Reviewed by Ella Inglebret and CHiXapkaid (D. Michael Pavel)
The salmon serves as an indicator species reflecting the overall health of the natural environment in the Pacific Northwest. For Native American tribal members, the salmon has played a central role in sustaining communities both historically and in contemporary daily life. Based on the importance of the salmon to all people living in this region, tribal leaders, environmental organizations, government agencies, and educators formed a partnership to create curriculum resources that bring awareness to the status of the salmon population as it interconnects with the broader ecological system. The outgrowth of these efforts is the Shadow of the Salmon curriculum, designed to prepare eighth- grade students with 21st century critical thinking, problem solving, and communication skills as they address environmental issues. (more…)
Recently Gregory Smith, Professor in the Lewis and Clark College Graduate School of Education and Counseling, received a $19,380 grant from the Gray Family Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation to train teachers in the West Linn (OR) School District on environmental issues. The Environmental Education Program seeks to encourage a strong local land ethic, sustainable communities, and stewardship of the natural environment by citizens throughout Oregon. The Fund is committed long term to institutionalizing a series of age-appropriate experiences that build a sense of place and responsibility towards Oregon and the region.
The Sustainability Education Initiative is a program of professional development coursework and activities for K-12 teachers in the West Linn-Wilsonville School District. During three courses offered in 2009, Smith prepared 50-60 teachers to incorporate sustainability issues into their classrooms and help them implement school or community projects that will enhance local natural and social environments. Participants will be eligible for small seed grants to fund start-up projects. The grant aims to increase the number of teachers implementing sustainability projects in schools, and increase student and educator awareness of local natural systems, ecologies, and social needs.
Sustainability and Schools: Educating for Interconnection, Adaptability, and Resilience
by Greg Smith
In my home state of Oregon it’s impossible to pick up the daily paper and not encounter some article that deals with concerns about environmental or social sustainability. With climate change, dramatically increasing energy costs, economic instability, and growing worries about the availability and cost of food, journalists and the public are at last paying attention to issues that for decades were pushed to the margins of the nation’s collective consciousness.
This shift in public awareness has yet to have much impact on American schools where a preoccupation with testing remains the central concern of the day. This should not surprise us. Education tends to follow social trends rather than initiate them. Given the rapidity with which changes are occurring in the environment and the economy, however, schools may need to take a more active role in preparing young people to address challenges posed by a warmer and oil-strapped world. All of our futures could well depend on their capacity to respond to these new conditions with intelligence and a spirit of generosity and compassion.
Fortunately, some educators are now adopting teaching approaches that promise to help young people grapple with the dilemmas of civic involvement and problem solving. Few teachers explicitly address climate change, rising fuel prices, or food shortages head-on; what they do instead is create learning experiences that engage students in community issues while preparing them to become actors more than consumers or victims. I believe that these educators are laying the foundations of an education for sustainability and equity.
What I find reassuring is the frequency with which I encounter these educational innovators. In the first few months of 2008, I heard stories about three schools where students are being drawn into experiences that demonstrate young people’s capacity to problem solve and act. They represent the possible and demonstrate what thoughtful educators can accomplish despite funding dilemmas or the constraints of No Child Left Behind.
The first is from the Oregon City School for Service Learning, at the end of the Oregon Trail just south of Portland.[1] Students had been complaining about the awful taste of the drinking water at the school. Interested in creating service learning opportunities that didn’t require transportation dollars, teachers encouraged them to do something about it. The Oregon City students contacted the South Fork Water Board and asked for their help in conducting a variety of water tests. To their surprise, they discovered that the water contained high levels of copper—safe but unpleasant to drink. They assumed that the source of the copper was old plumbing in the building.
Students then investigated possible solutions, including retrofitting the building with new pipes. Conversations with district officials convinced them that this latter option was prohibitively expensive, so they suggested that one of the drinking fountains be dedicated to include a water purification unit. Students researched costs for installing and replenishing a Brita filtration system and presented their project to the School Board, requesting its support. The Board and superintendent agreed with this solution, and the students no longer had to drink copper-laced water. Reflecting on this experience, one student noted, “I had always been told that one person could ‘make a difference’ but never really understood what this meant. Now I do, and I know that if I have a problem, and if I apply serious research to it and collect my facts along the way, that I will be taken seriously, and I can make a difference!”
I heard the second story from a middle school principal in Winnetka, Illinois while attending a conference north of Chicago.[2] He had brought a group of eighth-grade students to the North Dakota Study Group’s annual meeting to make a presentation about a project they had been involved with the year before. In their social studies class, they learned that in 1965 Martin Luther King, Jr. had delivered a speech about ending housing discrimination to approximately 10,000 people on the Winnetka Village Green. After conducting a search, however, they could find no written documents about the speech in any libraries or on-line sources.
Working with their teacher, Cecilia Gigiolio, they developed a proposal to construct a historical marker at one corner of the Village Green to commemorate the speech. They met with other civic groups to seek their support before presenting their ideas to the Winnetka Village Council. After the council accepted their proposal, an unobtrusive monument was designed, funds were raised, and the monument installed. Now future generations in Winnetka will be reminded about King’s speech every time they pass that corner of the Village Green. Their teacher observed that this was one of the most powerful learning experiences she had ever orchestrated.
The third story is again from Oregon, this time in Cottage Grove in the southern Willamette Valley. Earlier that year, I had a chance to spend an afternoon at the Kennedy School, a program that works with students who are credit deficient and in danger of dropping out. Under the leadership of a young principal, Tom Horn, the school has gone through a transformation over the past couple of years, partly as a result of Horn’s efforts to reach out to families of his students, and partly because of the way teachers at the school are linking student learning to the needs of the community. Students work in crews of 15 along with a teacher and are involved in a range of different projects.
In the spring of 2008, the school embarked on the development of a number of comprehensive garden sites around Cottage Grove, including the three trailer parks where many students live. The locally-owned Territorial Seeds Company provided seeds, and students planted about 1,000 a week as starts in the school’s greenhouse. These were then transplanted into garden sites as the weather warmed. Another project involves working with the City of Cottage Grove to initiate wetlands mitigation efforts on industrial sites. Students use native plants they propagate themselves, and the school receives compensation for their efforts. This money is then used to pay for school trips to places like Utah where students engage in biological field studies. The school’s work is resulting in regular press coverage and extensive public support as well as real engagement and excitement on the part of the school’s students.
