A Brave New Wild

A new report entitled ‘Count the cost of 2020: a year of climate breakdown’,  published by the charity Christian Aid, has once again highlighted the existential crisis we face from Climate Change. Unsurprisingly, the burden falls disproportionately on poor nations, like Bangladesh, where the 2020 floods covered almost a quarter of the land area of this beautiful but blighted nation.

The world’s 10 costliest weather disasters of 2020 saw insured damages of $150bn, topping the figure for 2019 and reflecting a long-term impact of global warming.

These disasters claimed at least 3,500 lives and displaced more than 13.5 million people.  In fact, the true cost of the year’s climate-enhanced calamities was far higher because most losses were uninsured.

Paul Wapner, in a brave and pithy new book called ‘Is Wildness Over?’wrestles with the question – probably the biggest question humanity faces – “what is to be done?”

It explores the three main ways of framing this question, namely the economics of dealing with mitigation and adaptation: the technical solutions and the ethical response via human rewilding. But his premise is an unusual one for many of us who situate our thoughts and lives in this knotty problem. He argues that we are living at a time when wildness increasingly encroaches and subsumes our lives – like the current impacts of the global pandemic, and the growing influence of climate change. Wildness from this perspective refers to the unwieldly or wicked character of the more than human world. As he enumerates the etymology of the word wild suggests something which is self-willed, even perverse: one which expresses itself as part of its own unique dynamics. Wildness also finds a place in human affairs like war or the social and economic complexities of Brexit. It even impacts on the chaotic behaviour of large crowds in sporting events or demonstrations. All of which are characterised by unexpected dynamics and take on a life of themselves and for most of us it spells fear, peril, and danger, which we detest and try to avoid. During the Holocene humanity sought progressively to avoid the unpredictability of wildness by immunising themselves from fluctuations in weather – in their dwellings and their food production systems and more recently using cars and aviation to travel long distances. There are many more examples in the book of our attempts to minimize wildness; one of the biggest being economic globalisation enabling manufacturing and distribution to avoid the vagaries of  localised weather and the availability of base materials. But economic globalisation  has wreaked a plague of unpredictability on the planet and its inhabitants  -as Wapner argues the feral has remerged!

So does technology have an answer along with those who promote it, the so called” Earthmasters”. They argue that by  harnessing some forms of geoengineering by disciplining the atmosphere itself  or to reverse biodiversity by genetically engineering evolution could offer a solution, but only if adopted at a global scale and in a manner analogous to how our “convenience culture” got us here. They see this as a further step in the human mastery of our planetary biogeochemical systems.  But this book argues from a hugely different perspective. It proposes a process of rewilding human experience such that we embrace more unpredictability into our lives and repurposing our pursuit of controlling everything. It offers a powerful strategy and ethical imperative for a rewilding that disconnects us from our comfort zones to live within a compassionate act of understanding with one another and all other lifeforms. This will need us to develop coping mechanisms for adapting to climate change and global pandemics along with the immense suffering they cause. Wapner sees this as a way of learning to live a more humbling form of life so that the living planet can sustain itself in partnership with a significant human presence. As he says , the Earth is in spasm so, we have the choice of either “shoving wildness from the planet itself or befriending it.”

As James Redbanks observes in his recent book- English Pastoral in developing transformative regenerative farming systems, many farmers are starting to work together to make things more nature based by fencing off river corridors and digging out adjacent ponds to provide wilderness corridors, along with wildflower meadows, liberated from artificial fertilisers. The old “us” and “them” human rewilding divide is fading now.

These are the two books that inspired this post.

Sustainability Leadership

THE POSITIVE DEVIANT: SUSTAINABILITY LEADERSHIP in a PERVERSE WORLD by SARA PARKIN EARTHSCAN 2010

This is a review I wrote for the Institution of Environmental Sciences in 2010-It has even more relevance to our current existential predicament now. So much of what we do is unsustainable and there seems to be a paucity of sustainability literate leadership in just about every field of human endeavour.

