Learning and Sustainability in Dangerous Times: The Stephen Sterling Reader

By Stephen Sterling

Stephen Sterling is a pioneer in sustainability education. This collection of his essential writings is freshly curated by the author and offers a new overview and chapter by chapter introductions that link together his thinking. Sterling’s work offers a compelling and stimulating perspective on the critical issue of how learning and education can make a decisive difference to securing the future in an increasingly uncertain and threatened world. Together these essays provide a critical perspective on the historical context of the role of education and learning with respect to the possibility of securing the future against current negative trajectories. They offer a commentary on current debates on rethinking education in the light of multiple global crises and lay out the key elements of educational thinking and practice based on ecological and relational principles that offer a way forward. These essays inform the growing and urgent debate on the role and nature of education appropriate for these unprecedented times and are essential reading for educationalists and sustainability advocates.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Release date: Apr 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9781788216937

Stephen Sterling

Stephen Sterling is Emeritus Professor of Sustainability Education at the Sustainable Earth Institute, University of Plymouth.

Book preview

Learning and Sustainability in Dangerous Times

The Stephen Sterling Reader

Stephen Sterling’s book distills the wisdom of a lifetime of sustained effort, careful reflection, and drive to communicate and inspire action on these most important of contemporary issues. This engaging and inspiring book is not just for those involved in sustainability education but needs to be read and acted upon by anyone involved in formal education at all levels, and perhaps most pressingly by those involved in policy and curricular development. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Peter Higgins, Professor of Outdoor Environmental & Sustainability Education, University of Edinburgh

This anthology is a masterclass in exploring how education could and should play a substantive role in achieving a sustainable and equitable society on this more than human-ecological world. Stephen Sterling’s authentic and authoritative deliberative analysis clearly and succinctly addresses the causes and the necessary transformational changes we need in our education systems – urgently and at scale. And he advocates a convincing case for developing a deeper understanding of the internal ecology of human beings to secure a wider social planetary consciousness through collective learning.

Stephen Martin, Honorary Professor in Learning for Sustainability, Universities of Nottingham and Worcester

If there is one person who stands out as having made the most significant and sustained contribution to how we ought to view the role of education, particularly higher education, at a time when planetary systems are under acute and dangerous stress, it is Stephen Sterling. Readers new to his work will find much richness and inspiration here; those familiar with it will likely find additional insights in the chapters that constitute new material.

William Scott, Professor Emeritus, University of Bath

For several decades, Stephen Sterling has led the movement for transformative education based on changing our consciousness so that our knowledge and practice are embedded in wider social and ecological systems. Educators who want to prepare their students for the world that is coming would be well advised to read this powerful and inspiring book.

Molly Scott Cato, Professor Emerita of Green Economics, Roehampton University and former Green MEP

Stephen Sterling has been a crucial contributor to the global discourse on sustainability within education as we know it today. This book is both a compilation of his perspectives, reflecting on a lifetime of integrating sustainability principles into all aspects of education and a thoughtfully curated, future-oriented, and inspiring read. It will serve those interested or involved in embedding sustainability throughout all aspects of formal and non-formal education to address today’s multilayered challenges and to be well-prepared for yet unknown futures.

Charles Hopkins, UNESCO Chair in Reorienting Education towards Sustainability, York University, Toronto

Through this well-crafted anthology of his own writings, Stephen Sterling displays all the characteristics of the critically reflective scholar-practitioner that he has long been. This a very powerful and significantly provocative narrative. His call is for the transformation of the prevailing culture of education itself that far transcends the conventional pedagogical interpretations of education for sustainability and sustainability education. It is a call that urgently deserves our considered attention and one which I strongly endorse.

Richard Bawden, Professor Emeritus, Western Sydney University

Drawing on fifty years of experience, scholarship and dedication, this book compellingly names the educational dysfunction that has brought us to the brink of ecological catastrophe. The urgency is palpable: education systems must be reworked to contribute to the learning shifts required during these perilous times. This book is essential reading for all those in the education community that are committed to rethinking, reimagining and remaking education.

Bob Jickling, Professor Emeritus, Lakehead University, Ontario

In this collection, Stephen Sterling zones in on the shifts of paradigm and purpose we need, to reframe learning in favour of sustainability. A critical reminder that sustainability education is still easily neutralized inside existing systems, if it lacks the ambition of higher-order learning. This is a timely restatement of the depth of vision required, for an education that truly powers system change for sustainability.

