The Heart of Sustainability (continued)


Problem Statement As life-long naturalists in the northwest, we intimately know


the texture and nuance of our home landscapes. We welcome the migrations and bloom sequences that pulse with seasonal varia- tions in climate as evidence of the cycles that contain and sustain us. Through surveys and species inventories of rare plants, birds and marine communities, we have helped to systematically chronicle the changes in distribution of northwest flora and fauna. After years of naturalizing and teaching in the wild places that comprise Cascadia, we unabashedly venerate the relationships between biota, land and season.


As educators and writers we choose to express our bio-


philia by sharing our love for the land and sea. We resonate with healthy and diverse natural communities. Yet, increasingly, we are alarmed by the degradation of our local landscapes and the habitat changes that threaten species diversity and human secu- rity. Today, we find ourselves steeped in the 21st century assault on nature. We witness the continued loss of basic knowledge of ecosystem components and functions to the extent that dramatic changes seem to go unnoticed by our students, friends and neigh- bors. “One of the penalties of an ecological education,” warned Leopold (1987), “is that we live alone in a world of wounds.” To heal these wounds we choose to live and act decisively as purposeful educators in favor of ecological, economic and cultural integrity.


The more we read and think about the implications of what


is taking place now on this planet, the more we are convinced that human civilization is facing a deepening ecological crisis that has never been faced before. If we want to create a culture, environ- ment and economy that are viable in the longer term, we must learn to promote an ecologically sustainable, socially equitable and bio-culturally diverse planet (Bowers, 2010). We believe the central question for educators is how do we engage our students in a consideration of the degradation of earth’s ecosystems and their ability to support us in our current lifestyle in a way that engenders something other than despair? In an interview with Bill Moyer, Barry Lopez states “the kind of expertise we need is not a facile grasp of policy, but a deeper love of humanity. The kind of love that can help us resist the temptation to despair” (Moyer, 2010). As environmental educators, we hold the belief that this capacity for love can and must be cultivated through shared experiences that help people discover value in the natural world, experiences that encourage the exploration of what we believe and who we are and how we intend to live in the world.


“Troubling” the concept of sustainability One of the well-known issues with “sustainability” is that


the term is rarely if ever clearly defined. What are we trying to sustain – our lifestyle, economy or surrounding natural communi- ties? Walls and Jinkling (2002) warn that “sustainability talk can, when used by advocates with radically different ideas about what should be sustained, mask central issues under the false pretense of a shared understanding, a set of values and common vision of the future” (p.2). For example, in Hot, Flat and Crowded, Freid- man (2008) suggests that sustainability literally means that we must learn to think and behave in a way that sustains the natural world and our cultural relationships for generations to come.


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Are we hoping to sustain conditions as they are now or actually improve conditions through ecological restoration and resource conservation? Certainly our human well-being depends on a vi- brant economy, healthy environment and equitable society (Nolet & Wheeler, 2010). Do we therefore mean “sustainability” of an industrialized country or are we betting that a less economically developed country will have more staying power? Moreover, if one country’s lifestyle is essentially dependent, as it is in America, on natural resource “subsidies” from other countries, especially from countries far less well off than this country and its citizens, can that lifestyle in any measure really be “sustainable?” It is essential to think globally with sustainability arguments. Yet, the issues of “sustainability” are intimately related to the local “car- rying capacity” of the land which has been greatly diminished through resource exploitation, pollution and poor land and water stewardship.


Capra and Stone (2010) enlarge a common operational defini-


of the degradation of earth’s ecosystems and their ability to support us in our current lifestyle in a way that


engenders something other than despair?


tion of sustainability from simply meeting material needs and avoiding ecologi- cal degradation, to include all the natural and social dimensions of the web of life. To make matters worse, the recent literature on sus- tainability educa- tion and education for sustainabil- ity (EfS) includes comprehensive lists of practitioner tips, principles, skills, dispositions, competencies, realms, theoreti- cal frameworks, elements, portals,


We believe the central


question for educators is how do we engage our


students in a consideration


perspectives and big ideas. Some educators use “sustainability education” and “environmental education” interchangeably while others argue that sustainability differs from environmental educa- tion by focusing on broader social and economic issues (Higgs & McMillan, 2006). To highlight human connections that stretch from local to worldwide levels, Church and Skelton (2010) deem- phasize environmental education’s focus on place-based nature study and adopt the inclusive term “global sustainability.” Nowhere in these emerging notions of sustainability educa-


tion do we see a substitute for the curricular activities applied in environmental education to cultivate feelings for humanity or value for healthy ecosystems in the natural world, the founda- tion from which any true change must grow (Wilson, 1984, 1994, 2006). To pursue ecosystem-based resource management or gain insights into functional ecosystem processes requires the cultiva- tion of intimate knowledge of one’s homeground, of paying close attention to one’s surroundings and exploring one’s values and feelings based on the relationship of people to nature, yet many argue for the separation of sustainability education from the big ideas of environmental education in a desire to distinguish one field from the other. We argue that to inspire people enough to make changes in their perceptions and behaviors, sustainability education must embrace the central role of acquiring ecological


www.clearingmagazine.org/online CLEARING 2011


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