TRANSFORMING UNIVERSITIES IN THE MIDST OF GLOBAL CRISIS:A UNIVERSITY FOR THE COMMON GOOD

From the Times Higher Education Book Review.

The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals

No one paying attention needs reminding that universities are “in crisis”. We are beset by critiques of their complicity with neoliberal and extractive capitalism, dispossession of First Nations, top-heavy administrative regimes, and pedagogical shifts away from critical thinking toward so-called job-ready, marketable skill sets.

When we turn a critical eye toward the history of universities – especially in settler colonial nations such as Australia – we find an uglier truth: universities are not only in crisis; they are of the crisis. That is, universities have been key drivers in the shifts that critical academics, including ourselves, oppose.

Confronting this reality led us to look beyond universities’ institutional and ideological bounds for solutions to the problems plaguing them. What we discovered was complex and hopeful, with projects straddling the inside and outside of universities in creative and subversive ways. Here, we touch on some examples detailed in our book, Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis: A University for the Common Good.

Decolonising higher education

A primary motivation for our research revolved around decolonising the university. Is it possible, we asked, for an institution that perpetuates settler colonialism in myriad ways to truly support Indigenous sovereignty? If so, how?

Enter the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, formerly the Dechinta Bush University, one of a growing number of Indigenous-led institutions. Located on Yellowknives’ Dene land in Canada, Dechinta focuses on the traditional pedagogies and bodies of knowledge of Northern Indigenous people.

The Centre uses learning as a way to reconnect people with the land and offers traditional skills such as harvesting medicinal plants and tanning animal hides alongside more conventionally academic training in reading, writing, discussions and presentations. These academic skills, however, are oriented toward issues identified by Northern Indigenous people as of concern to them, including land and self-determination, gender justice, and Indigenous storytelling. In doing so, Dechinta pushes back on centuries of colonial domination in education via the imposition of Western knowledge systems.

At the same time, Dechinta engages with the settler state in productive ways. It leverages funding from various state and private organisations, redirecting resources toward its students and programmes. It has partnered with the University of Alberta, the University of British Columbia and other tertiary institutions to offer formal accreditation to graduates. In this way, the centre can maintain Indigenous sovereignty over curricula and pedagogies while resourcing participants by diverting settler capital toward its operations. We see this as a hopeful model for how conventional universities can engage in decolonisation by supporting Indigenous intellectual sovereignty on its own terms.

Freeing learning and research from profit

Concerns over the streamlining of learning and research towards neoliberal capitalist agendas of employability and profit, eclipsing the place of civically engaged critical thinking, was a key driver of our research. These shifts often go hand in hand with the intensification of administrative power  in ways that recast universities as business enterprises, rather than centres of scholarly pursuit. We are not alone in these concerns; there is a plethora of projects that push back on these dynamics in creative ways.

Many fall under the umbrella term “free universities”: projects of collective learning that are open to anyone, free to attend, gather in physical, offline spaces and take an egalitarian approach to education. Free universities orient classes toward explicit political engagement, such as by studying critical histories of settler colonialism, refugee rights, workers’ struggles or racial politics.

There is much to be learned from the alternative approaches to education and learning that free universities create. Many refuse grading and accreditation but develop curricula and pedagogies based on the premise that everyone has something to teach and to learn, therefore teacher and student roles can be fluid rather than fixed.

Free university “classes” and learning communities – which range from one-off gatherings to groups meeting regularly over years – tend to define learning outcomes in ways that revolve more around issues of social and ecological justice than the cash economy. In this way, free universities push back against modern universities’ orientations toward profit, as well as top-heavy administrative regimes.

While offering a utopian vision for learning, free universities often leverage resources from formal institutions in ways that are, we argue, full of potential. Many free university organisers are also employed by traditional universities, and therefore have a degree of access to institutional resources. This allows free universities to informally use university-owned classrooms and equipment for their operations, or to disseminate knowledge beyond the university by inviting staff, faculty and students to offer classes and discussions that are accessible to anyone, not only university affiliates. It might also include making books, articles and other materials available to the broader public that otherwise sit in university libraries or behind paywalls. This redirects resources from the formal institution toward underserved communities and movements that often have pressing needs for such support.

