Transformation Moment

Transformation Moment – can Britain make it to the Age of Clean?

Preface

This pamphlet is a ‘Call to Arms’. It comes at a time of confused and divisive global politics, accelerating climate damage and a dangerous retreat into tribal answers to international problems. The UK’s contribution has been to add to the confusion.

Britain’s Brexit decision may or may not run its course. If so, it will almost certainly end in tears. Issues that call for a new ‘post 1945’ international consensus are being met by a pre-1939 resurgence of narrow nationalisms. These distractions and divisions obscure the bigger challenge of a world spinning towards climate crisis.

Energy policies, on their own, are no ‘magic bullet’ solution to this crisis. What they offer is a way into radically different choices that are still open to us; ones that might just limit the climate crises, allowing us to live more lightly on the only planet we have.

With or without Britain’s approval, an energy revolution is taking place. The forces that transformed telecommunications are doing the same to energy. Britain’s difficulty is that, faced with a host of transformative technologies, the government chose to throw its weight behind the past rather than the future: subsidising non-renewable rather than renewable energies; penalising ‘clean’ solutions in favour of ‘dirty’, and propping up a rigged energy market.

The most exciting issues raised within this pamphlet touch as much upon ‘democracy’ as ‘technology’.

Countries leading the race into the Age of Clean have benefitted from strong national leadership; changing energy market ground-rules and the thinking that underpins them. But the real momentum for change is coming from the grass roots; from empowered localities and included communities. People are becoming the architects of tomorrow’s solutions rather than just recipients of today’s problems.

Across the planet, towns, cities, villages and communities are emerging as critical players in the democratisation of energy. They are the key to a different energy politics; one which focusses as much on how we save and share, as on what we produce and consume.

Transformation Moment is a narrative journey, not a ‘Techies manual’. It will be overtaken by innovations within the emerging clean-technology sector. What it explores is how energy thinking is being turned on its head, where this is happening … and how Britain can join in.

Today’s global leaders are demonstrating how to live within reducing carbon budgets, how ‘clean’ and ‘smart’ can displace ‘dumb’ and ‘dirty’, and how active citizens (and localities) can drive the transition to a sustainable future.

If Britain is to become a part of this process it must fundamentally restructure its energy market –

Mandating the shift to a more interactive and decentralised Grid

Introducing a UK right of ‘local supply’

Establishing a national framework of carbon budgeting (including the reduction of grid carbon levels to 50 gCO2/kWh by 2030), and

Setting out duties to deliver annual reductions in total energy consumption

Such a change involves a wholesale re-think of tomorrow’s energy markets and the rules that govern them. Germany, California, Denmark and Sweden all understood that, to do so, a raft of policies had to be changed at the same time. Germany and California passed a dozen pieces of separate legislation in single sessions. Denmark, the real pioneer, now treats ‘whole system’ transformation as the norm. Norway, the Netherlands and (perhaps) Germany are taking ‘transport’ into the Age of Clean too.

Countries serious about the Paris Climate Agreement recognise that energy saving and energy storing become as important as (clean) energy generation. Seamlessly, the carbon footprint of food policies and waste re-use will become connected to transport, planning and air quality strategies. Carbon recycling and re-use will be as important as carbon reduction.

What can be produced, used and shared locally are already emerging as cornerstones within new national energy security thinking. Within this, the role of the State is also being re-defined; providing the legislative, regulatory and fiscal frameworks that underpin transformational change and (increasingly) taking more direct responsibility for the trans-national and intra-national balancing mechanisms that keeping the lights on still requires. But it is a politics of empowerment and engagement that is driving the change.

This is the ‘Age of Clean’. Transformation Moment sets out to explore some of the ways in which Britain might become part of it, by –

re-thinking the Grid,

making energy ‘systems’ more important than individual technologies,

putting ‘clean’ before ‘dirty’,

consuming less before producing more,

making citizens and ‘local’ the drivers of change,

putting carbon reduction duties on energy networks, and

making ‘smart’, ‘clean’ and ‘light’ the new benchmarks of sustainable economics.

