Well, thank you for coming and thank you, Israel, for inviting me to speak at such an
important education research conference, one of the biggest in the world.
And it's an honor also, I think, for our network, Network30, environmental and sustainability
education, that we are kind of moving from the margins to the mainstream.
And I think that is timely.
And what I will be talking about today, I think, is also, in a way, representing much
of the thought that has gone into that network over the last, I don't know, six, seven years.
And in a way, it connects historically to other fields that lead up to education for
sustainability, environmental education, and way before nature conservation education.
And we see today, I think, a kind of convergence of all kinds of what I would call planetary
educations, from earth education to human rights education, peace education, biodiversity
education, water education, health education.
There are all these educations representing existential concerns.
And I think it's important that this question, whether education can or should save the
earth, is being addressed at this conference.
What I try to do is to capture some of the thinking that has developed over the last
few years, not just at Wageningen University, but also at other universities that I've been
working with, the University of Rosenberg, primarily in the last five years, and in the
future with the Norwegian Life Science University, where we're doing some work on whole school
approaches.
And it's not a lot of time.
I do think it's good to kind of engage people.
So I did bring some toilet paper.
And it's not just in case this is a very shitty talk, that we have plenty of paper.
In that case, it's also very welcome.
But I will introduce the toilet paper in a few minutes.
So OK, to start off, Wageningen University is a life science university.
So I thought I would start with the question that, just to kind of get you active after
coffee, and there's a statement here that if we want to feed the world in 2050, with
maybe, probably, likely, nine billion people on Earth, then the use of genetically modified
organisms, GMOs, will be necessary.
Who would say, yeah, that's reasonable, that's likely?
And I kind of agree with that statement.
Yeah?
So, yeah, you can be more convincing in the hands.
I saw maybe 10 hands.
That's not so many.
But I would say, no, it's not necessary.
It's a very selective crowd, I can already tell.
And who would say it's a typical question of today?
There's no clear answer to this.
All right.
Now just to get into this a little bit, and to show kind of the ill-definedness of some
of these issues, but also showing that sustainability is really a continuous learning journey.
We can have a quick look at this.
There are those who would say, well, actually, we already produce enough food for nine billion
people today, but we throw away one third of our food.
So if we would just fix that, then we could already feed the world.
And so it's not about genetically modified organisms, which some think is controversial.
Others might say, the problem really is that we use too much, we eat too much meat.
And especially beef and red meat is taking up so much space for growing plants that we
can also eat, that if it would shift our diets away from animal protein to say plant protein,
some say even insect protein, then we could solve that problem too.
So it's a change in the way we eat our diets that would also feed the world.
Others would say, no, we need to make our current agricultural system more efficient
by using smart technology, drones, and precision agriculture, the high-tech approach, then
we can feed the world.
We don't need GMO, we can just optimize the systems that we have.
Again, others talk more about what you might call a food movement that has to do not just
with efficiency and technology, but it has to do with food sovereignty.
It has to do with how we share food.
It has to do with cultural aspects of food.
It's basically saying that, well, we have in the world at the moment 1 billion people
who are malnourished, undernourished, poor nutrition, and we have almost 2 billion people
who are overweight, too many calories, bad calories, so there is kind of something there
that we need to work on.
And there are also those who say, well, we need to increase food literacy.
People need to become more aware of how food is connected to larger issues like climate
change, to animal well-being, and it requires certain literacy and education that plays
a big role in that.
So you can see this question can be approached in many different ways.
And there are many questions like this.
So some would say that sustainability, sustainable development, it means so many things, it means
nothing at all.
It is hopelessly ill-defined and not a very useful concept for education.
Others would say, no, that actually makes it, it's attractively vague.
You need to embed it in a context.
You need to give it meaning.
All these questions behind me, they may not have one universal answer that is valid all
over the world, but it will have a best answer given where we are, where we ask the question,
given what we know today, fully realizing that it might be different tomorrow, that
our knowledge changes, the world changes.
So it's a continuous journey, a quest towards a more equitable, a fairer, healthier world.
And maybe it is more the journey than the destination.