Ecological awareness and regeneration

A third focus of our research was on projects that orient learning toward principles of ecological awareness and regeneration, while upholding, when possible, First Nations’ sovereignty over lands and waters. We found many promising examples, including the Earth University in Costa Rica and Schumacher College in the UK, among others. Crucially, these projects embody ecological awareness in what they teach, as well as how they teach. Not only do students learn practical Earth-based skills that support biodiversity or growing organic food; they learn in ways that are attuned to seasonal shifts, for example by focusing more on intellectual development during the winter, and hands-in-the-ground work such as planting or harvesting during spring and autumn.

These projects, in their own ways, offer practical ideas for transforming universities from the outside in and the inside out. By looking beyond the formal institution, we can find new paths toward decolonisation, egalitarianism, critical thinking and ecological regeneration for tertiary education. We can find new ways to lend material support to communities and projects beyond traditional university walls. To remain on the current trajectory of global higher education is to reproduce agendas that are tailored to the very system that is leading us to the existential brink. Radically altering this trajectory is vital as we confront the interlocking crises before us.

Richard Hil is adjunct professor in the School of Health Sciences and Social Work at Griffith University and the Faculty of Business, Law and Arts at Southern Cross University; Kristen Lyons is professor of environment and development sociology at the University of Queensland; and Fern Thompsett is a PhD anthropology scholar at Columbia University. Together they co-authored the book Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis: A University for the Common Good, published in 2022 by Routledge.

HISTORY NOW

I encourage anyone reading this on New Year’s day to watch Simon Schama’s BBC TV series called “History Now”

Schama is always a compelling presenter but in this series, he is more than a messenger, offering something of a call to arms as he emotionally recounted memories of watching Václav Havel address crowds of Czech protestors on television, and considered that today we appear to be at a historical crossroads of our own. He self-identifies as “an old man [ like me ,who doesn’t] want to die with the world selling its soul down that particular crummy river” of political apathy-especially in relation to climate breakdown and loss of biodiversity.

The argument that creatives are at the forefront of revolution is a convincing one that carries as a refrain throughout the series, which later looks at Nina Simone, James Baldwin and nature writer Rachel Carson as well as featuring interviews with Armando Iannucci and Margaret Atwood.

Shades of ILikeTrains and its recourse to history rock(or pop) with songs like “He Who Saw the Deep and The Shallows.

Five options for restoring global biodiversity after the UN agreement

From the Conversation December 20th 2022

To slow and reverse the fastest loss of Earth’s living things since the dinosaurs, almost 200 countries have signed an agreement in Montreal, Canada, promising to live in harmony with nature by 2050. The Kunming-Montreal agreement is not legally binding but it will require signatories to report their progress towards meeting targets such as the protection of 30% of Earth’s surface by 2030 and the restoration of degraded habitats.

Not everyone is happy with the settlement or convinced enough has been promised to avert mass extinctions. Thankfully, research has revealed a lot about the best ways to revive and strengthen biodiversity – the variety of life forms, from microbes to whales, found on Earth.

Here are five suggestions:

1. Scrap subsidies

The first thing countries should do is stop paying for the destruction of ecosystems. The Montreal pact calls for reducing incentives for environmentally harmful practices by $US500 billion (£410 billion) each year by 2030.

Research published in 2020 showed that ending fuel and maintenance subsidies would reduce excess fishing. Less fishing means more fish at sea and higher catches for the remaining fleet with less effort. The world’s fisheries could cut emissions and become more profitable.

Scrapping policies which subsidise overexploitation in all sorts of industries – fisheries, agriculture, forestry, and of course, fossil fuels – are in many cases the lowest fruit to be picked to save biodiversity.

2. Protect the high seas

Almost half of the surface of the Earth is outside national jurisdiction. The high seas belong to no one. Most of the world’s oceans are owned by no one.

In the twilight zone of the ocean, between 200 and 1,000 metres down, fish and krill migrate upwards to feed at night and downwards to digest and rest during the day. This is the ocean’s biological pump, which draws carbon from near the ocean’s surface to its depths, storing it far from the atmosphere and so reducing climate change.

The total mass of fish living in the open ocean is much greater than in overfished coastal seas. Though not exploited to any large extent yet, the high seas and the remote ocean around the Antarctic need binding international agreements to protect them and the important planetary function they serve, which ultimately benefits all life by helping maintain a stable climate.