Britain does not face a crisis of ‘keeping the lights on’. The challenge is just to create an energy system that is sustainable, accountable and affordable for all. This is why the ‘Age of Clean’ needs a completely different framework of energy thinking.

Transformation Moment recognises that these changes form a battleground. The conflict is not just between the polluting and non-polluting, the national and the local, or between new technologies and old. Ultimately, the most critical issues are rooted more in questions of ‘power’ – democratic power – than in ‘energy’.

Who should own, control and hold to account the energy systems that will define Britain’s future? Transformation Moment is an invitation to shape the answer.

Alan Simpson

May 2017

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Some Further thoughts on Green Washing

Greenwashing is a form of climate action delay so deepening our understanding may be the first step to preventing it. Or at least being able to call it out. And that is exactly what financial think thank Planet Tracker has done. Its new report deciphers six types of greenwashing:

Greenwashing growing increasingly sophisticated, says Planet Tracker

Greencrowding: hiding in a crowd of other ‘green’ (but vague) do-gooders but basically doing nothing new.

Greenlighting: spotlighting a particularly green feature of operations or products to draw attention away from environmentally damaging activities being conducted elsewhere. For example, the entire fossil fuel industry.

Greenshifting: implying that the consumer is at fault and shifting the blame to individuals not the company.

Greenlabelling: where marketers call something green or sustainable, but a closer examination reveals this to be misleading or sometimes completely false.

Greenrinsing: regularly changing ESG targets before they are achieved. this has been identified at Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, notes the report.

Greenhushing: refers to corporate management teams under-reporting or hiding their sustainability credentials to evade investor scrutiny.

SAFE AND JUST EARTH SYSTEMS

Humanity is well into the Anthropocene , the proposed new geological epoch where human pressures have put the Earth system on a trajectory moving rapidly away from the stable Holocene state of the past 12,000 years, which is the only state of the Earth system we have evidence of being able to support the world as we know it . These rapid changes to the Earth system undermine critical life-support systems with significant societal impacts already felt and they could lead to triggering tipping points that irreversibly destabilize the Earth systems. These changes are mostly driven by social and economic systems run on unsustainable resource extraction and consumption. Contributions to Earth system change and the consequences of its impacts vary greatly among social groups and countries. Given these interdependencies between inclusive human development and a stable and resilient Earth system an assessment of safe and just boundaries is required that accounts for Earth system resilience and human well-being in an integrated framework . Rockstrom et al propose a set of safe and just Earth system boundaries (ESBs) for climate, the biosphere, fresh water, nutrients, and air pollution at global and sub global scales. These domains were chosen for the following reasons. They span the major components of the Earth system (atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, biosphere, and cryosphere) and their interlinked processes (carbon, water and nutrient cycles), the ‘global commons’ that underpin the planet’s life-support systems and, thereby, human well-being on Earth; they have impacts on policy-relevant timescales; they are threatened by human activities; and they could affect Earth system stability and future development globally. Our proposed ESBs are based on existing scholarship, expert judgement, and widely shared norms, such as Agenda 2030. They are meant as a transparent proposal for further debate and refinement by scholars and wider society.

Rockstrom et al use three criteria to assess whether adhering to the safe ESBs could protect people from significant harm (Box 1):”interspecies justice and Earth system stability” “intergenerational justice” between past and present generations and present and future generations ; and “intragenerational justice” between countries, communities, and individuals through an intersectional lens.

These criteria sit within a wider Earth system justice framework that goes beyond planetary and issue-related justice to take a multi-level transformative justice approach focusing on ends (boundaries and access levels) and means.

Interspecies justice and Earth system stability

Interspecies justice aims to protect humans, other species and ecosystems, rejecting human exceptionalism. In many domains, interspecies justice could be achieved by maintaining Earth system stability within safe ESBs.

Intergenerational justice

Intergenerational justice examines relationships and obligations between generations, such as the legacy of greenhouse gas emissions or ecosystem destruction for youth and future people.