So it is a process, and we need to engage people in that process in a meaningful way.
It is a process that does meet a kind of moral compass, because if we don't care about
the future of humanity, the future of other species, the future generations, if that's
not a concern, then this doesn't mean anything.
So in the end, it has to do also with values and ethics.
So these questions were behind, I thought they were behind me, but they weren't.
But these questions are all similar to that question I just asked.
And they're not simple questions.
You could add the word when before then.
So when are biofuels sustainable?
And when are energy saving light bulbs more sustainable than conventional ones?
That type of question generates more conversations and dialogue.
Of course, we also must be aware that there is a lot of confusion and doubt around these
issues.
And sometimes that doubt is cultivated.
Intentional doubt to keep us from maybe seeing the real causes of some of these problems
that we are facing today to distract us from what needs to be done, to give us a false
impression that all will be well and that there is no need to transition away from fossil
fuels, for instance.
Which also means for us as educators, I think, that we need to be very critical of how we
communicate and that learners, students, pupils, children need to be early on engaged in kind
of interrogating some of the claims and the facts and the alternative facts that are
being shared.
European Union has a project that tries to do this beyond fake news, where we learn to
distinguish between things like click bait and propaganda and the cookies we accept and
the things we have to sign off on, like this just now I had to sign a paper before I gave
this talk, waving some of my rights, I don't know.
So this is something that we also need to be thinking about.
How do we develop this critical media literacy around some of these existential issues around
biodiversity loss, climate change, migration, loss of democracy.
And this cultivated doubt is something we need to be very conscious of in our society
today.
And there's also what you could say, genuine or real or justifiable doubt that is a result
of all the confusion that we create in a way for ourselves.
This is an example of that, all the logos, the different kinds of logos, qualifying food
in terms of whether it's healthy or fair or sustainable or organic.
What's behind these logos?
What logo can we trust?
Who decides?
These are questions that are difficult and not always easy.
It's kind of a saturation of this kind of information.
So how do we help citizens?
I don't like that word consumers.
In a way, consumers is a way of framing people as if we are on the earth to buy things and
to consume things.
And that is kind of a very narrow way of conceiving of humans.
So let's talk about citizens and try to forget consumers as a way of framing who we are.
So we live also in a world where people try to influence opinion and how we think, not
so much by maybe fact, but much more by who has the loudest voice, who has access, who
has access to social media, who has the most followers, who can be the most clever in short
tweets.
And that is influencing more and more how public opinion is shaped today.
And this is a concern I think we need to be addressing as democracy is also under attack
at the moment.
And we do know that there is still a lot of what you might call fake democracy where we
do try to get people's input, but in the end it is those who are in power who make decisions.
And this is something that we need to, when we talk about sustainability, we also talk
not just about the decline of global ecosystems, the loss of biodiversity, climate change,
rising inequity.
We also talk about injustice, abuse of power, loss of democracy.
These things are all connected.
And that's what I mean with the convergence of all these types of education.
So we live in a world where, and I think as education researchers, we recognize this
also in our schools, where everything is kind of commodified.
Water that we buy in bottles, but also a lot of public goods are being privatized, commodified.
Even education has become more commodified, where students are input, throughput and output,
and where we as teachers need to be very efficient in getting them through, where we
are kind of creating a world of accountability and not a culture of reflexivity.
And this is kind of diminishing the possibilities for educators to have a more localized curriculum,
to use the local environment as a starting point for learning, to experiment, to have
a more place-based education, new forms of learning, embodied learning, experiential
learning, social learning.
That space is being diminished because of this culture of accountability, where people
do not dare to take risk anymore, and they don't dare to engage in these types of experiments.
And we notice this also, I think most of us work in academia here, and that kind of commodified
culture of measurement, performativity is also there, just as a side note, and then
I will get to the toilet paper, otherwise I will forget.
As a side note, we now, you know, it used to be published or perished.
Now it's published and perished, I think.
This is not scientific.
I must preface this.
It's intuitive, but I think you will recognize it.
If you look at the number of publications worldwide over time, I started in 1992 as
a researcher at Wageningen, so I took that as a starting point, is exponential growth,
I think.
