America, the Environment, and the Global Economy
Spring 1997-- Global Human
Ecology:
America, the Environment, and the Global Economy
Question for Discussion: How
should ecological literacy be integrated into the college
curriculum? Can students be really educated without ecological
literacy?
Reading: Orr, pp. 109-152;
"Ecological Design" handout;
"Enviro-mania"
handout
Extra-credit Assignment: You can get extra
credit for going to any of the sessions at the CU-Boulder Earth
Summit Conference. See the internet site,
Agenda and information on the 1997 Campus Earth
Summit, April 21 and 22,
for a conference schedule.
Internet Sites and Documents:
Centre for Alternative Technology: 25 ways to save the planet!
Can you manage Spaceship Earth?: STAR QUIZ
Survival Test
Global 2000 Revisited: Overview
The Real WORLD Sustainability Resources guide
Environmental History: Explore the Field
National
Library for the Environment
Brown Center for Environmental Studies
University of Colorado Environmental Center
Environmental Studies & Environmental
Science Programs
Global Environmental Policy Research Tools : Course Syllabi
Project on Teaching Global Environmental Politics
WorldWatch Institute Home Page
Economic Growth and Equitable Human Development: The 1996 Human Development Report
Features of a Sustainable Ecocentric Economy
Global Environmental Policy Research Tools
Let's start by looking at three sources of information about the health of the global environment:
1. State of the World Indicators
2. Centre for Alternative Technology: 25 ways to save the planet!
3. Can you manage Spaceship Earth?: STAR QUIZ Survival Test
Each of these tables and questionnaires raise questions about our modern industrial culture and society. These are the kinds of questions Orr argues that we should be educating our children to both to ask and to answer. He believes that through education, we can gradually and slowly transform our society into a sustainable society. By teaching people to challenge our current assumptions about modern, industrial society, the health of the global biosphere, and the values that we organize our lives around, Orr hopes that we will be able to transform our society. By rethinking and reforming education to focus on ecological literacy, Orr hopes that people will begin to challenge the need for global trade, increased economic growth and development, the need to destroy the environment in the name of protecting jobs and communities, and our materialism, consumerism and individualism. But, if Orr is right, and I think he is, that education reflects the values and assumption of our modern industrial civilization, won't trying to fundamentally transform the educational curriculum cause various groups with vested economic and political interest to challenge this education reform?
To understand this, let's look at the kinds of knowledge and skills Orr's wants to teach and how they differ from our current thinking and practices. Let's look at the "Ecological Design handout. If schools taught students to use and demand renewable energy sources such as solar power, wind, small-scale hydro, and biomass power, wouldn't energy companies and utilities worry that they would loose their customers? If schools taught students to demand and use materials that are reusable, recyclable, and durable, wouldn't lumber, plastics, and metal companies fear losing their customers? If schools taught students to demand that companies and product they use don't pollute and produced no more wastes than the environment can absorb, wouldn't large industrial factories and companies that depend on polluting and producing waste lose customers? If schools taught students to demand and use products, materials, and food produced locally and regionally, wouldn't global companies be threatened with the loss of customers? Finally, if schools taught students to demand and build homes that use very little energy, materials, and fit into local bioregions and ecosystems, wouldn't national builders and developers lose customers to small local and regional builders who build homes to work and fit into the local environment? These are all very important and serious questions.
My larger point is that educational is political. The power of education to challenge student's to rethink their basic social, cultural, and economic assumptions, the very power that Orr highlights, makes it a very powerful economic and political tool and weapon. Our present educational systems, as Orr would certainly agree, are created and designed to teach the basic values and assumptions that support our modern industrial society. Just as conservatives in the late 1980s and early 1990s put up a serious fight over efforts to include multicultural education into the primary, secondary, and college curriculum, so too would conservatives, businessmen, politicians, and economic interests challenge Orr's and other's efforts to incorporate ecological literacy across the curriculum.
Students noted that critics would criticize Orr's ecological literacy by charging that it biases students toward local self-reliance, appropriate and small-scale technology, sustainability, and local citizen competence and activism. Critics would argue that our present global industrial society and its focus on global trade and production, large-scale technology, increasing development and material consumption, and global management and control is far superior to Orr's sustainable local societies and economies. Students charged that Orr's focus would violate free enterprise, impose too much local control and regulation, violate the law of comparative advantage, and undermine people's freedom to live and prosper in our global economy and society. These are important criticisms? How would Orr defend his "postmodern paradigm" for sustainability and ecological literacy against these criticisms.
Orr would argue that our present "modern paradigm" that is based on individualism, materialism, consumerism, and increasing global economic growth and development threatens to destroy the global environment and undermine the human future. We can't continue to have the freedom to engage in global trade, allow global corporations to destroy non-renewable resources and ecosystems in the name of profits, allow individuals to use the energies and resources required to enable them to buy products and goods from all over the world, and allow unlimited individual freedom to consumer, pollute, and destroy the global environment. In exchange for encouraging people to be dependent on local and regional economies, to use renewable energy, to reduce their consumption of resources, to protect and restore local and regional environments, to reduce and end their use of products that pollute and destroy the environment, and to demand local and regional accountability from corporations, politicians, and citizens, our society will guarantee a healthy, safe, clean, prosperous future for everyone. This is the choice Orr's ecological literacy offers us.