The ability to lead in building a more sustainable society requires far more than knowledge about sustainability it requires a facility for bringing about change which deals with complexity, uncertainty, multiple stakeholders, competing values, lack of end points and ambiguous terminology. In other words, leadership which can handle “wicked problems!”
The search for charismatic or “super leaders” to bring about this change has exercised the minds of many in the environmental movement, including many in the environmental professions. Some of the debate has inevitably been targeted at the paucity of political leadership – nationally and internationally, as exemplified by the limited outcomes at the world summit in Johannesburg, and more recently in Copenhagen and probably in Cancun, Mexico.
Sustainability is a big issue, probably the biggest there is. It is about whether there are birds singing in the trees, about climate change, about poverty alleviation, diminishing natural resources and about global security. It matters. Whilst it has caught the attention of some big companies such as Shell, BT, BP, Marks and Spencer, Tesco and Barclays, so far it has not caused CEOs and leaders of organisations to wake up in the middle of the night!
Perhaps the reason why sustainability only keeps a few people awake at night is that it is complex and often confusing and hence difficult to decide what to do about it. Most CEOs and other leaders are primarily trying to keep their institutions financially viable and like most of us, they have ‘a too big switch off’ mentality.
Sarah Parkin’s book is an impressive attempt to address the leadership gulf that currently exists in addressing this global issue. It describes and analyses how leadership is a complex cultural and behavioural process which influences the thoughts and behaviour of others. And it asserts that it is as much about followers and “sustainable followership” as it is about “sustainability leadership”. It is about getting people to move in the right direction, gaining their commitment and motivating them to achieve their goals because leaders need to achieve the task in hand and at the same time maintain effective relationships with individuals and groups of individuals.
The commitment of staff at all levels is vital if sustainability is to become part of the language and culture of an organisation. Strong leadership is crucial in creating opportunities for action and innovation at other levels. This process has been termed ‘vacuum management’ just as a cyclist creates a vacuum into which other racers can slip stream forward, so a leader, taking an organisation in a radical new direction creates a vacuum for others to fill with fresh ideas. Sir John Browne, now Lord Browne formerly CEO of BP, provides an example of such leadership. He took a stand against the prevailing views of the oil industry in May 1997 by publicly acknowledging the reality of climate change and withdrew BP Amoco from the Global Climate Coalition. He then wrote to the 350 senior managers in BP asking how the company might reduce its CO2 emissions. The response was overwhelmingly positive. “… no one could fail to miss the extraordinary level of support, the sheer excitement, within the company. For me, it is a matter of pride to report that BP employees do not leave their values at the door when they come to work.”

Whilst it is not the purpose of this book to explore in detail current leadership theory and practice it does emphasise the importance of transformational leadership in facilitating the integration of sustainable development into an organisational change process. According to the Leadership College, transformational leadership is characterised by a process that goes beyond an employee’s own self-interest and helps them contribute towards the resolution of societal issues within the purpose and mission of their organisation (like Lord Browne’s stance on climate change within the oil industry). An essential element of transformational leadership is having a clear collective vision and being able to communicate it effectively to all employees. And as role models, transformational leaders should inspire employees to put the good of the organisation (its sustainability in economic, social and environmental terms) above self-interest. They also stimulate employees to be more innovative, and they themselves take risks and are not afraid to use unconventional, but always ethical, means to achieve a collective vision. This form of leadership goes beyond traditional forms of ‘transactional leadership’, which emphasises corrective actions, mutual exchanges and rewards only when performance expectations are met. This form of leadership also relies mainly on centralised control through instructing each person what, when and how to carry out each task. Transformational leadership involves more trust and responsibility in employees and hence is more developmental and constructive. Much of the “cult of leadership” is centred on the charismatic characteristics which are deemed to be required. But as Parkin emphasises it is not just about charisma it is about the ability to persuade and transform followers to subordinate their individual wants to the wider needs of the organisation and society. The problem then is really as much about the poverty of followership as it is about the paucity of earth literate leadership. And yet the goal of most recruiters is to find charismatic leaders to resolve apparently irresolvable wicked problems. The most significant message for me in this book is that the most successful organisations are those where the errors of the leaders are compensated for by their followers – perhaps the title should have included the phrase: The Positive Deviant (and all of those crucial) “compensatory followers!” For anyone aspiring to be sustainability literate positive deviant this is a recommended read. It is full of good practical ideas, tools and techniques grounded in Parkin’s lifelong experience in the pursuit of sustainability.

“Sustainability leadership is like the abominable snowman whose footprints are everywhere but is nowhere to be seen.”

Learning for Sustainability in Times of Accelerating Change


Edited by Arjen E.J. Wals and Peter Blaze Corcoran. Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2012. 550 pages. (€) 69.00 (hardback) ISBN: 978-90-8686-203-0.


I reviewed this massive book for the Journal of Education for Sustainable Development in 2012 and set it in the context of a prescient album by the Indie Group ILiKETRAiNS: “And we regret the process of our age: progress, stagnation and decay” (He who Saw the Deep ,2010).