Achieving intergenerational justice requires recognizing the

potential long-term consequences of short-term actions and

associated trade-offs and synergies across time. They define two types of intergenerational justice: (between past and present; whether actions of past generations have minimized significant harm to current generations and (between present and future; the responsibility of current generations to minimize significant harm to future generations.

Intragenerational justice: between countries, communities and

individuals (I3)

Intragenerational justice includes relationships between present individuals, between states (international), among people of different states (global) and between community members or citizens (communitarian or nationalist). Intersectional justice

Considers multiple and overlapping social identities and categories (for example, gender, race, age, class, and health) that underpin inequality, vulnerability and the capacity to respond. Achieving intragenerational justice means minimizing significant harm caused by one country to another, one community to another and one individual to another. More details at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06083-8

New Ways of Seeing the World: Big History and Great Transition

Opening essay for a GTI Forum

David Christian

May 2023

As the first astronauts peered down on Earth from space, they saw the planet anew. They all had the same epiphany, as the sight of one small, fragile world, embedded in a huge universe briefly replaced the multiple, ever-changing impressions of everyday life. To build a better future, we will all need a new and more capacious perspective on our world, because the cracked and myopic perspectives of so much modern thought and debate have stymied action by hiding the colossal scale of change and discouraging global collaboration.

Fortunately, wider and more integrated ways of perceiving today’s world are working their way into modern scholarly thinking, such as the “Big History” framework, with which I am associated.¹ Our challenge today is to normalize more expansive ways of seeing and thinking that can offer the guidance, motivation, and hope needed to unite humans behind the colossal project of the Great Transition.

The global gestalt shift in thinking, education, and public discourse is already under way, and that augurs well for the future. Indeed, changing how people see the world may prove easier than changing our material technologies or the social and economic structures within which we live. But new ways of seeing and thinking will be just as important, because without the guidance and inspiration they can provide, our species will keep repeating old mistakes as it drifts aimlessly towards catastrophe.

The close-up lenses that dominate modern scholarship, education, and debate are far too narrow to let us see such vast changes, and a blinkered vision has constrained effective action. We are like ants on a charging elephant, confused by the jolts and tremors shaking our world, because the limited views of discrete disciplines and competing loyalties let us see only what is right in front of us. Take any conventional high school or university history course. It will be dominated by recent centuries, and by the stories of particular regions or cultures or nation-states. It can teach much about particular communities and identities, but the lens is far too small to let us see the larger historical trajectories that led to the Anthropocene. And to fully understand our impact on the biosphere, we need an even wider lens, one that can embrace the history of Planet Earth and of life on Earth over several billion years. Yet few of us acquire more than a fragmented, lop-sided, and compartmentalized understanding of planetary history.

For the full text: https://greattransition.org/gti-forum/big-history-christian

EMOTIONS AS A BASIS FOR ECOLOGICAL BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE

The question is urgent: emotions about climate change do not directly lead to behavioral change, what is needed? Yesterday de Volkskrant published an interview with Martha Nussbaum, following her latest book ‘Justice for animals: our collective responsibility.’ I really want to share the last paragraph of the interview with you:
“Making people feel guilty is not the way to bring about positive behavioural change. There are three emotions that I think do take this issue forward. The first is wonder at the complexity and beauty of animals. That prompts us to protect them. The second is compassion for the predicament they are in and that we have caused. That situation leads us to the third emotion, a specific kind of anger, which I call transitional rage. You look at the past, look away from it, and think: that shouldn’t happen in the future. That’s the emotion I feel most often, and that I try to cultivate.’
A new valuable starting point for planetary citizenship in education.
Full interview: https://lnkd.in/egCuEBUC.

REGENERATIVE CULTURES:LEARNING AND UNLEARNING

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.

GDP growth – the Emperor has no clothes

Maze: Is Growth a False God?