I take a number of things from these stories that will weave throughout the remainder of this article. The first is that the learning experiences they describe reflect issues that are important to students or important to their communities. Second, in each of the stories, students were given the chance to develop competencies clearly transferable to the work of adults: research skills, communication skills, gardening skills, environmental restoration skills. The answer to the question, “Why are we learning this?” was directly in front of students’ eyes. Third, these experiences gave students the opportunity to learn how to work collaboratively as members of a team for important shared goals. This kind of collective endeavor is what often inspires people to continue to seek out similar opportunities for community involvement when they become adults. Finally, these projects proved to the involved students that they could make a difference, that they had voice and power, and that their lives mattered.
What is sustainability?
So, what does all of this have to do with the creation of more sustainable communities? Doesn’t sustainability mostly have to do with recycling and using less energy and fewer resources? Of buying locally and organically? Of building green schools and driving hybrids? Of installing solar panels or purchasing green power? Yes, sustainability has to do with all of these things, and all of these responses will need to come into play if we hope to reduce humanity’s ecological footprint and forestall some of the consequences associated with climate change, water and food shortages, or wars over diminishing resources like oil and natural gas.
But people seeking to grapple with these challenges are now arguing that more will need to be done than adopt different production methods and technologies. We will also need to change the way that we interact with one another and the planet as well as—to borrow Einstein’s phrase–the way we think. What I’d like to move on to next is a brief discussion about sustainability and then an exploration of an approach to curriculum development that focuses on giving students access to the kinds of experiences described above, learning experiences that I’ll argue may underlie changes in attitudes, beliefs, and dispositions related to what may be necessary to forge more sustainable societies.
The term sustainability began to be used with reference to the environment and society in the 1980s. The most commonly cited definition is from a United Nations report published in 1987 entitled Our Common Future. The authors of this report said that a sustainable society is one that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”[3] The initial concept of sustainability is very similar to the concept of sustainable yield from the field of forestry. If a forest is managed sustainably, its long-term productivity over generations is never threatened by current cutting practices or levels. If a society were to become sustainable, the same idea would be applied to all resources.
More recently, the notion of sustainability has been extended beyond resource use, itself, to the impact of industrial and agricultural production on people and the land. In the late-1990s, British writer John Elkington introduced the concept of the triple bottom line, which asserts that when businesses assess their own activities they need to look not only at the financial bottom line but also at their impact on the environment and the human communities in which they operate.[4] This attention to economy, environment, and equity—the triple bottom line–has come to dominate most contemporary discussions about sustainability. The primary advantage of this formulation is that it links the economy to the environment rather than setting these domains in opposition to one another. Over the past decade, many major corporations and a number of European states have bought into this perspective, something that Toyota’s recent advertising campaign about its green practices demonstrates.[5]
In the Pacific Northwest, a program developed by a Swedish oncologist, Karl-Henrik Robert, has been especially influential in business and public discussions about sustainability.[6] Called the Natural Step, it provides a more specific way to think about the impact of economic activities on the environment and human communities. Working with a broad range of Swedish scientists, Robert articulated four system conditions necessary to achieve a sustainable society. These are:
(1) No accumulation of toxic or potentially toxic materials from the earth’s crust
(2) No accumulation of toxic or potentially toxic human-made materials
(3) No destruction of habitat in ways that threaten species diversity or natural services
(4) Equitable distribution of resources to all human beings[7]
The Natural Step has found a North American home in Oregon where scores of corporations, architectural and engineering firms, and public agencies have adopted elements of Robert’s agenda. These include nationally known firms such as Nike, Norm Thompson, Hewlett Packard as well as locally-focused Portland General Electric and TriMet (public transportation). Although few of these organizations have truly embraced all of the system conditions, especially the fourth about equity, many are in other ways attempting to reduce the use of resources as well as pollution associated with their activities. Their efforts are one of the main reasons that Oregon is on the global sustainability map.
Most mainstream discussions about sustainability focus on the economy and the kinds of technological and production changes mentioned earlier. Other activists, however, share Einstein’s perspective about needing to change our way of thinking, especially our allegiance to an economy predicated on endless material growth and rising standards of living. These are the people who argue that not only must we produce things in a more environmentally conscious way and distribute them equitably, we also need to consume less and organize our communities to assure that despite having less, the basic needs of a greater proportion of the world’s population are better met than they are today.[8]
These spokespeople argue that the planet simply does not contain enough trees or oil or fish or water to allow everyone to achieve the same standard of living as people in the United States, Europe, Japan, or the upper classes in China, India, and other parts of the developed world; residents of industrialized and industrializing nations will need to reduce the amount they consume and find other sources of meaning and security while being willing to share equitably the remaining resources that do exist. Attempting to grapple with this dilemma may seem virtually impossible, but the advocates of this position suggest that if the basic needs of all are not met, human beings risk the creation of a fortress society in which a decreasing number of groups enjoy economic privileges which must be defended against a growing majority of impoverished and disenfranchised people—a situation that in many respects uncomfortably resembles our current circumstances.[9]
So what are humanity’s options? This is where my initial stories come in. My suspicion is that because contemporary conditions lie so far outside the ways of thinking that have created modern institutions and the expectations associated with them, humanity is going to need to invent or reclaim ways of being with one another and the Earth predicated on a recognition of planetary limits, our fundamental dependence on natural systems and other people, and a willingness to participate in the shaping of more sustainable cultures. This transition seems unlikely to happen in Washington, D.C. or Tokyo or Brussels or Beijing. People who have risen to positions of political and economic power in these global cities have done so because of their allegiance to systems that are now proving themselves to be unworkable. These leaders also are showing less and less willingness to invest in the needs of common citizens. The fact that people in New Orleans lived for years in formaldehyde-off-gassing FEMA trailers is a grim indicator of this possibility. I suspect that if real change is going to happen it will be enacted by growing numbers of people acting locally like the students in Oregon City and Winnetka and Cottage Grove.
Climate change activist Ross Gelbspan—a former editor of the Boston Globe—says much the same thing. Writing in the web-based environmental journal, Grist, he argues in an article entitled “Beyond the Point of No Return” that humanity’s response to climate change will necessarily have to be largely local—this is where human adaptations happen, and that if we wish to avoid descent into a world in which the wealthy are protected and supported by the Blackwaters and Haliburtons of the world, we must, to quote Gelbspan, “reorganize our social structures to reflect our most humane collective aspirations.”[10] This, I think, is the task that educators concerned about sustainability must take on: to surface those “most humane collective aspirations” and prepare students to reinvigorate our community and democratic processes while enacting the innovations required by changing planetary and social conditions.
What kind of people will be needed to move society in the direction of sustainability?