3. Ban clear-cutting and bottom trawling

Certain methods of extracting natural resources, such as clear-cutting forests (chopping down all the trees) and bottom trawling (tugging a big fishing net close to the seafloor) devastate biodiversity and should be phased out.

Clear-cutting removes large quantities of living matter that will not be replenished before the forest has regenerated, which may take hundreds of years, particularly for forests in Earth’s higher latitudes. Many species which are adapted to live in fully grown forests are subsequently doomed by clear-cutting. 

Bottom trawling catches fish and shellfish indiscriminately, disturbing, or even eradicating animals which live on the seafloor, such as certain types of coral and oysters. It also throws plumes of sediment into the water above, emitting greenhouse gases which had been locked away. Seafloors that have been trawled continuously for a long time may appear to be devoid of life or trivialised with fewer species and less complex ecosystems.

4. Empower indigenous land defenders

Indigenous people are the vanguard of many of the best-preserved ecosystems in the world. Their struggle to protect their land and waters and traditional ways of using ecosystems and biodiversity for livelihoods are often the primary reason such important environments still exist.

Such examples are found around the world, for example more primates are found on indigenous land than in surrounding areas.

5. No more production targets

Many management practices will have to change, since they are based on unrealistic assumptions. Fisheries, for instance, target a maximum sustainable yield (MSY), a concept developed in the mid 20th century which means taking the largest catch from a fish stock without diminishing the stock in the future. Something similar is also used in forestry, though it involves more economic consideration.

These models were heavily criticised in the subsequent decades for oversimplifying how nature works. For instance, species often contain several local populations which live separately and reproduce only with each other, yet some of these “substocks” could still become overfished if just one production target was applied for all of them. However, the idea of a maximum sustainable yield has come back into fashion this century as a means to curtail overfishing.

Herring is a good example here. The species forms many different substocks across the North Atlantic, yet one maximum yield was adopted over vast areas. In the Baltic Sea for instance, Swedish fishing rights were given to the largest shipowners as a part of a neoliberal economic policy to achieve a more effective fishing fleet. Local stocks of herring are now declining, and with them local adaptations (genetic diversity) could eventually disappear.

Heading for more robust strategies than elusive optimal targets for extracting the most fish or trees while maintaining the stock or the forest may lead to a more resilient pathway regarding biodiversity and climate mitigation. It could involve lower fishing quotas, but also change from industrial fishing to more local fishing with smaller fishing vessels.

12 Renewables days of Christmas

Here’s a renewables Christmas quiz for you: 12 questions.  Getting 4 right or nearly right will be pretty good and show a better understanding of the problems our electricity grid faces than most people.Reposted from Bill Scott’s Blog

………..

1 – The proportion of our electricity generated by coal in 2011 was 29.5%.  What was it in 2021?

2 – The proportion of wind and solar generation in 2011 was 5.2% of the total.  What was it in 2021?

3 – Burning biomass generated 3.6% of electricity in 2011.  What proportion was generated in 2021?

4 – Gas generated 39.9% of electricity in 2021.  What was the proportion generated in 2011?

5 – It costs more to store a unit of electricity than it does to generate it in the first place.  By how much?

6 – In terms of time, how much of the country’s electricity demand do we currently have the capacity to store?

7 – Overall generation capacity available to the National Grid was 77.9 GW in 2019?  How much was it in 2021?

8 – During 2021 by what percentage did the available generation capacity grow for wind and for solar?

9 – In 2021 by how much did the amount of electricity actually generated by wind, wave and solar rise (or fall)?

10 – Thinking about wind speed across the world?  Is it falling, level or increasing?

11 – At one point in September 2022, the Grid paid wholesale prices of £2,500 per MWh to persuade gas power stations to make and sell electricity.  What was the average gas price at the time in £ per MWh?

12 – For a brief period in Summer, the grid briefly paid Belgian electricity suppliers to provide power to the UK.  How much did they have to pay in £ per MWh?

………………………………….

12 answers – not all are intuitive.  Some are concerning …

1 –  2.1%

2 – 24.6%

3 –  13%

4 – 39.8%

5 – between three and four times as much

6 –  less than an hour

7 – 76.6 GW

8 – wind by 5.3% and solar by 2.8%

9 – it decreased by 9.3%

10 – it’s falling.

11 –  £50

12 – £9,724 per MWh

…………………………………………..

