Then I have an article from the bi-monthly magazine "Resurgence" about ecology and economy, pointing to the flaws of the present economic and educational systems and suggesting what to do to change it.
GREENING OF EDUCATION - David Orr
"Nothing less than the re-creation of humankind will do" - Paul Kennedy
Ours is an age of paradox. We have more power over nature than ever before, but the exercise of that power has created perils unprecedented in human history. Similarly, while knowledge is growing exponentially, we are engulfed by a world-wide tide of mindless nihilism, consumerism, drugs, and violence. In the twentieth century, the world economy has grown some 1,300%, but the gap between the richest and the poorest countries continue to widen. These and other paradoxes of our time suggest that the great modern project to improve the human prospect through the control of nature has not worked out as its first proponents once assumed that it would. Nor has the project of improving the world through economic growth proved to be as benign or sustainable as once supposed in this, the "American century". We are now in the early stages of a great planetary emergency, aspects of which are familiar enough: population growth, ozone holes, spreading deserts, deforestation, species decline and risks of rapid climate change, and global epidemics. These, in turn, have effects that ripple through politics, economics and societies. Yet faced with crisis, our first impulse is to find yet another technological fit fix for ecological malfeasance. so, in the name of one imperative or another, we go where angels fear to go. And where does this lead?
Describing the future direction of the great effort to create Artificial Intelligence, for example, Daniel Creviet says: "in the longer term, AI remains immensely threatening. The machines will eventually excel us in intelligence and it will be impossible for us to pull the plug on them...they will be impossible to keep at bay...human society will have to undergo drastic changes to survive in the face of artificial intelligence...their arrival will threaten the very existence of human life as we know it...we should expect the main battles of the twentieth century to be about...whether we or they should control the future of the Earth".
Who has ordained that progress means replacing humans with machines? Who decided that "society will have to undergo drastic changes?" When were such things discussed in our democracy or in the classrooms of our colleges and universities? I could have mentioned as well the effort to re-weave the genetic fabric of life with consequences that we cannot know, or that to develop "nano-technologies" which their developers admit may be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. The point, however, is clear enough. We are trying to solve with technological Band-Aids what can only be solved by deeper and more thorough-going change. In Vaclav Havel's words: "We treat the fatal consequences of technology as though they were a technical defect that could be remedied by technology alone. We are looking for an objective way out of the crisis of objectivism....We cannot devise, within the traditional modern attitude to reality, a system that will eliminate all the disastrous consequences of the previous system....We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use waiting to be discovered." Havel is right. The planetary emergency unfolding around us is not a crisis of technology, although it certainly has technological aspects. It is rather first and foremost, a crisis of thought, values, perspectives, ideas and judgment. In other words, it is a crisis of mind, which makes it a crisis for those institutions which purport to improve minds. This is a crisis of education, not one in education.
And how have educational institutions responded to the manifest deterioration in the human prospect? "Most colleges", in Dartmouth Professor Noel Perrin's words, "act as though they have all the time in the world." Yale historian, Yaroslav Pelikan, goes further, to question whether institutions of higher education will ever "address the underlying intellectual issues and moral imperatives of having responsibility for the Earth with an intensity and ingenuity matching that shown by previous generations in obeying the command to have dominion over the planet." In the face of overwhelming evidence that we have only a matter of decades in which to prevent irreversible and disastrous changes, colleges and universities continue to equip the young for short-term success in the extractive economy, not for long-term success in a society of sustainable and resilient communities. The hard truth is that the planetary emergency now upon us is not the fault of the uneducated, but of the well-educated, sporting degrees from our proudest educational institutions. When thoroughgoing reform is called for, we have tinkered at the margins of the status quo. Remove computers and a scattering of courses and new programs and the curriculum of the 1990s looks a great deal like that of the 1950s. On the whole, higher education has failed to engage the big and contentious issues on the human agenda with "intensity and ingenuity". A more adequate response would have led faculty and administrators to challenge the hidden curriculum with its hidden assumptions that:
* Knowledge is everywhere uniform, hence abstract knowledge is more important than practical, local or indigenous knowledge.
* High technology is better than simpler technology.
* Manual skills are separate from and less valuable than intellectual skills.
* Success means making it in the cash economy; hence, I comes before we.
* Self-gratification is more desirable than self-denial.
* The world is governed by competition, so the young must be equipped to compete rather than to co-operate.
* Urban is better than rural, hence rural areas are good mostly for what they can do for the cities by providing cheap resources, labour and land.
* The goal of education is to equip the young to serve the growth economy which requires the total domination of nature.
