Environmental Sustainability

Environmental sustainability

I now live in the Scottish Highlands. Before that, I spent the firs ten years of retirement in the most remote part of the North Pennines. I spent my childhood in Kent. Though there were good times and there are undoubtedly some very beautiful parts of Kent, I longed to escape from the overcrowded roads, the dense housing, the overdevelopment and the polluted air that is the south east. There is a cost to this. The winters in the Highlands are long and harsh. To visit family means an expensive, all-day rail journey and hotel stay. Those costs are examples of values quantification, what I am willing to pay (WtP) for the picture on the left. The pictures on the right show the future that in 1992 I predicted for the year 2050. Unfortunately, they were taken last year (2025). Yet still, world governments are not WtP for environmental sustainability.

The Sustainable Millennium Project -what was it?

Flat Holm Island in the Bristol Channel was an ideal location to teach children principles of sustainability base upon value.

Marooning groups of ten twelve-year-olds there for five days at a time was probably the highlight of the project.

Pupils marooned on Flat Holm were found hording water under their beds in genuine panic because they had to pay for everything in island currency and water is expensive. A real eye opener!
The project also built an Earthkeepers' Training Site and a Sustainability Laboratory.
It ran FutureWorld energy courses where pupils set a "fair price" electricity through generating it by small scale renewables. They learned that boiling a kettle used energy equivalent to lifting their own weight a height of 50m. (Kilve Court, 1995-2000).
It received the Worldwide Fund for Nature Curriculum Management Award.

The Sustainable Millennium Project -why did it fail?

Many reasons might be given, but the most concise answer comes from page 208 of my thesis.

Children are socialised into an anthropocentric culture in which resources are committed to to environmental protection or sustainability only when demands for high levels of service in areas such as health and education have first been satisfied.

Children have, in general, acquired the values of this culture by the age of eleven.

Click the journal on the left to see an article that demonstrates the truth of this conclusion.

So, are we "on a highway to hell with our foot on the accelerator"?
António Guterres Secretary General of the United Nations.

So, is Guterres right? Unfortunately, I believe he is but I have two questions to ask

How will we know we have got there?
What will our values then look like?

Key Publications

2026. Speeding Down the Highway to Hell: Could it have been different? Evaluating the potential contribution of Rudolf Steiner’s teachings for a sustainable millennium. Bloomsbury Handbook of Steiner Waldorf Education, forthcoming 2026.

2010. Behaviour Change and Environmental Citizenship: A case for spiritual development? International Journal of Children’s Spirituality, 5(2), 131–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/713670914

(2008) Here's what you must think about nuclear power: Grappling with the spiritual ground of children's judgement inside and outside Steiner Waldorf education, International Journal of Children's Spirituality, 13 (1), 65 – 74.

(2006) 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.

(2005) Tensions between indoctrination and the development of judgement: The case against early closure, Environmental Education Research, 11 (2), 187 - 197.

(2000) Science: an unreliable friend to environmental education?, Environmental Education Research, 6 (3), 265 - 276.

(1999) Sustainability and the humanities. In. M. Ashley (ed) Improving Teaching and Learning in the Humanities. London: Falmer. 184 -203.

(1998) Economics, environment and the loss of innocence. In N. Clough and C. Holden Children as Citizens, London: Jessica Kingsley, 176 – 182.

(1998) Value as a Reason for Action in Environmental Education. Unpublished PhD thesis, Bristol: University of the West of England.