Source: Bill got most of these data from The Spectator website and data hub, though all are freely available.

NEW ECONOMY based on NEW SYSTEMS

The role of human agency is an essential element of the authors of this new books analyses, evaluations, and prescriptions. If humanity is to live in harmony with itself, with other creatures, and in balance with the planet’s ecological systems, then we must be clear about what we can and cannot do, and what we ought and ought not to do. We still hope to successfully deal with climate change, produce a far more socially and economically equal world, and meet other challenges such as COVID. We can only do this by recognising that most of our problems are due to the way human economic, technological, social, and political systems have operated in the last two hundred or so years. Humanity must acknowledge how it has changed planetary ecosystems and how it ought to affect future changes safely, regeneratively, and wisely. Humanity must work with rather than against nature. This necessarily will involve deciphering how ecological and social systems interact, how change occurs and how both voluntary and involuntary human actions contribute to such change. A systems approach applies trans-disciplinary perspectives that encompass the methodologies, insights and practices of Earth systems science, philosophical speculation, ethics, radical economics, human social development, technology and (democratic) politics. This is the kind of ‘big picture’ thinking that the Schumacher Institute promotes and supports. We cannot stop the world and get off, but we can, hopefully, fashion a better world on which all living creatures can flourish peacefully and equitably. For this to occur, radical systemic change is essential.

The good news is that movements all over the world are developing, experimenting, and innovating all kinds of elements for the New Economy New Systems – we already have so many of the ideas and resources that we need to explore further in this book. Our capacity and motivation to share and learn from each other in this field has got a powerful boost from our common global experience of the pandemic – although this affects countries differently. We now must turn this human disaster into a success for humanity and the best way for this is through collaboration and mutual learning. Recent research by Rutger Bregman (2020)amongst many, demonstrates that we are wired to cooperate and therefore must revise our view of human nature and rethink how we organise our politics, social services, democracies, and businesses based on compassion.

Edited by John Blewitt, published by the Schumacher Institute, and with contributions from Inez Aponte, Hugh Atkinson, John Blewitt, Jenneth Parker, Kristin Vala Ragnarsdottir and Ian Roderick, New Economy, New Systems: Radical Responses to Our Sustainability Crises calls for “a radical re-set of the sustainability agenda to recognise the full extent of the changes needed and their urgency.”

What can Sustainable Development do for World Heritage Sites like Cromford Mills?

   ‘Why bother?’  – if you have never thought about sustainability in terms of heritage and education, or have only touched on it, there are several reasons to engage, or engage further:

– Public interest: Society is in a state of rapid change not least about rising energy costs and more generally the cost of living. There is evidence that, increasingly, young people are expecting educational and other institutions to address sustainability-related issues. Since 2010, around 80 per cent of university students have said that they want their institutions to be doing more on sustainability, and around 60 per cent want to learn more about it. And first-year students said that the environmental credentials of their university were important in selecting a place to study, and just under 40% believed that how seriously their university took global development issues was important. (https://www.sos-uk.org/research/sustainability-skills-survey )

As this report(https://www.historicenvironment.scot/archives-and-research/publications/publication/?publicationId=c6f3e971-bd95-457c-a91d-aa77009aec69 ) sets out the existential threats of climate change is the fastest growing global risk to many of the World’s Heritage (WH) Sites. Many WH properties around the world are already experiencing significant negative impacts, damage, and degradation. These and many others are vulnerable to climate impacts, including those from rising temperatures, sea level rise, extreme precipitation, flooding, coastal erosion, drought, worsening wildfires, and human displacement, and will be at risk in the future. Recently observed trends are expected to continue and accelerate as climate change intensifies.

 – Relevance: Sustainability and heritage education can be helpful by introducing immediate context (local, regional, global and ‘in the news’ relevance) to public lectures, renewal of and diversity in heritage related events, and better motivation among staff and volunteers. It can make a major contribution to professional development planning and building the kinds of values and attributes that UNESCO and other professional bodies currently aspire to.

– Community links: are a rich source of potential for both students and volunteers undertaking placements, work experience and voluntary activity, and links between schools and universities and the wider community including businesses or industry (local or national). The war in Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis has led to a renewed interest in Community Energy. This and the climate emergency has put a much greater policy priority on energy security and its impact on escalating energy prices and the cost of living. Consequently, the future of energy is renewable, zero-carbon, flexible, smart, and local. Community energy is also key to delivering an engaged citizenry who will participate actively in these changes and in how energy is generated and used. The importance of and diverse services provided by community energy have been recognised at the highest levels in government.