OK. How might this be done? This is where I’d like to turn to the subtitle of this article: “Educating for Interconnection, Adaptability, and Resilience.” What do I mean? First, the experience of interconnection seems to lie at the heart of ethical and caring behavior. When people grasp the degree to which their own physical and psychic welfare is dependent on the welfare of others or the health of natural systems, they become much more likely to behave responsibly towards them and to take steps to protect them from harm. Humanity’s higher aspirations tend to reflect this sense of interconnection and the desire to preserve and extend it. The root of the word, religion, for example, means to bind together. Absent that sense of being bound together, anything can go.
This is one of the reasons that nature writer Robert Michael Pyle worries about what he calls the “extinction of experience,” the fact that many children growing up today have such limited contact with the natural world.[11] Without that contact, Pyle fears that they will demonstrate little interest in preserving it. The same could be said of children’s diminished contact with their communities. What will lead them to care for those communities if most of their lives are spent in isolation from them—as they play video games, watch TV, or are safely sequestered in the aural cocoons of their i-Pods? One thing educators can do to acquaint students with those higher collective aspirations is to make sure that students are given a chance to know their own communities and places well.
Second, human adaptability has been the characteristic that has allowed our species to populate the planet and survive as well as we have without the kinds of physical protections that permit other animals to successfully navigate the world. The ability to adapt, however, depends on our ability to perceive what is happening around us accurately and to respond appropriately. This is where awareness and intelligence come into play as well as the willingness to task risks and try new things. People in the future will need to be able to observe, problem solve, and act in order to adapt to the challenges posed by climate change, resource exhaustion, an unstable economy, and the forms of social instability likely to accompany such events. To prepare young people today for these challenges, they can be given opportunities to participate in efforts to address issues in their own schools and communities in an attempt to make them better places for everyone.
Finally, the difficulties students are likely to encounter in coming decades are almost certain to be daunting. Dealing with them will require resilience, persistence, and determination. Resilience is tied into the ability to keep coming back despite challenges, failure, or even the threat of failure. Studies of resilience in children often point to their relationship to at least one person who has faith in their capacity to succeed and do well; that faith then contributes to their own self-efficacy.[12] A classic psychological exploration of resilience, Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, argues that Nazi concentration camp survivors tended to be people who saw their personal experiences as linked to the experiences of others and a broader sense of meaning.[13] They were people whose own individual stories were folded into the stories of their communities and of life, itself. Engaging young people in learning activities that connect them to others and that give them an opportunity to address challenges to their community could potentially foster in them such resilience as well as a deep understanding of the satisfaction and sense of personal well-being that come with purposeful action in the company of others.
What contribution could educators make to the development of interconnection, adaptability, and resilience?
I can almost hear readers thinking, “Nice words, but what does this look like?” Fortunately, I’ve spent a share of the past decade or so visiting schools and collecting stories that demonstrate how this kind of education might happen. Although not all of the schools where this work is occurring would necessarily say they are directly confronting issues of sustainability or cultural change, they are in different ways cultivating interconnection, adaptability, and resilience. They are doing this by incorporating curriculum and instruction characterized by a focus on local and regional issues, oftentimes coupling this with opportunities for students to engage in projects that have value for the broader school or community. Called place- or community-based education, this approach is aimed at developing in children a sense of relatedness to their own regions, familiarity with important local knowledge and issues, the capacity to act collectively with fellow students and outside-of-school partners to address community concerns, and a commitment to participatory citizenship and stewardship. An additional benefit in our era of accountability and standards is the way these experiences are often associated with higher levels of academic engagement and achievement.[14]
In talking about place- or community-based education, I do not mean to suggest that all of a students’ school experience should focus on local knowledge or issues, but enough to draw them into a sense of community membership and connection to the natural world. I am furthermore not suggesting that these kinds of educational experiences on their own will be a panacea for the challenges humanity will face in coming decades. I believe, however, that adults who recognize their connectedness to others and the world, have learned how to adapt to changing conditions, and who possess the resilience needed to turn difficulties into opportunities will have a better chance of creating a sustainable society than people who have not developed these attributes or skills.
Nurturing interconnection. Now it’s time for more stories. Boston’s Young Achievers Science and Mathematics Pilot School models how connectedness can be cultivated in an urban setting. In addition to focusing on math and science, the Young Achievers School also places social justice and environmental issues front and center in its curriculum development efforts. During the 2007-2008 academic year, second graders invested much of their energy in an investigation of important community issues. Students explored the experience of people living in Boston’s Chinatown, air quality issues and asthma rates, the role of public art murals and community health, and space needs at their own school. In the spring, they shared their findings on WBUR’s weekly Saturday night radio show, Con Salsa, a public presentation that required high quality written work and speaking skills. This experience provided both an incentive to develop literacy abilities as well as a self-esteem boost for all participants.[15]
I saw similar efforts to connect students to their places in Montgomery, Alabama, during a 2005 convocation of the Program for Academic and Cultural Excellence in Rural Schools (PACERS).[16] PACERS is a project that has been addressing educational and community development issues in rural Alabama since the 1990s. Central to its efforts have been strategies to engage students in their communities in meaningful ways. An especially powerful initiative involved giving students the skills and resources needed to become community journalists. Throughout Alabama as well as other rural regions of the United States, small town papers have become a thing of the past. Newspapers published in larger population centers rarely carry news of anything other than crimes or scores from athletic contests in outlying villages and towns. It is difficult for citizens to get information about local issues that require their attention. High school students in 21 communities took on the task of informing their families and neighbors about these issues and in the process developed both the skills of budding journalists and a sense of belonging to communities where their energy and attention and voices were listened to by adults. One former student at the convocation—now a graphic designer for the daily paper in Montgomery—observed that when he was in high school three things were central to his world: God, family, and PACERS.
At the Wells Community School in Harrisville, New Hampshire, a second grade teacher has adopted an even simpler approach to connect her students to their place. After moving to a new classroom, she noticed a stand of Eastern white pine two dozen yards away. She decided to focus on nature observations throughout the year and thanks to a small grant bought kid-friendly field guides, binoculars, and a digital camera to help out with the project. Students became eager participants, carefully keeping track of birds or other animals that passed by over the course of the year. Following up on students’ suggestions, they built a brush pile and put out feeders to attract wildlife. They then shared their findings with students in Italy and Brazil who were keeping similar records of animals and plants they encountered in their schoolyards through the web-based service provided by www.epals.com.
