The illusion of certainty

All the notions we thought solid, all the values of civilized life, all that made for stability in international relations, all that made for regularity in the economy...in a word, all that tended happily to limit the uncertainty of the morrow...all this seems badly compromised. I have consulted all the augurs I could find, of every species, and I have heard only vague words, contradictory prophecies, curiously feeble assurances. Never has humanity combined so much power with so much disorder, so much anxiety with so many playthings, so much knowledge with so much uncertainty.
Paul Valery Historical Fact (1932)
The concept of Education for Sustainable Development would appear to be a sound basis upon which to develop a strategic response to environmental change. It has the support across national boundaries, it is founded upon three program areas for redefining education and learning:
1) reorienting education to sustainable development;
2) increasing public awareness, and
3) promoting training.
These objectives from Agenda 21 clearly step beyond the school site and demonstrate a need to establish a more systemic understanding and application of sustainable ‘capacities’ in the mainstream of daily life. Learning to know, do, live together and to be, the four pillars of Education for Sustainable Development are credible founding ideas, they generate an air of certainty.
However, there remains a fundamental question that lies with the very notion of Education for Sustainable Development, What do we mean by development?
As I wrote the first draft of this chapter the world financial markets were in crisis. Each day a significant financial institution, was absorbed into US or UK Government ownership, or merged into ever bigger conglomerate institutions but the uncertainty remained. The national structures, which we take to be solid and permanent, suddenly began to be seen for what they are, temporal, socially constructed and therefore socially changeable institutions. For some commentators the banking crisis was an end of an empire, for others it was a readjustment (Soros 2009). But for everyone it raised a question, it challenged the accepted idea that has come to dominate political systems over the last century that stability, growth and economic development are absolutes and givens upon which our nations flourish.
The fluctuations of money markets have other repercussions and serve to illuminate and enlighten our ability to see beyond self to the dynamics of what is often an opaque set of relationships. It is fair to say that many people were angry and shocked at the circumstances that led to the banking collapse, and this anger was compounded by the amounts of money that their governments had to then use to bring balance back to the markets. In the newsgroups, papers and in general conversations about financial meltdown people were expressing a strange mix of fear, anxiety, unease and sometimes optimism about the future, for themselves, and their families.
This readjustment and reconsideration of opinion of such established institutions is interesting. While for some people there was a clear concern for self, there was also a concern for the universal, beyond self, not simply to find a solution to money markets, but to stop and consider the broader direction of travel of this form of speculative capitalism. For the first time in memory the established way that the economy functioned was being seriously questioned and substantive answers were not quickly forthcoming. A deluge of questions were raised: Is it more than merely a blip in an otherwise upward march of ‘progress’? Is it a moment of possible transition, where human society recognizes the inherent weakness in the way it is organized, and perhaps understands that we have choices we can make about the direction we might choose to take? Is it to be business as usual? Or are we facing up to a new realization, a new sense of possibility that transcends national perspectives and begins to foster a different perspective which is at once local – related to my own place and connections and kinships, and global, to draw this realization to a wider picture, to consider the global dimension of what we do in our own settings through the narratives we choose to follow?
This broader theme is taken up by Chrispen Tickell (in Lovelock 2006) who points out, that as nations and individuals we are currently trapped in a vicious circle of positive feedback where our preoccupation of self impedes our vision of our wider effect. ‘What happens in one place very soon affects what happens in others. We are dangerously ignorant of our own ignorance, and rarely see things as a whole’ (Tickell in Lovelock 2006).
So it is within this frame of enquiry that we can turn to the question of Sustainable Development. Sustainable development is fashionable and fits perhaps rather too cosily with the old world order that still believes in the main that global warming is fiction, or at least fixable, and favours business as usual structured around the existing order with a trust in technology as the solution to the current problems we face. But as James Lovelock (2006) comments, sustainable development puts us in the comfort zone of pretending we are making real change when in fact we are deluding ourselves, and colluding with existing arrangements;

‘Sustainable development is a moving target. It represents the continuous effort to balance and integrate three pillars of social well-being, economic prosperity and environmental protection for the benefit of present and future generations. Many consider this noble policy morally superior to the laissez-faire of business as usual. Unfortunately for us, these wholly different approaches, one the expression of international decency, the other of unfeeling market forces, have the same outcome: the probability of disastrous global change. The error they share is the belief that further development is possible and that the Earth will continue, more or less as now, for at least the first half of this century. Two hundred years ago, when change was slow or non-existent, we might have had time to establish sustainable development, or even have continued for a while with business as usual, but now is much too late, the damage has already been done. (Lovelock 2006, p3/4).

