The problems confronting us in the Anthropocene may be summarized as the “three Ps,” namely Population, Pollution and Poverty. Metamorphosis to the Sustainocene will require application of the three “Es,” namely Ecology, Education and Ethics.–(Furnass, 2016)
Part 1 considered the extent to which pedagogical practice has perpetuated and endorsed a culture of heedless exploitation of the natural world, with the justification of it being for the common good of humanity. I surmised that for several centuries the pedagogical goals of formal education have been moulded by a culture of human exceptionalism and economic growth as the prime progenitors of human well-being. As such they have contributed greatly to heedless exploitation of the world’s ecosystems resulting in the current disconnect with the natural world.
Geological time periods are common reference points for defining our planet’s past but currently subdivisions of the Holocene (our nanny epoch) have become reference points for our past, present and future. With much debate over the geological accuracy of its beginning, the Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2000) bridges our past into the present and the Symbiocene (Albrecht, 2020) and Sustainocene (Furnass, 2012) both point hesitantly towards the future. Common to all these markers is recognition of the existential nature of the polycrises that presently afflict the ecosystems of the world and the necessity for a cultural shift to support any kind of meaningful future for ourselves and the planet. This follow up article uses Furnass’s three “E”s (op cit) to take stock of the transformative role of education in triggering and supporting transition towards a sustainable socio-ecological interaction with the biosphere that supports us.
Sustainability Education…. It still needs practice
The purpose and nature of education is a long story, the preserve of philosophers as much as educationalists, but a useful distinction can be drawn between pedagogy and instruction and training. Instruction and training concern themselves with skills and knowledge aligned with accredited predetermined outcomes for learners. These are invariably in response to the marketplace but also sensitive to the needs of more technocentric applications such as medical science, energy production and other essential attributes of a technology dependent society. On the other hand, pedagogy concerns itself with an underlying cultural appreciation of values in order to inform, bring about or maintain desired changes and perspectives in society on the basis of contextualised learning (Biesta and Miedema, 2002). In this latter sense it is key to bringing about the cultural perspective called for in Part 1 and the distinction presented here is useful in considering a cultural shift of pedagogical goals focussed on sustainability. Importantly however, a conflation of the two practices need not be antithetical to each other (Johnston, 2012, 2022), consequent on being underpinned by an ethical perspective empathic to the preservation of ecosystem integrity and a strong emphasis on environmental sustainability.
Is economic development the right cultural focus?
Such a cultural shift could be said to have been attempted already with the decade of Education for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2005), influencing global education policy and disseminating the principles of sustainable development worldwide (World Commission on Environment and Development (UN WCED, 1987). However, I am sceptical, and muse over the clearly self-contradictory nature and anthropocentric bias of this initiative as the required culture-shift called for in Part 1 (Huckle and Wals, 2015).
It seems almost heretical to be critical of an initiative which has significantly raised awareness of the anthropogenically driven negative impacts on the regenerative capacity of global ecosystems attributable to extensive and persistent resource exploitation. Nevertheless, the ideology underpinning sustainable development and thus, education for sustainable development, is flawed and as a cultural shift towards transformative pedagogical principles, it is unsound (Kuhlman and Farrington, 2010; Hickel, 2019; Bendell, 2022). For me, it is a matter of some concern that in essence the socio-economic basis of SD is not far removed from the current model of exploitative neo-liberal capitalism which has contributed in no small measure to those consequences summarised in my opening paragraph.
Regardless of how the economic ‘deckchairs’ are arranged in complex graphical geometries on schoolroom whiteboards, it is difficult to discern how sustainable development is possible without significant environmental exploitation to drive the economic growth necessary for its viability even in the short term. It thrives best in an affluent habitat and inevitably, favours economically developed nations at the expense of developing nations where the majority of natural resources are drawn from. Ultimately, we must accept the realisation that even with current population levels, the impact of our demands of the natural world are beyond the resilience and regenerative carrying capacities of global ecosystems. I take this further in (Johnston, 2024) but for expediency’s sake here, the issue is summarised well by Kenneth Boulding’s (1966) assertion noted below which lends weight to the many other well-rehearsed critiques of the paradoxical conflation of sustainability and development which reach beyond mere semantics.
“Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.” In: Economic Principles for “Spaceship Earth”-(Barbier and Burgess, 2017)
Sustainable development is therefore a socio-economic political response which trades off long-term sustainability against comparatively short-term benefits due to its anthropogenic bias towards human development fuelled by economic growth which must ultimately be at the expense of environmental sustainability and ecosystem stability. As if to reinforce this, the education for sustainable development criteria presented generally in Sustainable Development Goal 4.0 and in particular SGD 4.7 omit any reference to environmental sustainability (Walid and Luetz, 2018) obviating the important legacy of Environmental Education for Sustainability of previous decades (UNEP, 1978; Tilbury, 1995).
SDG 4.7: by 2030 ensure all learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including among others through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship, and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development. (UN :2015)
SDG 4.7 presents a huge canvas of admirable aspirations with little contextualisation which in conjunction with the foregoing concerns identifies sustainable development principally as a socio-economic rather than a socio-ecologically holistic enterprise. Ergo it is unsafe as a policy guide to inform transformative pedagogical goals aimed at transitioning towards a more long term ecologically empathic interaction with the biosphere.
What now ?
