Education, Sustainability and the Ecological Social Imaginary: Connective Education and Global Change

222 Pages·2018·3.315 MB·English

by  Jeff Buckles

EDUCATION,
SUSTAINABILITY
AND THE ECOLOGICAL
SOCIAL IMAGINARY
CONNECTIVE EDUCATION AND GLOBAL CHANGE
JEFF BUCKLES
Education, Sustainability and the Ecological
Social Imaginary
Jeff Buckles
Education,
Sustainability and
the Ecological Social
Imaginary
Connective Education
and Global Change
Jeff Buckles
York St John University
York, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-74441-4 ISBN 978-3-319-74442-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74442-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940524
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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To Liz, Julia and Peter for their love and support.
To Pet and Tom for the raw material, and to Mike Bottery and Julian Stern
for their help and support in shaping it.
Preface
What do the Pope, Paris, ppm and population all have in common?
Apart from the letter p?
The answer is they all acknowledge global change.
• In May 2015 The Pope released the encyclical letter Laudato Si, On
Care for our Common Home (Pope Francis 2015), highlighting the
harmful impact humankind were having upon the Earth, and what
needs to be done to ameliorate that impact.
• In September 2016 it was reported (Betts et al. 2016) that the annual
mean atmospheric CO concentrate at Mauna Loa, Hawaii for 2015
2
was 400.9 parts per million (ppm), the first time this level had been
breached in 4 million years. By February 2018 it had risen to 408ppm
(Scripps 2018). It was likely to stay at or above that level, and was
caused by ‘anthropogenic emissions arising from fossil fuel burning,
deforestation and cement production’ (Betts et al. 2016: 806).
• In November 2016 the Paris Agreement was adopted by the United
Nations Climate Change Conference, the purpose being to limit to
less than 2°C the effects of global warming compared to pre-industrial
levels. So far 197 countries have signed the treaty and 146 ratified it
(UNFCCC 2017).
• According to the United Nations (UN 2017) the World’s population
will have surpassed 7.6 billion people in 2018, with the United Nations
vii
viii Preface
projecting a population of 8.5 billion on 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and
11.2 billion in 2100. In 1960 it was 3 billion (US Census 2016). The
World Bank (2015b) noted that the rural population had reduced to
46% of world population, down from 66% in 1960. All of this has
resource implications on land, water, food and biodiversity.
The four examples given are a mixture of hope and despair. Hope, because
as the Pope and Paris suggest, there is growing understanding of the
effects of human activity upon the Earth, and of a willingness to map out
answers. Despair in that human activity appears to be harming the planet
in a way that is threatening to all life, and there may be limited time to
react to this. This book aims to build upon the hope, suggesting that by
changing how humankind views its place upon the Earth, despair can be
overcome. This requires two things to happen. Firstly, for humankind to
recognise and act upon the foundational truth that all life upon Earth
(including human beings) is dependent upon the living and non-living
processes of the Earth. Secondly, that by asking a key ethical question,
‘what kind of planet do we wish to pass on to our children and all living
and non-living things?’ we (that is humankind), can refocus how we live,
so that the planet that we live and depend upon can flourish.
York, UK Jeff Buckles
References
Betts RA, Jones CD, Knight JR, Keeling RF, Kennedy JJ (2016) El Niño and a
Record CO Rise Nature Climate Change (6) p806–810. http://www.nature.
2
com/natureclimatechange. Accessed 1 Oct 2016
Pope Francis (2015) Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home [Encyclical].
http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-
francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. Accessed 26 May 2015
Scripps (2018) Scripps Institution of Oceanography The Keeling Curve. https://
scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/. Accessed 20 Feb 2018
UN (United Nations) (2017) Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
Population Division. World Population Prospects 2017. https://esa.un.org/
unpd/wpp/DataQuery/. Accessed 20 Feb 2018
Prefac e ix
UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) (2017)
The Paris Agreement. http://unfccc.int/paris_agreement/items/9485.php.
Accessed 15 May 2017
US Census (2016) International Data Base World Population: 1950–2050.
https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/worldpopgraph.
php. Accessed 10 Mar 2017
World Bank (2015b) Rural Population (% of Total Population). http://data.
worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS. Accessed 25 May 2016
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Setting the Scene: Domains, Challenges and the Social
Imaginary 13
3 The Modern Social Imaginary 25
4 E ducation in the Modern Social Imaginary 51
5 The Major Challenges of the 21st Century? 77
6 The Challenges of the 21st Century and the Modern
Social Imaginary 105
7 T he Ecological Social Imaginary 121
8 Education in the Ecological Social Imaginary 145
9 C onclusion 181
xi
xii Contents
R eferences 189
Index 207