Is Growth a False God? is an episode of the Radio 4 programme Moral Maze broadcast on 22^nd March 2023. Presented by Michael Buerk, the programme has an unusual format where four semi-regular panelists question and elicit testimony from several invited guests representing opposite sides of an argument. I’ve never been a big fan of its adversarial format but, given the subject, I couldn’t miss this episode . The four panelists on this occasion were: Melanie Phillips¹, Anne McElvoy², Mona Siddiqui³ and Matthew Taylor⁴. The witnesses were Beth Stratford⁵, Ross Clark⁶, Kate Raworth⁷ and Matthew Lynn⁸.

At the outset of the programme, the four panelists briefly outlined their own positions on the pursuit of GDP growth. This immediately revealed a bias. Whilst two of them – Mona Siddiqui and Matthew Taylor – were willing to question the hegemony of growth, neither occupied what would be considered a degrowth position. But the other two panelists – Melanie Philips and Anne McElvoy – were openly hostile to degrowth. Melanie Philips said “Being against growth means wanting to go backwards, reduce living standards and embrace decline. To me, degrowth is a kind of cultural deathwish“. In a format such as this, the panelists ought to be both well informed and, notwithstanding their own opinions, as open-minded as possible. Melanie Philips’ statement revealed that she was neither. Her astonishing misrepresentation of the degrowth paradigm means either that she hadn’t done the most basic preparation or that she willfully misrepresented degrowth. I suspect a mixture of the two. The opening did not bode well for the quality of the argument in the rest of the programme. And so, by and large, it turned out.

The bias of the panelists meant that there were, effectively, four people arguing in favour of growth, two in favour of degrowth and two adopting a gentler position of ‘growth skepticism’. I use the term ‘degrowth’ for convenience – in fact both Beth Stratford and Kate Raworth argued that we should be agnostic to growth, shifting our economic goals to better represent human wellbeing, whilst acknowledging that this would result in lower or negative growth in many sectors. Another indication of Melanie Philips’ misunderstanding of degrowth came when she attempted to wrong-foot Beth Stratford by saying that it would be wrong for rich nations to prevent poor nations from growing their economies. But Beth Stratford simply agreed! I’ve never come across an exposition of degrowth that argues against poor nations growing their economies. Later in the programme, Anne McElvoy returned to this, saying that the idea that growth is required for some nations and not others is a ‘fault-line’ in the degrowth argument, but it simply isn’t – there is no contradiction. All economies (rich and poor nations alike) should aim to provide a good social foundation for all their citizens without exceeding planetary boundaries. In poor countries, that often means growing many sectors of the economy; in rich countries it doesn’t. It’s that simple.

For me, a highlight of the programme was Kate Raworth’s testimony. She is always lucid and persuasive, but in this programme she also showed herself to be combative and effective under hostile questioning. If it had been a boxing match, she’d have been an easy points winner! I particularly enjoyed an exchange with Anne McElvoy when Kate said that functioning systems in nature do not grow indefinitely and unchecked growth in the human body is called cancer. Anne McElvoy said that this was a ‘loose metaphor’ (left jab) but Kate immediately shot back that it was a very tight metaphor – both the earth and human body are complex, delicately balanced systems (right hook). Later in the show, after the testimony of the guests, Michael Buerk returned to this metaphor and this time Melanie Phillips made another astonishing statement: “Nature shows us that if you grow you live and if you don’t grow you die“. I don’t know where Melanie gets her knowledge of biology and ecology, but it’s definitely not a from a textbook. Curious, because her very opening remark in the programme was: “Unlimited anything is not a good thing“.

Rather than starting his testimony with a defence of growthism, Ross Clark instead (like Melanie Phillips) chose to attack degrowth by misrepresenting it. He describes degrowth as a ‘dangerous myth’ and without any further explanation claimed that the degrowth movement wants ‘permanent recession’. Again, even the most cursory reading of the degrowth literature would disabuse him of that misconception. We have all experienced recessions – but none of us has experienced an economy built on the principles of degrowth. Recessions are an all too familiar feature of growth-based economies. Degrowth aims to restructure economic and social infrastructures so that zero growth would not result in the same acute social problems that arise from the recessions of growth-based economies. (Unfortunately none of the panelists made this point.)