Lovelock’s argument is that it is much too late for sustainable development, he makes the case for what he calls sustainable retreat (p8). In his critique of science as a ‘cosy, friendly club of specialists who follow their numerous different stars, he observes that they are ‘wonderfully productive but never certain and always hampered by the persistence of incomplete world-views’. We might usefully draw the analogy across every sector, and particularly shine it upon current educational policy and its relationship with sustainable development. It is much too late for educational reform under its current guise as it is wedded to the view that we create citizens in the form of consumers, reliant upon economic development. This, the old order, has crumbled, we prop up schools as if there is no alternative, yet we fail to see that the damage is already done, we need to transform the whole notion of education for a clear need, survival.

This may seem rather remote from the central question in this book of educational reform or transformation, but I maintain that it is fundamentally important to our topic because without a clear idea of what we are hoping to develop, we may find our actions aligned to the mast of education for sustainability but see ourselves sailing into the sunset of continuous economic growth, with all of the destructive resource implications associated with that way of knowing, doing living and being, suited to a world that is sold on the illusion of certainty.
Redefining sustainable development
Instead, let us consider a different meaning to the idea of development and its connection with sustainability. I want to emphasise the importance of growth, but through a much wider notion than the singular economic preoccupation with financial concerns. Instead, I want to suggest that we think of growth in terms of the way we might establish learning communities that will equip people with the tools, ideas and capabilities so that we can work together to reposition ourselves in relation to our planet.
This repositioning of the basic action of education as a form of new development is what Thomas Berry (1999) calls ‘The Great Work’ of our time. This is where we learn how to provide sustainable food, energy, water, minerals, livelihood, health and shelter for everyone. Thus, we can only consider to have demonstrated growth in a sustainable manner when we have transformed our existing systems to attend to these life forces across the planet from self to universal. Berry (ibid) argues that we will achieve this through the creation of authentic, creative and vibrant sustainable communities.
These communities are deeply embedded in responding to cultural, social, ecological, economic and spiritual needs, with closely aligned connections to local food, local work, interconnected networks of similar communities. Each of these communities are looking at new forms of building for sustainable living, exploring how we educate all members of the community to begin to participate in what Senge calls metanoia - a shift of mind and practice in response to a changed environment.

To redefine sustainable development from this perspective therefore, we have a number of areas to focus upon.

Sustainable development is the practice of choice and freedom
I am suggesting here that we need to create ways in which we can begin to uncouple ourselves from the destructive effects of development at all costs. Education for sustainable development is at present just a softer version of the already failed solution. If you remain unconvinced, look at the continuing levels of poverty, problems with ill-health and well-being, mental illness, educational failure, ecological pollution, social injustice, economic exploitation of cheap workers the list can run and run. We need a new solution and it will be driven by people making choices and exercising those choices by participating in different ways of resisting the mainstream, until they become the mainstream.
I suggest that this is a starting point to define our selective actions as the starting point of new hope through a shift of mind leading to a shift of behaviour. There is a growing view, coming from many parts of the world, that holds a view that the future will be very different from the past, even the recent past, formed because the main trends that have shaped the global industrial development cannot continue in the ways that they are at present. It is clear that across many different dimensions of human action, there is a crisis, and that our muddling through efforts to resolve it epitomise the paucity of options we seem to have established in our systems to cope and to be able to create alternative approaches. In a world of increasing interdependence, the concentration of wealth is no longer acceptable, in a world of finite resource, we simply cannot waste, throw away and fail to recognise the consequences of our waste, in a world which now has a clear scientific evidence of humankinds effect on climate, we simply cannot continue to burn fossil fuel and think it will just solve itself, or that the problem is over-exaggerated. The trends that have been established over the past century of consumer society are now deeply embedded in our structures and systems, but they are socially constructed, they are fragile and can be changed. It is not beyond us to tackle such challenges, but we have first to admit to the difficulties that they create for those of us who are expressing concern.

