Teachers/parents: stop teaching un-sustainability and do this instead

If you talk to kids these days, most are horrified by the world’s problems and afraid for their future. At a recent neighborhood gathering, an elementary schoolgirl shared how upset she and her friends were about ocean plastic, climate change, species extinction, etc. Elementary school! It’s because schools are still teaching un-sustainability (all the problems, symptoms of old ways of thinking) rather than sustainability (principles and solutions for living on planet earth.)

The Big Bummer

Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

Here are some typical examples from teachers when asked what they’ve been teaching about sustainability.

Used with permission: From Jaimie Cloud’s Educating for Impact presentation at the
Oxford International Curriculum Conference April 2024.

No wonder eco-grief and climate-grief are emerging fields for psychologists! But it’s not teachers’ fault. When teachers see the slide above, they often say, “That’s what I thought I was supposed to do.” In some cases, state standards are written in a way that requires teaching un-sustainability. But it’s hard on the students and it’s hard on the teachers! Focusing on problems ends up being a Big Bummer for everyone. And brain science shows that focusing on the problems can make things worse, not better.

IBID

Teaching life-centered sustainability instead

Did you or your children ever get taught natural laws and how they relate to human behavior? I didn’t learn this until well into my adulthood when I started learning about sustainability. These can be boiled down to simple phrases even kindergarteners can understand. For example:

• There is no “away.” You can’t throw something “away.” It just goes someplace else. Your trash goes to someone else’s property. The gas in your car ends up as a gas in the air.
• Waste = food. In Nature, there is no waste. Plants exhale oxygen and animals breathe it in. Fallen trees feed fungi which then feed the soil for another tree to grow.
• Cycles. There’s the hydrological cycle, carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, and on and on. If we pollute water, the water pollutes us.
• Diversity. Variation is nature’s insurance policy. Variation in DNA, in and within species, helps to ensure we can adapt to changing conditions.
• Humans are Nature. In Western thinking, humans are separate from nature. For people who are aware of the problems we’ve caused, it can lead them to thinking the world would be better off without us. But Native peoples see themselves as part of Nature, kinship with everything around them. And for millennia they worked with nature to preserve the ecosystem for themselves and their “relatives.”
• Interdependence. Everything is connected. You can’t change one thing. Independence is an illusion. An old growth forest is dependent upon the scat from the vole that lives in its canopy. Trees in a forest communicate and share resources. We are all in this together.

There are different frameworks that chunk life’s principles into different groupings. The Natural Step has four principles. The language is scientifically precise but a little nerdy. Ask me if you want to learn how I ease people into the principles so they make sense. Properly presented, the framework can make sense to kindergarteners and grown ups. And having such a small number of principles makes it easy to remember and apply.

Screenshot: https://thenaturalstep.org/approach/

Biomimicry’s version has six overarching principles, and twenty underlying principles, 26 in all. This framework is great for designers and kids tend to like Biomimicry, especially the Ask Nature database, because they get to see how nature has solved a particular challenge. Slugs, spiders, lotus leaves and mussels can all be sources of inspiration.

https://www.learnbiomimicry.com/blog/biomimicry-lifes-principles

The Educating for Sustainability Benchmarks identify ten areas of applied knowledge. This is most useful for educators designing curriculum in K-12 or college settings.

Image created by Richard Sidy from the Benchmarks document.
Note, this section called Applied Knowledge is only a portion of the Benchmarks.

Regardless of the framework you use, the power is in defining the “right answer,” what we should be doing, how we create conditions consistent for life. Then school-age children and adults can start figuring out how we align with those principles. Rather than being mired in a muck of symptoms of un-sustainability, there is a positive direction. That generates positive feelings of agency, new ideas and innovations, which then generate more positive feelings. A virtuous cycle.

Sustainability fits in all subjects

There’s a common misconception that sustainability is just a science subject. Not so! Here are a few ideas for other subject areas.

Math: Build a spreadsheet to calculate the school’s greenhouse gas emissions; count trees on the property; calculate how many trees would be needed to offset the school’s emissions. Audit how many parents leave their cars idling when they pick up their children. Audit electricity use in each classroom.

English: Read about climate solutions. Consider how the view of Nature has changed over the ages in literature. Read about leaders who promote social and environmental justice.

Social studies: Compare indigenous and western cultures and the impacts on social and environmental justice. Learn how different cultures manage the commons (eg, fisheries, forests.)

History: Study the environmental laws in different countries, for example, the extended producer responsibility laws in Europe, and consider how they might be applied here.

Engineering: Build a solar cooker or solar car. Build robots to pick up litter. Learn about biomimicry and apply its principles to solve the plastics problem.