The problem of higher education, like that of Western civilisation, is rooted in the crisis of objectivism that Havel describes. Real change will require us to overturn the hubris and ecological vandalism built into the modern curriculum. What would it mean for colleges and universities to respond to the global crisis with "intensity and ingenuity?" What would it means for educators and educational institutions to address Havel's crisis of objectivism? First, there are obvious and important changes to be made in how institutions operate, how they exert their purchasing power in the economy, and how they invest endowment funds. Beyond these changes are other, and more difficult, changes in curriculum and pedagogy. What will the young need to know in order to arrest and reverse the ecological deterioration? What qualities of mind, person and heart will they need for perilous times ahead? What analytical abilities and practical skills will they need in order to make sense out of complexity and to find their way amidst mounting disorder? These are difficult questions for which there are no easy answers, but I can say with great certainty that the rising generation will face trials of intellect, moral stamina, and character more severe than those faced by any previous generation. For them the stakes are higher, the margin for error smaller, the stage on which they must act is global, and procrastination and dereliction will not be forgiven. Whatever the institutional form and pedagogical details, post-modern education has six essential tasks:
First, whatever else they learn, the young must muster the analytical and practical skills necessary for them to make a rapid transition to a post-fossil-fuel world. They must learn, in other words, how to run civilisation on current, not ancient sunlight. Accordingly, educators must confront, in economist Richard Norgaard's words, the many ways in which "modern values, knowledge, organisation, and technological systems reflect the availability of fossil hydro-carbonates". In subtle, unstated, but powerful ways, the modern discipline-based curriculum has been shaped by the assumption that humans have solved the energy problem. We haven't, but our students must.
Second, post-modern education must equip students to think in systems and patterns and extend their sense of time to the horizon. We can no longer safely and confidently educate only specialists, whose bailiwick is the hermetically sealed discipline. We must equip our students to think "at right angels to their field of specialisation". this does not mean the end of disciplines, but rather the end of disciplines that exist as islands, and sometimes as fortresses. It means developing linkages between different branches of knowledge. It means disciplines disciplined by the knowledge and perspectives of other fields, particularly those of ecology and ethics. Further, we must educate the young to comprehend how cause and effect work in complex systems. We must help them establish an honest economics in which prices tell the truth about the full ecological and human costs of consumption.
Third, education must equip the young for a post-urban world. The proper question is not whether the urban tide will ebb but when, how rapidly and whether by foresight or happenstance. In other words, the choice is whether those returning to rural areas in the century ahead will do so, in the main, willingly and expectantly with the appropriate knowledge, attitude and skills as home-comers or arrive as ecological refugees driven by necessity, perhaps desperation. For all of the fashionable talk about cultural diversity, schools, colleges, and universities have been agents of fossil energy-powered urban homogenisation. There is one curriculum, which as Wes Jackson notes, prepares the young for "upward mobility" in an urban world. But if the human future will be as much rural as urban, what will the young need to know? For one thing, they will need to know more about food and agriculture than they are now taught. Agriculture will become more important for a large number of people. British sociologist Raymond Williams, once put it this way: "If we are to survive at all, we shall have to develop and extend our working agriculture. The common idea of a lost rural world is then not only an abstraction....It is in direct contradiction to any effective shape of our future, in which work on the land will have to become more rather than less important and essential. It is one of the most striking deformations of industrial capitalism that one of our most central and urgent and necessary activities should have been so displaced in space or in time. For another they will need to know how to do more than they are now being taught to do. But a considerable number of practical skills useful for rural life in a post-fossil world are being lost. An Amish friend of mine, for instance, describes his father in these words: "Father was one of those rare people who possessed many of the arts and skills needed in thriving rural communities. Besides being a farmer and a husbandman, he was a thresher-man (a title that also included silo-filling, corn husking with the machine, fodder-shredding, and clover-hulling), a sawyer, an orchardist, his own mechanic, a carpenter (he could design and build anything from kitchen cabinets to mortise and tenon frame buddings), for a short time his own blacksmith, plumber, and for a while he even whitewashed our milking stable, using the orchard sprayer." Outside the Amish community, however, these are no longer common skills. But the more serious loss is the decline of the qualities of mind that permit skills to flourish. A mind that knows how to do many things well has a complexity, agility, and resilience unknown to the specialist (what Nietzsche called an "inverted cripple", i.e. one with a single overdeveloped faculty instead of an impaired one). This is a mind capable of shifting from one material to another, from one set of tools to another, and from mechanics to biology to animal husbandry all in the same day. It is a mind with the wherewithal to design, build, repair, grow, heal, tinker, orchestrate, improvise, neighbour (a verb), and tell good stories, a mind with range and stretch to it.
