Podcasts - so many things I want to listen too, so little time.

If you want to find out more about sustainability issues it doesn't all have to be hard work. I've taken to susbscribing to podcasts from radio programs that I like, putting them on my Ipod and then listening to them as I drive. Just go onto the webpage, click susbscribe and new episodes will be downloaded to your itunes everyweek, when you open itunes and have the internet on. I find them really interesting, they get you thinking and you could easily find you use them in your lessons to get discussions going.

Here are a few of my favourite sustainability related ones:

Costing the Earth This is a program from the BBC radio 4 (my favourite radio station which I miss alot!). This is what its about... ' Man's effect on the environment, questioning accepted truths, challenging those in charge and reporting on progress towards improving the world. Presenters, Tom Heap and Dr Alice Roberts, travel the UK and the world in search of solutions to the challenges facing the natural world and the people and wildlife that live in it.'

Future Tense This is from ABC radio National. Its not specifically about sustainability but its is about future thinking and so often covers sustainability for lots of different perspectives eg.

• Future Governance - In a world where issues like climate change, population and migration are challenging the way we organise our societies. How should we address some of these issues? And what affect will they have on the future of governance? or
• Resilience Science - Many scientists around the world believe that we need to focus on ways of making our urban and natural environments more resilient. So what is the idea of resilience science? And how can it help deal with future environmental challenges?

Or try these podcasts from Oxford University which Richard just found, you can't susbscribe but can down load any you find interesting, just right click and 'save link as'. Its dangerous though you might find you want ot download most of them and will have no time in your life for much else!!!! I just downloaded one by Howard stern on the economics of climate change but there are so many other relevant ones it would be hard to list but start by searching the social sciences division.

Happy Listening!

Let us know if there are any other good ones you know of.

How can happiness help the environment?

I've always been interested in the Psycology of Happiness, what it is that makes us happy and gives us a sense of wellbeing. Living in present, noticing the little things, nurturing our relationships and being part of a community, seeing the positive and doing a bit of exercise to keep all this going or help get rid of your frustrations if you're not seeing the positive!

I'd thought about how these are the important things rather than the material possessions that you have and have gradually changed my life around a bit to make it easier to do more of these things. My mum has been out staying for the past 3 weeks and I'd been talking to her quite a bit about it too and then I came across this video, again in the great green razor newsletter from the Greenpages.

Nic Marks at TED talking about The Happy Planet.

Did you know that that Costa Rica has the same levels of wellbeing as western Countries but achieves this with 1/4 of the ecological footprint? I didn't.

• They have a life expectancy of 78.5yrs, higher than the US,
• 99% of their electricity is from renewable sources,
  
• They plan to be carbon neutral by 2021,
  
• They abolished the army in 1949 and have invested in social programs of health and education instead,
  
• and well they have a 'latin vibe' which values family and community and having fun.
  

Other latin American countries are going the same way. So our challenge is to get all countries heading this way. We need to measure progress in terms of wellbeing not economic growth, looked at like this we don't have to give anything up just to make less environmental impact, we might gain. Marks argues that it may be a way to turn around the climate sceptics, who are possibley afraid that to admit it is happenign will mean they have to reduce their lifestyle, if we look at quality of life in terms of wellbeing then they wouldn't have to.

A great video use it with our lesson Feeling Good in the Big Consumption module. We look at Bhutan and how it measures Gross National Happiness rather that GNP and students come up with policies to help achieve that in their country. Marks also talks about how government could encourage this at the end of his talk too. All in all just a great vid which might just help you feel good too! Vertainly put a smile on my face.

Dilemmas, Dilemmas

I was really excited to hear from my colleague Richard that we are hoping to be able to offer workshops with the team from www.dilemmas.net.au. He met with Lily Settlemeyer from Curtin University, who has been instrumental in developing these and they are keen for us to help promote their resources for use by schools.