In each of these examples, educators provided opportunities for students to immerse themselves in the human and other-than-human life of their communities and places. By doing so, they created a space where students can develop the relationships that undergird both citizenship and stewardship. Research conducted by the Place-based Education Evaluation Collaborative over the past six years points to the positive impact that learning experiences grounded in community issues and the natural world can have on students’ civic involvement, environmental awareness, and achievement.[17]
Cultivating adaptability. Cultivating adaptability can be more challenging. Nurturing a sense of interconnection is generally non-threatening. Problem-solving, innovation, and action can potentially lead to conflict and must be handled with thoughtfulness and tact. Demands related to their discovery of high levels of copper in their school’s water supply in Oregon City, for example, could have alienated district officials if students hadn’t learned how to negotiate and been willing to consider multiple solutions to the problem they had identified. Dealing with challenging issues both now and in the future requires such abilities.
A program called Promoting Resolutions with Integrity for a Sustainable Molokai (PRISM) is giving upper elementary and middle school students in Hawaii a chance to learn how to do this.[18] Created in the mid-1990s by two fifth- and sixth-grade teachers at the Kualapuu School, PRISM uses a process developed at the University of Southern Illinois called Investigating and Evaluating Environmental Issues and Actions.[19] The process requires students to identify all of the important groups concerned about a particular issue, uncovering their beliefs and values, and articulating their proposed solutions. After gaining this knowledge and investigating the dimensions of an issue, students then begin to develop their own suggestions and the actions that follow from these.
At the beginning of the school year, teachers work with students to choose a topic that will be the focus of their inquiry for the next several months. Students have studied and developed proposals about solid waste disposal at the school and on the island, the impact on native habitats of an expansion of the airport runway and ecotourism developments, the restoration of traditional Hawaiian fishponds, and emergency preparedness. Students interview resource professionals, read technical documents and plans, and then create presentations for a two-day meeting generally held in the spring. Parents and community members are invited to attend these.
Students’ work has come to influence adult involvement in these topics, leading family members who might not have seen themselves as activists to begin contributing their energy to the issues students have investigated. Students also develop action plans. They initiated a recycling program at the school that subsequently grew into an island-wide recycling program. They wrote a bottle bill that was introduced but defeated in the Hawaii State Assembly. They have engaged in the restoration of traditional fishponds and regularly write columns about their research in the island newspaper.
Students in other schools have taken on economic as well as environmental concerns, an issue that will be especially important when communities grapple with what it means to transition to a post-fossil fuel economy. Howard, South Dakota, is located in the southeastern quadrant of the state. Like many Midwestern communities, it has experienced a steady drop in population and job opportunities for decades. In the mid-1990s, Randy Parry, a business teacher at the local high school, joined up with faculty at a local state college to write a grant to the Annenberg Rural Challenge aimed at creating more economic opportunities while doing so in ways that preserved the integrity of natural systems. Awarded the grant, Perry proceeded to involve his students in their community’s economic life.[20]
One of their first projects involved surveying county residents about where they spent their money—in local businesses or in the nearest big towns of Mitchell or Sioux Falls. They found that half of their respondents did most of their buying out of the county, depriving businesses of the multiplier effect that occurs when money is re-circulated locally. They also asked survey respondents about what kinds of changes would lead them to spend more of their earnings in Howard’s businesses. They learned that placing an ATM machine close to the stores would make a difference. After tallying the data, students let county residents know that if they spent only 10% more of their disposable income close to home, seven million additional dollars would be added to the regional economy and more sales tax revenue would be available for local government. People listened, and over the next year, taxable sales in Miner County increased by $15.6 million–and then gradually stabilized at this level.
Through students’ collection of data and their development of plans and proposals, they are helping their community adapt to changing circumstances in ways that are allowing it to survive. Similarly, on Molokai, students involved in the PRISM project are gaining the tools needed to make thoughtful decisions about how their island home can respond to development pressure from outside forces in ways that preserve the beauty and integrity of local ecosystems.
Developing resilience. In many respects, resilience could simply be one of the outcomes of educational experiences that connect children to others and their place and that give them the opportunity to use their lives and energies in activities that win them the respect and appreciation of their families and neighbors. A final example, however, demonstrates how an exploration of local history in Montana affirmed for students their ability to deal with difficulties and contribute to the improvement of their communities.
In the mid-1990s Jeff Gruber, a Libby High School social studies teacher invited his students to participate in a community study aimed at surfacing information that might help them to figure out how to make good decisions about its future. Libby at the time was experiencing even more challenging forms of economic disruption than Howard. As in many places, conflicts and fears ran so deep that civic leaders avoided calling a public meeting to explore these issues.
Gruber and his students did what others could not. They began a conversation about who Libby residents are, why they stay in Libby, what cultural resources they possess, and how they could make life better.[21] Students then embarked on an investigation that continued for a number of years. One of their first projects involved collecting thousands of photographs from Libby and assembling them as an extended photo essay about the town’s future. Other projects took students to the local plywood plant where they interviewed millworkers about their jobs and learned first hand about the steps that transform trees into wood products. They wrote a pamphlet about what they learned, which to their and the millworkers’ surprise became an historical document, itself, when the mill was closed by Stimson Lumber in 2003.
Now deeply committed to their place, students were not prepared to take this event sitting down. With their teacher, they prepared a presentation summarizing what they had learned about their community and took it to the headquarters of the Stimson and Plum Creek Lumber Companies in Portland. As writer Michael Umphrey observes:
“. . . the kids did not imagine villains—their game was understanding. In that spirit, they wanted the corporate officers to understand the sometimes devastating impact their actions had on the local community. They were beginning to understand that one reason for learning was to find their voice.”[22] Students also developed a deeper understanding about the factors that had contributed to Libby’s continued survival. As they reported in their presentation, “We looked to Libby’s past for answers to our current troubles. But we didn’t find answers. What we found was that life had always been difficult, but that our grandparents and great-grandparents had always found a way to help each other and get along. And so will we.”[23]
In Libby and other Montana communities, young people have begun to realize that their success and well-being are intimately tied to the success and well-being of others, a story that is not regularly conveyed by the mainstream media. From this story they are gaining a sense of resilience essential to the creation of more sustainable societies. This story of mutual support and collective identity is exactly what Libby and other small towns like it will need if their current residents are to weather the storms of economic globalization and a declining natural resource base.
Stepping up to the plate and making it happen
In conclusion, I’d like to share one more story about the work of a high school teacher that has become a model for community regeneration worldwide. It again points to the possible and serves as an exemplar of what educators concerned about the welfare of their communities and the planet can accomplish. In the 1950s, Ari Ariyaratne taught in a high school in Colombo, Sri Lanka where he worked primarily with children of the upper class. He realized that many of his students would become business or political leaders of the country, but that few of them had any personal knowledge about how most of their fellow citizens lived. He started a community service program that involved taking students out to rural villages where they would ask people to brainstorm projects whose completion would make everyone’s lives better. Not uncommonly, villagers would go to a file drawer and pull out requests that had been submitted to government officials but never addressed.[24]
Ariyaratne and his students would ask the villagers what resources they needed to complete projects—things like building cisterns or constructing a simple school or community center—and how many people would be required to do the job. The students would then help them organize the event. These school-based efforts eventually became an organization called Sarvodaya Shramadana that has operated in over 15,000 villages in Sri Lanka and has touched the lives of 11 million people.[25] A rough translation of sarvodaya shramadana is lifting everyone through the gift of labor.