Also at the number of journals, same thing, exponential growth.
How many times don't you get a message that starts out with good day or greetings?
You can filter them on that and throw them all out, because they tend to be fake journals
wanting you to submit some kind of manuscript to a field that you know very little about.
Exponential growth of conferences, conference sessions, this is something that we must be
engaging in to produce more papers, ideally with impact.
Now if you look at the time to review, to read, to have conversations, dialogue, seminars,
you don't get points for that.
So you see the quality of reviews going down, I think intuitively.
I haven't studied this, but I have a feeling that the quality of these reviews is going
down.
Everybody is writing, nobody is reading, everybody is writing for nobody.
And that is really a problem, especially when it's a public university with public money,
what is it then that we are adding to society, if we spend so much time doing that?
And this thing is, you know, we can, and another, not so, no, I'm going to do the toilet paper.
All right.
I have three roles to do.
Okay.
I'm going to, somebody can catch, I hope, I'm just going to throw, who wants to catch?
Very good.
Any volunteer in this corner?
All right.
That was my fault.
Okay.
Now, the person who has it, can you hold it up?
Okay.
Now, what I want you to do, and this is something I saw, I have to declare this, I saw this
a few weeks ago when a colleague of mine from Sweden, Dawn Saunders, did this with ecologists.
And it worked quite well, but I'm not sure if it will work well with education people.
So what I'd like you to do is carefully unroll, open it up, unroll it a little bit, and then
try not to tear the paper, unroll it, give it to your neighbor, forward, backward, so
that it starts traveling through the audience.
So you just hand it over, yeah?
Slowly unroll it, and I will continue, and at the end of the talk, we'll get back to
this.
Okay.
Let's continue.
So here's another intuitive graph.
If you look at diversity in the world, whether this is culture or biodiversity, you see that
there's a decline, a dramatic decline, you could say.
And it's worrisome.
And maybe we will be one of those species to become extinct.
It's possible.
Now if you look at, and I don't like that word, but if you look at consumer product
diversity in the world, it's still growing.
It is growing in every area.
I now pick just one area.
This is deodorants and shaving, but I could have done other cereals or maybe toothpaste.
And a lot of people who have studied very hard at universities, chemical engineering,
marketing, all kinds of sciences, that are helping companies come up with new kinds of
shampoos to get people like us to buy it.
So there's a lot of innovation going on, and a lot of innovation is being pushed by our
society to remain competitive and to grow the economy.
And as George Monbiot says, we should be wondering if that is our role as higher education
and for education to help grow the economy.
Is education not becoming an extension of the globalizing economy, if we just focus
on innovation that is serving the market?
And I think that is a very legitimate question, if we are just producing, as Monbiot says,
things like smartphones for dogs or pre-pilled bananas, then we must ask, what is the moral
compass that is driving this innovation?
And is that the moral compass that we need, if we are to extend our being as humans, but
also the responsibility that we have for other species on this earth?
If we don't do that, then we end up, well, becoming part of the rat race, where happiness
is always around the corner, but where we are always working and trying to find work.
And where we are always, and you see this also around me, whether this is in my own
children or in the students around us, a lot of people working on their CVs all the time.
Always trying to work on personal growth.
You cannot just be, you must always become something else.
You cannot just be in a place, you must always travel to another place.
You cannot be happy where you are or who you are.
This is an interesting, something to think about.
Can we continue to grow personally too?
You know, there's a limit to growth in a finite planet, finite earth, but are there also maybe
limits to personal growth?
That's an interesting question I think we need to ask.
Heila Lotz yesterday already referred to some of the big issues that we are facing today
and we see, and this is the forest fires in the Amazon, and we can find lots of images
that are causing a lot of emotional stress to a lot of people who are worried.
But it's also real stress for those who need to flee or need to hide or need to find shelter
or are exposed to some of the traumatic experiences that come with these kinds of tragic events.
And they are symptomatic, they are signs of global systemic dysfunction that is much deeper.