No problem! I think they are great and by chance (well not totally, we discovered them after a meeting with Jenny from SPICE) had already included one in an Ecosystems/ Biodiversity/Fieldwork module that we are developing for science called 'Know Your Place'. We've used the swamp tortoise one in this case. These are my notes from the lesson plan about why these resources are so good to use. They are exactly the type of learning experiences that we think are best for Educating about sustainability.

www.dilemmas.net.au

There are a series of dilemmas on this website which have been developed in collaboration with scientists in WA universities and the SPICE program. They tie in perfectly with our philosophy for Sustainable education. This is why:

• Enquiry based; students ask relevant and interesting questions about the world around them.
• Decision making, students make decisions based on the information that they have at the time but are willing to reconsider when they learn new facts.
• Values education, students consider other students points of view and respect the fact that others make think differently to them and try to understand the reasons why. This can help them to make persuasive arguments for their case.
• Collaborative approach, students work together to discuss their decisions and must respect the opinions of others in their group.
• Controversial issues, the topics allow students to examine the complexity of decisions made in everyday life about environmental/scientific/social issues and to understand how these issues are contested and can be resolved.
• Relevant engaging topics; they include farming and housing development on wetlands, endangered swamp tortoises, whether or not to save beached whales and farmers decisions in relation to changing climate.

Graphs students can get excited about.

Yes really!!!

Have a look at Hans Rosling's Gapminder World. The link goes to a cgraph about CO2 emissions form 1820. It shows all the countries, how their level of emissions per person changed over time, diff colours for diff. continents and the size of the circle is overall emissions. You can click on each circle to see which country or select different countrires to look at their trajectory. Income per person is on the x axis.

• Where does Australia end up?
• What happens to China and India after about 1980?
• Which country led the way with emissions?
• Whats the correlation between wealth and emissions?
• When did the US become the biggest producer per person? Why did the figure fall in the 1930s?

Or watch the overall emissions on a map for a really stark vision of where the emissions are coming form.

You can project it at full screen, pause it at different points or back track by draggin, hover over circles to find out who it is. You can choose different cgraphs for all sorts of global measures. All UN statistics.

The picture above is just a screen grab, the interactive is so so so much better.

Blogs

I have been finding myself using blogs more and more for inspiration, to find out what teachers are doing, to get an idea of feelings on different topics etc. I get ideas from them and they invariably lead me on to other places and sites where I get more ideas. You've got to stop somewhere but when you are a bit short of insporation I find them really great. Its really why I decided to start to write one aswell, to try to give you a bit of inspiration or the lead to set you off on the path to discovering new things for you.

Here's the train of thoughts/pages that I went along when reasearching for some lessons on climate change, MEDC vs LEDC attitudes and Kyoto. I think I started by search for Climate change Developing Countries Adaptations. This is what I found:

From Power to Poverty is a blog by the UK Oxfam research manager covering lots of aspects of aidwork. He had written a post about how african nations were acting to adapt to climate change. I then searched for other posts of his about cliamte change, from the comments I linbked to another website debating the effects of being sustainable in the North on the South from the IIED. This then led me on to a documentary on Copenhagen from the point of view of developing nations, really interesting.

So much better than all the dry stuff I was getting from official websites which was making me fall asleep and not really telling me what the issues really were (well probably they were but I was bored by then so imaging how bored your studetns might be if they had to read this). I was thinking it would be great to be able to direct students to blogs about the topics they are studying. They can see what views real people have, look at different sides of the arguement and could even engage in it themselves by leaving comments on a blog.

They could start their own class blog if they wanted, give their opinions about what they are studying, post some of their work, see what other people had to say about it. For a blog with loads of ideas about how to use social media in you teaching check out http://daviderogers.blogspot.com/ he's really innovating with it in his lessons, using twitter, facebook, shaerd files etc.

So I hope this gives you some inspiration to go off searching for yourself. It certainly got me reinspired.