Matthew Lynn began his testimony by asking if consuming more stuff puts the planet at risk and this is how he answered his own question: “Possibly if you extrapolate it too much, but I don’t think we’re there at the moment“. He says that GDP is the most important measure of human success that there is no conflict between GDP growth and the environment. His views fly in the face of virtually all the evidence accumulated by environmental scientists over the last four decades or more. When pressed by Mona Siddiqui and Matthew Taylor to defend GDP growth as a measure of wellbeing, he agreed that it tells us little about how happy people are, but argued that doesn’t matter. He seemed to place wellbeing wholly outside of the realm of economics and politics, preferring the line that things relating to wellbeing are issues of personal choice.

The subject of inequality and redistribution arose frequently of course. There were a couple of notable exchanges on this. Matthew Lynn was reluctant even to admit that inequality was increasing, saying that it depends on how you measure it. That’s an extraordinary viewpoint given the overwhelming evidence of increasing inequality in the advanced economies. Melanie Philips viewed redistribution of wealth as a red herring because, she argued, redistributing money from one group of people to another simply changes the people who consume rather than reducing consumption. But that completely ignores the sort of stuff that different sectors of society consume. I can confidently predict that redistributing money from billionaires to poor people would result in a slump in sales of luxury yachts and improved sales of fruit and veg.

I will always applaud the broadcasters involved in bringing programmes on this subject to air. The pursuit of GDP growth has an overwhelming impact on society and our planet, yet it is rarely questioned in the mainstream media. So I congratulate the BBC on producing this edition of the Moral Maze. But I felt that the programme misfired and failed to realise its full potential. That may have something to do with the adversarial format which generates not a little heat at the expense of some light, but I think that the biggest problem was the selection of participants. On the pro-growth side the two panelists and the two experts tended to adopt extreme positions and were either unable or unwilling to mount a cogent defense of growthism, more often relying on attacking a misrepresented version of degrowth instead. I ask myself why? The answer I think is fear. People resort to those tactics when they have no confidence in their own arguments and are afraid of being exposed. Growth is no god, but as Emperor it has reigned supreme for some 70 years. But the world is waking up and the the word is out: the Emperor has no clothes.

Footnotes

1Melanie Phillips is a social commentator in The Times.
2Anne McElvoy is a columnist and editor with the Politico news and commentary feed.
3Mona Siddiqui is professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at the University of Edinburg.
4Matthew Taylor is Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation.
5Beth Stratford is an ecological economist at the University of Leeds, and a fellow at the New Economics Foundation.
6Ross Clark is a political commentator.
7Kate Raworth is Senior Associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute.
8Matthew Lynn is a financial columnist and author.

March 23, 2023

Rich Burkmar

bbc, media

HOSPICING OUR UNIVERSITIES IN DECLINE

In this the third of my most recent blogs on the theme of a University for the Common Good – I reflect on the decline of our current model of the University and how the concept of “hospicing a habit of being” coined by Stein et al(2020) might enable those of us who have argued for transformative change in our universities for some considerable time -to continue to question the status quo and survive the discomfort and pain and the losses directly emanating from the multiplicity of crises-and yet find ways to open new ways of knowing and being in what are tumultuous times.

Ray Ison at the Open University and others in the systems in practice discourse argue for further innovation in our collective ways of knowing and doing because our social world is increasingly becoming severely constrained by:

explanations we are asked to accept that are no longer relevant to our circumstances;
outdated historical institutions (in the institutional economic sense)that contribute as social technologies to a broader human created and ungoverned technosphere;
inadequate theory-informed practices, or praxis;
governance systems no longer adequate for purpose.

Humans are adept at inventing words to describe how we conceive of phenomenon in the world like ecosystems or biosphere-the latter being the worldwide sum of all ecosystems . These so-called neologisms through their reification and use as “things in the world” frame the ways we engage with the world because Ison proposes that language acts like a mediating social technology. So, if we are attempting to innovate to change our relationship within and to the world our framing choices become increasingly important.

