In an earlier blog I suggested that we are beginning to see evidence of avoiding using the word “sustainability.” “Sustainability is steadily falling into disrepute, mainly because of its reformist piecemeal applications, which exclude wholesale systems change.” In its place terms such as “regenerative paradigms” have come into play. In its broadest sense this encompasses a change in human culture. One of the keyways we can tackle our unsustainability is by adopting a re- generative human culture. This means adopting a healthy, resilient, and adaptable way of life that cares for the planet and cares for life by creating an awareness that this is the most effective way to create a thriving future for all of humanity. Most proponents of this change argue that this is not simply a technical, economic, ecological, or social shift, it must go hand in hand with an underlying shift in the way we think about ourselves, our relationships with each other and with life. This shift in thinking is a movement away from intellectual rigour, a space in which academics tend to feel most comfortable towards relational rigour andwhich recognises the complex and life sustaining interconnections between human and non-human beings, highlighting the responsibilities that such relationships necessarily entail. This creates the necessary epistemic preconditions for such relationships to flourish through respect and trust, reciprocity, accountability, and consent.
According to the authors of Transforming Universities in the Midst of a Global Crisis-this reorientation toward a regenerative relational educational paradigm is already underway. Examples include workshops and conferences on community energy, community education, localism, resilience, transition towns, interdisciplinary collectives, radical reading groups and various other forms of “edge work “are all part of this growing and evolving movement. But for it to work it must embrace those liminal places that sit both within and beyond the university-such as experimental and co-creative endeavours, where multiple pedagogies, cosmologies, epistemologies and more collide. These critical encounters generate what some refer to as the third space. It is in these messy and necessarily deceptive spaces that re-generative eco relational possibilities arise. Ultimately this movement involves overhauling the wholesale colonial mindset with its roots in ideas of certainty, permanence, growth, progress, and dominion. All of which are deeply antithetical to a regenerative relational educational movement. Ultimately, the challenge lies in, deconstructing and unlearning this worldview and instead cultivating an ethos of inter-connection of the primary basis for learning. Examples of this already exist such as the University Sydney’s celebrated social ecology programme. By participating in this programme, a generation of conservationists, activists and educators have benefited enormously from the deep appreciation of how transformative learning expands consciousness in general towards a more fundamental ecological consciousness. Social ecologies seeks to foster an understanding of our ecological interconnected connectedness, including our relationship with each other as a means of re engaging with life and all its complexity. In another ground-breaking course at Murdoch University -its environmental ethics course is the first of its kind in Australia. This course focuses on ecofeminism and eco-philosophy in practice; each of which critically explores the interconnected structural forces driving the domination, control and oppression of nature and women.
Several of these new educational approaches have contributed to one of the more successful global initiatives in recent years, called the Ecoversities Alliance( https://ecoversities.org ), an international hub for alternative regenerative relationship educations from around the world. As an emerging knowledge change movement and “silent learning revolution,” the alliance has developed new ways of contributing to the transformation of teaching and learning, placing significant pressures on mainstream institutions to rethink their teaching practices. Founded in 2008, the Alliance makes plain his opposition to the unjust and destructive and extractivist orientation of corporate capitalism. However, the extent to which such projects will disrupt the general market orientation of the modern university remains less clear. “For many of today’s students, the modern university experience is instrumentalist( aimed at job attainment and narrowly career orientated) dissociative( studying rather than experiencing) atomised, terminally irrelevant and boring. “
Taking all these insights into our education system is essential if we are to promote deep ecological learning that sustains all life forms and which views the Earth not just in terms of dominion, but in terms of coexistence and balance. A key challenge will be how universities in future might engage with diverse knowledge which encourages earth centred learning. Those involved in this transformation advocate that this must develop from a values framework that extends care and compassion beyond the realm of the human, towards the vast and complex webs of life in which we exist.
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