Here in Derbyshire, there is a growing collective vision of a stronger, better informed, and capable community movement well able to take advantage of their renewable energy resources and address their energy needs in ways that builds a more localised, democratic, and sustainable energy system.

Derbyshire Dales Community Energy Ltd (DDCE Ltd) is seeing growing evidence  of interest and motivation of people and groups in community energy willing to contribute to averting climate catastrophe, coupled with a desire to bring about community benefit.  We believe that failure to harness this capacity is to plan to fail to achieve our collective net zero targets.

Community energy grew exponentially, more than doubling every year between 2014 and 2017 but for the last 5 years policy changes have mostly thwarted the sector such that community energy now struggles to make a business case to get active at all. This is fast changing with the advent of new and innovative financial ideas which this business case develops further later.

 Policy changes include the removal of ROCs, the Feed-in Tariff, Export Tariff, the Urban Community Energy Fund and Tax Relief, punitive business rates on roof-top solar, planning constraints on on-shore wind and increasing VAT on solar panels, batteries and ‘energy saving measures’ from 5% to 20%.

This threatens to waste a dynamic, community-embedded army of potential supporters who would be a vital ally if they were enabled to get active – which would produce multiple economic, environmental, social and community returns on investment that would far outweigh the upfront government investment. The Friends Provident Foundation, leaders, and pioneers in investing in social change, have said, “There is nothing that provides higher social and environmental returns on investment than community energy”

  • Ethics, reputation, and quality agenda: There is a growing interest in the links between the quality agenda and sustainability and heritage education, and the potential of it to raise performance and profile and help to develop  innovation.

– Sustainability performance marketing and reputation: many organisations are more than ever before striving to improve their sustainability credentials and performance as measured by many different types of league tables-like the People and Planet Green League ( http:// peopleandplanet.org/green league) and environmental and social responsibility schemes such as Learning in Future Environments (http://www.thelifeindex.org.uk/).  

– Employers’ views: There is growing evidence that employers are seeking employees with ‘green’ and ‘sustainability’ skills (BITC 2010) in relation to the low carbon economy, and uncertainty in socio-economic conditions. Green skills are the building blocks of the green transition and the key to unlocking the human capital that will power it. We need more opportunities for those with green skills. We must upskill workers who currently lack those skills. And we need to ensure green skills are hardwired into the skillset of future generations. Green-skilling is needed to fuel greener jobs.

– What is sustainable development? ‘Sustainable development’ describes the processes and activities that help ensure social, economic, and ecological wellbeing, at any focus – local, regional, global – where these three dimensions are seen as systemically interdependent and inseparable. By contrast, unsustainable development has a deleterious effect on at least one of these dimensions of wellbeing. Sustainability is at the heart of the Earth Charter Initiative, an international declaration of fundamental ethical principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society in the 21st century. Its mission is to: … promote the transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework that includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. (See: http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/) .

Most people in the world today have an immediate and intuitive sense of the urgent need to build a sustainable future. They may not be able to provide a precise definition of sustainability … but they clearly sense the danger and the need for informed action. World Heritage sites like Cromford Mills offer practical examples of low carbon industrial practice and can contribute to helping visitor interest in sustainability by providing tangible and symbolic and culturally important examples. Interest and activity in sustainable development is driven by rising concern in public life and wider society as people in all sectors become increasingly aware of the negative impact and threat of sustainability issues – such as climate change, economic vulnerability, social inequity, resource depletion and biodiversity loss in conditions of increasing global population – as well as of positive opportunities to develop more sustainable lifestyles and economic activities like the growing adoption of renewable energy for homes and businesses and in new forms of low carbon transport.  A recent report by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) highlighted the ‘immense ‘and ‘untapped’ potential for cultural heritage to spur action on climate change and support a transition towards resilient and low carbon pathways (https://www.wmf.org/blog/cultural-heritage-changing-climate ).