Declining faith in the integrity and workability of sustainable development as an economic template and a valid pedagogical goal for achieving sustainability, signals the opportunity for a re-evaluation of the pedagogical goals necessary to inform transformative educational practice overall. The compartmentalised nature of the sustainable development goals fails to take into account the ‘wicked’ interconnectedness of the socio-ecological problems that we as educators, facilitators, and learners struggle with, in equally compartmentalised and reductionist educational systems worldwide. The federal dissemination of (education for) sustainable development policies which emanates downstream from affluent developed countries to (economically) developing countries replaces local socio-ecological contexts and puts traditional cultural values at risk. I would therefore cautiously posit that perhaps the cumulative limitations presented above signal that the era of education for sustainable development has passed and the time for a more sustainability focussed integrated approach has arrived.
Well , that was easy ! Problem solved! But…!… there are a lot of moving parts to reforming formal education provision towards a more sustainability focused pedagogy which by extension stimulates a wider sociological awareness and capacity to act upon issues. In the first instance, it is necessary to acknowledge that sustainability can be a confused and confusing panacea for our socio-ecological ills (Johnston, 2024).
As Mark White notes,
“sustainability remains an elusive concept… hard to define, but many of us believe we ‘know it when we see it.’ ….. it means different things to different people. How can we hope to achieve a shared vision when we’re not certain what vision we are sharing?”-(White 2013: pp. 213–217)
Within a complex educational system committed to sustainability as an end-goal, the underlying pedagogy requires parity of value with the acquisition of skills and knowledge as accredited by the provider and accepted by society (Johnston, 2022). With this in mind, perhaps the true goal of sustainability education is to nurture a holistically informed and valued consensus of what sustainability means to us as a civilisation and realistically acknowledge the root causes of the pressures that fuel the psychological and physical dislocation between ourselves and the ecological systems we are part of.
Furnass has noted a fact tacitly understood by most teachers and learners, that, “the crux of sustainability education is working with rather than against nature”. His three “P”s (as noted in my opening quote) can be rightly identified as a manifestation of our dysfunctional relationship with the biosphere we are part of but equal regard should be given to his three “E”s as a useful compass with which to navigate towards sustainable solutions to address them. My own plea is for a cultural shift in pedagogical goals that expresses a less managerial and more sustainable and protective engagement with the ecosystems that we live in rather than prosecuting an obsession of developing them as workers in our service.
References
Albrecht, G.A. (2020) ‘Exiting the Anthropocene and entering the Symbiocene’, Minding Nature, 9(2), p. 12.
Barbier, E. and Burgess, J. (2017) Economic Principles for “Spaceship Earth”. Available at: https://www.resources.org/archives/economic-principles-for-spaceship-earth/ (Accessed: 12 September 2024).
Bendell, J. (2022) ‘Replacing Sustainable Development: Potential Frameworks for International Cooperation in an Era of Increasing Crises and Disasters’, Sustainability, 14, p. 8185.
Biesta, G.J.J. and Miedema, S. (2002) ‘Instruction or pedagogy? The need for a transformative conception of education’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 18(2), pp. 173–181.
Boulding, K.E. (1966) ‘9 Key Key text: The economics of the coming spaceship earth1’, in Interdisciplinary Economics: Kenneth E. Boulding’s Engagement in the Sciences. Routledge, p. 335.
Crutzen, P. and S.E.F.R.S.A. of S.S.Sweden. (2000) ‘The anthropocene ’, IGBP newsletter, 41.
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Furnass, B. (2016) The Sustainocene – Interview with visionary, Dr. Bryan Furnass. Available at: https://zerospinzone.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-sustainocene-interview-with-dr.html (Accessed: 30 May 2023).
Hickel, J. (2019) ‘The contradiction of the sustainable development goals: Growth versus ecology on a finite planet’, Sustainable Development, 27(5), pp. 873–884. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/SD.1947.
Huckle, J. and Wals, A.E.J. (2015) ‘The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development: business as usual in the end’, Environmental Education Research, 21(3), pp. 491–505.
Johnston, R. (2012) ‘The central role of science education for effective sustainability and citizenship education’, Teacher Education for Equity and Sustainability Network, (January 2012), pp. 59–66.
Johnston, R. (2022) Achieving SDG 4.7 by matching sustainability learning outcomes to subject-specific curricula: a guide | THE Campus Learn, Share, Connect, Times Higher Education . Available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/achieving-sdg-47-matching-sustainability-learning-outcomes-subjectspecific-curricula-guide (Accessed: 13 December 2022).
Johnston, R. (2024) ‘Communicating Sustainability: Science Literacy and Transformative Pedagogies’, in Cottle Simon (ed.) Communicating a World-in-Crisis. New York: Peter Lang (in press).
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UNEP (1978) Final Report, Intergovernmental conference on environmental education, Tbilissi (USRR), 1977. Paris (France). Tibillissi.
United Nations (2005) UN Decade of ESD 2005 – 2014. Available at: https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-sustainable-development/what-is-esd/un-decade-of-esd (Accessed: 10 January 2023).
Walid, M. and Luetz, J.M. (2018) ‘From Education for Sustainable Development to Education for Environmental Sustainability: Reconnecting the Disconnected SDGs’, in W. Leal Filho (ed.) Handbook of Sustainability Science and Research. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 803–826. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63007-6_49.
White, M.A. (2013) ‘Sustainability: I know it when I see it’, Ecological Economics, 86, pp. 213–217. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/J.ECOLECON.2012.12.020.
Author’s other publications: Publications | Sustainable Futures (ronjohnstonsustainablefutures.com)
