by Richard Kool
THE achievement of a sustainable way of living is perhaps the most perplexing challenge now facing us as a society. The controversy over what the word `sustainable' means, over what time scales must be considered, and over who is responsible for it, make it clear that the very idea of sustainability is in need of careful and deep analysis. The web has many resources, not all of them congruent with each other, which students and teachers alike can use to try to understand the essential ideas around sustainability. Let's look into a few of them.
Based in Ottawa and growing out of an educational initiative of the National Roundtable on the Environment and Economy, the Learning for a Sustainable Future project has spent a great deal of time laying out what they and their partners consider to be the essential knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to achieve sustainability. Their web site <http://www.etc.bc.ca/~lsf1/> lays out those objectives, presents a cross-curricular guide to educational planning, and provides a large number of links to other sites in Canada and elsewhere which look at questions of sustainable development and sustainability.
The World Wide Web Library on Sustainable Development <http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/sustvl.html> is a very complete listing of organizations, projects, listservs and people involved in sustainable development work around the world. It is a fine resource for students looking to make global environmental connections.
The National Centre for Sustainability <http://www.islandnet.com/~ncfs/ncfs/homemenu.htm> in Victoria, British Columbia, is an organization trying to promote the "Awareness of situation, understanding of causes, and discovery of means to adjust what we do to what nature can take at no further damage..." Members of the centre are very interested in education, and have put up ideas on how the educational community can begin to address issues of sustainability.
I'll end this final column of the school year by acknowledging a letter (Green Teacher 46, February-March 1996) in which writer Susan Kiil, referring to this column, expresses concern that the "techno-elite are going to dominate Education for Planet Earth..." and asks, "Will [our children] have to conform to the world view provided through these no-dimensional means of communications and expression, and compromise their health and well-being in the process?"
On a personal level, I have to say that one of the defining moments in my life was as a young person walking into the Marine Biology Laboratory at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and seeing the plaque on the wall with Louis Aggassiz's famous dicta, "Study Nature, Not Books." That has always been my rallying cry as a teacher, and if ever there was a conflict between studying the real world and getting hooked into cyberspace, I know where my allegiance would be.
But on a deeper level, Kiil raises a good question about where we should be putting our effort in EE, and about the implications of choosing to spend time in the on-line world. An important point of debate in EE is the question of what are the most important things we can do with our students. Should we concern ourselves with trying to get kids outdoors to have those experiences that Kiil describes as being "about heads, heart, and hands, of creative expression, imagination, caring, and respect..."? Or, given that most of our students are urban dwellers without easy access to natural surroundings, should we try to focus on answering the kinds of questions that are used in State of the Environment reporting: what is happening, why is it happening, how do we know it is happening, why is it important, and what are we doing about it?
Of course, it is not an either-or situation. We need to do both. We need to bring young people into caring and ongoing contact and conversation with the natural world in as `unspoiled' a state as we can find. We definitely need to connect with our heads and hearts and develop that emotional centre from which we are willing to act on knowledge, changing ourselves and the natural and social world in which we find ourselves. But we also need to deal analytically with our predicament. If we are to understand what a sustainable society might look like, if we are to match the demands we place on nature with nature's ability to respond to those demands, we have to have data, analytical tools, and other like-minded people to talk with and to learn from. In this endeavour, the on-line world is of great value. Cyberspace is a means, not an end. It is a way to get to a place where one can do what one has to do through action in the real world. As one my educational heroes, Alfred North Whitehead, used to say, "A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth."
So get outside this summer, smell the flowers and the rich summer fragrance of forest, field, river and glacier. But don't forget to keep in touch, via snail mail, face to face conversation...and the internet.