And young people today, and Heila referred to Greta Thunberg yesterday and I will refer
to her as well, but what is happening today is that a lot of people are beginning to feel
a little anxious and they feel a bit overwhelmed by these kinds of problems and this existential
threat can lead to melancholia, and I will refer to a book about this in a minute, and
young children around the world, oh by the way this is interesting, you're probably wondering
why is the master there?
And I was wondering that myself, because obviously I looked for this article and I found it and
it's on the Guardian, I used the Guardian a lot and then I thought what kind of cookies
did I accept to get this advertisement?
I'm not really a font of cars or anything, but I must have been seen as somebody who
might be interested in buying a master, and then I thought maybe it's in crossover because
I do look at hybrid learning and hybrid I type in a lot, maybe that's it, but it also
shows that while we are looking at media they're subliminally planting all these seeds
that we must get something and buy something, so this you might call the hidden curriculum
of unsustainability that we face every day, and I think if you look at the amount of money
that goes into trying to make the world more sustainable and we compare it with the amount
of money that goes into advertising worldwide, it's not a very level playing field, and just
by recognizing that and becoming aware of that, that already I think helps and should
be a part of education.
Young children today are growing up yesterday at the reception that we had in the city hall,
I think the Mayor or the Secretary Mayor referred that the big challenge is that we are in the
digital age, and that we must, we have now digital natives and we must learn to live
with technology, and I was thinking the big challenge is trying to survive on this planet
and keep this earth liveable, but okay that's another perspective, a lot of young people
today are not so digital natives, they are growing up in this case the Mekong Delta,
and these are the kinds of drawing young children make there about how they see their
world and their fears that they have.
There's an interesting book, Environmental Melancholia, by Rene Ledger that talks about
the ambiguous loss that we get from being engaged in these kinds of problems, and what
can we learn also from psychology in coping with these losses.
At Wageningen University, environmental science and climate studies students raised this issue
recently in a course that we are teaching, or actually it's a course that they developed
and we are kind of helping them, that would be the better way of saying it, and they recognize
that they are learning about these kinds of issues every day and exploring them, investigating
them through internships, thesis work, courses, and they are not really being helped, I would
say, supported in dealing with the emotional stress that they get having to learn about
these traumatic issues, and Rene Ledger says that by listening more deeply and focusing
on invitation versus persuasion and fear-based appeals, we can build deeper conditions, coalitions
and collaborations that cross political and ideological boundaries, so listening, dialogical
understanding, that type of engagement can help, and we need to provide for that.
So to recap really quickly what I have said, we live in unusual times, there is inevitable
complexity and confusion, ambiguity, uncertainty, that demands a different way of teaching,
learning and creating educational spaces where we can be kind of enmeshed and tangled in
these types of issues.
The extinction of truth, alternative facts dominating the discourse demand for a kind
of critical media literacy and a rethinking of governance and democracy, hyper-connectivity
through our ICTs, the digital age, we live in a continuous state of distraction, many
of us as the technologies that we have are always demanding our attention and monitoring
what we do, mining our minds, colonizing our minds, grabbing our eyeball attention, which
makes it hard for us to more deeply engage in these issues that require deep engagement,
they require time, they are slow issues in that sense.
The dominant conventional economy, the logic of say the neoliberal way of thinking is influencing
our education tremendously and minimizing the possibility to engage in these issues.
That needs to be changed, disrupted.
The rise of apocalyptic futures can lead to trauma, stress, anxiety, and we need to help
people cope with that, also young people.
We need continuous learning, we need a reflexive society as there are no definitive answers.
And this is where education is so crucial.
And young people today are seeing that more and more in our part of the world where they
can go to the street and protest, in other parts of the world they don't have that possibility
or they don't have the time because they're trying to survive.
So we must recognize that I'm talking from kind of this perspective who I am, where I'm
from, which is from a northern European country, but extinction rebellion, but also Greta Thunberg,
mentioned yesterday, who write, I would say, inspires many young people, leads to a lot
of discussion in schools, should we allow our children to go on climate strike, do we
support it as an educational experience and embrace that, or do we punish them for that
because they have school, how do we deal with that, and what would we do if they would
support a march against immigration?