The Epic of Gilgamesh’s existential themes made it particularly appealing to German authors in the years following World War two. Even Saddam Hussein, made much of the story of Gilgamesh during his autocratic reign over Iraq.
The epic tale tells of Gilgamesh undertaking a long and perilous journey to discover the secret of eternal life. He eventually learns that “Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands.
“I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh. This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, returning he rested, engraved on a stone the whole story.” (Sanders 1960)
Epic tales of floods (climate change), knowledge, wisdom and uncertainty set the context to this ambitious book published at a time not unlike the present impacts of the global pandemic. A time when the world’s leaders struggle to come to terms with the impact of Covid -19, widening global austerity, major conflict zones and catastrophic and unpredictable weather systems in virtually all parts of the globe. What does this mean for humanity and in particular the global education community? How do we respond to ‘tipping points’, when situations move from stability to instability as human activity crosses planetary boundaries, such as elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations leading to climate change? Is there a path towards more resilience, adaptation, and renewal in the face of such unprecedented and accelerating change around the world?
Arjen E.J. Wals and Peter Blaze Corcoran(2006) have argued that sustainable development cannot be an end in itself but as part of a journey consisting of several inputs or drivers for transformative learning. While there is a wide range of ideas as to what sustainable development might entail, the lack of consensus about an exact meaning in variable contexts mitigates against global prescription. More importantly, to demand consensus about the perspective of an ill-defined issue such as sustainable development, is undesirable from a deep-and deliberative democracy perspective and is essentially ‘mis-educative’.
Deliberative democracy offers a way of thinking about difference, as opposed to consensus. Democracy, from this perspective, depends on difference, dissonance, conflict resolution, and antagonism, so that deliberation is fundamentally indeterminate. Any deliberative exploration of sustainable development raises inevitable tensions among the three P’s (People, Planet, Profit) or the three E’s (Efficiency, Environment, Equity). All of which are prerequisites for rather than barriers to higher and deep learning.
As I and many others have argued Universities have a responsibility to create space for alternative thinking. They have a profound moral and ethical role to play in developing students’ attributes and competencies. The acquisition of these qualities is essential to cope with uncertainty, poorly defined situations, and conflicting or at least diverging norms, values, interests, and reality constructs. The development of these dynamic qualities and related competencies sets higher education apart from training institutions and avoids prescription which stifles creativity, homogenizes thinking, narrows choices, limits autonomous thinking. It emphasises wisdom over knowledge acquisition-and prioritises the application of knowledge for the betterment of humanity and social progress.
Given this level of uncertainty and complexity there can be no universally applicable recipe for implementing sustainability in higher education. University governance systems cannot rely solely on limited structural use of economic incentives, rules, attainment standards, and regulations to enforce sustainability in higher education. Sustainability is an inchoate concept which can only derive democratic meaning with the involvement of multiple stakeholders in the university enterprise- both the academic and non-academic community within it but also the wider stakeholder community within which it sits. This can then resolve the “ wicked question” of what a university is for.
It ultimately needs a university stakeholder sustainability assembly-which invests in a transformative deliberative learning process and crucially deals with the inevitable tension among the divergence of interests, values, and worldviews on the one hand – and the need for the shared resolution of issues that arise in working on sustainability in higher education on the other.
“Plato’s division between well-educated, judicious leaders and the crazy and uproarious masses came to be so widely accepted that it’s easy to forget that he was writing as a contrarian in his time. Higher education in Greece then was often in the hands of the Sophists: private tutors, thinkers, and craft masters. Plato believed that engaging in higher thought for wages was corrupting and schlock-prone—the corporate lecture circuit of its day—and he rarely missed an opportunity to dump on those who did it. (His efforts succeeded: “sophistry” remains a sneer more than two thousand years later.) Yet the Sophists do seem to have believed that crowd wisdom was true wisdom. Aristotle, Plato’s student, ended up sharing this belief. “


Arjen E.J. Wals and Peter Blaze Corcoran(2006); Sustainability as an Outcome of Transformative Learning. In Drivers and barriers for Implementing Sustainable Development in Higher education. UNESCO Technical Paper no 3.

Can philosophy help humanity cope with the complexity of reality?


In an earlier blog, I explored the ideas of objectivity and subjectivity and how different world views impact on our understanding of reality. In 2002 philosopher John Gray also explored these issues and their impact on human thought in a book called Straw Dogs. He wanted to attack the unthinking beliefs of thinking people. The book is a powerful and withering critique of liberal humanism, one of our dominant worldviews.
He suggests that “The prevailing secular world view is a pastiche of current scientific orthodoxy and pious hope”. Which from a Darwinian perspective reinforces the fact that we are animals but which those who call themselves Humanists rail against because they argue that unlike animals, we have choices – or free will. But the idea of free will has its origins not in science but in religion. Not just any religion, but the Christian faith itself! This dichotomy underpins our failure to respond to the existential threat of climate change and our unsustainable lifestyles. We are beset by a huge array of false news, self-illusion, echo chambers, myths, and stories. Our beliefs do not map onto the actual structure of the world (reality). This makes it increasingly difficult for us to make rational, evidence based and logical decisions. This cognitive dissonance between belief-systems and rational thought and action is a major issue and unless we confront it, we will make no real progress towards the goal of a sustainable future.


Gray goes much further and critiques the “religion of Humanism” and its post Christian faith in humanity’s ability to make the world better through scientific advances; their idea of progress he argues is a secular version of the Christian belief in providence or the divine guidance from God.
However, our belief in progress has other origins. The growth of scientific knowledge is cumulative whereas human life is not since any gains in knowledge in one generation may be lost in the next. Our pursuit of more knowledge from all its sources is a mixed blessing. It has offered us longevity along with better living standards and at the same time has allowed us to wreak havoc on a planetary scale.
Scientific progress has been a huge part of modern society. But an equal emphasis has not been placed on the application of ethics as an integral part of scientific enquiry. Scientists are meant to be objective; they are not required to think about the social implications of their research. Knowledge and scientific progress are simply deemed to be good for their own sake. But as the following example points out this inequality between science and ethics has had devastating impacts.