 Key point: In essence, sustainability is about trying to ensure a society whose economy and ecology  are viable and durable now and long-term. Evidence suggests we may be on the cusp of very different patterns of social and economic organisation, in response to the end of cheap energy and the threat of climate change – necessarily towards low carbon, low waste, resource efficient, and possibly more localised economies. Such changes are increasingly reflected in government and business rhetoric. There is growing awareness that we need to rethink and re-evaluate many historical patterns of economic and social organisation if we are to assure the future.

Raising Public Engagement in Derbyshire

In January 2021, the United Nations Development Programme and University of Oxford’s Sociology Department published their survey report on what is described as the largest every public opinion survey on the climate and ecological emergency. Some 1.2 million citizens in 50 countries covering half the world’s population were interviewed.  Globally, over two thirds of respondents said climate change is a global emergency requiring greater action to tackle the emergency. In the UK, this was the view of 81% of those surveyed. 

In November 2021 IPSOS MORI Issues Index research revealed that worry about climate change is the biggest concern for the British public, with the issue recording its highest-ever score.  Fieldwork was conducted from 5-11 November, covering the end of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow.  Significantly, concern about Covid 19 came second behind climate change.

Despite overwhelming public consensus in the UK, this concern is not being translated into widespread direct public action or indirect activism and lobbying of authorities to tackle the climate and ecological emergency, either individually or collectively.  This is although in April 2021, an IPSOS MORI UK survey found that only 3 in 10 respondents think the UK government had a clear plan to tackle the climate emergency. 

This lack of public engagement exists despite an almost daily stream of scientifically evidenced authoritative reports appearing in news and other media highlighting the impacts of climate breakdown already.  And a widely predicted alarmingly dystopian future the level of public action and activism appears very low, including in Derbyshire. Clearly, this is a challenge that World Heritage sites like Cromford Mills can address by making their role and purpose more directly related to the growing interest in sustainability.

Incontrovertible facts, data, statistics and predictions from the IPCC and other authorities evidencing the now imminent existential threat of the climate and ecological crisis have failed to shock many people into acting at an individual level or collective level. 

Locally, this is clearly apparent. Since February in Derbyshire where despite the Just Stop Oil action group leafleting around 5,000 homes in each location at Belper, Matlock, Derby and Chesterfield inviting residents to attend public meetings to discuss the climate crisis and options for action, the largest audience so far was just 15 people, an attendance rate of around 1 resident in every 300 households not auger well for the future. Albeit the meetings convened by Matlock Town Council and DDCE Ltd on community energy have involved between 40 to 50 residents and directors of local businesses. In addition, we have held successful online meetings with U3A groups in Belper and Darley Dales.

 Many high-profile commentators such as Jonathon Porritt contend that mobilizing public engagement on climate change requires an alternative to the narrative of fear and impending disaster.  Public engagement and then mobilization requires the creation of a story or stories that paint a vision of a far better future for everyone and their families in a decarbonized future.

This positive framing of the climate issue enables citizens to see the potential upsides to themselves.  Self-interest is a powerful motivator.

This potential of self-interest to catalyze climate action across a much wider population than the very small activist community could be triggered by applying the aggregate purchasing power of Derbyshire residents as consumers rather than as potential climate activists. Community energy supported solar power (solar PV) provides the potential to do this immediately and at scale. Other more technically complex and expensive renewable energy schemes like hydro, wind and geothermal-could come later.

CULTURAL HERITAGE in a CHANGING CLIMATE

March 21, 2022 | by Adam Markham

Climate change is the fastest growing threat to heritage sites across the world, and as such it was chosen as one of the themes for the 2022 Watch. As a member of the independent panel that gathered (remotely) over three days to make the final recommendation of sites for inclusion, I was impressed by the number of nominations we reviewed that had started to grapple with the complexity of the climate issues they face. Most that cited climate change were concerned with the current and future impacts of climate change, including coastal erosion and flooding, and extreme weather events and hotter environmental conditions, but several also addressed the role of cultural heritage as models for climate resilience.

Perhaps the 2022 Watch site under the most immediate threat is the Koagannu Mosques and Cemetery in the Maldives, where sea level rise threatens to inundate not just this important place but also much of the rest of this low-lying island nation in the Indian Ocean. Sea level rise is also the main concern for Hurst Castle in the United Kingdom, since erosion has already caused a major part of its wall to collapse. English Heritage, the national agency that manages Hurst Castle, hopes to use lessons learned there to help inform future management of other at-risk coastal properties.

