Teaching About Sustainability

Abstract

During a summer symposium about ecological education more than a decade ago, David Orr, a professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College, suggested that humanity is now like a person experiencing a heart attack. Deteriorating environmental conditions threaten our species' future, and we've got to do whatever we can to take corrective measures. The first step is to stabilize the patient, and for a heart attack victim, this means drawing on all available technologies--defibrillators, emergency angioplasty, or clot-busting drugs. But these actions can do no more than prevent the patient from dying. They won't stop another attack. That will happen only when the patient adopts significant changes in lifestyle: altered diet, a regular exercise regime, reduced stress. Orr argued that as much as human beings may hope for a technological solution to problems like resource exhaustion, pollution, or climate change, technology will only go so far. What ultimately is required is a transformation of our way of life and our beliefs about humanity's relationship with the planet. Defining Terms I've been teaching a graduate course entitled Envisioning a Sustainable Society since 1996 that seeks to explore the possible dimensions of this transformation. Designed for future teachers, educational leaders, and counselors, the course focuses on the implications of contemporary environmental and social crises for people in schools and counseling centers and the role they might play in addressing these issues. The course considers technological changes that support the creation of a more earth-friendly and just society, but focuses primarily on cultural and attitudinal shifts needed to reduce humanity's footprint on the planet and to distribute its limited resources more equitably. After introductions that include students' responses to a question about their own history of involvement with environmental and social justice issues, we watch Helena Norberg-Hodge's film, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh. This documentary provides an opportunity to develop our own definitions of sustainability after witnessing what happens to a small traditional society opened to the forces of modernization in the decades after the 1970s. Situated in a nearly inaccessible section of northern India, Ladakh remained isolated from the rest of the world until a road was built to its capital, Leh, following the Indo-Pakistani War in 1971. Ladakh's first tourists arrived in 1974, and with them followed international trade, fossil-fuel burning vehicles, and the attractions of materialism. The first half of the film recounts what traditional Ladakhi society was like when Norberg-Hodge, a linguist who accompanied the early tourists, first arrived. The second half describes the erosion of long-standing beliefs and social practices under the onslaught of international trade, the global media, tourism, and modern education. Despite or perhaps because of the harsh conditions encountered at 11,000 feet, the Ladakhis had developed a way of life capable of providing for people's needs in a remarkably equitable and sufficient manner. After witnessing the sizeable family homes and well-tended barley fields, Norberg-Hodge asked a young man about the whereabouts of poor people. He stopped for a moment, thinking, and said that there were no poor people in Ladakh. While watching the film, I ask students to record information about common aspects oflife in any society: human relations, economy, natural resources, governance, education, technology, food production, worldview. Following the film, the students break into groups of five or six to discuss factors that they believe contributed to the long-term sustainability of Ladakhi society. They note things such as the way extended families remain with one another across generations; well-established patterns of shared labor and support; the fact that people live within their means and all possess the skills needed to feed, clothe, and house themselves; the time devoted to celebrations; the blending of play and work; the absence of strong divisions between social classes or genders; the careful use and husbandry of natural resources; the integration of education into children's experience with their families and community; and a belief system that stresses the interconnection of all things. …