What is especially significant about this program is its emphasis on uncovering community assets and cultivating participants’ faith in their own capacity to take positive action. A central tenet of the program is that everyday people have the capacity to govern themselves and respond appropriately to the conditions of their lives when given the support and encouragement to do so. After the tsunami in 2004, for example, people who had participated in Sarvodaya were not uncommonly those who created make-shift emergency kitchens or organized efforts to contribute clothing and other household items to people who had lost everything.[26] It is this kind of leadership that the coming decades with all of their projected economic and environmental uncertainty will demand of all communities.
As educators, I would suggest that the world now requires us to find ways to prepare our students for the roles they will need to play as citizens and stewards responsible for imagining and then creating new social and economics structures as well as technologies that truly represent humanity’s highest aspirations. This is the way people will be able to grow cultures that are sustainable both ecologically and socially, cultures that will be worthy of our children for many generations to come.
Gregory Smith is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Lewis and Clark College in Portland.
References
1] I heard this story from Susan Abravanel, the education director of SOLV, an Oregon non-profit heavily involved in environmental restoration and service learning projects.
2] Dan Schwartz is a regular at the North Dakota Study Group meetings. I heard this story from him in February, 2008 and later spoke with Cecilia Gigiolio, the teacher who saw this project through.
8] See Wendell Berry’s article entitled “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits” in the May, 2008 Harpers Magazine (pp. 35-42) for a cogent and passionate presentation of this position as well as Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, New York: Holt, 2008.
9] Allen Hammond, Which World? Scenarios for the 21st Century, Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998.
10] Ross Gelbspan, “Beyond the Point of No Return,” Gristmill, December 11, 2007, paragraph 47, retrieved on June 4, 2008 from http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/12/10/165845/92.
11] Robert Michael Pyle, The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, New York: Lyons Press, 1993.
12] Reginald Clark, Family Life and School Achievement: Why Poor Black Children Succeed or Fail, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
13] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, New York: Washington Square Press.
14] See David Sobel’s Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms to Communities, Great Barrington, Mass.: Orion Press, 2004, and Gregory Smith’s “Place-Based Education: Learning to Be Where We Are,” Kappan, April 2003, for more complete descriptions of this approach and its possibilities.
15] Robert Hoppin, personal communication (e-mail), June 5, 2008. Hoppin is a place-based education coordinator at the Young Achievers School.
16] John Shelton’s book, Consequential Learning, Montgomery: NewSouth Press, 2005, provides a description of many PACERS projects and the spirit that undergirds these
17] See http://www.peecworks.org/index , retrieved on July 3, 2008, for a full listing of research reports written by this organization.
18] Marie Cheak, Trudi Volk, and Harold Hungerford, Molokai: An Investment in Children, the Community, and the Environment, Champaign, Ill.: Stipes Publishing, 2002.
19] John Ramsey, Harold Hungerford, and Trudi Volk, “A Technique for Analyzing Environmental Issues,” in Harold Hungerford, William Blumm, Trudi Volk, and John Ramsey (editors), Essential Readings in Environmental Education Champaign, Ill.: Stipes Pubishing), pp. 190-195.
20] Rural School and Community Trust President Rachel Tompkins provides a history of this project in “Overlooked Opportunity: Students, Educators, and Education Advocates Contributing to Community and Economic Development,” a chapter in David Gruenewald and Gregory Smith’s (editors), Place-Based Education in the Global Age: Local Diversity (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008), pp. 173-196.
21] This story is drawn from Michael Umphrey’s volume, The Power of Community-Centered Education: Teaching as a Craft of Place, Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
22] Umphrey, p. 6.
23] Umphrey, p. 8.
24] Joanna Macy, Dharma and Development: Religion as Resource in the Sarvodaya Self-Help Movement, West Hartford, Conn: Kumarian Press, 1983.
26] Sharif Abdullah, personal communication. Abdullah is an American social activist and writer who has acted as a consultant to the Sarvodaya organization for more than a decade.
The symbolic act of learning and living sustainability in the future should intermingle the fabric of natural systems and human made social systems
by Pramod Parajuli, Ph.D.
Doctoral Program in Sustainability Education
Prescott College
Introduction
The hundreds of thousands of initiatives of this blessed moment are not about the bread and butter, or just about the soil and water alone. Art and the things of beauty are emerging from the most ordinary—a permaculture household in El Salvador, a thread of garlic organically grown in the Chino Valley, Arizona, a solar cooker in the remote Nepalese Himalayas, a Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, a sustainable fishing regulation in British Columbia, or a bag of coffee produced under the canopy of agro-forestry in Chiapas, Mexico. One solar cooker at a time, one biogas at a time, there are millions of solutions, sprouting amidst crisis and seeming chaos. The time has come as William Blake wrote:
To see a world in the grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
What might all these imply as we prepare the future generations of learners, educators and leaders? The eight transitional insights I offer below testify that the symbolic act of learning and living sustainability in the future should intermingle the fabric of natural systems and human made social systems—two most complex systems on earth. A new sustainable human trajectory will not be of humans alone shooting to Mars; it will require re-rooting ourselves with all our multiple senses, and working along with all more than human species.
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First, there is an Inviting Context: Climate of Change amidst Climate Change
By now, almost all have accepted that the climate change is real, undeniable, and is accelerating very fast. Most among us also admit that climate change is caused largely due to the way we live our lives, the ways we extract, use and waste our resources. Many also agree that it is urgent to address it from all dimensions. Fortunately, ferocity of these very real crises are accompanied by a “climate of change.” This is the focus of my paper here, a unique opportunitythat accompanies climate change.
The “climate of change” is evident in the way hundreds of thousands of people and groups who are already involved in changing the way we have been doing things, living our lives or using our tools. In his new book, Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken estimates that worldwide there are at least 2 million such initiatives. Maybe there are more, certainly not less.
Second, learning sustainability should help us live lives and be well in the World.