Another site picked this year is Nuri in Sudan, an extraordinary collection of pyramids and other funerary monuments, the earliest of which date
from the eighth century BCE. Nuri sits in the Nile Valley and its underground chambers in particular are susceptible to flooding as the water table rises in response to climate change and poorly planned dams.

Understanding how to manage water resources in a rapidly changing climate is increasingly important as rainfall patterns change and extreme events, including droughts and storms, become more intense. There is much to learn from ancient water management systems, and two of this year’s World Monuments Watch sites may provide lessons that can be used for improving climate resilience in other places. In Nepal, the network of hitis (water taps and fountains) of the Kathmandu Valley have been supplying clean water to communities for more than 1000 years, and in addition to being a unique element of the region’s cultural heritage, they will be crucial to water security as the Himalayan climate continues to warm and glacier meltwaters change.

In Peru the Watch project for the Yanacancha-Huaquis Cultural Landscape aims to restore a pre- Incan water system consisting of small dams, canals, and agricultural terraces. These ancient water management technologies can tell stories of how people have adapted to climate changes in the past. In the archaeology and intangible heritage of the biologically unique islands of Yemen’s Soqotra archipelago, a World Heritage site in the Arabian Sea, there are also lessons to be learned about how communities have adapted to harsh climates and environments.

Although I have highlighted here a few of the Watch sites for which responding to climate change was a central element in the nomination, it is likely that almost all the monuments selected will be affected in some way. Whether the threat is from more frequent wildfires, coastal erosion, flooding, changed rainfall patterns, or impacts of changes in heat and humidity on building materials, understanding local climate impacts will be critical for the preservation and management of pretty much all monuments in the future. Cultural heritage itself is crucial for creating and maintaining climate resilience, and this too is reflected in the 2022 World Monuments Watch.

NO MORE FAIRY TALES

Research by Dr Denise Baden shows that stories which introduce climate change solutions in the context of an otherwise mainstream story are more likely to inspire greener behaviours than catastrophic tales of climate change. In her guest blog she introduces the latest Green Stories anthology No More Fairy Tales—Stories to Save Our Planet.

Blog by Denise Baden

No more fairy tales—Stories to Save Our Planet

As the climate crisis becomes ever more urgent, eco-anxiety continues to rise. While often hard to bear, a recent article by psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary suggests that anxiety can be beneficial to help us prepare for the worst. It can also lead to avoidance and denial—not irrational responses in the circumstances one might argue.

To further constructive engagement with and action on climate change, the Green Stories project is taking a solution-focussed storytelling approach. We run writing competitions and other projects to create a cultural body of work that presents positive visions of what a sustainable society might look like and how we can get there.

This year, Green Stories has been working with Herculean Climate Solutions and the Climate Fiction Writers League to compile an anthology of climate solutions wrapped in short stories. Published in time for COP 27, we are targeting a wide audience. The aim is to harness the eco-anxiety most of us feel (in varying degrees) towards constructive actions. 

For each story we have prepared to a carefully curated information page that allows the reader to delve deeper on the details of the solutions presented in each narrative. We want to inspire readers to take action and make it as easy as possible for them to do so. 

Research from the last green stories publication, Habitat Man, provides solid evidence that stories aimed at a mainstream audience with green solutions embedded can affect behaviour. Findings revealed that 98% of readers adopted at least one of the green solutions mentioned. These included practices such as wildlife gardening, composting, and even changing their will to specify a natural burial. 

We hope to gather similar learnings from a survey aimed at readers of the new anthology: No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save our Planet. This time, as well as asking if the stories changed readers’ behaviour, we are also interested to see if there were any effects on eco-anxiety. Our hope is that by tying issues directly to solutions, we can help reduce eco-anxiety by increasing a sense of agency. 

The process of working with a range of climate experts and climate fiction authors to compile the anthology has also revealed much about the divergency of preferred approaches. The engineers love the big, bold, audacious solutions, the more impossible the better. ‘Glaciers melting? Well let’s just refreeze them! Need to build up seawalls and capture carbon? Just plant mangrove terraces.’ This outraged some nature lovers and ecologists who would rather we stop destroying mangroves in the first place (substitute forests, peat, kelp forests, seagrass etc.as needed). The nature lovers abhor the geo-engineering approach, while the engineers claim that we’re geo-engineering all the time anyway in the name of development, so why not do it on purpose and more thoughtfully? Nature lovers claim greenwash and the engineers and techies claim green hush! The social scientists query the point of pouring resources into carbon drawdown projects if we’re still consuming as fast as we can in the name of economic growth. 

