arenas, from individual actions to the expression of collec- tive political will. We will face an uncertain future together. We have to organize, to talk and to push each other, and pushing is an attribute that youth have always done and always done well. Facing the future means that solving the problems that we face collectively is not just my personal problem, and that only by working together as a we can those problems facing us be solved. The problems are large and there are many places where we can put our energies; indeed, the collective we have to put our energies into many places at the same time to see the kinds of results that we need to see. Arne Naess, the co-creator of the Deep Ecology Platform, used to say that “the frontier is long,” and we all have a place where we can work to break through the barrier to the other side. We have to talk about the fact that our lives need to be
purposeful and have meaning (e.g., Frankl, 1984) because it is that sense of purpose and meaning that will attract us, will pull us, towards the future that we want to see. Throughout human history, one clear purpose of human life, as Aristotle noted more than two thousand years ago, was to live well, to flourish and achieve a state of happiness and satisfaction: but our happiness cannot simply reside in material wealth and prosperity that is only available to a relatively few of the global many. As educators, we can engage with our students to consider the nature of happiness and the impact of mass consumerism on both happiness (e.g., Bok, 2010; Lane, 2000) and on the sustainability of the entire human enterprise. A skill for confronting the future might be the ability to develop a range of purposes for our lives, considering what we can and should do with the time that is given to us. Emma Wood Rous, writing in Green Teacher #69 (2002) had her high school students read Walden, and then write their own version of “What I Live For,” following Thoreau’s “Where I lived and what I lived for” chapter, thus potentially at least, making the natural idealism of youth explicit. What are the qualities that will allow us to flourish?
When we talk to youth about the future, we have to talk about those qualities that our postmodern world sometimes forgets, but that have been the hallmark of the best of our societies for millennia. Regarding these qualities, Aristotle wrote “The things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them ... men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts” (Nicomachean Ethics). These qualities are those such as friendship, courage, self-restraint, wisdom, and a love of justice, along with respect, caring, frugality, awe and hope. These are what the ancients called virtues – dispositions and habits that lead to right actions – and it has long been known that the only way to learn them is to do them: one can’t learn these through teaching, but only through practice, until they become habit and to not do them becomes nearly unthinkable. We need to identify and then practice, over and over, the virtues that will allow us to move with courage into the future. Likely more than any- thing that can be measured in standardized exams, these are the tools that we will need to face the future. As teachers, focusing some of our efforts on the analysis of our cultural understanding of where happiness comes
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from may help to enact the needed education which asks us to consider whether human well-being is necessarily derived from material possessions, wealth or fame. Indeed, the research is becoming increasingly clear that economic prosperity, beyond a certain point, does not cause happiness, but the converse may be more correct: happiness may result in economic prosperity. Since our society seemingly fails to teach us what actually brings about happiness, most of us fail to act in ways that are in fact good for us. All of this – for example confronting the environmental
changes that are now going to happen even were we to stop emitting CO2
, or confronting the lie that we can ‘grow’ our
economy forever and purchase happiness through an end- less succession of consumer items – will require courage: courage will be of particular value and an important virtue for youth. We will need courage to create alternative images of the future, images that we want to live in and that can be achieved given the changes that are already unfolding in front of us, and then the courage to map our pathway to that future. Rav Nachman, the 18th century Chassidic rabbi and sage, spoke about courage: “The whole world, and every- thing in it, is a very narrow bridge. And the important thing is to not be afraid at all.” This is a truth for our time. We all have to begin walking on that narrow bridge. Our job as teachers is to learn, together with the youth, the knowledge, skills and beliefs necessary to make the crossing. And to not be afraid.
Dr. Richard Kool is an associate professor at Royal Roads University in Victoria BC. He is interested in the emotional work of environmental education and educators and strug- gles daily to have the courage to do what needs to be done.
References
Bok, D. (2010). The politics of happiness: What government can learn from the new research on well-being. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University press.
Bonhoeffer, D., & Gruchy, J. D. (1991). Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Witness to Jesus Christ. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Frankl, V. E. (1984). Man’s search for meaning. New York: Simon & Schuster. Inc.
Jensen, D. (2004). Listening to the land: Conversations about nature, culture and eros. White River Jct., Vermont Chelsea Green Publishing. Keynes, J. M. (1935). The general theory of employment, interest and money.
Lane, R. E. (2000). The loss of happiness in market democracies. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press
Lorenzoni, I., Nicholson-Cole, S. A., & Whitmarsh, L. (2007). Barriers per- ceived to engaging with climate change among the UK public and their policy implications. Global Environmental Change. 17, 445-459.
McLuhan, M., with Quentin Fiore. (1967). The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Random House.
Moser, S. C., & Dilling, L. (2004). Making climate hot. Environment. 46(10), 32-46.
O’Neill, S., & Nicholson-Cole, S. (2009). «Fear Won’t Do It»: Promoting Posi- tive Engagement With Climate Change Through Visual and Iconic Representa- tions. Science Communication. 30(3), 355-379.
Olson, R. L. (1995). Sustainability as a social vision. Journal of Social Issues. 51, 15-35.
Polak, F. (1973). The image of the future (E. Boulding, Trans.). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
van der Helm, R. (2009). The vision phenomenon: Towards a theoretical underpinning of visions of the future and the process of envisioning. Futures. 41(2), 96-104.
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