Asking: Why does the ecological focus matter? What is the fuss about?

Asking: Why does the ecological focus matter? What is the fuss about?

If we succumb to a dream world then we’ll wake up to a nightmare. But if we start with reality and fight to make our dreams a reality, then we will have a good life, a life of meaning and purpose. Jimmy Carter (1980)

I was recently asked why I keep talking about ecological sustainability when there are so many problems we have to deal with already in our schools. It was a good question, and I hope here to explain my preoccupation.

My simple response is that most, if not all of the problems we face as a species, arise from a profound realignment between human and Nature that has arisen over the industrial period of the past 200 years or so. It seems we  have simply forgotten some basic things, we are part of Nature, we rely upon it, and when we turn back to learn the lessons it can teach us there are great benefits we can draw into our own lives, in terms of better well-being, better outlook, and better practices in our life.

On the more complex level, I think that ensuring ecological sustainability is the defining issue of our age. This is both selfish and practical, selfish because if we do not pursue this goal we will perish, and therefore practical because it demands we engage in substantive actions to ensure such a situation does not arise. For example, we need to maintain the existing wild spaces on earth, and systematically restore the damage we have caused in recent times in such places. This may seem a long way from our daily life, a rainforest after all, is not something we might encounter in an entire lifetime. However, if we visit the supermarket, there will be numerous products on the shelves which have a direct relationship with the destruction of such places, from beefsteaks, to palm oil, the clearance of the forests arrives served up on our plate for our convenience and as such, we are implicated. However, this is not an entirely tragic story, we can change the course of this destructive sequence because we choose what we consume, we can act differently, and markets respond to consumer decisions. In effect, our design for life, as a set of conscious choices, can and should be redefined, we are complicit in this process, for good or bad. 

So this agenda demands attention on a global scale, but has local consequences for all of us. It is far more than simply counting carbon emissions and ticking a green box, although that is at least a start. It represents a total rethink of our entire systemic game.

The more I have considered this huge and interwoven problem, the more I am convinced that the challenges I am referring to, and the context in which we might place it, are sufficiently significant to suggest that they represent a new epoch – a new age in the movement of planetary time.  The ecological crisis is big enough to be considered as the defining feature of a new social, cultural and economic narrative. Our great work is to settle ourselves into a way of living on the earth in a minute frame of time (within the next thirty or so years), before we find that we have completely trashed the place. At the same time, we have to make sure that the remaining wild places, forests, grasslands, wetlands and oceans stay as such. Our moral purpose is clear, ensure we take ourselves and as much as possible of the biodiversity with us across the next century, through what E.O. Wilson calls the bottleneck of converging crisis of water, soil, population and biodiversity depletion.

The challenge comes to us in the form of action, or inaction. The suggestion is that we are at a decisive moment where the past is no longer sufficient to inform the present. There are occasions in human history when we can look back and recognise that the future was being formed in a beneficial manner. We might take as an example the moment that humans began to control fire, or when the first languages were spoken, or the first wheel was crafted, when we learnt to cultivate edible plants and created an alphabet through which we learnt to paint, read and write. Similarly, there were also moments when great visionaries lived, and they presented to people of the world a view that transcended the moment and put us in the context of the universal, longitudinal time frame of human history. We can think of the many prophets, gurus and spiritual leaders, we can think of the musicians, painters and storytellers. We can also think of the historians, Ssu-ma Ch’ien in China, Ibn Khaldun in the Arab world, and the Greek Thucydides in the West. All of these in their own ways represented ideas and insight of the human journey, each taking us to a higher level of awareness and consciousness. The sum of these contributions created great civilizations, cultures and dynasties. They were instrumental in assembling ways of governing the mind to connect the sacred with the practical; they were formative elements in generating the basic norms of reality through which people designed their lives. We can see that for many thousands of years, human beings have lived a relatively sublime existence in keeping with natural systems, in so doing; they sustained a quality of life, which connected directly with the natural world. These civilizations of our shared human past were sophisticated and cultured, they were founded on a practical understanding of the connection between spirit and nature that was often witnessed in their temples, cathedrals and sacred places. It was through an eco-literate (Capra 2005) agrarian consciousness that this connection between the human and the planet, the nature and the spirit, the self and universal was demonstrated and maintained across the centuries.