Fourth, the young must learn how to reduce the human "foot-print" on the Earth, by which I mean lower the total amount of energy, materials, land, and water necessary to sustain a good life. Over a lifetime each person in the United States uses an average 540 tons of construction materials, eighteen tons of paper, twenty-three tons of wood, sixteen tons of metals, thirty-two tons of organic chemicals - ten to fifteen times as much as people in the so-called "underdeveloped" world use. If environmental decline is to be reversed, Americans, by one estimate, will have to reduce their consumption of energy and materials by fifty to ninety per cent. To do so and still live well, those now in schools and colleges will have to master the art and science of ecological design which includes the perceptual and analytical skills necessary to maximize resource and energy efficiency, take advantage of the free services of nature, make ecologically smarter things that "fit" in nature, and incorporate intelligence about how nature works - what David Wann calls "biologic" - into the way they think, design, build, and live. They will have to be smarter than earlier generations had to be when it was still possible to deplete the ecological and biotic capital of the Earth. A curriculum that enables the young to do these things will include new fields of learning such as ecological engineering, sustainable resource management, restoration ecology, conservation biology and "Green" architecture. And it will include the knowledge necessary to know what should not be made in the first place.
Fifth, the young will need much more ecological imagination than they now have and new visions of the land that stretch their notions of ecological possibilities. Landscapes shaped by fossil energy will have to be made over in the century to come. The young will need the ecological imagination necessary to reconstruct rural and urban landscapes that sequester carbon dioxide, restore wildness, support biological diversity, harness sun and wind, and create zones for hunting and gathering: landscapes with wildlife corridors, forests, wilderness areas, protected rivers, small farms, technologically advanced wind machines, and restored land. In a post-fossil-fuel world, for example, the highly specialised, capital-intensive and ecologically destructive
farm will be radically changed. The new farm will be ecologically diverse, smaller, and less expensive. Such farms will exist in both urban and rural areas. They will be "community supported" farms selling a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, and grains directly to paying members. The young will also need broader visions of wild landscapes. There can be no enlargement of our sense of the landscapes, however, without a deeper ecological perspective about ourselves. We are, in part, reflections of our places. Locality is etched in our minds in more ways than we can know. We are eddies in one watershed or another. We are parts of larger parts, pieces in a larger ensemble, shot through with wilderness beyond our imagining.
Sixth, true education must be more than merely the transmission of facts, information, techniques, and know-how. It must aim to provide the young with "know-why" as well. As E. F. Schumacher once said, real education would "clarify our central convictions...for it is our central convictions that are in disorder." IF education is not to be "an agent of destruction", in Schumacher's words, it must aim "to produce more wisdom." When education does this well, it clarifies what's of lasting importance from the ephemeral and equips us with ideas and ideals large enough to overcome cynicism, nihilism, and preoccupation with self. The end of education as we have known it, is in sight. Its trajectory follows the curves depicting the decline in the habitability of the Earth itself. I am referring, of course, to the kind of education by which we presumed to master nature by technology. We must now confront the overwhelming irony that the greater the power of our technology over nature, the less predictable and resilient nature has become. The idea, tacitly built into much of the modern curriculum, that we can make and end-run around natural constraints is a bet that sane people would not make. It is a bet that humankind cannot win. What are the prospects that education can be transformed in ways that will enable it to equip the young to do what they must do in order to build communities, societies, and a global order that is ecologically durable and fair? This is, first, a problem of vision in institutions at present administered by people not famous for it. The analogy of the churchmen of the seventeenth century refusing to look through Galileo's telescope comes to mind. Oliver Sacks, author of Awakenings, tells a similar story of "Virgil", a man blind from the age of four who recovered his sight at the age of fifty. What should have been a miraculous and joyful recovery of vision, however, was for Virgil a painful and unwanted thing that interrupted comfortable routines and fantasies. Virgil had grown used to his blindness and the security of life as a partial invalid. Virgil did not want to see, and in the end he lost his sight, partly by his own choosing. In our day, too, many will refuse to see what is daily becoming all too clear. Comfortable, academic and administrative routines are a kind of blindness by which we choose to avoid larger and more demanding concerns. But there is a revolution in education from below gathering force. It has been apparent in the conferences sponsored by the Student Environmental Action Coalition that have drawn thousands of students from campuses all over the United States and Canada. It was evident in the February, 1994, conference sponsored by Yale University students who organised the "Campus Earth Summit" to draft the "Campus Blueprint for a Sustainable Future". It is evident in the rapid growth of environmental studies programs on campuses virtually everywhere. It is evident in student enrolments in environmental studies, classes and participation in campus environmental projects. Increasingly, the young know that their inheritance is being spent carelessly and sometimes fraudulently. And I believe that a sizeable number know in their bones the truth of Goethe's words that "whatever you can do or dream to do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." What they may not know is where we, their teachers, mentors, role models, and leaders stand or what we stand for.
David Orr is Professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, Ohio, USA. His book, Ecological Literacy, is available from the Schumacher Book Service at £13,95
Click below to see the next document about economy, the final draft from the NGO Social Summit in Copenhagen, March 1995: NGO Social Summit
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