Let me offer a working definition of learning sustainability. Learning sustainability is “an art and a process that could reorient human beings to become a beneficial member of an abundant biosphere.” First, it is an art and a process. Second, the intent of this art and process is to reorient humans from one mindset/worldview to another that will then lead to new visions, dreams and designs. Third, humans can be beneficial members of the biosphere and that the human needs and that of the biosphere do not have to be in conflict but can be mutually enhancing. Fourth, the biosphere is abundant and based on that we can create foundations for an abundant and equitable human life. Fifth, that we can prepare the next generation who can be beneficial members and who can make the biosphere abundant.
As sustainability educators, at the core of our concern is nothing less than “life” itself. For me the message is loud and clear: We can be resilient and bounce back towards a sound and satisfying life systems for humans and other-than-humans. But as the author of Biomimicry, Janine Benyus, advises, we have to learn from our own evolutionary trajectory and the memory line of DNA. She reminds us to be humble of our techno-industrial accomplishments because other organisms have done everything we humans want to do without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet, over harvesting water, depleting soil or mortgaging their future. For example, how do other species clean themselves and why do humans need soap, shampoo and hot water to clean? Rather than asking “What is the least toxic detergent to use?”, a more hopeful question, Janine Benyus, suggests, might be: “How does nature stay clean?” How does nature thermo-regulate? How could our ecological designs be informed by these biophilic insights?
Third, Food and Gardens could be a Gateway to Deep and Delicious Social Engagements
For the last six years, I was involved in designing and implementing the learning gardens experiment in Portland, Oregon, and now in Prescott, Arizona. We found that engaging children and youth in food and garden can offer avenues for a mode of learning that is multicultural, multisensory, interdisciplinary and intergenerational (Parajuli, 2006; Parajuli , Dardis and Hahn, 2008).
We have been a pioneer in developing curriculum for K-8 children and youth who learn at any point in the continuum between, what I call the “soil to supper, and back to Soil
(the SoSuS) loop. The SOSuS Loop not only connects children and youth with the earth, it also connected people to people, communities to communities (Parajuli, 2009). We then explore the continuum between “food to foodshed” and “water to watershed.”
Our initial conclusion is that if designed carefully and tended with heart, learning gardens may offer a series of benefits to enhance and deepen learning:
• impact a school’s physical as well as learning environments
• lead to academic enrichment and achievement for students
• enrich learning of the whole child
• cultivate and nurture motivation, resiliency and leadership among children and youth
• promote multi-sensory learning
• be applicable to grade by grade, subject by subject, and season by season instruction and learning
• use recurring themes over K-12 span of experience
• effectively link ecology, culture and learning
• enhance interdisciplinary inquiry
• address and fulfill academic benchmarks
• provide the seasonal framework for learning
• teach both time (linear and cyclical) and a sense of place
• link experience to meaning, thought to action and classroom to community
• be the best sites for inter- and intra-generational learning, and
• connect/collaborate with the larger food and garden community
Not only in the arena of nutrition and learning, our engagement in food, water and soil can take us towards a mode of social engagement that is not only “deep” but also “delicious.” Interestingly, the flavor of local, organic, and sustainable food economy is much more alive in urban centers than in rural farms and communities. Here again we are witnessing the melting of the old fences that divide the rural from urban, industry from agriculture, soil from food and people from the planet. By changing our food habits and preferences, we are witnessing a wide-ranging and a deep process of change from the very belly of the techno-industrial beast and what the food author Michael Pollan calls, the nutritional/chemical complex. Transition towards local and sustainable food could give us the most delicious inter-economic partnership, as premised in the diagram below.
Fourth, Enhance Maximum Partnerships to create a world that is not only Ecologically Sustainable, but also Socially Equitable and Bio-culturally Diverse.
For the last seven years, I have developed and used a “Partnership Model of Sustainability” as a guide to practice pedagogy for transformational leadership among the new generation of learners and leaders. This model addresses the issues of economy and ecology on the one hand and equity and bio-cultural diversity on the other.
A brief description of the four partnerships follows.
Intra and Inter-generational partnership: Explores social classes, gender, caste, race, ethnicity and other human created institutions and practices of social inequities and cleavages. Attention to intra and inter generational equity and partnership is urgent because inequality is also at the core of current ecological crisis.
Inter-species Partnership: Addresses ecological, philosophical and ethical aspects of human’s relationship with the more than human worlds. I am teaching that we humans are nature in microcosm. “We are nature in every molecule and neuron,” says Paul Hawken. “We contain clay, mineral and water; are powered by sunshine through plants; and are intricately bound to all species, from fungi to marsupials to bacteria. In our lungs are oxygen molecules breathed by every type of creature to have lived on earth along with the very hydrogen and oxygen that Jesus, Gautam Buddha and Rachel Carson breathed” (Hawken, 2007:71-72).
Inter-cultural Partnership: Examines the field of biological, cultural, and linguistic diversities and the inextricable relations between the three. It is about recognizing what I call the “ethnosphere,” the diversity of knowledge systems and diverse ways of knowing, teaching and learning.
Inter-economic Partnership: Includes mapping and reshaping of the global North and South as well as the social and economic institutions, trade, arrangements for exchanges and surplus, fair trade and free trade, rural and urban, agriculture and industry, raw and processed materials, and producers and consumers. Moreover, water, food and soil will be one of the most critical elements in the future of humanity.
Fifth, Learn and Lead for both Biospehric and Ethnospheric Health.
Through a deeper probing of the partnership model of sustainability, I have learned that no human solutions could be found by just rearranging the human world. We need to reshape our relationship with the more than human world. In the same way, ecosystems regeneration could not also be achieved by “fencing off” humans from the so called pristine natural areas but by changing how humans live their lives (Parajuli, 2004; 2001 (a and b). Thus our challenge is how to maintain the delicate balance between biospheric health and ethnospheric health.
In order to create the confluence between the three realms, the learning environment should be multisensory, multicultural and intergenerational such that it fosters interdisciplinary inquiry. Much ink has been dried writing about multicultural education, as if adequate solutions were found simply by rearranging human relations, in race, class and gender terms. While that is absolutely necessary, it is tragically inadequate. I realize that the future lies in multi-sensory pedagogy that nurtures our multi-sensory engagement in and with the earth. As eco-philosopher David Abram awakens us: “The fate of the earth depends on a return to our senses.”
Sixth, Learning should inculcate Integral Visions and Designs
The readers of this journal have worked miracles in the outward-bound and experiential education fields. But most of this genre is poised as antithetical to skills needed for what I call the “homewardbound.” On the other side, many of us have worked in creating sustainable livelihoods, through agro-ecology, permaculture, fisheries, sustainable industries and such. These homeward-bounders have hardly any time to enjoy raw nature, like the “outwardbounders” do.