Despite the immense legacies and civilisations they represent, it seems clear they no longer on their own provide us with enough guidance, the lessons they give us of the past are insufficient to guide us into the future because our intervention in the world is so significantly different now from that past record. Whilst we cannot function without these lessons from our past, they are insufficient in themselves to generate a narrative of the present post-industrial society. We are out of step with ourselves and with our world upon which we depend. Something is happening that is profoundly different, apart from the lessons we have learnt from the past. We need to form the conditions to enable a new vision for the future to emerge. 

Let us begin by suggesting that what connects us as a global human tribe to this time is the ecological crisis. I am taking it as given that this is a fact of our time and this alone distances us from our fellow human beings of the past^..  As Rees (2003) observes, ‘We still live, as all our ancestors have done, under the threat of disasters that could cause worldwide devastation: volcanic super-eruptions and major asteroid impacts, for instance. Natural catastrophes on this global scale are fortunately so infrequent, and therefore unlikely to occur within our own lifetime, that they do not preoccupy our thoughts, nor give most of us sleepless nights. But such catastrophes are now augmented by other environmental risks that we are bringing upon ourselves, risks that cannot be dismissed as improbable.’ (p2) Our presence here on earth is no longer benign; we are no longer ‘one species amongst many’ on this planet. Instead we are a dominant species exerting that dominance over all other forms of life. This is having a damaging effect on the environmental conditions upon which we, and other species depend in order to survive.

This change is historically and profoundly significant, brought about by disturbing the biosphere to such an extent through human industrial actions that we are now at an impasse in our relationship with the earth. It has no parallel in historical terms of ecological shift since the geo-biological transitions that occurred some 65 million years ago during the last great die off of species. At that time history witnessed the terminal phase of the dinosaurs, and a new biological age began with the Cenozoic age. This was age of life on earth, and so it has been until now.  Evidence from all parts of the planet is suggesting that, through our wanton destruction of the natural environment there is a profound change taking place across the planet and it is sufficiently significant to be considered as the beginning of a new biological age, what Thomas Berry calls the Ecozoic era. This change is likely to take centuries for our species to respond and adapt, if we are able to do so at all (see Berry 1999, Lovelock 2009 and an extensive commentary by McIntosh 2008).

Over the years of growing industrialization, the general rule to continue a direct and clear connection with the natural has been lost. It seems to be that as industry spreads globally in both scale and power, our essential connection with the natural environment declines.

What defines this relationship and generates the conditions which in turn generate our action in response? One way of looking at this question is to consider the role of education to provide a platform of understanding about sustainability - our education systems define what we choose to learn, the reasons why particular things are selected as valued knowledge, and what their relationship is to the broader consideration. They also model our behaviour, the purchasing choices the school makes, the way the outdoor environment is nurtured, or all too often, ignored as a learning resource. Our capacity to respond to the global challenges of water, food, energy and population in no small part depend upon the way we make sense of these things in our daily lives and change our behaviour accordingly. As such, these ecological challenges are fundamental educational challenges, they require new learning, a new way of seeing our present problems, a new literacy for our time – an ecological literacy.

Development, growth and improvement

For many years now, industrialisation has been the mainstay of our economic certainty, it has been the basis of our understanding of how our world connects, and it has formed a definition of human progress, industrial growth, through which we have come to measure progress. It is now under serious question, can we continue to seriously believe that we can model our civilization on an industrial growth model and not be concerned about the consequences?

This common legacy, our industrial connection, is not just the result of one single set of intentions and outcomes, it has instead arrived as a result of layer upon layer of change and modification, and of the consequences and unforseen consequences of those changes. William MacDonough calls the consequences of this inherited legacy an ‘intergenerational tyranny’ (MacDonough 2008). It is intergenerational because  the cumulative actions of the past influence and inform our present ways of understanding. It is tyrannical because we have little knowledge of why our ancestors decided to do what they did, when they did it. Perhaps all we can do is to continue to fumble away towards the next re-organisation, weaving our way in and out of the layer upon layer of the landscape of past versions of society as we navigate through our present world, but perhaps we might make some important choices along the way. These past versions of society are all around us, in our buildings, our public spaces, our institutions, our businesses, our cultures, they serve as pointers to these possible choices. No doubt our ancestors tried their best to deal with a world that they too inherited as a result of earlier solutions to earlier problems, just as we do today, no doubt they were left sometimes wondering if the approach was correct, just as we do today.