Would we then also, as a school, say, oh yeah, that's democracy and go, you learn from that?
Or would we then say, oh no, no, that we can't?
So this leads to interesting conversations.
And rightfully so, she does raise the question, why should I study for a future that soon
may be no more, when no one is doing anything to save that future?
So young people today, I think, will be living on this earth longer than most of us will,
so they have to deal with the consequences of what we do to the earth more than we have
to.
So this is a very legitimate concern.
And here, and you see that easier too, that this concern is trickling into society, also
in networks like this one, what I found interesting is you've probably seen this one, who has
seen this in the registration area.
Most conferences do this, how you can put your pin in where you're from, and then you
get kind of a, it's hard to see here, but here are, let's see if this works.
Here are all, you see white pins and a lot of red pins, and this is new what they've
done here, which is interesting, if you're red, you came by plane, white by train or
bus, yellow by car, so this is a new addition to this activity to kind of show the ecological
or the carbon footprint of getting here.
And I think it's good to think about that and to also think about what Halem introduced
yesterday, the ecological handprint, that is how does what we learn here travel further?
Does it influence others?
Does it help shape policy?
Does it help shape education in a way that can help live us more lightly on the earth?
If it does that, then maybe you can justify flying here from hopefully far and not from
very near, then you can justify the ecological footprint.
If your handprint is bigger than your footprint, you're okay.
Of course, it's not so easy to figure out how big that handprint is because it's not
always easy to measure.
I also want to show you a Dutch slide, not of a protest against, a march against climate,
runaway climate change.
This is an educate, these are educators protesting that they're under supported in schools, that
they want more funding, but also more autonomy, and they want to get the joy of teaching back
in the schools and take the stress out of teaching and the stress out of learning.
And these kinds of protests also signal or signify a kind of resistance in our school
system to this managerial management and control way of teaching and learning that is quite
dominant also in Dutch education.
So then how do we learn to live more lightly on the planet?
This is a model from Kate Raworth, economist, the donut economy, just to check how many
of you know about this model?
Okay, so it's again the same 10, no different 10.
And what's nice about this model, it shows on the outside that we have kind of ecological
boundaries that we need to learn to live in, learning to live within ecological boundaries
that there are ecosystem requirements, you could say, that we cannot overstep.
Otherwise we get things like climate change, toxification of the oceans, mass extinction,
air quality going down, so we cannot breathe the air.
So these are kind of the ecological parameters that we need to learn to live with in a good
way so that the earth can regenerate itself, that there's a kind of a balance, a dynamic
balance.
And on the inside, she's saying we also need to have the social foundation, decent work,
a more equitable society, voice, agency, democracy, education.
If we don't have that social foundation, then we can also not live well.
So how do we guarantee a minimum social foundation for all people?
And how can we remain within that ecological boundary that also includes our fellow species
and the non-human world?
That is a challenge.
And I was thinking, maybe we need to rethink in a way the purpose of education from that
perspective.
Maybe we need to rethink bildung.
What does bildung mean in the Anthropocene?
That is an interesting question.
Fred Bista, many have already referred to him.
I thought, well, let's think about that a little further.
If you look at his three purposes of education, subjectification, socialization, and qualification,
if we would be more mindful of the planetary boundaries and learn to live within those
planetary boundaries, then building is not just about the social foundation, it is also
about learning to live within ecological boundaries.
And that has consequences for the qualifications, that we learn it has consequences for how
we socialize, and it has also consequences for our identity, our being in the world,
how we relate in the world to others, to other species, to our surroundings.
And that is an essential end event that I think if we think about sustainability and
the future of the earth, that we need to be more conscious of.
So I'd like to emphasize that.
What then does something like, and I know this is not a real concept, maybe it will
become one day, what you might call sustainability bildung or something like that.
Originally I had sustainability learning here, but I thought, oh, maybe that's too
narrow learning.
And there's also issues about learnification of everything.
So maybe try sustainability bildung.
If you look at that, then you can say, well, it has to do with values and ethics, diversity,
dissonance, it has to do with agency, transformation, it has to do with change and transitions,
and it has to do with boundary crossing and system thinking.