Sustainable development redefines the importance of community
I want to challenge the existing formulation of learning community which is too closely aligned to a knowledge society which in turn is designed around a failed economic model. Instead I want to suggest that community needs rethinking in terms of a number of interconnections centred upon different forms of learning. If we position the community as a set of alliances with learning at their core, which connect according to need and act as much more radical agents of real educational transformation, led by people coming together through a range of communities of learning, action, kinship, place, interest and connection we begin to see the importance of community as a reality defining network.

Sustainable development is a local action
Peter Senge (2007) observes that governments are ‘muddling through’ a strategy that ‘characterises most of us in rich northern countries. It embraces a combination of working to preserve the status quo combined with an almost hypnotic fascination with wondrous new technologies that, so the belief goes, will solve our problems’ (px11. I) He suggests that this form of policy-driven action is misguided, even with the best intentions we have managed to create a collusion between government and local action where real purposeful connection with ideas plays second fiddle to a social and moral order wedded to consumerism. Action is very different when released from simply implementing a service or product, it demands new ‘people’ skills, where we learn how to listen and hear each other. As we try to create more sustainable forms of living we have to learn not to create a new form of the old economy where the sustainable lifestyle is a consumer product.

Sustainable development is about knowing a place
In a globalised world, where employees and organizations are able to be uprooted and assigned anywhere on the planet, the direct knowledge of place is of no immediate concern. Being uprooted is literal and metaphorical. But sustainability is all about place, it is about the connection with the earth. It is about the importance of the micro-contexts within which our actions have a direct relationship with the land upon which we live. Place is not a centralised question. Place is the habitat that defines us, locally understood and nurtured according to locally identified need. As such, the sensitivity of place comes in its connection with other important principles of citizenship, participation and empowerment through user-defined action.


Sustainable development is the result of critical consciousness
Education for sustainable development is emancipatory education. It radicalizes people. It gets them to look again at how things are and ask ‘why are they like that?’ instead of taking things as they are, and accepting that this is just how it is, we have to learn to challenge the existing order of things, only through critical analysis can we gain new insights and understandings. We have to be resilient to the inevitable resistance and refutation of the arguments that will come, but in the end I think that we can trust that these are ideas whose time has come, as Martin Buber put it ‘Listen to the course of being in the world...and bring it to reality as it desires.’ We are beginning to know how to respond to the subtle forces that shape and influence our ways of being, by attending to them we learn more about ourselves, how we must change if we are to initiate any such change in the wider system. It is only through deeper examination of self in our situation that it becomes clear that the inner self upon which they draw seems to have a huge influence on the work they subsequently undertake and on its lasting influence. This influence is more than practical and technical in its form. It has something to do with the way in which real learning leaves an imprint that others truly feel. It goes beyond the problems we face in our schools, it is a failure that persists deep down in our cultures across many different developed industrialised nations.

