I have been thinking about whether to review the predictions for 2011 that I made - not from any great personal expertise, I should add, but from paying attention to those who are expert in these things - at the beginning of the year. But, to be honest, I really don’t want to. After the non-stop whirlwind of consequential global events of the past twelve months, a brief glance back at the predictions shows how many not only have come to pass but also are now self-explanatory.
I will get back to the predictions, I expect, because it seems to me that there is already much that is good and hopeful emerging from the past year’s turmoil. But, for now, I want to post a draft introduction to a “sustainability through experience” handbook I am compiling in the hope of making a contribution to the growing world-wide call for social change.
The handbook will explore ways of overcoming the immense social and psychological barriers that are preventing us from embracing sustainability and, importantly, of ‘outreaching’ active engagement beyond the already converted.
The experiential learning activities it will contain are intended for use “not only in classrooms, campuses and work-place training venues, but also amongst social groups in community meeting rooms, congregations in places of worship, work colleagues in works cafeterias, and family and friends in kitchens and living rooms; in short, any setting where people come together to explore what becoming sustainable means for our lives.” And many of them “are not intended to take place indoors at all, but in natural environments where new insights and learning about ecological sustainability can be most profound.”
The concluding summary paragraphs are below. A pdf of the full introductory chapter can be accessed here. Because, like social change itself, compiling these activities and exercises will be most powerful as a collaborative effort, I would be grateful for ideas, criticisms and other contributions from your own experiences here.
The firstSTEP handbook: Sustainability Through Experience Programmes
In summary…
Our modern urban technology-dependent culture has disconnected us mentally, physically and spiritually from the natural biological systems of our planetary habitat. This disconnection has inhibited our constructive responses to the urgency and severity of converging ecological crises. Experiential learning activities which bring us ‘closer to nature’ can enhance our understanding of human systems as operating within, not independently from, the wider eco-system of the biosphere which sustains us.
Lacking this ecological context, varying interpretations of sustainability have diverted our attention from the ecological issues that underlie our unsustainability and permitted us to avoid engaging with them. Conventional educational and informational approaches to improving our understanding and engagement have proved insufficient to overcome powerful social, psychological and cultural barriers to change.
Some of these barriers are beyond the agency of ordinary people to influence and can only be addressed by political and institutional interventions. Without the active commitment of ordinary people to change, these interventions are harder for political and institutional leaders to implement and they seem unlikely to become sufficiently emboldened to bring them about.
In the West, we presently lack clearly attributable experiences of the consequences of unsustainability that are compelling enough to motivate widespread commitment and action to mitigate them. Active experiential approaches to exploring the issues that underlie unsustainability can motivate and retain such commitment and action by:
- exposing us to ideas, experience and knowledge different to our own and thereby encouraging critical analysis of received wisdoms and cultural ‘norms’ and holistic thinking about the causes and consequencies of our unsustainability;
- breaking down interpersonal barriers and fostering trust and group bonding that enables mutual recognition of shared anxieties and inner conflicts, engages commonly held core values, and supports the transfer and application of learning to wider life settings;
- providing first-hand experiences to demonstrate the benefits of inclusive and co-operative problem-solving and ‘futures-thinking’ processes and to enhance individual and collective knowledge, skills and confidence in evolving appropriate and sustainable living systems and technologies;
- improving ecological ‘literacy’ through close involvement with the natural environment and first hand experiences of biological systems, their limits and constraints, and the ecological effects of unsustainability, both for people and for the planet;
- enhancing understanding of physical, material, psychological and spiritual human needs and of reconciling these with the ecological needs of the planet;
- making learning and development about severely problematic issues communally supportive, personally meaningful, memorable and fun.
These characteristic developmental outcomes of active experiential learning are all highly relevant to acquiring the skills and motivation that will help not only to mitigate our present unsustainability but also to prepare us for the inevitable challenges to come.
The first part of this book contains chapters to explain the key elements of experiential learning and of sustainability and ecological literacy and to provide guidelines for the essential processes of groupwork and facilitation, reflection and review, and transfer of learning to wider life applications.
The second part describes a range of adaptable and accessible experiential activities, arranged into sections that make it easy to identify activities suitable for specific study topics and learning areas. The activities have been adapted from many different sources from permaculture to parlour games, bushcraft to balloon debates, motivational interviewing to military command tasks, alternative technologies to art and crafts, nature study to natural construction techniques and local wildlife watching to remote wilderness expeditions. What they all have in common is high potential to open up our minds to new insights and inspirations about the crises we are facing that make acting on them much more possible for us.
It is unrealistic to imagine that any one educational approach, however powerful and affecting, could somehow miraculously make our societies sustainable. But it is reasonable to suppose that many people are already feeling deep concern about the cultural values that permit us to justify gross social inequalities and the degradation our habitat beyond the point of no return. The purpose of this firstSTEP handbook is to facilitate the challenging first steps that lead away from such isolated and debilitating feelings of unease towards the personal empowerment and committed resolve that comes with purposeful communal action.
