Environmental sustainability
That was then. . . .
This is now
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Marooned on a small island with ten Y8 pupils who are hording water under their beds in genuine panic because they have have to pay for everything in island currency and water is expensive. (Education Consultant, the Flat Holm Project, 1992-1996)
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Finding a "fair price" for the electricity generated by small scale renewables equivalent to pupils lifting their own weight a height of 50m. (The FutureWorld Energy Courses, Kilve Court, 1995-2000)
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Receiving the Worldwide Fund for Nature Curriculum Management Award. (The Sustainable Millennium Project, 1992)
"We are on a highway to hell with our foot on the accelerator"
How did we get here?
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These publications from the 1990s have proved to be prophetic
Value as a Reason for Action in Environmental Education is an unpublished thesis. It has been disseminated as book chapters and through the journal articles below.
Thesis
abstract
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Finding the Right Kind of Awe and Wonder: the metaphysical potential of religion to ground an environmental ethic. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 11, 88 – 99.
Behaviour Change and Environmental Citizenship: A Case for Spiritual Development? International Journal of Children’s Spirituality. 5 (2) 131 –145.
Tensions between indoctrination and the development of judgement: The case against early closure, Environmental Education Research, 11 (2), 187 – 197.
Science: an unreliable friend to environmental education?, Environmental Education Research, 6 (3), 265 – 276.
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Economics, Environment and the loss of innocence, in C. Holden and N. Clough eds. Children as Citizens: education for participation. London: Jessica Kingsley, 171 - 182.
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Sustainability and the Humanities, in M. Ashley (ed.) Improving Teaching and Learning in the Humanities. London: Falmer, 184 - 203.
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The arts outside the classroom, with Adams, J. and Shirley, S. in S. Waite (ed.) Children Learning Outside the Classroom: From birth to eleven. London: Sage, 119 - 132. (2011).
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The Sustainable Millenium Project
The Sustainable Millenium Project was an award-winning curriculum initiative of the early 1990s based on the principle that the youngest children in the school would be the first adult citizens of the new millenium. Click the WWF icon to find out how it worked.
Thirty years later, it is abundantly clear that we are a long way off course for a sustainable millennium. During the 1990s, I was editor of the NAEE journal Environmental Education. Click the journal and you will see an article that may go some way to explaining why.
Where next?
Would things have been any different had the Sustainable Millenium Project been based upon the principles of social threefolding and the kingdom of childhood, two of Rudolph Steiner’s most radical and consequential ideas? A new project for 2024 is setting out to answer this question.