And there might be other areas.
But these are some key areas, I think.
And if you look quickly at some of these, you could say, well, this diversity and dissonance,
I think we all know as educators that diversity and dissonance are triggers for learning.
If we only hear or listen to the people that we know already what they are thinking and
like-minded people that we are comfortable with, then we're not learning as much when
we're exposed to people who have very different ideas.
Scott Page has done a nice book about the difference, and he shows how diversity can
create healthier communities, organizations, societies, and that building, it does require
building social cohesion and trust among people who have different backgrounds, otherwise
the diversity can become a problem, which we have also plenty of examples of in today's
world.
So diversity is a lever for sustainability.
Then change and transition, that's important because do we optimize the kinds of systems
that we have, the kinds of routines and habits that we have developed, and we say, well,
there's nothing wrong with, say, the industrial agriculture that we have today, we just need
to make it more efficient, we need to optimize it, we need to include external costs better.
We can work within that model, there's nothing wrong with that model itself.
We just need to perfect it.
Or do we say, no, the values and principles upon which agro-industrial, agro-industry
is based need to be challenged, need to be questioned.
We need to think about maybe other kinds of values of solidarity, of communal sharing,
of regeneration, and that requires a different way of organizing things.
So it's a transition towards something very different.
Agency and transformation, I think, especially with these overwhelming issues, that if we
only raise awareness and help people understand how complex and wicked things are, which we
do not create possibilities to act, to try to make change, to learn from making change,
what's working with us, what's working against us, then it can lead to apathy and powerlessness
and it could lead to paralysis or psychic numbing.
So we need to also have that component of acting, making change.
And there are lots of possibilities for doing that.
We see this already in some schools, also in early childhood education.
There are good examples of this, of greening school grounds, of engaging young people in
the redesigning, engaging them actively in the redesigning of school grounds so that
there's more possibilities for different kinds of play in these areas, but also the possibility
of connecting teaching and learning to what's happening outside.
You see all kinds of off-the-grid kind of community initiatives at the moment, whether
this is localised energy or in this case it's a company, oh, I lost something, yeah.
On the right side, hard to see, but this is an initiative in Amsterdam called Le Compostier.
It sounds wonderful, it's about composting and worm hotels in local communities managed
by the local community, often working with local schools and the compost comes from people
in the neighbourhood and it goes back to school gardens or goes back to people's gardens and
it doesn't just lead to compost, it leads to social cohesion, it leads to interaction,
it leads to integration, it leads to healthier lifestyles.
So there are all kinds of spin-off activities.
It also leads to children who engage in these kinds of activities, research shows this,
are also better at concentrating when they're back in school.
It can actually help them learn and they learn a lot by doing that, so you could say it's
a win-win.
Then I'm not sure if that's keeping up, yeah, boundary crossing and system thinking, I think
it is critical that we learn to see connections, that we get better at seeing relations and
establishing relations, that we know that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
If you look at schools, this picture I've used a lot, but I think it's still an easy
and telling one.
We have been good in education in dividing the world into silos and in disciplines and
subject matter areas.
Our kind of engineering mindset has led to lots of technology and the way I talk here
through this microphone and click on this thing is a result of that type of thinking.
So you could say it has brought us lots of progress, but it has also led that type of
thinking to the kinds of global systemic problems that we have today.
To deal with those, we need to have a more integrative, holistic way of thinking.
We are not born in the way you see here on the left side.
That is actually cultivated, that ability we learn in our schools.
We're very good at dividing the world up in pieces, in categories, in boxes, but we're
not very good in seeing relations and connections.
And if we want to live more lightly, healthier, more equitably on the earth, we need to be
able to do that.
And again, young children, they are able to see things more holistically, but the more
time they spend in school and our way of schooling, they lose that ability.
And it's similar to other qualities.
Franz de Waal, primatologist, also shows that we are in a way born with empathy, but often
in many school systems where there's a lot of attention for individual growth, competition,
excellence, we kind of lose empathy.
