will use the term ESE for the same reason.
Education has been held up as an important tool for achieving a sustainable society. The idea was—and still is—that everybody can help, that the world can be saved with the aid of education, engagement , and a will to do the right thing. Children and adolescents—and also adults—should therefore be educated and socialized in new lifestyles, demanding ecological, economic, and social sustainability . What this means in purely concrete terms is harder to define. As pointed out by several scholars (e.g. Bengtsson & Östman, 2013; González-Gaudiano, 2005; Gough & Scott, 2006; Hillbur, Ideland, & Malmberg, 2016), ESD, and ESE are “slippery” concepts . This makes them receptive to political and societal changes. They can be given meaning depending on how, when, and where they are used and work as “an airport hub for meaning making” (Mannion, Biesta, Priestley, & Ross, 2011, p. 444). This is clear in the way that “sustainability” is used by companies in their codes of behavior or in justifications of political decisions, in applications for research funding, or in selling products. Sustainability is not merely a political will; it is also a symbol which means that the United Nations can be used to advertise a brand of ice cream in an educational context, under the cover of saving the world. Sustainable development cannot be contested. Who could be against working for sustainability?
This book aims to problematize the incontestability of sustainable development and the notion of being an environmentally friendly person in general, and a pupil in particular. I ...