Alex Ryan, Sustainability Director and UK National Teaching Fellow in Education for Sustainability

Stephen Sterling is clear, deliberate and persuasive in his quest to redesign and reposition education in a world that is threatened and dangerous but also systemically connected. This synoptic text takes a deep dive into the consequences of these turbulent times for learning; it brings together a cogent vision for education that has been constructed over decades of reflection, challenge and influence. Will this book change (how we see) education? It certainly has the potential to and our future may well depend on it.

Daniella Tilbury, Honorary Fellow, St Catharine’s College, Cambridge

This book presents a unique opportunity to delve into the profound insights of an inspiring sustainability thinker, researcher and educator. By reading these essays, one understands how best to connect critical thinking, vision and design to develop the kind of education that will provide the next generation with the ability to respond to today’s dangerous times and make the positive difference they are determined to make to their future.

Hilligje van‘t land, Secretary General, International Association of Universities

THE AUTHOR

Stephen Sterling is Professor Emeritus of Sustainability Education, Centre for Sustainable Futures and Sustainable Earth Institute, University of Plymouth, UK. Widely recognized as one of the leading voices in sustainability education, his first book (co-edited with John Huckle) was Education for Sustainability (1996), which was followed by the influential Schumacher Briefing Sustainable Education: Revisioning Learning and Change (2001). He co-founded the first masters course in the UK on sustainability education (at London South Bank University). He is the author or co-author of eight books and numerous chapters, papers and articles.

He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Schumacher Institute, Senior Fellow of the International Association of Universities (IAU), a National Teaching Fellow (NTF), and Fellow of the Alliance for Sustainability Leadership in Education (EAUC). Formerly, he was a teacher, deputy director of a national environmental education NGO, senior advisor to the UK Higher Education Academy on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), and visiting professor at the University of Bath. He has worked as a consultant in environmental and sustainability education in the academic and NGO fields nationally and internationally for more than four decades, including long-term advisory work with UNESCO – lastly as co-chair of the international jury for the UNESCO-Japan Prize on ESD. He is a Quaker and musician and lives on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon with his wife Deborah.

Learning and Sustainability in Dangerous Times

The Stephen Sterling Reader

STEPHEN STERLING

© Stephen Sterling 2024

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2024 by Agenda Publishing

Agenda Publishing Limited

PO Box 185

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE20 2DH

www.agendapub.com

ISBN 978-1-78821-690-6 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-78821-691-3 (paperback)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books

To the memory of our son Dan who left this life too soon. This book honours his generation and those to come – and is written with hope for our beautiful planetary home and all its inhabitants. A special mention and deep thanks to Deborah who has supported me throughout the years, and to our daughter Ellie who also makes the world a better place.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword by David W. Orr

Introduction

Part I – The view from here

1Choosing the future

2Probable or preferable futures: the responsibility of education

3Setting out the stall: propositions and key ideas

Part II – Platform pieces

4Planetary primacy and the necessity of positive dis-illusion (2019)

5Educating for the future we want (2021)

Part III – Re-thinking education

6Assuming the future: repurposing education in a volatile age (2017)

7Sustainable education (2009)

8Learning for resilience, or the resilient learner? Towards a necessary reconciliation in a paradigm of sustainable education (2010)

Part IV – Re-thinking our thinking

9Transformative learning and sustainability: sketching the conceptual ground (2011)

10At variance with reality: how to re-think our thinking (2014)

11Why the environment can be a misleading myth (2020)

12Ecological intelligence: viewing the world relationally (2009)

13Let’s face the music and dance? (2012)

Part V – Change-ability

14Vision and practice

15Afterword: the call of participation

Appendix

Resources

Selected chronological bibliography of the author

Credits

Index

Acknowledgements

I have been fortunate to have been part of a worldwide movement seeking a better world through the power of education and learning. There are many colleagues who over the years have lent me support, encouragement and stimulating ideas. I cannot thank them all personally here but wish particularly to mention the following: John Baines, Richard Bawden, John Fien, Harold Glasser, David Hicks, John Huckle, Bob Jickling, Satish Kumar, Alexander Leicht, Stephen Martin, David Orr, Alan Reid, William Scott, Daniella Tilbury, Hilligje van’t Land, Mirian Vilela, Ros Wade, Arjen Wals, Paul Warwick. Thank you to my editor Camilla Erskine for her constant support, encouragement and careful attention to this project.