And we're not supposed to have empathy, otherwise we might not succeed on the global marketplace.
That of course is a terrible kind of, again, you call it the hidden curriculum of the kinds
of values that accelerate on sustainability that we need to be challenging.
Finally, but not lastly, values and ethics, the moral compass.
What guides our thinking, acting, what are the underlying ethical principles of what
we do?
To what extent are we aware of them?
And should we?
Or how can we?
That's a better question.
How can we engage people in also moral dilemmas?
Here you see the iAnimal tool on the left side developed by Animal Rights Organization
that allows you to go into an industrial pig farm with 24,000 pigs and to kind of walk
through it and to see how do pigs live in that kind of environment.
And it's very overwhelming.
You could also go to the rainforest in that way and see what is the rainforest like, those
fires destroying the rainforest.
What does that rainforest look like in reality?
We cannot all travel there, but maybe through VR technology we can kind of see what does
it do to indigenous people living there and we can bring that closer.
But we need to also find ways, how do we then have the conversation about this in the classroom?
Do we need GMO?
That's also an ethical question in many ways.
So how do we bring in those ethical questions more?
Here you see to think more about in systems, this is one way of doing this, this is something
that the Center for Development Innovation at Wageningen University created.
And it's an activity and you can do it with lots of things.
You can take an everyday item and start dissecting it in a way, but in a way that you can see
the connections.
A bag of tea, how does a bag of tea connect to water, to energy, to waste?
You can connect this to some of the SDGs quite easily, the Sustainable Development
Goals that are also in the exhibit area, and Heila introduced them yesterday as well.
And here are some obvious ones that you can connect, energy, climate, life on land, good
health and well-being, but the real question is maybe how does it connect to all the SDGs?
How does this bag of tea connect to gender, for instance?
Now maybe it connects to gender by looking at where is the tea coming from, who's picking
the tea on the land, what kind of salary is being made, is the equal pay.
So all the SDGs have something to do with this bag of tea.
In some ways the whole sustainability challenge is wrapped up in this bag of tea, or in your
cell phone, or in any item around us we can ask what's in it, where does it come from,
who's involved in it, what does it do to how we live, are there alternatives?
And that's really critical to also ask that question, are there alternatives, concrete
utopias, as mentioned yesterday as well, toilet paper.
I put that in as a cue, we should, we have to be quick.
Where is the toilet paper, can we kind of lift the toilet paper, yes, okay, everybody
have a look at where the toilet paper, how it traveled.
Okay where is the roll, the beginning, who has the beginning, where is the beginning,
and who has the end?
Okay the person at the end, where is the end person, you keep your hand high, yes, okay.
Now this toilet paper, typically toilet paper has between 100 and 200 sheets, yes.
This is German toilet paper, I didn't count, but let's assume it's 100 sheets, right.
Now let us assume that each sheet is one million years in time, then we have here 200,
how many million, 20 sheets, 200 million years, from the beginning 200 million years, it's
about the Jurassic period, when the dinosaurs were roaming, right.
Now the one who has the last piece, can you tear off that last piece, just rip it off
and hold it up, yeah, okay, that is the last 100,000 years, we are part of that, yeah,
of that whole roll, that is the last 100,000 years, and if you tear off just a little bit
of that at the end, that is, so in the 100,000 years by the way, is when we have Homo erectus,
Homo sapiens, life on earth is unfolding, and this is about how long humans have been
on the earth, and only in the last little bit of that piece of toilet paper, is when
humans starting to overstep ecological boundaries, and they're beginning to shape, we are beginning
to shape systems that have taken millions of years to be formed, in less than 100 years,
this gives you kind of a sense of deep time, and the earth is not actually that, is much
older, 4.5 billion years old, so we would need 22 of these rolls to kind of capture
all of time of the earth, it's one way, you could call it embodied learning, of putting
in perspective, and showing some humility on the one hand, that we are a very small
part of that history of the earth, but we have a gigantic influence on its course and
its trajectory, and I could have also done this activity to look at, you know, we could
go also down to the future of the toilet paper, what happens, we could dissect it like this
and we could ask the question, what happens after the flush, where does it go?