Take a specific example, like the right to bear arms which is protected under American law by the Second Amendment. This is undoubtedly a controversial topic, and one that’s been even more fiercely debated since there have been innumerable school shootings recently. Many of which resulted in multiple deaths and injuries (in 2018 there were 8 making 18 school shootings in total). Is this still a necessary legal entitlement in the 21st century, given that since 1887 ,when this legislation was passed, there is no longer a “Wild West?” Coupled with the fact that scientific progress has resulted in the development of semi-automatic guns which allow one person to kill so many more people than the guns that were around in 1887. Is it in any sense ethical for a politician to support the continuation of this law?


Is humanity’s search for progress to be shaped only by its longing for immortality or should it be based on our yearnings for a good life as an integrated part of a self- sustaining biosphere?
Maybe this implies the need for a clear and unambiguous ecocentric theory of ethics as an essential prerequisite to the creation of a more sustainable world and one in which a programme of green citizenship based on virtue ethics, plays a significant role? Could this provide a philosophical blueprint for a more balanced, sustainable world.

A LIFE ON OUR PLANET

I was invited to a virtual event last Sunday by WWK-UK to hear from Sir David Attenborough about his new film on Netflix.

 A Life on our Planet is a feature-length documentary which tells the story of life on Earth and the ecological changes of the last century, many of which have been filmed and orated by this influential 94-year-old  commentator.

It is what he describes as his “witness statement”, as a conservationist who has visited every continent and made countless hours of TV programmes about the planet. A Life on Our Planet explores how natural habitats have changed and how we can save them.

Attenborough said he has had an “extraordinary life”, but “we are replacing the wild with the tame.”

It is quite an extraordinary message – a witness statement from a single individual who recently reached a record 1 million followers on the social media platform Instagram!

Will the message resonate I wonder? Geological time versus an individual’s lifetime – can it light humanities “blue behavioural touch paper” and transform our consumerist lifestyles?

Another extraordinary feature of the film is that it starts in Chernobyl where there are still no humans living there following the massive explosion which released  radioactive Caesium around the globe. Yet, there is an abundance of other forms of life , but an eerie silence, no birdsong and a  haunted feeling about its former inhabitants – with school notebooks left on the floors of empty schools. It represents a world of nature without Humans.

The documentary, created with Silverback Films and environmental organisation WWF, looks at some of the biggest challenges our planet is facing today, while also offering a message of hope and solutions into what can be done to stop this trend of destruction.

 Attenborough advocates that “Saving our planet is no longer a technological problem, it’s a communications challenge.” I agree.

The film does not just focus on the negative but tries to show how things can improve if humans do things such as rewilding areas and using renewable energy. As with any Attenborough documentary, the film features stunning scenery and wildlife footage from around the world, but also devastating shots such as large chunks of polar ice melting and all-encompassing pollution.

The film makes suggestions on how we can reverse the planet’s decline, such as with the use of renewable energy.

Film director Jonnie Hughes said of Attenborough:  “He has witnessed a serious decline in the living world over his lifetime (he began filming in 1954!). He has seen the rainforests retreating and the grasslands emptying and has searched ever harder for species hanging out in hidden corners of the world.”

He added: “He is dedicated to lending his considerable profile to efforts to halt and then reverse this decline, and he’s in a good place to do so.”

Twelve Principles for Reinventing the 21 Century University

Universities are much in the news, but it is not good news. The rise in the  pandemic R number in the UK is having a profound impact on university students as they return in their thousands to campuses to find in many of them that they face total lockdown. So, no immersive quality campus experience for them, as the virus spreads amongst them.

We hear from university leaders about how they are creating more online teaching with mixtures of blended learning which they claim will offer a different but high-quality experience. But I do not hear how this will reflect on the learning outcomes for those exposed to this new regime nor of the job prospects in a post covid world?

Nor is there a clear message about the contribution universities can make to societal transformation, as I have argued in some earlier blogs. Especially in those which advocate their potentially significant  role in civic renewal.

A recent blog by Otto Scharmer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has seriously questioned their role in contributing to social progress. I agree, with him their role is very unclear. And this is clearly not on the policy radar for the Department for Education or Universities UK and more importantly it is not a priority for the university quality and standards regulator-the Office for Students.

The problem is lack of political will and a “knowing-doing” gap, which Otto calls “a disconnect between our collective consciousness and our collective action.” All of which leads to social breakdown, political unrest, and massive environmental destruction, including the extinction of our planetary biosphere.

He argues that as we move from one geological epoch-the Holocene to the Anthropocene it is time to reconceive the 21 Century University.

He explores these issues by mapping our current actions onto a set of Operating Systems(OS)-set out below.

In most of the sectors above he suggests we are stuck in OS levels 1, 2 and 3 and seem unable to progress beyond  to level 4.