My suggestion is that there is something important we can examine here about the interdependence of people when they generate commitment and action that demonstrates a new idea of development. Despite the united front that many headteachers and leadership teams present, there is a great deal of uncertainty in what they should actually do and how they might engage their colleagues in collaborative effort. It is a difficult subject to examine because of its embeddedness in specific organisational contexts. But in an environment of continuous reform, in which I think we now operate, interdependence seems to really matter as a way of overcoming enormous doubts and uncertainty about action. A decade ago, we talked enthusiastically about ‘school’ improvement. And whilst the school remains, rather strangely, the unit of measure, we understand now that school in itself is not enough. Our reform has become more ambitious and more dispersed. Rather than pursue challenges as individual school communities, it is clear that teams of people across a number of sites can generate greater potential and possibility for change. Not surprisingly in these circumstances they also generate greater levels of interdependence and at the same time these interdependencies breed uncertainty, because new knowledge feeds the possible, they begin to need each other and learn that this need is more than simply about dealing with practical and technical demands of change, it is intimate, personal, it reaches deep inside their inner-self asking them what do they really value. Placing trust in the potential of the larger group to be able to support personal need is a step beyond depending on someone else, it is a public act of faith in a particular way of working together and is not to be underestimated. Governments and their agencies are often keen to know the ‘replication potential’ of any perceived effective reform. Whilst understanding this question, it seems to me that it misses a fundamental point about scale and reform. People working with each other generate trust and a whole social technology around risk taking, meaning making and such like. It is not something that is simply manufactured by a request to implement a reform. There are lots of examples of projects which have worked well in one environment and then fallen flat when efforts are made to put them into place into another. So we might have to look again at exactly what we should perhaps wish to replicate, not things that we do, but how we nurture working relationships that deepen interdependence. We have become more interdependent, and at the same time our organisations are having to move towards greater levels of interdependence, at present it is not entirely clear if we have, as yet, developed an operational method which will enable this to work well.

Sustainable development is timeless
A commitment to learn how to live sustainably is a lifelong commitment which we pass on to others as we develop ourselves. This is what happens when people get together and actually learn together, from each other’s questions and from enquiring into specific issues in depth they gain insights into their own understanding. Our work over the last decade has clearly shown that time spent together, at inter and intra- institutional levels, sharing ideas, deepening understanding of different cultural and social conditions enables people to further connect and relate to each other can be extremely powerful and has transformational potential. Time together, when it is undertaken well can generate trust, and we take greater risks when trust is established and demonstrated.

Sustainable development is global and local
What will the impact be? It will be global and local. We live in a time that is obsessed with impact results and immediate solutions and as such, we look more to surface and immediate issues, rather then wanting to spend our time digging deep examining the relationships that are at play and how they are nurturing the environment for more fruitful ways of working to emerge. All too often the measure of our success is seen in speedy short-term changes, at the forefront of such change is restructuring, establishing what seem to be better aligned systems, ensuring paperwork is up to date, and keeping aligned to new policies. However, the shallowness of these efforts has led to superficial reform and meaningless, draining and futile action that saps human ingenuity, creativity and energy. It is not hard to get below the surface of any organisation and begin to identify the dis-ease - a ‘fragmentation.’ I think that our examination of action, and a method of analysis, can be extremely valuable in assisting communities to learn that real sustainable change is something that happens on a local scale and at a global scale. It only becomes development when it succeeds at the wholistic level, it is not enough to happen just on a local basis, that is not development.

Sustainable development is systemic
When we reconnect self and system, the personal with the universal we begin to practice sustainable development. The observation that across a community of people there is a vast, untapped pool of skill and talent is to understate the importance of having a chance to participate and to be a citizen with other citizens, engaged in common good. Whilst this might not immediately resonate with one as a spiritual dimension to self, I wish to explore that notion later in the book. Clearly, western society has sacrificed the universal in preference for the self, and yet, this pursuit of personal want, which is much more than personal need, has not resulted in personal satisfaction. It is seldom that the community can truly observe that all of the participants feel fulfilled in the things that they do there. More often than not, people are impeded significantly by pointless restrictions and barriers that the organisation has established and which people feel unable to overcome. Sit down and chat with any group of people from any organisation and pretty quickly you will hear the same pained cry - we are doing things we don’t see the need for, we are filling in forms which seem to take more time than the day job, our staff aren’t listening, nobody has time for anyone else, we are always restructuring, we don’t get time to implement one change before the next one comes along, our managers don’t listen to our needs, they undertake consultation but its a sham, if I could afford to I would quit. This is the sorry sum of our days, the fragmentation of our lives, the failure to function systemically. It is no wonder that we face massive problems in our communities, our social lives, our economic lives, and we extend those out to the environment and our presence in the planet. We have lost our ability to connect, we have lost the skill of trusting interconnection and using it to help us to make sense of what we do. Across the education system, the effect of working and living in an environment driven by outcomes is one of rapid pace. A colleague recently commented that he no longer took annual leave of more than four days because he could not ‘stand the feeling of being left behind.’ Resisting the urge to say ‘go and get a life!’ he fully appreciated that it was neither wise nor healthy to approach his work in this way. Yet, despite being an informed, articulate and in a position in our school system of some power, he felt completely trapped by the pressure of work. His predicament is repeated time and again. People know that what they are doing feels wrong for their wellbeing, for their families, for their colleagues and for their workplace, but they express a sense of powerlessness to overcome the problem and nurture a different environment. It seems that our sense of personal and collective agency has been sapped, the trouble is, whilst we might know this, we have grown used to waiting for someone to tell us how to get out of this situation, and no-one, or nothing is coming along to reform this problem. Sustainable development is systemic, it enables people to reconnect and seek wholeness, mental, physical, social and individual – to empower their lives and believe in themselves.