Stephen Sterling

Devon

November 2023

Foreword: sustainability in dangerous times

Stephen Sterling is a friend of long standing going back to our collaboration in a Schumacher College course in the early 1990s. He is also one of the clearest thinkers and most prolific scholars working in field of education policy and pedagogy. Among other things, we share the conviction that ecological disorder reflects a prior deficiency in how we think, what we think about, and consequently how we live in a mind-boggling, complex ecosphere with feedback loops, leads and lags, and long gaps between cause and effect. All of which makes the work of improving minds central to teachers at every level of education and in virtually every discipline. The awareness that we live within an ecological community calls for humility, restraint, and reverence, traits not often associated with the industrial/technological mindset. But the stakes are higher now and the time for change shorter than we could see in the early 1990s. To wit.

In the summer of 2023, ocean temperatures near Miami hit 38.3°C and set record highs in the North Atlantic. Phoenix, Arizona recorded thirty consecutive days over 43.3°C; temperatures in the Persian Gulf and parts of India reached 50°C. Storms, fires, and rainfall broke records worldwide. The Earth is warmer than ever recorded and likely warmer than any time in the past million years. Beyond some point, rising temperatures will cause cascading systemic failures. We were warned as far back as the 1950s and with increasing frequency ever since but oblivious to danger we sped past all the warning signs in order to keep economic growth going, the profits rising, and wealth accumulating. James Lovelock once cautioned of a time when all our controls would fail leaving us as helpless as passengers on a boat with a stalled engine on the Niagara River just above the falls. Are we there? Hard to say. But it is a very good time to think about many things including that mysterious thing called thinking and how it might be improved to better the odds of our being around for the long haul.

One way or another all societies educate their young. Some by acculturation – hanging out with adults and seeing how things are done. Others, by formal schooling. Either way the question to the young has always been what will you make of yourself? And to adults how can we help you, or more often, help you to conform? A great deal depends on what adults assume about young minds, whether a blank slate or something already filled waiting to be drawn forth, i.e. educed. Early on, the context for learning was the natural surroundings and being alert to signals and signs of danger that made the difference between life and death. Now, not so much. Education mostly occurs indoors and is organized by fortified enclaves called departments and curricularized (a new word) around groups of symbols and abstractions. Whatever it is, nature is somewhere out yonder. For all of the many advances in learning, science, and culture we have lost our bearings in the blooming buzzing confusedness of a crowded, fast-moving, complex, and ironic world. We are long on how and short on why, as Lewis Mumford once put it. Worse, something like manic repetition has taken hold of us. We aim to grow the economy forever in a finite world and search for more efficient and clever ways to exploit while measuring success too often by the lifetime earnings of graduates engaged in such things and often in what David Graeber (2019) calls Bullshit jobs.

Amitav Ghosh (2017) believes that any posterity able to look back and think clearly will regard us as thoroughly deranged. While living as we do in planetary overshoot it would be difficult to argue otherwise. The caveat, and it is a large one, is that blame is not evenly distributed. The wealthy and educated have caused most of the environmental damage to Earth, not those living close to the bone. That is not an argument against education, but rather an admonition for a different kind of education that better conforms our thinking to the way Earth works as a biophysical system and makes more explicit connections between head, heart and hands.

Transforming educational institutions, however, is no easy thing to do. I doubt that it will happen by tinkering at the edges of the status quo. It will require, rather, a deeper reassessment and redesign of assumptions, goals, processes, and even the architecture of schools (Orr 2021). When we get around to it, here is a list of things we might consider:

• Ecological disorder reflects a prior disorder in the way we think and what we think about, making it central to educators;

• Humans are fast thinkers but slow learners;

• The idea of system implying our interconnectedness with all that was, is, and will be is the most radical and necessary in our language;

• True self-interest is inclusive, not exclusive;

• Not all knowledge is good and not all of it can be deployed responsibly in a world of feedback loops, leads and lags, surprises, and time between cause and effect; and new knowledge is not necessarily better than old knowledge rediscovered, i.e. slow knowledge;

• Formal education focuses most on one half of the brain and seldom engages the hands or heart; the result is often an inverted cripple with a single overdeveloped capacity;

• The planetary crisis cannot be attributed to the uneducated, but rather to the highly degreed i.e. itinerant professional vandals;

• Formal education, bounded as curriculum, can be completed in a few years but true learning is an unbounded process over a lifetime;

• Upshot: the problems are those of education not those in education.

