Education for sustainable development, nature and vernacular learning

Abstract

Education for Sustainable DevelopmentIn the last thirty years the idea of sustainable development has come to be widely advocated as the best hope for alleviating the global environmental condition, a condition marked by the degradation and thinning of ecosystems, huge biodiversity loss, the ubiquitous spread of toxicity, the desertification of land and deadening of oceans, a worsening epidemiological environment for both humans and other-than-humans, depletion of groundwater, and the spoliation of land not least through the outward march of land-devouring urbanisation (Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 2013). Lurking behind and fueling this multi-crisis syndrome, in which crises in the human socio-economic condition also figure prominently, lies stealthy but rapid onset climate change (Selby, 2014, p. 166).Sustainable development was famously defined in the Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, p. 43) as 'development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs' a definition that continues to enjoy wide currency. It is generally depicted as a process of maintaining a dynamic balance between three interrelated 'pillars' or 'dimensions', i.e. economy, environment and society as the development process is taken forward, with the aim of staying within the constraints imposed by the 'carrying capacity' of the planet.At the 2014 conference in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, wrapping up the 2005-20 UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD), education for sustainable development (ESD) was declared to be an 'enabler for sustainable development' with the potential to 'empower learners to transform themselves and the society they live in' (UNESCO, 2014a). The Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development, designed to provide the roadmap for the post-2015 ESD agenda and launched at the conference, rehearses the core learning content, approaches and competencies of ESD:* It involves developing in the learner the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes enabling informed decision making and responsible action for environmental integrity, economic viability and the just society in the present and with an eye to the future;* It entails the use of participatory learning and teaching methods that motivate and empower learners;* It is fundamentally a rights-based approach;* It relates to the environmental, social and economic pillars of sustainable development in an integrated, balanced and holistic way, comprehensively embracing, inter alia, poverty reduction, climate change, disaster risk reduction, biodiversity and sustainable consumption and production;* It encompasses but does not seek to usurp historical and/or current 'adjectival' educations such as environmental education, global education and development education (UNESCO, 2014b, p. 33).From the perspective of anyone concerned about the wellbeing of the natural world, ESD would seem at first glance to offer an auspicious agenda. The environment, it would appear, figures significantly. A second glance, however, unearths a decidedly anthropocentric vein. 'People' we are told without further elaboration in the preface to the Aichi-Nagoya Declaration on Education for Sustainable Development, 'are at the centre of sustainable development' (UNESCO, 2014a). So where, we might ask ourselves does nature truly stand in the ESD landscape?A De-naturing of LearningA word search of recent key international ESD documents, such as those cited above reveals only limited reference to 'nature' and 'natural world'. Rather, nature is referenced through the filter of 'environment, a term derived from the French 'environs', i.e. that which surrounds us but in which we are not necessarily embedded. Only very rarely in the literature searched does the descriptor 'natural' ever precede the term 'environment' thus further confirming the impression of the environmental pillar of sustainable development as a reductively de-natured conception. …