“The main problems in our universities and schools today is the lack of vertical literacy. Vertical literacy is the capacity to lead transformative change, i.e., to shift the level of operating from 1.0 and 2.0 to 3.0 and 4.0 as needed by:

· seeing yourself — i.e. self-awareness — both individually and collectively
· accessing your curiosity, compassion, and courage
· deepening the space for listening and conversation
· reshaping the type of organizing from centralized to ecosystem
· cultivating governance mechanisms that operate from seeing the whole
· holding the space for profound transformation: letting go and letting come”

University Vice Chancellors and their deans largely operate at OS level 2(education). Whilst there are some exceptions(see my blogs on Arizona State University President Michael Crow), most exhibit epistemic myopia when it comes to building the capacity for vertical development towards level 4. “They think and operate in terms of horizontal development — for example, adding another skill here or another course there — not in terms of vertical development, which essentially deals with the evolution of consciousness. To use the analogy of the smartphone: they think in terms of adding another app, not in terms of upgrading the entire operating system.”

Plutarch argued two thousand years ago that “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”  But education keeps on filling and often drowning the recipients! As Richard Bawden and colleagues at Hawkesbury College in New South Wales  found there are innovative ways of learning that avoid the “knowing-doing gap”

The key for them was to shift the place of learning  from campus to community. They knew that students learn better by doing.  So, they created action learning programmes in rural communities where the student becomes  the change agent, and the teacher is the coach, the helper who holds the space for the learner to facilitate their highest potential. Developing action learning at scale requires quite different learning infrastructures, including classrooms that are not primarily about content delivery but about reflection on action, which requires a different type of faculty that can hold the space for student-centred forms of learning.

“Learners and change makers must cultivate different ways of knowing. While action learning shifts the outer place of learning from the classroom to the real world, whole person learning shifts the inner place of learning from the head to the heart, and from the heart to the hand. Activating these different intelligences requires a deepening of the learning process by cultivating curiosity (open mind), compassion (open heart), and courage (open will).”

If we are to transform our universities to meet the 12 principles advocated by Otto,  then we need to co-create with students and communities a new and adaptive “Ecological University”. In my view this can only be achieved through a process of deliberative democracy involving students, academics, and the communities which the university serves (see my earlier thoughts on Civic Universities and Civic Agreements in Holland). And learners must become adaptive ecosystem leaders and as such become context and place based- change-makers.  They will need the competencies  to convene a diverse group of stakeholders and partners and then take them on a journey from a silo to a systems view, from” ego-system to eco-system” awareness. Creating the sustainable and ethical space for such a journey is at the heart of all major leadership challenges today. It is a capacity that is largely missing in organizations and insufficiently developed in our Universities.  Our Universities  could then offer real-world platforms and ecosystem partnerships in the cities and regions that they are embedded in and enhance that capacity by providing relevant out of classroom learning laboratories for student participation and learning by doing.

Michael Crow and the New Realms of Learning at Arizona State University

I have just watched a short video(made in June 2020) of Michael Crow-President of Arizona State University articulating clearly and convincingly this university’s approach to learning post Covid. I would describe it as visionary, comprehensive and accessible, along with many new features; one in particular called by the extraordinary name “Alien Zoo” which they are developing with the help of Steven Spielberg and Dreamscape ( https://www.topionetworks.com/people/steven-spielberg-55b118feba49fadb550005a4 ) As you might imagine it is extra-terrestrial too and linked to ecosystems and planetary sustainability.
My only concern is the focus on the acquisition of knowledge and knowledge creation and limited reference to its wise social and political application .
You can view his talk here: https: //youtu.be/LilG6ekrpjk
Is this the creation of a transformative and adaptive 21 Century University?

Reflecting on including environmental aspects in research integrity and ethics

Guest blog by Judith Krauss (SIID), Stephen Allen (Management), Renee Timmers (Music), Phil Warren (Animal and Plant Sciences) and Matt Watson (Geography)

Reposted from SIDD Blog.

How important is it to reflect on environmental aspects as part of research integrity and ethics? On 5 June 2020, an online-only workshop supported by the University of Sheffield’s (TUoS) Research Ethics Committee took place to begin answering this crucial, but challenging question.

The workshop, which was organised collaboratively by the authors, was conducted virtually through Blackboard Collaborate. The participants were from a diverse range of disciplines at TUoS (including, Neuroscience, East Asian studies, Animal and Plant Science and Philosophy), different geographical backgrounds and career stages (PhD researchers to Professors).

The workshop included contributions on environmental campaigning, carbon accounting and Higher Education activities in the ethics and environment space. It was intended to initiate a conversation within TUoS about the potential inclusion of environmental aspects into research ethics and integrity, if we should be doing this, and how this could be achieved. The outputs generated included a report (available from judith.e.krauss@gmail.com) and a creative summary by artist Luke Scoffield (enclosed with this blog).

Listening to learn

The first contribution came from Prof Fraser MacBride, Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Manchester. He reflected on his successful experience of campaigning for an environmental policy within his discipline, explaining the motivations and principles underlying the document. The British Philosophical Association’s environmental policy is now supported by 23 departments and 7 learned societies and commits signatories to researching responsibly given accelerating climate change. Significantly, among a multitude of e-mails that Fraser received in response to his requests for support, none raised significant ethical questions along the lines of ‘What do we owe future generations/nature?’ – there was a general acceptance of a debt. Objections rather focused on what the policy would mean for personal or professional lives, referencing employers’ emphasis on travel through promotion and probation processes, the heavy reliance of academia/REF on international networks, the potential limitations of an individual’s actions, or annoyance that the policy was not radical enough.