The transformation has already begun (Sterling 2001, 2021). In the larger ecology of learning, situated on the periphery are many alternative small educational centres scattered around the world. They serve as important adjuncts to colleges and universities. They are not a substitute for formal education, but offer the opportunity for students, faculty, and others to step back and put things into perspective and to sort the important from the trivial. Professor Sterling and I have often participated in one such example, Schumacher College in Devon, England. The college occupies an old medieval house on an estate that dates back to 1388. Named for the author of Small is Beautiful, Schumacher College concerns itself more with large questions than with answers. Typically, the questions posed in seminars and conversations at Schumacher are the divergent kind that challenge paradigms and pomposity alike. The atmosphere is seldom as certain as in the higher reaches of the academic world. The scale is minuscule ‒ several hundred students per year. Its clockspeed ‒ the rate at which things happen ‒ is human-scaled. Its stock in trade is the kind of dependable old knowledge that has accumulated over many centuries. Daily routines at the college allow for serendipity and spontaneity. The focus is a kind of disciplined diversity and boundary crossing. The programme includes meditation, music, serious lectures, gardening, walks along the Channel coastline that trace geologic history. In other words, it is diverse but unified around the connection of body, mind, and soul. The College clientele is diverse. The classes in which we participated over the years included students of all ages from all kinds of backgrounds from all over the world. Still, they typically bonded quickly into a supportive community in part because they work together to keep the place going. More important, at the periphery and removed from the mad bustle and busy-ness of their ordinary lives, participants have the time to sort trivial from the important and observe the world and themselves from a calmer vantage point. We need such places and times to reconnect with our souls, the soil under our feet, and the Life all around us.

Over many years, Stephen Sterling’s writings have evolved into a cogent and useful philosophy of education as a preface to lifelong learning that fosters humility, humour, conviviality, breadth, and deeper connections to the Earth and neighbours alike. Dangerous times cry out for a new generation dangerous to ecological ignorance, narcissism, greed, authoritarianism, linear thinking, and hubris.

David W. Orr

Professor of Practice

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

Arizona State University

References

Ghosh, A. (2017). The Great Derangement. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Graeber, D. (2019). Bullshit Jobs. New York: New York: Simon & Schuster.

Orr, D. (2021). Building as pedagogy: Oberlin’s Adam Joseph Lewis Center. In Buildings and Cities (2021) https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/building- pedagogy.html.

Sterling, S. (2001). Sustainable Education: Re-visioning Learning and Change. Schumacher Briefings 6. Dartington: Green Books.

Sterling, S. (2021). Educating for the future we want. Opening essay for GTI Forum, The Pedagogy of Transition, Great Transition Initiative. https://greattransition.org/gti-forum/pedagogy-transition-sterling.

Introduction

The fundamental challenge of sustainability goes far beyond that of environmentalism. The question is whether we can fulfil our unique potential as human beings, to understand our behaviour and its consequences. To do this, we must review every area of human life [and] … transcend the current limitations on our thinking if we are to become aware and rational beings in a way that no other species has ever had to do or been able to do before.

Clayton & Radcliffe (1996)

A welcome

One of the benefits of getting older is gaining an overview of things. You obtain a clearer standpoint from which to view trends, patterns, and changes. All too quickly, you also find yourself journeyed from a young advocate, passionate about the environment and education and keen to learn, to one of the old guard, still committed but possibly a bit wiser about the possibilities of and barriers to change. Welcome to this selection of my writing – a project I had in mind long before it finally came to fruition, and one which reflects my learning journey to date.

