Sustainablity as a learning process

The ARIES 2005 National Review of Environmental Education and its Contribution to Sustainability (ARIES 2005) notes that sustainable development is hard to define as a concept, notwithstanding the generally common acceptance of the Brundtland Definition ("Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs").

Coal and energy generation

ABC Radio's This World Today (listen here) had a program yesterday on California's push to have one third of their energy generated by renewables in the next decade, as part of their legislation-backed attempt to cut their emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Its interesting that in the US, especially the seaboard states, and Europe pretty much no governments are approving new coal power stations but in Australia this debate is not really even happening - old style coal power plants are still being approved. The article notes that this might be as electricity in Australia has traditionally been largely coal fired (80+ %) that its much harder to get the debate started here,, and much harder to put in place aggressive state backed measures.

If we had a government that actually backed climate action, its fun to speculate how they would engage citizens in this debate. I'm presuming citizens assemblys wouldn't be part of it!

Climate change and the 2010 Australian election

Given the large role that climate change played in the 2007 election, and February's Newspoll that showed 73% of Australians believe climate change is a problem, it was interesting to see the way it largely had disappeared from the public debates surrounding the 2010 election.

John Hepburn discusses the role that climate change played in the election results, especially the strong showing of the Greens, in an August post to the Rooted environment blog. He makes the point that both the Greens and the independants (with the exception of Katter) are all pro-action of climate change, and he argues that their sucess is in part to do with the mainstream electorates disatisfaction with the major parties stance on climate change. I think this may be partially the case, especially in the lower house Greens result, but its important to remember that this election was also fought largely in the marginals, and on very local issues, so climate change was pushed out of the media, and that the move to a third party may have reflected a more general disatisfaction with the majors.

However it does seem that the sustainability dialogue has been somewhat sidelined in Australia.

ABC Catalyst report: What role has science in combating climate change?

Catalyst did a good report on the role of science in the climate change debate. It could be used as a good discussion point for a critical thinking exercise on public perceptions of science and authority in the climate change debate:

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3013512.htm

learningforsustainability.net

learningforsustainability.net is an online sustainability resource which aims to provide a practical resource for proponents of multi-stakeholder learning processes.

It defines sustainability as a process, rather than an outcome or an external achievable goal. The site notes that in sustainable development everyone is a user and provider of information, and notes the need to change from old sector-centred ways of doing business to new approaches that involve cross-sectoral co-ordination and the integration of environmental and social concerns into all development processes.

It also provides links to a number of tools and teaching resources with a sustainability bent, including a number of excellent games such as My Sustainable House and Stop Disasters. Games are an excellent, structured way of learning for children especially, as they contain multiple levels of increasing complexity which increase knowledge as they go, and they offer a wide range of challanges that help combat boredom (Kirriemuir & McFarlane 2004).