The second contribution was from Prof John Barrett, Chair in Energy and Climate Policy at the University of Leeds, who explained how a very sharp decline in carbon emissions is required to attain net zero in the UK by 2040, but how this rapid decline is not happening. He highlighted how carbon accounting at an organisational level includes both direct emissions (i.e. company-owned vehicles, fuel combustion) and indirect emissions (e.g. purchased electricity/materials, waste disposal, employee travel). Reflecting on his involvement in carbon reduction initiatives at the University of Leeds, he described how an analysis by Townsend and Barrett (2015) showed that ca. 80% of carbon emissions are indirect emissions (e.g. occurring in the supply chains of purchased goods and services), over which the University has less control. Nevertheless, the University makes decisions about how to manage their buildings, a high contributor, departments decide how to organise labs, principal investigators define how research grants are spent (e.g., is budget allowed for low-carbon travel or procurement options?). A key message was not to give responsibility for carbon emissions solely to Sustainability Services, but to embed this responsibility across the University, e.g. through questions around ‘Have you considered …?’ at the point of purchase, or in procurement forms. From John’s experience, asking questions and monitoring activity can raise awareness and reduce carbon even without a hard target.

The third contribution by Judith Krauss, supported by the rest of the organising team, illustrated how various ethics and integrity frameworks and policies (e.g. EU 2013, UKRI 2013, UKRI n.d.) include references to the environment as part of a broader ‘do no harm’ principle. However, this does not necessarily translate, e.g. in the REF or in universities’ ethics policies, into systematically considering the potential ecological consequences of the choices made about how research is completed. A notable exception that was mentioned is the ethics approval process by the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences and its explicit consideration of the climate emergency and other environmental considerations. Conversely, many environmental measures e.g. around reducing flying (Tyndall or University of Iceland travel policies) do not make explicit any ethical or moral reasoning. The two drivers – ethics/integrity vs. ecological initiatives – start from different places and would require careful integration to be able to respond to a key question: if we wish to integrate environment with research integrity and ethics at TUoS, how do we do this in ways that are generative and constructive and not ‘just’ a box-ticking exercise?

Let’s apply this to our work

In the second part of the workshop, small group discussions firstly acknowledged considerable environmental impacts of our research, ranging from flying via plastics used in lab settings or working with endangered species and habitats, to electricity for on-campus work.

Secondly, there was widespread strong agreement, especially in line with student voices, that these environmental impacts are very much ethical considerations. Importantly, ethics specialists emphasised that, since TUoS research ethics policy is concerned only with research involving human participants, they would have to be considered under the research integrity remit.

Thirdly, it was agreed that there is a critical need for education and action across TUoS beyond any formal processes and policies, though there is a need not to place additional excessive burdens on individuals/early career staff and recognise that different disciplines have different needs. For example, including a slide in research presentations about carbon emissions generated through the completion of the research could start to highlight possibilities for change in research culture. Also, it is important to recognise positively when individuals make decisions about research activities (e.g. not flying to a conference) which are based on clear environmental considerations. There was also discussion about potential lighter-touch research integrity evaluations of all research projects to take into account environmental aspects.

So what do we do now?

In summary, there was broad agreement that it is important to consider the environment as an important intrinsic element of research integrity and ethics. Participants suggested that they found the workshop to be a useful space for learning and discussion, which encouraged them to pursue action in their respective contexts. Their one-sentence summaries of key take-aways included wanting to change departmental policies, showcasing people who complete their research in environmentally conscious ways, and the need to make institutional change happen across the board, including in career progression processes.

The workshop highlighted the far-reaching implications of taking climate change seriously and the need to make this a collective priority. Whilst there is a role for grassroots initiatives and personal action, change is particularly required at a collective and institutional level, where environmental considerations are taken into account in the support, funding and career development structures. Since the workshop, the organising team have begun to take this conversation forward within TUoS particularly in processes of reviewing research integrity policy, as well as through the Sustainability Delivery Group.

Climate Assembly UK: Talking about the whether…

Guest Blog by Barry Carney, Research Associate with Change Agents UK

The UK is legally committed to net zero emissions by 2050. This target was put forward by the Government’s statutory advisor, the Committee on Climate Change, for delivering on the UK’s commitments to the Paris Agreement.

The measures are a continued response to the extensive reports, evidence and lived realities which attest to current, worsening trajectories away from a sustainable, equitable and thriving world.

If taken seriously – and it must be – ‘Net-Zero by 2050’has huge impacts on government discourse and policymaking; industry regulations; energy provision; transport systems; the clothes we wear; the food we buy; the physical ‘lay of the land’ around us; and more.