And before, I'd like you, I don't want any waste today, so I suggest we all take a little
piece, and take it with you for lunch, or you might need it, on average by the way,
this is a fact, we use eight sheets per day, just, you know, so if you need, if you want
your day supplied, then take eight pieces, but don't leave it, leave it here, okay, I'm
going to wrap this up very quickly.
I want you to, and this is an experiment, not an experiment, but I tried to kind of
capture this, this learning space that we need to create to engage learners meaningfully
in these kinds of wicked problems, one, we need to be looking at the filters that we
look through to see our world, what kind of frames, perspectives, values do we have, are
they our own, or are we pushed to have them somehow, how does this influence what we see?
Then we also need to think more about the language we use, the media, how they shape
how we think, the technology, how it can be conducive, and how it can be destructive.
We also need to think about the mechanisms of learning well beyond teaching, which is
critical, but also we have peer-to-peer learning, mentoring, apprenticeships, we have other
forms of learning like citizen science, we have self-learning, online support learning,
all these four mechanisms are all relevant and need to be considered when we engage people
in these types of wicked problems, then we also need to think about transformation, learning
to transform, but also learning, and that's learning to make change, but learning for
being and learning for knowing, the lore, pillars you could say, and of course also
learning to know, but it's also learning to care, learning to care, I think it's a missing
one, that ethic of care, Nell Nodding's work is very relevant there, and then there are
the transition levers that have to do with ethics and values, that have to do with diversity,
that have to do with agency and boundary crossing, and now I know this is a bit black and white,
and to try to capture all this in one model is probably not a good idea, and I tried to
do that, it looks like this, it's intentionally black and white, but this is kind of, you
know, then I looked at it later, and I thought it's almost like the spaceship that we need
to be leaving the earth, but this is kind of the learning ecology or the ethical space
in which we can need to be entangled, my PhD student Kun Wessels is using that, he's talking
this afternoon, space education, space for entanglement, maybe is a better word for this,
how do we create that, that's I think critical if we want to transition away from this systemic
globalised dysfunction that is driving us all to extinction, so we really have a huge
challenge I think as educators, as education researchers, to see how education can be part
of a societal movement, a transition movement that is more off the grid, more autonomous,
more self-determined, less dependent on economic mechanisms, and more connected to the ecology,
and there are lots of forms of this varying from living labs in higher education, change labs,
challenge labs, to whole school approaches, where schools are beginning to use the local environment,
we're also living the talk, walking the talk by trying, experimenting with solar, with water
conservation, creating local biodiversity, connecting it to the curriculum, but also bridging
the divide between school and community. A new book about this is coming out in the fall, it is by
Ronald Barnett and Andrew Jackson, and it is about Norman Jackson, and it's about equalities for
learning and practices, and I think this might be, for those of you who are interested in this way
of ecological thinking about education, and rethinking building in the Anthropocene, this
might be a good. Let me end by recognising some of the work of PhDs at Wageningen, who have been
developing some of this thinking from in this case Ghana, responsive curriculum development in
forestry, to Vietnam, smallholder farmers social learning in times of climate change, to regional
sustainable development, reflexively fumbling to sustainability by Yifka Sol. In Colombia,
communities, intentional communities, eco villages, trying to develop alternative ways of living that
are more responsive to changing, systemic change. And finally, values based indicators, Ashley J.
Brockwell, and the last one submitted yesterday, the transgressive gardener by Thomas McIntyre.
These are all interesting works, and there are lots of other interesting works coming out of the
T-learning project that was mentioned yesterday, that is beginning to develop a body of research
that is investigating this type of learning and this type of transition in education. These are
some not closing comments. They are, I would say, conversation starters that we can talk about more,
but I know that it is time, I think, to do a little bit of exercising, so I don't want to repeat that,
but these are some of the key messages that we need to be talking about, that we need to have
conversations about, and hopefully in Glasgow this will be continued, this conversation, and it is
nice to see these conversations also happening in other networks than our own. And I feel
depression now. Don't forget the toilet paper. Thank you for listening, and you can be in touch.