Over recent decades there have been many different initiatives aimed at responding to the changing world in which we all live. Many of these fall under the broad frame of the ”green university” or “sustainable university”-“movement”. Most of which might be framed as “soft” reforms”. Yet these movements remain strangely silent on how the curriculum and research programmes emanating from these programmes have been co-opted by corporate interests , let alone the role of universities in aiding and abetting the fossil fuel industries. And there is little or no acknowledgement of how the university’s sustainability strategies gloss over the awkward fact that universities are integral to a system directly reliant upon the unsustainable goal of mass consumption and endless growth.

Hence, some of those who seek to repurpose the university have begun to frame the debate based on some new neologisms like the “regenerative university” and the reorientation of universities towards a” regenerative and relational educational paradigm.”

As Ison(2017) reflects -the example of the contemporary university exemplifies how ways of knowing and acting undermine attempts to govern more effectively in an Anthropocentric world. He argues- as do I that the current organisation of the university with all its constituent parts( e.g.-disciplines;projects;research institutes.) is poorly equipped to foster the ways of thinking and acting needed to respond to the existential crises. Systemic failings in these “hospicing” institutions include perpetuations of disciplinary silos; inadequate fostering of interdisciplinary and trans disciplinary approaches to research and teaching; inadequate problematising and opportunity framing ;unacknowledged epistemological tyranny -a form of epistemological injustice in the refereeing of research publications, evaluations and promotional practices and an over adherence to linear first order traditions of knowledge production and its dissemination in teaching and research.

CAN WE REIMAGINE THE UNIVERSITY?

In my earlier post I set out the idea that universities are of the crisis rather than as is widely understood that external risks are the real threat to them. I have written an earlier blog(Educating Earth Literate Leaders) – if we look back on the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (2002) and many of the other international summits which followed, and reﬂect on their impact, the overriding conclusion is that political leadership the world over has failed to rise to the challenges of sustainability. And yet it is likely that most of the hundred or so leaders who attended the earth summit would have had a higher education degree from some of the world’s most prestigious universities. This raises some serious questions for our university leaders and their governance structures. Why, as the American academic, David Orr once remarked, is it that the people who contribute most to exploiting poor communities and the Earth’s ecosystems are those with BAs, MScs, and PhDs and not the ‘ignorant’ poor from the South? And why is the illiteracy amongst the world’s politicians as to how the world works as a living system so widespread? Why is it so rare that we encounter in our leaders the qualities needed to enable sustainability: humility, respect for all forms of life and future generations, precaution and wisdom, the capacity to think systemically and critically challenge unethical actions? And more worryingly based on current performance, what hope of improvement is there for future leaders?

The fact that the higher education sector is seriously failing society by producing leaders incapable of addressing our most pressing problems should trigger some critical consideration about the fundamental role of universities in society, based on three key assumptions: If universities are the nursery of tomorrow’s leaders and educate most of the people who develop and manage society’s institutions, then the sector bears “profound responsibilities to increase the awareness, knowledge, technologies, and tools to create a sustainable future”, as the Talloires Declaration (signed by many of the world’s university leaders) stated in 1990 (ULSF, 1990). This clearly implies that graduates of every discipline (whether as engineers, teachers, politicians, lawyers, architects, biologists, banks managers or tourism operators, etc.) will need a sound working knowledge of sustainability.

Yet you only need to read a few university websites to get a sense of the official voices of university leaders and managers symbolised as an enduring rhetoric promoting universities as institutions of noble service particularly regarding their public good in supporting graduate cohorts’ upward social and economic mobility. But dig a bit more deeply into the teaching and learning practice and the curriculum upon which these epistemological processes are based and the social purpose of the university becomes conflicted. As the authors of Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis argue-even a cursory analysis exposes much of this rhetoric as “tropes” which lack any reflexive engagement with the world as it is, and the role and purpose of the universities therein is buried under commercial and self-sustaining neoliberal values that guide the modern university.”