Ecological literacy – how to implement sustainable development
This is a demanding and radical agenda, it needs energy, stamina, courage, leadership and clarity of purpose and competence. So where might we turn to begin such a journey? I think we turn to what Frijof Capra (2005) calls ecological literacy .
Ecological literacy is radical, rather than mainstream, because the content of the vision, desired state and design emerge from the ‘central convictions’ (Sterling 2006 p.12) being informed from an ‘authentic’ educational standpoint which critically asks What education is for? Who it serves? Why it is fashioned like it is? As Sterling says, ‘Sustainable education…is about integrating and balancing process (what it is) with purpose (what education is for), so that they are mutually informing and enhancing’ (p26).
Work underway in the Centre for Ecoliteracy (2009) has been exploring the ideas of the school as the place where we learn to build a sustainable community which builds upon these earlier considerations. A director of the Centre for Ecoliteracy, Frijof Capra observes that we do not need to begin the process of creating sustainable community entirely from scratch. Instead, we can learn from the natural world where ‘life creates conditions conducive to life.’ (Benus 2008). In Capra’s work, sustainable community is centred around natural patterns and processes which provide our ‘lifelong’ lessons. This is a significant departure from earlier formulations of sustainable education literature because it offers a way of interpreting the design of the sustainable paradigm through a new methodological approach more attuned to natural systems, rather than developmental designs drawn from industrial systems (Clarke in press).
To facilitate their work, the Centre for Ecoliteracy (2009) uses four guiding principles, reflecting the simplicity through which they present their message.
These are:
1. Nature is our teacher
2. Sustainability is a community practice
3. The real world is the optimal learning environment
4. Sustainable living is rooted in deep knowledge of place.
In the next chapter I will discuss the development of these ideas in the form of community, leading to capabilities we can learn, and then reframing the idea of school within these communities of learning.
References
Benus, .J.M. (2008) Nature’s 100 best: Top biomimicry solutions to environmental crises. Bioneers 19th Annual Conference. San Rafael. CA. October 19, 2008, plenary address
Capra, F. (2005) ‘Preface,’ in Ecological Literacy: Educating our Children for a Sustainable World. Ed. Stone, M and Zeno
Clarke, P. (2009) Sustainability and Improvement: a problem of and for education. Improving Schools. Vol 12 no 1, 11-17
Clarke, P. (ongoing) www.sustainableretreat.blogspot.com
McIntosh.A. (2008) Rekindling Community: Connecting people, environment and spirituality. Schumacher Briefings 15. Green Books. Bristol
Sterling,S. (2001) Sustainable Education: Re-visioning learning and change. Schumacher Briefings 6. Green Books. Bristol
Esbjorn-Hargens, S., and Zimmerman, M.E. (2009) Integral Ecology – Using Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World. Integral Books. Boston
Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality. London. Open Books.
Dalin, P., with Rolff, H (1993) Changing the school culture. London. Cassell
Fullan, M. (1991) The New Meaning of Educational Change. London. Cassell