Today is also very different from the past because there are simply a lot more of us around to fit into the cities where we live and work, and the interconnection between ourselves and our environment is both local and global on a continual daily basis.  If I call a customer helpline about my bank account, I speak to an operator in Bangalore India, who then connects me to my regional branch in Leeds, Yorkshire, England. If I take a look at the computer I am using to write this book, I see that it is designed in California, USA and assembled in southern China. If I eat a meal, the chances are that it will contain ingredients drawn together from many countries. This in itself promotes utterly new logistical, economic, cultural and environmental challenges compared to those faced by our ancestors.

The sheer abundance of commodities available to consumers generated by our industrial  activity is at once the miracle and the nightmare of the modern world. It is miraculous that we are able to pull all of this together, when one considers the logistical demands that arise from almost any manufactured or processed product the interconnectivity of resource, construction and distribution is extraordinary, but the nightmare comes when we begin to scratch the surface and see the consequences that this lifestyle is having on habitats, human and natural on every continent and ocean across the planet.

The miracle comes primarily from the availability of cheap energy, and central to that cheap energy is the availability of cheap oil. Cheap oil has facilitated the greatest period of industrial growth in human history, it powers our economies and drives our lives. The nightmare of this legacy comes when we begin to understand that we are so dependent on oil, and then we recognise that oil is a finite resource, that many commentators are now reporting that cheap oil production has or will peak in the coming decade and the price of such energy will rise as ever more expensive extraction mechanisms have to come into use. It is a serious problem because we are all addicted to oil. Our oil dependent industrial systems feed us, clothe us, keep us warm and move us from place to place, but far more significant is the fact that by burning oil we are continually adding to the heating of the planet. Little wonder then, that the Chief Economist at the International Energy Agency tells the world government leaders that ‘we should leave oil before it leaves us’ (Birol 2008).

The industrial legacy and its oil hungry legacy is also playing itself over timeframes which were immaterial to our ancestors daily needs. In the past, when resources were plentiful, and populations were small, the need to conserve our physical material resources mattered little. But, as our resource hungry economies continue to expand, we face a stark reality that almost all essential resources are finite, our earlier economic and industrial models of make, use and dispose no longer suit our urban circumstances.

This is the fault line from the past to the present, it is the gap between how we used to respond to our problems of growth, and how we now need to respond to our idea of growth. This time around, if we aren’t conscious of what we are doing as we plan our next steps we will find that the results might be dire, it suggests that we need a new design for life. As Richard Register says, ‘if we don’t explicitly recognise the role of conscience as well as consciousness in this process, we won’t be able to harness the process for anything close to what we generally think of as good. For our next step in the pattern of healthy evolution, the two modes of thinking - consciousness and conscience  - need to be seen as whole.’ (Register 2006, p106) We clearly need to develop new learning to suit our time to accommodate these ideas, and begin to step away from our existing and inherited habits.

The parallel worlds of human systemic dysfunction and the natural systemic dysfunction both tend to suggest that there seems to be something profoundly outdated, destructive and unsustainable about how we live our lives in modern society, and our schools as part of these societies, are complicit in this process.  However, our efforts to rectify this will remain fundamentally flawed if all they ever do is reform the existing order, after all, it was this order of things which created the problem in the first place. Our way forward is a new design, a design for living that connects the natural systems to the human systems, that models itself on the cycles of life, how to generate abundance without waste, and how to ensure variety and richness in all things without depleting the resources for the next generation, the essential building blocks that Nature uses, the durable, sustainable model.

If there is one clear message from the convergent crisis of water, energy, population, food and the environment it is that they are all just symptoms of the deeper malaise, our lack of connectedness to nature. If we realign our attention to the eco, and move off our obsessive belief in our own ego, we begin to establish the basic reconnection to the earth. This is the foundation of the new narrative, a narrative that combine the heart, hand and mind of change to an ecological consciousness, the new literacy for our time.

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