There is hardly any dialogue, sharing and mutual learning between the two genres. Such isolation does not allow us to find integral visions or integrative solutions. In other words, how could we bring the David Thoreau(s) and Wendell Berry(s) in the same imagination? Vandana Shiva(s) and Jenine Benyus(s) at the same table? I urge us to develop such learning designs that connect the outward-bounders with the homeward-bounders, the wild with the domestic, nature with culture and the forest with the farm. A deeply and truly integrative vision and design is needed to heal the wounds that have been inflicted between the cities, where most of the consumption happens, and the rural where most of the production happens. The same could be accomplished between the industrial sector that eats up bunch of raw materials and agriculture where such raw materials are sustained. How could we bind the buyers and the producers by the same thread of ecological health, diversity, justice and integrity?
Seventh, let us move from Discourse to Design
My students tell me that they want to learn deep sustainability in product as well as process, in content as well as the method of inquiry. I am convinced, it is not by saturating them with discursive pessimism (even when substantiated with facts) but cultivating in them incurable optimism but which is informed by reliable dreams and viable designs. In my courses, such as Leadership for Sustainability, Sustainability Theory and Practice, Modes of Scholarly Inquiry, each student begins to articulate his/her wildest dream that they want to achieve in ten years. Then they follow a 4Ds protocol: Diagnosis, Dream, Design and Delivery. It is important that we embrace diversity of learning needs of each student and let them grow into their own space and dreams. But push them to the wildest side, we must.
Eighth, Cultivate Leadership in the open Space of Democracy
Terry Tempest Williams has articulated the notion of open space of democracy for our turbulent times. She writes: Open space of democracy is interested in circular, not linear power—power reserved not for entitled few but shared by many (Williams 2004). I also want to introduce a fairly new book by Otto Scharmer, entitled, Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges. To begin with, Otto asks us to have open mind, open heart and open will. Only when we let go of the old habits, dreams and designs (the left line of the U), we can transition towards letting come of the new habits, designs and dreams (the right line of the U). The bottom line of the U is the incubation process between the letting go and letting come.
I urge the readers, you draw a U and practice for yourself.
Selected References
Benyus, Jenine. (2004). “Biomimicry: What would nature do here?” in Nature’s operating instructions: The true biotechnologies. Ausubel, K. and Harpignies, J.P. (eds). San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. PP 3-16.
Capra, Fritjof. (2002). Hidden Connections. Integrating the Biological, Cognitive, and Social Dimensions of Life into Science of Sustainability. New York: Doubleday.
Hawken, Paul. (2007). Blessed unrest: How the largest movement in the world aame into being and why no one saw it coming. New York: Viking (published by the Penguin Group).
Jones, Van. (2008). The green collar economy: How one solution can fix our two pressing problems. New York: Harper Collins.
Parajuli, Pramod. (2009). Greening Our Cultures: Emergent Properties of Life and Livelihoods, Learning and Leadership. Manuscript. Prescott College.
Parajuli, Pramod. (2006a). “Learning suitable to life and livability: Innovations through learning gardens” Connections 8: 1: 6-7.
Parajuli, Pramod. (2006b). ‘Coming home to the earth household: Indigenous communities and ecological citizenship in India” in J. Kunnie and N. Goduka Eds. Indigenous Peoples’ Wisdom and Power. London: Ashgate. pp. 175-193.
Parajuli, Pramod. (2004). Revisiting Gandhi and Zapata: Motion of global capital, geographies of difference and the formation of ecological ethnicities. in Mario Blaser and Harvey Feit eds, In the way of development: Indigenous Peoples, life projects and globalization. London: Zed Press. Chapter 14. pp. 235-255.
Parajuli, Pramod. (2001). How can four trees make a jungle? The world and the wild. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. pp. 3-20.
Parajuli, Pramod, Dardis, Greg and Hahn, Tim. (2008). Curriculum Development and Teacher Preparation for the Learning Gardens. A report submitted to the Oregon Community Foundation.
Stone, Michael. K and Barlow, Zenobia. (eds.). (2005). Ecological literacy: Educating our children for a sustainable world. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
Williams, Terry, Tempest. (2004). The open space of democracy. Barrington, MA: Orion Society.[/password]
Pramod Parajuli is the Director of Program Development in Sustainabililty Education at Prescott College in Arizona. He has designed and developed various academic and community empowerment programs including the Learning Gardens and the Leadership in Ecology, Culture and Learning (LECL), a graduate program at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon (2002-2008). At Prescott College, he is incubating several new innovations that could build on its forty years of accomplishments and seek new heights and horizons.
There are over 4,000 institutions of post-secondary and higher education in the United States, with over 14 million students. In 1999, 2.3 million degrees were handed out. These technical schools, colleges, universities, and professional schools prepare the majority of the professionals who will work, teach, and live in our towns and cities. The graduates of these institutions will affect future generations by their example and their teachings. Their alma maters, therefore, play an important role in how society defines its priorities and goals, and accomplishes its objectives.
Johnson and Beloff (1998) state that education is the best way to prepare future citizens to respond to an environmental agenda, and that higher education is the best place to provide that instruction. Cortese (2003) states that in order to solve some of the current and pending environmental problems, humans need to understand their impact on the earth, and their connections to the natural world. He states that the change in thinking needed is “a sustained, long-term effort to transform education at all levels” and that “higher education institutions bear a profound, moral responsibility to increase the awareness, knowledge, skills, and values needed to create a just and sustainable future.”
According to Orr (1994), one of the goals of higher education should be to prepare its graduates to be responsible citizens, including the knowledge about their place in the natural world, and the sustainable practices needed to protect that world. However, teaching these values is not necessarily, by itself, enough — higher education should “practice what it preaches“ and make sustainability a fundamental part of its curriculum, operations and investments.
Universities function as a microcosm of society; therefore, the manner in which they carry out their day-to-day activities can be a demonstration of the ways in which we can achieve environmentally responsible living. By looking closely its own practices, the university can set an example in sustainability, and engage students in understanding the ecological footprints institutions and individuals leave (Abate et al., 1995).
A movement was begun towards these ends in 1990. In order to attempt to define and promote the concept of environmental sustainability in higher education, the Talloires (pronounced Tal-Whar) Declaration was created. The president of Tufts University convened twenty-two university leaders and nine international environmental experts in France to voice their concerns about the environmental condition of the world and to create a document that spelled out actions that colleges and universities should take to create a sustainable future. This gathering defined the importance of higher education in the following way:
“Universities educate most of the people who develop and manage society’s institutions. For this reason, universities bear profound responsibilities to increase the awareness, knowledge, technologies, and tools to create an environmentally sustainable future.” (Report, 1990).