This Introduction outlines the purpose of the Reader and provides a context for what follows – including some background on the philosophical orientation that informs my writing. I’ve been working in environmental and sustainability education for some five decades, first inspired as a young man by the wave of environmentalism of the early 1970s. The calls for change towards a more sustainable and equitable society – ever present throughout those fifty years – have become much more insistent and urgent of late as clear evidence of critical global issues mounts and existential questions about achieving a viable future for humanity have become unavoidable.

In response, this book aims to contribute a timely and original perspective on the key issue of how learning and education can make a decisive difference to securing the future in an increasingly uncertain and threatened world. It is based on a core of previously published papers and articles which are here booked-ended by six new chapters (including this prefacing chapter), and it is offered as an introduction to my work and field of inquiry over a long period. Full details of the previously published chapters are listed under Credits on pp. 233–4. There is a lot of original material on my website,¹ but in this Reader I have sought to produce a new and coherent volume, which can stand alongside rather than reproduce that material.

All of my writing implicitly or explicitly constructs and builds on the premiss that a change of cultural and also of educational paradigm is urgently needed, transcending the dominant mechanistic and reductionist view of reality which has shaped educational thinking, policy and practice for decades. Rather, I have argued that it is necessary to embrace consciously an ecological or relational worldview as it holds the potential to underpin the educational and urgent social transformations that are necessary to secure a safer future than that currently in prospect.

This has been the fundamental theme of my work over many years, and it recurs in the pieces chosen for the book. There is therefore – and inevitably – a degree of overlap and connectivity between the chapters here, for example, some key ideas are revisited and re-examined. But I have endeavoured to ensure that while each chapter can be read on a stand-alone basis, taken together they form a coherent whole.

It is not possible to make the case for an ecological paradigm and elaborate its implications within the constraints of one chapter, rather aspects tend to be touched upon in each piece. So, reading more than one essay in this collection should afford a fuller picture of the argument as a whole, as I chose papers that I believe complement rather than duplicate. A new introduction written for each chapter – including those that comprise the previously published material (Chapters 4‒13) should help the reader to see how the contents interrelate.

When I set out on this project, I thought it would be a fairly straightforward matter of pulling together some of my writing, adding some commentary, topping and tailing the collection with some new pieces – and that would be that. In the event, it has been rather more testing. Having written published material over some forty years, this has been almost a voyage of discovery of my own work, some of which I had pretty much forgotten about. There is a good deal of original material in my archives, and trying to achieve a comprehensive survey and retain a synoptic memory of it all has been a challenge. Within the confines of one book, inevitably I have had to decide what to include and what would need to be omitted. The selection of candidates from the total published material available presented a number of challenges. Some of what I consider my strongest work lies in chapters (in others’ books) which are too long and detailed to be presented here, whilst my doctoral thesis (Sterling 2003) written over a period of more than eight years remains a sort of magnum opus, should readers wish to delve more deeply. (I had intended to convert this into a book, but at the time it was not possible.) So, I have gone for writing which is mostly quite short and accessible to the general reader as well as the academic reader interested in the subject matter.

The structure of the book

The View from here section (Part I) comprises three new chapters. The first provides an overview of how people and the planet have come to the current dangerous state which endangers the future, outlines how we must choose between two pathways, and argues that this depends on achieving a planetary consciousness through collective learning – which is already underway. The second chapter reviews the culpability – but also the positive potential – of education and learning in relation to our troubled world and suggests that transformative learning within educational systems based upon an ecological paradigm is necessary if the potential for transformative social change is to be realized.

The third chapter sets out the stall of my work and argument in the form of 50 propositions. It also includes some key ideas and models, which are supplemented in the Appendix.

The next three sections (Parts II–IV) comprise ten chapters that have been previously published – so this is the anthology part of the book. The two chapters in the Platform Pieces section (Part II) lay down some ideas and perspectives that define my work. Following on, Part III explores the theme of Re-thinking education in the light of the sustainability agenda, a topic which has been central to my writing for a long time. Part IV Re-thinking our thinking focuses more on social learning and change and on how we can think more ecologically or relationally. Finally, Part V Change-ability, includes some short pieces and models intended to help take this work forward and put it into practice, as well as a concluding reflective Afterword.

Research questions

Over the decades I’ve tussled with a fundamental research question, which can be summarized as follows:

How should – and how can – education and learning be re-thought and re-configured to make a significant and central contribution