Discussions on sustainability

Discussions on sustainability I love teaching because I get to encourage students to look at things in new ways. Reaching into assumed truths about technology, the environment, the world, and challenging held beliefs, including my own, is at the core of my pedagogy. This approach is especially salient when teaching sustainability because educators, practitioners, and policymakers do not agree on what ‘‘it’’ is or how to achieve ‘‘it’’. If we are going to talk about sustaining, we need to talk about what should be sustained, why it should be sustained and barriers to sustaining it. A standard dictionary gives us numerous definitions of ‘‘sustain’’ including, ‘‘to supply with nourishment’’ as well as ‘‘to affirm the justice of’’. If we want students to learn about sustainability, how do we define it? What is it we want to sustain and why? As a species, Homo sapiens has sustained itself quite well. In any course that covers sustainability, I assign reading related to the Brundtland Commission and general ideas about sustainability. In class, I then posit that humans have always met the Brundtland Commission’s notion of sustainability by meeting current needs while not impinging on future generations’ ability to meet their needs. Humans have successfully inhabited all reaches of the planet and have largely become healthier and physically more comfortable with each successive generation. This statement sparks a discussion. Several students usually agree with my assessment and conclude that humans will always find a way to meet our needs and address all problems through our intelligence and creativity. These students see technology as savior, and for them, human success covers both the what and the why of pursuing sustainability. Inevitably, other students respond that this situation cannot continue forever, that eventually humans will place too great a strain on the biosphere’s ability to produce what humans need to survive. Some also note that humans have succeeded at the expense of other species and that this fails the justice-based definition. Many in this group are catastrophists who are certain that the world is on the verge of collapse and they blame a variety of targets – corporate America, globalization, political administrations – for causing a non-sustainable situation. The catastrophists usually express the idea that the what of sustainability should not be limited to humans, and that technology is often more antagonist than savior. A third group of students, likely silent to this point, may raise elemental questions about sustainability and its relevance to their lives. These individuals are ‘‘blank slates’’, meaning that they have not formed any strong opinions about sustainability – often because they have never encountered the concept. Engaging in such classroom discussions is a challenge. Moderating requires a broad knowledge base to enable the instructor to insert key bits of information, to clarify misconceptions, or to correct factual errors. For many instructors, it is a challenge to maintain a discussion and not lapse into lecturing, which in this value-laden topic too often sounds like preaching. Personally, I am not on a mission; I am not seeking converts to my philosophical position. My goal is to help students think about the topic at hand and ideally to begin to question why they believe what they believe and why others may believe differently. Traditional lecture format works well for delivering purely factual information (like formulae, dates). Discussions work well for complex, sometimes controversial topics, like what should be sustained and why. Because it is controversial, it can be tricky, initially, to get students to talk about their beliefs and positions. My students often look to me to provide the answer – a negative outcome of traditional lecture-based education. I stress that I do not have the answer and note that debates about what and why and how have been ongoing for decades regarding sustainability. I stress that our class discussion mirrors conversations in the ‘‘real’’ world amongst scholars, policy-makers, and interest groups. Like the technologists in the classroom, many people believe that we should focus on technology. Clean technologies are touted as key to sustainable development. Yet, many engineers and other technical experts recognize that technology is a necessary but insufficient approach to achieving sustainability regardless of how we define it. For more than a decade scholars and experts have stressed that new technology applied within old paradigms will not allow us to avoid that limit out there in the biosphere. Clean Techn Environ Policy 6 (2004) 151–152 DOI 10.1007/s10098-004-0253-z