Food Futures: A Poetic Essay

The problems we are facing are linked.
It is not a set of problems.
It is a system of problems.
Now it is time to look at the system of solutions.
– Janine Benyus, Nobel Laureate Symposium, 2011.

Integrating Culture as a Cornerstone of Success in Sustainability Education: A Case Study, Youth Allies for Sustainability Leadership Program, Earth Care, Santa Fe, NM

Environmental sustainability cannot be separated from social justice. Christina Selby presents a compelling case study of sustainability work grounded in cultural democracy, or processes that involve all groups in community decision-making. In the Youth Allies for Sustainability Leadership Program, young residents of Santa Fe, New Mexico, address ecological integrity through intercultural healing, relationship-building, and advocacy. Selby grounds her case in the broader theoretical work of eco-justice and transformative education. She highlights the urgent need to further integrate the defense of cultural integrity with the protection and restoration of ecological balance and economic vitality. This case study is a shining model for such integration.

My Ecological Self on Trial: Confessions of a Graduate Student in Sustainability Education

Malcolm Brooks, as with all good lol humor, helps us look in the mirror, recognize where we come from, and not take it all so seriously.

How our Teaching Changes our Thinking, and How our Thinking Changes the World: A Conversation with Jaimie Cloud

In this insightful, foundational and wide-ranging interview, Jaimie Cloud makes the case…and defends it…for the prime importance of Education for Sustainability (EfS). Her ground-breaking work and years of experience bring an authoritative voice to this nascent field and give confidence that, as she says, “it all begins with a change in thinking” and “we just have to educate for it.” Her impressive accomplishments and the examples she brings to the interview are a must-read of inspiration for anyone involved with sustainability education.

How Do We Really Make Change Happen?

In this inspirational presentation, Gibrán Rivera talks of how we work within the “tribe” to make change happen. He speaks of how we use stories to create our future as “ancestors in training” and this is the way that epiphanies which lead to real change will be incorporated into the community base.

Sustainability in Outdoor Education: Rethinking Root Metaphor

Recognizing that behavior comes not only from understanding, but also from attitudes cultivated in outdoor settings that elicit visceral feelings toward nature, outdoor educators have unique opportunities to make sustainability comprehensive, accessible, and relevant.  Yet the principal metaphor underlying outdoor education in general, and the Leave No Trace (LNT) program in particular, may be counterproductive to fostering environmentally and [...]

Compost, Blossom, Metamorph, Hurricane – Complexity and Emergent Education Design: Regenerative Strategies for Transformational Learning and Innovation

This work proposes a novel theoretical framework for sustainability education and explores four possible applications of the framework. Insights from complexity and complexity education elide with patterns from nature to birth four patterns of regenerative, emergent education. In this work I explore these four natural systems models of emergence and apply them to education. For [...]

Sponsoring the Journal of Sustainability Education

Sponsoring the Journal of Sustainability Education The Journal of Sustainability Education is actively seeking partners, sponsors, and donors to collaborate on moving the field of sustainability education outward and deeper. The Journal is a premiere publication with dynamic content elements, a blend of peer reviewed and timely interviews and media pieces that draw over 11,000 unique visitors [...]

Spare Changing the World: The Inner Challenges of New Paradigm Organizations

Timothy Clayton looks at the internal workings of NPO’s (New Paradigm Organizations) to see how they might respond to the experiences of operating in a world structured by capitalism and traditional business practices. His insights produce an impressive and thoughtful list of ways in which some NPO’s, despite a flashy mission statement, might not practice what they preach, and can fall into traditional modes of operation.

This essay explores the challenges facing organizations intent on fostering peace, justice, and sustainability when incorporating traditional business practices into their operational modeling. The implications of these practices on internal organizational community conditions are examined, as are the possible impacts on mission-intended transformational capacities.

Let Us Learn Again to Nourish a Gifted Subsistence

In this fascinating personal and educational journey, Terril Shorb asks us to look locally and look at our own subsistence first when we consider sustainability. While acknoledging a role for large-scale efforts based on technology, he believes in the inward solution that relies on relationships, being resourceful, working reciprocally, and finding a way of living in gifted subsistence.

Northwest Earth Institute’s Discussion Guides Enhance Sustainability Education at University of Michigan

Mike Shriberg shows the power of implementing a true discussion-based curriculum in his sustainable campus course at the University of Michigan.

Trash Talk: A case study of waste analysis at Pomona College

In this well-formulated case study, Miller and Close show us how student involvement and action through a group independent study course led to sophisticated analysis and real change in the handling of waste at Pomona College. They make a good case for student analysis to have equaled or better what experts might have done, with the added benefit of giving students an impactful, real-life experience with practical solutions to sustainability education problems.