Let us make no mistakes here: we must progress beyond any lingering notions that these targets can be hit without real effort or resolved by ‘someone else’. To change our national emissions for the better is to change the air we breathe. It requires redefinitions of our ways of living, thinking, acting and relating with the world.

We should probably talk about this…

Citizen’s Assemblies – a new conversation?

Towards inclusive, open and well-informed conversation – particularly wherever an issue has complex, ambiguous and context-specific aspects (i.e. no ‘black & white’ answers) – citizen’s assemblies are opening new spaces for progressive inquiry and robust decision-making.

Typically, a citizen’s assembly consists of a randomly selected panel of jurors, collectively representing the diverse make-up of the locality (whether an organisation, town or city, county/state, or nation). Expert panellists are invited to present information regarding the focal theme, and jurors have opportunities to ask questions and expand the discussion. Facilitators manage and guide the process and serve to maintain optimal conditions for the collective enquiry.

As is the goal, the jury work towards an agreed set of recommendations in response to an initial question or intention, often with private ballot voting aiding the process. Recommendations are fed back to targeted decision-making bodies to inform and leverage policy [for the common good].

Climate Assembly UK

Commissioned by six select committees of the House of Commons[1], Climate Assembly UK recently sought public insight on how to realise net zero by 2050. The question posed to the Assembly was:

“How should the UK meet its target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050?”

Randomly selected through a ‘civic lottery’, 108 assembly members gathered over six weekends to deliberate climate change and the importance of reducing emissions to net zero. A total of 47 experts – from academia, industry and policy – delivered information on a range of relevant aspects. Facilitated by Involve (a public participation charity), over 6000 cumulative hours of presentations, conversations, questions and reflections concluded with the Climate Assembly’s recommendations – forming the core content of the 500+ page ‘Path to Net Zero’ report, published on 10th September 2020. The executive summary can be found here.

[1] The six select committees are: Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy; Environmental Audit; Housing, Communities and Local Government; Science and Technology; Transport; and Treasury.

Key insights

Importantly, the Climate Assembly, as with other citizen’s juries and participatory decision-making methods, comprised a representative sample of the UK population. This inevitably included people with varying degrees of concern about addressing climate change [or not].

In covering issues spanning home heating and travel, carbon-capture technology, consumer/producer supply chains and energy usage, we can assume that the 108 jurors held different viewpoints. And we may reasonably suppose many of them persist. A well-facilitated assembly expects this and positively works with these rich disparities. The focus is on clear presentation of pertinent information and affording all participants fair voice and representation.

“Participants speak of their learning, how they clarified their views and their respect for each other’s perspectives, even when they didn’t agree”

The Climate Assembly UK collaboratively created over 50 recommendations designed to inform the policies to enable net zero by 2050.

Many of the recommendations align with the advice provided to the government by the Committee on Climate Change. A notable divergence is the Assembly’s clear vote away from fossil fuel and carbon capture ‘solutions’.[1]

Some of the Assembly’s more specific recommendations include:

  • Urgently banning heavily polluting vehicles, e.g. SUVs
  • Taxing frequent flyers
  • Increasing Government investment in low-carbon trains and buses
  • Expediting the transition to electric vehicles and providing grants for buying low-carbon cars
  • Reducing overall car use by 2–5% per decade
  • Prioritising wind and solar energy in achieving net zero
  • Supporting and strengthening local produce and food production
  • Reducing individual consumption of meat and dairy by 20%-to-40%.

The Assembly identified the nation’s recovery from Covid-19 as an important opportunity for stimulating lifestyle changes which can enable net zero. A 79% majority either ‘strongly agreed’ or ‘agreed’ that the economic recovery from the pandemic must be designed in line with the 2050 target.

The practical recommendations are buttressed by broader themes. The assembly members identified the need for:

  • Improved information and education on climate change, nationwide;
  • Fairness – irrespective of sector, location, income and health;
  • Freedom and choice, for individuals and local areas;
  • Strong, cross-party leadership from government (which transcends ‘political point-scoring’);
  • Valuing the co-benefits in addressing climate change – e.g. collective wellbeing;
  • Restoring and enhancing the natural world.

Rather than seeking hard rules to be followed, these themes are concerned with the guiding principles which underpin good actions. They prioritise a systemic competence (instead of limited linear approaches) – i.e. they offer foundational resources for navigating highly complex topics (thus avoiding mishandling issues by trying to isolate them from the interdependent whole). The report calls on policymakers to use the Assembly’s cumulative insights as an invaluable decision-making resource.

“The UK path to net zero must be underpinned by education, choice, fairness and political consensus… ”

The Assembly concluded that effectively responding to climate change demands that those in governance lay down their personal ambitions for power and short-term popularity. The jurors’reflections on expert information affirms that the challenges-in-hand extend far beyond [party] politics, and that politicians, alongside each of us, have a duty to act accordingly.

[1] One of the six members in the CCC’s ‘Costs and Benefits Advisory Group’ is a representative from Shell, which perhaps usefully reminds us that ‘impartial’, ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ information is impossible, and no issue can be separated from wider social contexts.

