No topic is more important right now than sustainability. To help schools and young people envision together a sustainable future, Edge and Schools of Tomorrow recently co-hosted ‘Regenerating Schools: A Taste of Change’. We welcomed eminent Professor Robert Barratt, who has a shared role between Lancaster University and the Eden Project to share his sustainability expertise, both from an education standpoint but also, more fundamentally, in terms of our planet’s long-term survival.
Storytelling is essential for presenting positive visions of the future. Robert therefore shared three of his own, exploring humanity’s current approach to the natural environment and how we might learn to start building more positive relationships with ourselves, each other, and the planet.
Story one
“But I would lose my job”
One day, a concerned citizen came to visit a Canadian environmental activist. A logging company was threatening to clear lumber on local sacred land. Offering to help, David invited the company’s CEO to his office. He asked him: Did he believe we have the right to fresh air to breathe? Clean water to drink? Fertile soil on which to grow food? "Of course," replied the CEO. David explained how cutting down the forest would remove these rights and irreparably damage the land. The CEO simply replied: "Yes, but do you know how much that lumber is worth? I would lose my job.”
For Robert, this story captures humanity’s misguided perceptions of what we see as valuable.
We consider ourselves above nature rather than being part of a complex ecosystem.
However, we simply cannot now sustain business as usual. Some estimates predict that we will exhaust all natural resources by 2040. If we are to flourish, Robert says, we have to drastically reconsider our position.
Story two
“I can see the bottom of the canal”
In March 2020, lockdown turned lives upside-down. It also drastically reduced industrial pollution and global carbon levels. In Lancaster, Robert found he could hear birdsong and see fish swimming along the bottom of the canal for the first time. Although lockdown separated us from nature, it also had a phenomenal effect on the environment, proving how fast change can occur. After weeks of being locked indoors, people began to realise how much they valued the natural environment.
Strangely, though, if you ask people whether humanity is morally obliged to protect the planet for future generations, the answer is split about 50-50. Reframe the question as: ‘Are we obligated to protect nature?’ though, and the answer becomes almost unanimously yes.
Robert says this points to how our fragmented relationships to one another obstruct us from the greater actions required to protect the planet. So how do we connect to each other better and translate abstract concepts, like decarbonisation, into something everyone can understand and do something about?
Story three: Living in harmony with nature
Robert’s final tale brought some hope. For three months, he lived with descendants of a native community in Borneo. Listening to birdsong, these people knew which fruit to pick. They knew the different mineral content of various water sources. They knew the forest, its boundaries and the complexities of spaces and organisms within it. They understood that the environment’s health and wellbeing was more important than their own self-interest.
To build a sustainable future, Robert says we must all do our part to reposition nature at the centre of our world, economically and ideologically.
There’s some hope here. Post COP26, the UK government has promised to put climate science at the heart of the National Curriculum. It also has plans to increase biodiversity. Meanwhile, organisations like the Eden Project are helping to trial innovative green technologies that work in conjunction with nature. These are small steps in the right direction.
Turning stories into sustainable futures
Robert’s stories illuminated the vision of a sustainable future. Next is to bring these visions alive, in part, through education. Robert believes schools have greater power than they know to reimagine sustainability. Policy frameworks must change, of course, which means unifying the environment, communities, healthcare and economics. But schools can also play their part right now..
The curriculum is key. Currently, most curricula are too content-led.
The need is to bring into a new balance learning for deep understanding (the head), development of character (the heart) and the ability to use both to act with agency (the hands).
That means there’s a strong argument for moving towards blended approaches – like those promoted by Edge – where learning becomes a collaborative, research-based process, drawing on knowledge and skills from core subjects to help us understand the spaces we are connected to and live in.
Tackling these major issues requires local and global collaboration and needs an interdisciplinary approach combining traditional environmental measures with modern technologies. It also needs longer-term thinking than we are used to. These aren’t small challenges but the education sector can play its part. Now is the time for school leaders to start thinking hard with their communities about what they can do in their school. It’s time to create new skills, new knowledge and new sustainable solutions. The future depends on it.
On November 17 2022, Edge and Schools of Tomorrow will host a one-day summit for school leaders and their student leaders on developing Education for Sustainability in Birmingham. Sign up here.