Review of The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy: Skills for a Changing World

In this detailed and insightful review, Laura Henry-Stone admires the breadth and cohesiveness of this edited volume from mostly European sustainability educators. She makes a good case for bringing this wide array of pieces under one cover, for avoiding static definitions of sustainability, even the traditional “triple bottom line”, and rather looking outside reductionist approaches to find integration, inter-relation and the kind of broad strokes that the chapters in this book propose for educating and solving for sustainability.

Primary care—what it should embrace. A review of “A World of Health: Connecting People, Place and Planet”

In their review of the Northwest Earth Institute’s A World of Health, the Frolich brothers look to place the wide-ranging issue of environmental health concerns into the every-day framework of so-called “primary health care.” They see value in the book where it addresses what can really be done, through action, and through a guided study group, to confront and change the way our interactions with the environment affect our every-day health.

Implementing Education for Sustainable Development: The Potential use of Time-Honored Pedagogical Practice from the Progressive Era of Education

Education for sustainable development (ESD), a UN initiative, is an emerging field and a movement advocating for a reorientation of education. Integration of ESD has been slow, especially in higher education. The most notable progress is marked by campus greening and research initiatives, while pedagogical innovation, the topic of this paper, has been much slower [...]

Educators as Architects of Living Systems: Designing Vibrant Learning Experiences beyond Sustainability and Systems Thinking

This article discusses how living systems principles can inform educational design. It describes a theoretical framework for creating academic learning experiences as organic wholes that sustain learning verve. The framework is intended to aid educators in awakening a felt sensation of aliveness, vibrancy, and self-organizing creativity in a group of learners. It seeks to create [...]

Growing Our Own: A Case Study of Teacher Candidates Learning to Teach for Sustainability in an Elementary School with a Garden

This case describes how four teacher candidates, placed for a year-long internship in an elementary school with a garden, learned to teach for sustainability. Evidence from the interns’ Teacher Work Samples, survey data, interviews, and observational data are used to assess the extent to which teacher candidates demonstrated the knowledge, skills and dispositions to teach [...]

Teaching for Transformation: (Re)Designing sustainability courses

If educators are to effectively prepare learners with the knowledge, skills, and values they will need for creating more sustainable places and communities, a transition must be made from transmissive teaching models to transformative learning processes. But how can courses be designed or redesigned so that they create opportunities for transformational sustainability learning, and how [...]

The Digital Divide in Kentucky: Is Rural Online Learning Sustainable?

This paper describes the perceived condition of access to high-speed Internet for many rural Kentuckians, and reflects on the experience of attempting to bring broadband Internet accessibility to a rural area in Kentucky. This experience is not unlike rural areas in other states however, as numerous stories were discovered over an 8-year period. The general [...]

Living Soil and Sustainability Education: Linking Pedagogy and Pedology

Sustainability is now permeating educational institutions. Yet the emerging discourse on sustainability education is in many ways caught in a modern web of theoretical, ontological, and epistemological assumptions that are incongruent with sustainability. We introduce an ecologically grounded metaphoric language rooted in living soil as an alternative regenerative framework for linking sustainability pedagogy with pedology [...]

Leadership without Domination? Toward Restoring the Human and Natural World

The author constructs a theory of sustainable leadership in contrast to exploitive leadership and argues that all leadership in the modern world falls somewhere on a continuum between these two extremes. The definitions developed for sustainable and exploitive leadership hinge upon the purposes toward which leadership is applied. The concept of sustainable leadership is further [...]

Educating for Sustainability: Competencies & Practices for Transformative Action

Achieving a sustainable future requires that individuals adopt different values, attitudes, habits, and behaviors, which are often learned and cemented at a young age. Unfortunately, current educational efforts are inadequate for achieving transformative action.  Even programs whose primary goal is to promote responsible, pro-environmental behaviors have largely failed at creating change among students.  The lack [...]

Living Systems and Leadership: Cultivating Conditions for Institutional Change

Since its founding, the Center for Ecoliteracy, where Zenobia Barlow is executive director and Michael Stone is senior editor, has supported and advanced education for sustainable living in K–12 schools. One of our particular concerns has been leadership and systemic institutional change. We have sought to understand both how schools can themselves change and how [...]

The Heart of Sustainability: Big Ideas from the field of Environmental Education and their Relationship to Sustainability Education or What’s love got to do with it?

Two northwest naturalists offer a critical perspective on sustainability education by suggesting that, in order to inspire people enough to make changes in their perceptions and behaviors, sustainability education must embrace the central role of acquiring ecological knowledge through direct and shared experience in the natural world.

Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability

In this inspiring essay, Capra and Stone take us beyond the trite use of the word “sustainability” to an operational way of applying it in the educational setting. They outline four universal principles that should guide sustainability education, each with a profound implication for how learning occurs. They then show how the principles can be applied through a “curriculum that is anywhere learning occurs,” including lunchtime in the cafeteria and the design of the school campus. Their book Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability expounds on the principles and learning-anywhere ideas laid out in brief here.

Protecting What We Love: Ideas for Systemic Problem-Solving

Riki Ott uses “ultimate civics” to inspire students to take action and make a change. Here, she puts forth the foundation for her curriculum that brings students out of the classroom and into the political arena, with the goal of eliminating our addiction to petroleum.

The Role of the Architect in Sustainability Education

In this thoughtful, and fundamentally practical, down-to-earth essay, Christopher Haines puts architects squarely on the front-lines of sustainability education. He shows us, with real applications based on thoughtful inter-disciplinary analysis, how the complexities an architect faces in designing a building extend their tentacles into every aspect of sustainability—from environment to economics to social and psychological considerations.

Review of Sharon Astyk’s Depletion and abundance: Life on the new home front or, one woman’s solutions to finding abundance for your family while coming to terms with peak oil, climate change and hard times

Dennis Lum helps put Sharon Astyk’s book in a historical context and brings forth its pessimistic premise along with its optimistic prescription. While accepting that the crisis is here, and the oil reliance has reached its peak, Astyk sees a special place for the role of women in providing food security while re-inventing a truly productive home environment.

The Value of Indigenous Ways of Knowing to Western Science and Environmental Sustainability

In this deeply articulate analysis, Dennis Martinez argues that Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of indigenous communities can be complementary to Western science, but“ bridging” or “integration” with Western Science will inevitably lead to second-rate status for TEK. The unique and powerful, place-based and ancient, traditional ways of knowing are based on the same fundamental human ways of analyzing the natural world. But the language used to conduct, express and translate indigenous understanding is in danger of loss to oppression and assimilation.

Sustainability and Economics 101: A Primer for Elementary Educators

Susan Santone simply and elegantly tells us how sustainability, or ecological, economics can be made real for K-12 education. She shows us how easy it is to bring the very real, and fundamental, conceptual breakthroughs offered by sustainability economics to a grade-school curriculum through simple applicable exercises that children will easily relate to.

Catlin Gabel School—a Focus on Food

In this case study at Caitlin Gabel School in Portland, Oregon, Eric Shawn and George Zaninovich present a comprehensive, integrated and hands-on curriculum that has used food sustainability issues to transform the school campus and cafeteria. They provide simple, interesting and apt curriculum project examples for all grade levels from K-12.

Higher Education for Sustainable Consumption: Concept and Results of a Transdisciplinary Project Course

In their action project seminar course, Daniel Fischer and Marco Rieckmann show how students applied the principles of sustainable consumption while initiating several impressive on-campus programs to help the community obtain food, clothing and transport in a sustainable fashion. Using a solid theoretical foundation, the course shows how to integrate the formal and non-formal aspects of sustainability education.

Teaching Sustainability As If Your Life Depended on It: A Photo Essay of Fort Lewis College’s Ecology and Society Field School

In this inspiring photo essay, Rebecca Clausen demonstrates the power of being in the field and learning sustainability in a holistic, hands-on way that starts students down the road to primary production, upon which our future will depend.

The Importance of Controversy: Is Education for Sustainable Development Too Nice?

The Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) community, argues Robert Bray, is shy to confront controversy. In this quick review of three controversial issues—population control, the role of science, and limits to growth—he quickly points out how important it is to embrace controversy as a way to arrive at sound policy.

Rekindling Memories of Yesterday’s Children: Making the Case for Nature-Based Unstructured Play for Today’s Children

Abstract This study examined adults’ feelings towards the environment in relation to recalled memories of childhood play. Today’s adults often associate scouting, summer camps, or playing in a creek with environmental education, with positive affect. Tomorrow’s adults won’t have this experience base. Environmental education and outdoor play have become too formalized for children to benefit [...]

Sustainability Education in Practice: Appropriation of Rurality by the Globalized Migrants of Costa Rica

Abstract An innovative framework for sustainability helps investigate the impacts of real estate development and educational attainment of newcomers; more specifically, landscape transformation due to ‘amenity migration’ into the Global South.  We argue that sustainability research requires a de-categorization from mutually exclusive ‘human’ and ‘nature’ divisions, to refocus on intersections of multiple and complex socio-environmental [...]

Cultivating Sustainability Pedagogy through Participatory Action Research in Interior Alaska

Abstract As the environmental movement grows into a broader sustainability revolution, we must move beyond the traditional scope of environmental education to address social-ecological challenges through integrated education for sustainability. This paper proposes that the purpose of sustainability education is to foster a community culture that will promote the emergence of sustainability in complex adaptive [...]