As editor it’s been a challenge reconciling all these viewpoints. Each story was written by a professional writer and then honed by climate experts. The stories I co-wrote myself as a social scientist, with Steve, a chemical engineer and Martin a comedy writer were an amusing but educational wrangle to determine which aspects got priority. With my social scientist hat on I was keen to ensure that the point about consumption got top position. 

I would highly recommend CUSP readers to have a look at the collection. You might especially like The Assassin which imagines eight people in a citizens’ jury debating climate solutions all based on reducing consumption (repair, sharing economy, personal carbon allowances)—only, one of them is an assassin. Similarly, The Award Ceremony addresses the issue of how scriptwriters implicitly promote excessive consumption as an aspiration via characters who fly in private jets, drive fast cars and wear a different outfit each day. Both these stories also promote the idea of switching from the GDP to a well-being index as a way to change the conversation from what’s good for the economy to what’s good for us. 

Judge for yourselves if we got it right. Please see the Habitat press website to buy a copy, and we’d love you to complete the survey at the end so we can return to share our findings on whether we were successful in translating eco-anxiety into positive action.

Link

The collection includes short stories from Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Sara Foster, Andrew Dana Hudson, Brian Burt and others. Further details about the anthology and accompanying material can be accessed via the Habitat Press website: https://habitatpress.com/no-more-fairy-tales/

IS UNESCO STILL THE CONSCIENCE OF HUMANITY ?

According to a recent and challenging publication there are growing concerns that UNESCO might be being influenced by the prevailing neoliberal ideology( as neuroliberal) to the extent that its distinctive role as the conscience of humanity is being compromised :

  (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03057925.2022.2129956)

 As the paper argues UNESCO came into existence at a particularly prescient utopian moment bracketed by the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. As outlined in Article 1 of its Constitution, the organisation’s raison d’être is “ … to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affirmed for the peoples of the world, without distinction of race, sex, language or religion, by the Charter of the UN.”

 It is widely regarded as the intellectual agency of the UN; UNESCO has provided an intellectual arena within which  inter alia the human rights movement could be advanced. It also remains a major architect of international standard setting instruments on various problems confronting humanity, resulting in the diffusion of human rights norms and principles within its member states.

UNESCO’s  global mandate post war remains the quest to advance a new form of “humanism.” Key pillars of this humanistic “tradition” or “ontology” include: a belief in universalism, a recognition of the “intrinsic” value of education and its role in realising human potential and human emancipation, dialogue and international cooperation, a commitment to equality and democracy and to the advocacy of “unity in diversity,” and a belief in human agency and human beings’ responsibility to contribute to the betterment of society. The agency’s role as the moral and intellectual “conscience of humanity”–was an expression attributed to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru at the ninth session of its general conference in New Delhi in 1956.

 Author Audrey Bryan argues persuasively that contemporary appeals to the historical positioning of UNESCO as the arbiter of humanity fundamentally supports and reinforces the agency’s sense of identity, authenticity, and distinctiveness. However, in this paper she suggests that this designation is becoming increasingly untenable as the agency increasingly aligns itself with neoliberalism and digital pedagogies in pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs). According to the author these developments have resulted in the agency’s loss of “epistemic legitimacy”  because it espouses fundamentally opposing ideological perspectives on the purpose and value of education -one which privileges the intrinsic value of education and its role in enhancing prospects for peace, social justice, and sustainable development, and another which promotes unfettered economic growth, marketisation and private/corporate interests.

The central tenet of this argument seems to rest on the fact that UNESCO has adopted what she terms the “neuroliberally-infected” conscious brain approach to the implementation of the SDGs-which is signified by the slogan SEL for SDGs. And this social-emotional learning(SEL)distorts the agency’s approach to social and global justice by using this as a so-called flag of convenience and hence compromising its role as the conscience of humanity.

Whilst, there may be substance to this well-argued opinion piece it seems to me as someone who has worked closely with the UK National Commission for UNESCO and its HQ in Paris these potential distortions do not detract from the significance and prominence of its voice in promoting ways of implementing the global goals.