Orr is very much aware of the costs and benefits of ecological literacy. He is one of the American leaders in the environmental studies movement. Orr supports first creating environmental studies programs and then using them as a base to integrate ecological literacy across the curriculum. Let's look at the growing number of environmental studies program and courses across the country. The following internet sites provide solid evidence of the growing strength of the environmental studies movement in the United States:
1. Environmental Studies & Environmental Science Programs
2. Global Environmental Policy Research Tools : Course Syllabi
3. Project on Teaching Global Environmental Politics
These environmental studies programs and courses demonstrate that there are a growing number of people throughout the country who are committed to ecological literacy and creating sustainable societies.
But the larger question we are left with is this: Can we really hope that the environmental studies movement and efforts to integrate ecological literacy across the curriculum will be able to help Americans change their basic values and assumptions in time to avoid the global collapse of our modern industrial civilization caused by the destruction of the global environment?
A student suggested that it is actually a bigger problem than this. If we are to solve the global environmental crisis, we not only have to teach Americans ecoliteracy, we need to teach the peoples of the world ecoliteracy. We need a global consensus that the "modern paradigm" is threatening to undermine our future by destroying the ability of the biosphere to support our global industrial civilization. How can we expect these environmental education reforms and the development of ecological literacy to occur in time to avoid the increasingly serious global environmental problems that threaten our future? This is the greatest challenge facing the environmental movement. Orr believes that we can only solve the global environmental crisis through education and challenging people throughout the world to rethink their basic assumptions and values. But can we do this in time?
Orr's larger answer is that we have no other choice but to try. In several places in his book, Ecological literacy, he suggests that only a series of local, regional, and global catastrophes will force our modern industrial culture and society to rethink it basic assumptions and values. So even if at the present time, environmental concerns and sustainability are written off as irrelevant to the larger task of increasing economic growth and development, increasing global environmental threats will make ecological literacy and protecting and restoring the environment vital to the success and well-being of our society. With the growing efforts to include environmental studies in universities and incorporate ecological literacy in education at all levels, when our modern industrial society finally wakes up to the reality of growing environmental peril it will have the information it needs to begin to transform itself into a sustainable society. With the increasing interest in ecological design, recycling, renewable energy, creating durable products, protecting and restoring the environment, and re-integrating our society into the natural world, we now have the resources to create a sustainable society that balances humans needs with the larger needs of the biosphere.
To give you just one example of an environmental threat that might force people to begin to question the culture and basic assumptions of our modern industrial society, let's look at a recent study examining the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear accident on children's health:
Chernobyl linked to leukemia in
U.S. children
Fallout from the 1986 accident at Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear
power plant may have
caused a 30 percent increase in leukemia cases among U.S.
children born soon after, a
researcher said Friday.
Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health Project in New
York said he found
evidence of the increase in cancer registries for 12 U.S. states
and cities.
"The leukemia rate among children aged under one year born
in 1986-1987 (62 cases)
was 30 percent higher than among other children born during the
decade," he wrote in a
letter to the British Medical Journal.
There have been no reports of more cases of childhood leukemia in
countries closest to
the site such as Belarus, Finland and Sweden. But there has been
a clear rise in incidence
of thyroid cancer in children.
Mangano said his findings supported a Greek study that found
extra cases of childhood
leukemia.
The thyroid cancers are linked to radioactive iodine that fell
out and concentrated in
crops and later in milk, while leukemia is linked to radioactive
caesium-137.
"Studies of health effects in children since the accident at
Chernobyl continue to yield
new findings," Mangano wrote.
"Although any increases in leukemia are likely to fall short
of the sharp rises in thyroid
cancer, possibly because elements like caesium were released in
smaller quantities than
iodine, more precise analysis should be pursued."
Mangano said his study covered 50 million people -- a much larger
sample than used in
any European studies -- and thus could be more reliable.
Copyright 1997, Reuters, All Rights Reserved
ENN Daily News -- April 18, 1997
Many people hoped that as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown and explosion in 1987 that nuclear power would finally be proven to be the dangerous and risky source of energy that it was. But this proved not to be the case. But increasing medical studies like the one above continue to prove that nuclear power threatens the environment and human health. Catastrophes and disasters such as Chernobyl, Bhopal, Prince William Sound, Love Canal, Times Beach, etc. hopefully will begin to force people from our modern industrial culture to rethink the basic assumptions and how they educate themselves and their children. We know what we need to do, we have the educational resources in place, what we need now is the collective will and determination to transform our modern industrial culture into a sustainable culture. Orr concludes that only through education can we hope to create this will and determination to change our ways.