And as Bawden (2008) commented:

There is a strange and inexplicable reluctance by our institutions of higher education across the entire globe, to overtly promote the fact that they are first and foremost, agencies of human and social development .

Bawden argues that ‘project civilisation’ is profoundly fragile – predicated on the stability of planetary systems – and our universities have extraordinary knowledge and capacity to protect it. However, reform in higher education tends to take place in three broad categories, which include soft, or minor reform, major or radical reform, as well as “beyond or transformative reform”. In the context of immense societal complexity and change, what is most needed- is intentional transformative reform of universities’ institutional cultures, curricula and campuses- based on system-wide approaches. Hil,Lyons,and Thompsett(2022) liken this to the “hospice” of a system that is already in decline.

UNIVERSITIES FOR THE COMMON GOOD

It is difficult to imagine a future that is humane, decent, and sustainable without marked changes in the substance and process of education at all levels, beginning with university. David Orr(2018)

In my next series of blogs, I want to bring out some of the compelling arguments for transformative change in the education provided by our universities. Much of what I want to say is eloquently portrayed in a recent book( featured in an earlier blog) by three Australian academics in their book published last December: TRANSFORMING UNIVERSITIES IN THE MIDST OF A GLOBAL CRISIS:A University for the Common Good.

“Universities are facing serious problems. Including well before the onset of COVID-19.There are a growing number of provocative book titles appearing like The university in ruins; Whackademia? Zombies in the Academy; Living death in higher education ; Knowledge for sale; The Neoliberal takeover of higher education ; Bullshit Towers and many others. Alongside this is the rise of critical university studies. All of which signifies that the university academy is increasingly concerned -even troubled- with its own fate.

In Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World Eli Meyerhoff (2019 ) examines just how well baked the crisis in university narratives has become. Despite its popularity, the crisis frame further entrenches liberal capitalist modernity as the dominant and enduring paradigm that serves to bolster universities as normalised sites of knowledge accumulation that are in crisis rather than, of the crisis. In this book. The authors of the book argue persuasively that such an approach closes the spaces in which the contemporary university might be reimagined otherwise.”

The purpose of this blog and others that follow is to situate universities as of the crisis – and as such a fundamental governance crisis which we need to tackle at scale and urgently. A university’s priorities must embrace the growing impacts of human induced climate change, including rising sea levels, land surface heat and ocean temperatures, all of which threaten life and livelihoods around the world. Especially in those places least responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions. Such climate change represents the continuity of environmental disruption that has occurred since European colonisation of Africa, Asia, the Americas and in Australia. Ecological destruction remains the historical legacy that continues to drive the expansion of fossil fuel extractivism and the privileging of economic development and mining interests over indigenous land rights on a massive scale. According to these authors these dynamics are a vivid reminder of the colonial shadow that defines the neoliberal Academy across the globe.

In recent decades Universities have grown to expand student numbers so that UK universities like Nottingham celebrate its campuses in Malaysia and China which bring its student population to 40,000 or more. And notwithstanding the presence of more international students on campuses across the world, universities have in many respects retained their Anglocentric and western cultural dominance but continue to marginalise the importance of indigenous knowledge and culture from the global south.

Many observers argue that universities have a particular responsibility to respond to the existential crisis of climate change and loss of biodiversity. A responsibility to engage in deep and reflective consideration of what universities are for; the interests they serve and the prospect they may hold for ecological survival. In recent decades, universities have begun to lean into this space in ways not dissimilar to other large institutions and organisations, including government departments and private corporations. They have, for example, introduced numerous “climate smart” and “sustainability initiatives” , established sustainability committees in training programmes in structured green buildings and community gardens, and embedded sustainability topics across curriculum. The impetus to demonstrate performance in this arena itself is often seen as a green marketing opportunity- which can reinforce new forms of instrumentality and support for more ambitious growth in support of the neoliberal ideology.