Summary

The Climate Assembly UK exemplifies the worth in developing skills for exploring complex issues. We see the benefits of inclusive, respectful inquiry and how, given the supportive space and a unifying purpose, diverse opinions can advance forwards together.

A sample of the nation’s genders, ethnicities and age groups, from different areas with varying levels of education and prior climate-change knowledge, converged to have a serious chat about a very serious issue. They committed to hearing the hard facts, learning of the nation’s social-ecological challenges and failings, and stepped up to contribute to creating a new, positive path to sustainable futures.

This Assembly, and other participatory assemblies and processes like it, speak for our abilities to respond to profound challenges: to not sidestep seemingly irresolvable issues and hide behind short-term pursuits, but to gather as one Jury and take actions for a sustainable, flourishing future.

CREATING BETTER FUTURES:FROM WORLDVIEWS TO A BETTER WORLD


There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

your philosophy ] i.e., philosophy (or learning) in general.

If I have a fond memory of my mother’s wisdom it is this quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet she frequently used in our daily conversations. She had much more of a literary context to her take on the world than my father, whose reality was grounded in practice and his lived traumatic experience as a soldier in North Africa and Italy in WW2. I think my mother’s use of this quote might be framed by the words “dreamt of”, since it seems that Hamlet is pointing out how little even the most educated people can explain. In general terms he is talking about the limitations of human thought. And, there is no doubt that this is surfacing more into our collective consciousness, as we progress through the serious impacts of Covid -19.
This is also exemplified in a new book written by a close friend and colleague Rolf Jucker, who is the Director of Silviva-an environmental education charity in Switzerland. The title of his book is Time to Live Complexity: Reflections on science, self-illusions, religion, democracy, and education for the future.
The book explores this critical question: Why the crave for easy answers is at the root of our problems? It argues, persuasively that education for a viable future has never been more important than in our era of fake news, self-illusions, corporate dominance, and Fridays for future. By reflecting on several decades of theory and practice in education for sustainability his book focuses on the most important issues we need to address, if we are to succeed in creating a fair, open, just, equitable and environmentally sustainable world. We need to clarify how we can arrive at a sound understanding of reality, which belief-systems and ideologies impede this understanding and which issues need to be addressed as a matter of urgency (such as the reinvention of democracy and overpopulation). By applying the conclusions drawn on education itself, the author forces educational practitioners to reflect self-critically on their practices and increase the quality and efficacy of their interventions for a better world.

In a review of the book, I highlighted how timely it was in exploring the relationship between intelligence and rationality. Why is this so important? Because, humanity is facing an existential crisis; a pending Armageddon which threatens our very existence on planet earth because of our unsustainable lifestyles. And, yet humanity has so far failed to respond to this threat at scale and with urgency. Rolf Jucker frames this book from the standpoint of future proofing our education systems, so that current and future generations might learn and so create a more sustainable future- for all life on earth. Its premise originates from the fact that intelligence and rationality are far from perfectly correlated. Indeed, the book argues that we are beset by a huge array of false news, self-illusion, echo chambers, myths and stories which makes how our beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world(reality) increasingly difficult for us to make rational, evidence based and logical decisions. This cognitive dissonance between intelligence and rational beliefs and action is a major issue for education and learning for a sustainable future. The book explores how intelligence can be a tool for both propaganda and truth -seeking based on the ground-breaking work of Kahneman and Tversky. Most cognitive scientists now divide our thinking into two categories: system I, intuitive, automatic, fast thinking that may be prey to unconscious biases; and system 2,slow,more analytical, deliberative thinking. System 1 thinking is now considered to be the reason why people do stupid things!


It reinforces one of the real issues humanity faces around both an ancient and more recent skirmish about world views-or paradigms between the objectivists, who think that truth is a very simple matter of matching a statement against facts-something known to be true-and the other side- the subjectivists, who think that what count as facts depend on who you are, where you are from and often in what era you live in. Ideas about paradigms are very slippery-some authors ague that if you think you have it clear, then you have not got it all! We owe much to our current understanding of paradigms to Thomas Kuhn-a historian of science. He revolutionised our understanding of science by pointing out the critical distinction between Normal Science and Revolutionary Science. The first grows by gradual accretion over time and the second is more unpredictable and transformative; examples include the discoveries of Galileo, Einstein and more recently James Lovelock and the Gaia hypothesis. Kuhn’s insights gained traction in Europe where there was a tradition in favour of alternative theories of knowledge. In the USA and to some extent the UK there was an ignorance and persistent anti-paradigm empiricist(objectivist)paradigm! Why is this important ? Because the anomalies of paradigms reflect our basic belief systems and because these can significantly underpin our cognition and perceptions of reality. Kuhn’s categorisation of two types of science are more than just descriptions of baby steps and giant steps in our understanding, they are much more radical than that. They reinforce the idea that we make giant breakthroughs in our reorientation of reality but more fundamentally we alter what counts as reality. And, another great irony is that the thinking skills explored by Kahneman’s Nobel Prize winning work are still neglected in most of the well-known assessments of cognitive ability.