The Talloires Declaration is a plan with ten “action items,” and is intentionally broad, covering the major areas of university activity: teaching, research, operations, outreach and service. The Declaration is designed to be interpreted and shaped for each individual institution. (Report, 1990).
Increasingly, universities are bringing sustainability into their curriculum, and incorporating its principles into their operations (Barlett and Chase, 2004; Cortese, 2002). Making this change has helped them to realize economic savings and esteem amongst their peers through the greening of their campuses. As an example of savings on a larger scale, in California the state’s Sustainable Building Task Force commissioned a report to assess the costs and financial benefits of constructing sustainable buildings in the state. The report shows that it costs, on average, nearly two percent more to construct a green building than one using conventional methods. However, the energy savings realized equal more than ten times the initial investment during the life of a building, conservatively assumed to be twenty years (California Integrated Waste Management Board, 2003).
How can universities promote sustainability? There are so many ways. Since they are such microcosms of society, they can model green principles in every aspect of their operations. For example, consider their physical plants. These operations manage the physical environment in which students live and learn, and employees work. They have enormous capabilities to save money and resources through green practices. Native plants in the landscaping save water. Chipping and spreading green materials saves money on mulches, saves water, and reduces removal fees. If they follow the Green Building Council’s standards for LEED certification in new and retrofitted/renovated buildings, they will discover energy savings – for example, night cooling systems and occupancy sensors reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and save universities money at the same time.
An exemplary model of sustainability in buildings can be seen at Lewis and Clark College in Portland Oregon. Their new residence halls have been rated LEED Silver, and their new social sciences academic building (Howard Hall) is expected to be rated LEED Gold. The new 50,000-square-foot building is expected to consume 40 percent less energy than a typical building of the same size, with raised-floor displacement ventilation and night cooling systems. Its elevator operates with 40 percent less electricity than standard elevators and does not use hydraulic fluid. Its storm-water filtration, storage, and reuse system has already received praise from the Oregon Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Touring the building in October of 2004, I at first found its exposed steel, unpainted concrete blocks, and polished concrete to be somewhat stark; however, they have softened the effect with student art and other projects. Howard Hall has a smaller ecological footprint than the structures it replaced, but it brings a net gain of 25 offices and 14 classrooms to the campus. Additionally, the contractors recycled more than 95 percent of the construction debris and used low-toxicity adhesives, carpet and composite wood products throughout the building.
Additionally, Lewis and Clark has a natural gas co-generation unit for electricity and for heating the school’s swimming pool.
Transportation is becoming a hot topic at universities. Visit just about any campus today, and you will find electric carts being used by their dining services, physical plant, housing, student life – you name it. Electric carts are just the beginning, though – universities are coming up with some very innovative – and fun! – sustainable solutions.
Let us consider the example found at the University of Oregon (UO). UO has one of the highest concentrations of bicycle per capita in the State of Oregon, possibly the country. This high level of bicycle use benefits the campus, the city of Eugene, and the state by reducing the usage of fossil fuels, and reducing the need for parking on the UO campus. University campuses are facing a huge problem because of limited parking areas and increased numbers of cars. Being in Eugene is beneficial for the campus, too, as that city has built one of the most sophisticated and highly developed bike route systems in the country.
Bicycle “taxis” are another innovative – and fun! – step that UO has taken. The Tandem Taxi Service began operating at UO during the spring term of 1997, and was first service of its kind on any college campus. They use 2 and 3 seat bicycles to provide free evening transportation for the University Community. And in the spirit of teaching sustainable practices to our young, Tandem Taxi introduced a new program of giving children from UO’s child care program experience in riding a bicycle.
California State University at Chico has developed an extensive transportation program designed to reduce the University’s contribution of air pollutants to the valley portion of Northern California. The University has selected three transportation alternatives on which to focus, including the increased use of bicycles. To encourage bicycle use, the campus has over 5,000 bicycle parking spots and has cooperated with the City of Chico to establish a major cross-town bicycle path that terminates at the University campus.
Food service is another area in which universities are leading the way. For example, at the University of Portland, their food service provider, Bon Appetit, strives for sustainability by buying from local organic farms and co-ops. Their “Farm to Fork” Program involves the purchase of produce and dairy (organic when available) from small local farms, meat purchases of grass-fed animals raised without the use of hormones or antibiotics, and sustainable seafood purchase principles. They also feature recycling and energy-saving efforts such as using biodegradable disposables.
At Portland State University the Food for Thought Café is a student-run café that embodies sustainability principles. It began in the spring of 2000 with a group of students interested in promoting sustainability in their campus food systems. They have a community business mentor, and partner with the Western Culinary Institute which assists them with menu development and the placement of interns. Most of the food in the café is local and grown sustainably. Disposable materials are eliminated as much as possible, and recycling and composting are within easy reach.
Even our office practices can make a difference. Margins on our letters and reports, for example, can save on paper and printer cartridges. At the University of Pennsylvania a policy was set that mandated reducing margins on most university documents. This simple and painless step saved the university over $120,000 per year (Pearce and Uhl, 2003).
University curricula are an obvious area in which universities can teach and model environmental sustainability. Environmental studies/sciences programs and majors can be found at many universities across the country, such as Sonoma State University, The Evergreen State College, and even small private schools such as the University of the Pacific. Environmental sustainability is also found incorporated into other university programs such as law (Hammer, 1999) and business schools (Pesonsen, 2003).
Very few teacher preparation programs include environmental education — the numbers of such programs has dropped significantly since the 1970s heyday. This is one of the primary reasons why basic environmental education is rarely taught in K-12. Gabriel (1996) claims that one of the reasons basic environmental education is rarely taught in K-12 is that teacher preparation programs rarely include environmental content. Gabriel identifies barriers to incorporating environmental education in higher education, and they include such factors as the disciplinary structure of higher education, and the fact that state teacher requirements do not include environmental education. Strategies offered for influencing higher education institutions to include environmental education in their teacher prep curricula include such ideas as implementing faculty development programs in the area, establishing partnerships with local schools, developing campus environmental stewardship programs, and taking the leadership step of signing the Talloires Declaration.
So, where do we go from here? Let us start with encouraging higher education institutions to sign the Talloires Declaration. Then, let’s ask them to walk their talk. They should implement faculty development programs in the environmental sciences and establish partnerships with local schools to teach our young about their own place and their planet. Universities can implement sustainability principles in their operations, housing, purchasing, and community and campus environmental stewardship programs. All these steps are important, and overall represent a collective intention for a sustainable future.
Carol Brodie is a doctoral student at the University of the Pacific, exploring case studies of universities at varying levels of organizational environmental sustainability.