Climate Cartoon

I was looking for cartoons to illustrate some lessons I am doing on climate change. This one made me laugh and summed up really what we believe here. Whatever you think about climate change the move to more sustainable living has so many benefits in so many areas. Why wouldn't you want to try?

Power to the Pupils

Ingrid reported on the meetings she'd been attending in our partner schools and I was struck by two examples of students being given ownership of projects.

At Mandurah Baptist college students volunteered to adopt vegetable beds. They were told what they would need to do to maintain them and grow their vegetables and now there is a waiting list of students who want to adopt a bed and gardening going on in breaks and after school. This is in contrast to before where 'everyone' was responsible and there were issues with harvesting. This seems like a great step and is testament to how well students perform when given responsibility, real ownership and the chance to prove themselves. Good on the teachers for making this happen, its not always easy to let go fo the reins.

At another school, John Curtin College of the Arts, one of the biology teachers has rewritten the curriculum to allow studetns to support each other via a wiki. A great way to get students to realise that they can all help each other to do well in their exams, that they are not competing against each other for the best result but can share knowledge and ideas, reduce their workload and support each other. Wiki's are shared spaces on the internet which different people (e.g. all members of a class) can edit and add information too. A great tool, if you don't use them elsewhere then start by using them for revision, with different groups preparing notes on diff topics would be great.
http://www.wikispaces.com/ Go here to set up your wiki. Free for K-12 education.

This great video explain how they work and what you might use them for really simply
Wikis in plain english

So Power to the Pupils - get them to help themselves and free up some time for you!

Lucy

Consumption Conundrum

Anup Shah, Consumption and Consumerism, Global Issues, Updated: September 03, 2008

This article really shows how important consumption (as oppsoed to population) in using up the world's resources and degrading the environment. It contains links to articles on particular products and data about how the top 20% of the world's consumers account for 76.6% of the the World's consumption.

This is a quote extracted from the UN.

Today’s consumption is undermining the environmental resource base. It is exacerbating inequalities. And the dynamics of the consumption-poverty-inequality-environment nexus are accelerating. If the trends continue without change — not redistributing from high-income to low-income consumers, not shifting from polluting to cleaner goods and production technologies, not promoting goods that empower poor producers, not shifting priority from consumption for conspicuous display to meeting basic needs — today’s problems of consumption and human development will worsen.

… The real issue is not consumption itself but its patterns and effects.

… Inequalities in consumption are stark. Globally, the 20% of the world’s people in the highest-income countries account for 86% of total private consumption expenditures — the poorest 20% a minuscule 1.3%. More specifically, the richest fifth:

• Consume 45% of all meat and fish, the poorest fifth 5%
• Consume 58% of total energy, the poorest fifth less than 4%
• Have 74% of all telephone lines, the poorest fifth 1.5%
• Consume 84% of all paper, the poorest fifth 1.1%
• Own 87% of the world’s vehicle fleet, the poorest fifth less than 1%

Runaway growth in consumption in the past 50 years is putting strains on the environment never before seen.

— Human Development Report 1998 Overview, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) — Emphasis Added. Figures quoted use data from 1995

More to think about. Its stillconsumption and we have to look to ourselves as well as the structures in place that turn us into consumers. Lucy

The Population Puzzle

I watched Dick Smith's population puzzle last night hoping that would address some issues of sustainability. Personally I found it quite a dissapointing program in terms of balance and really examining the complexity of the issues but its definitely one that could help spark debate, and indeed the debate after was better.

It all seemed a bit reductionist and very 'conservative'. Dick seemed to want to maintain things as they are. Well ok but even so things are not really ok as they are.

He argued that slower population growth would stop areas of land on city outskirts being concreted over and high rise developments. He argued that we did not want to become like Bangladesh. Well there is some way to go to get to that population, they certainly don't have a problem with lack of water but I would strongly argue that their poverty is not due to overpopulation but to their history. On top of that the environmental impact/carbon footprint of each individual person in Bangladesh is a tiny fraction of an Australian's.

Dick seems to want Australia to stay as it is so that we can continue to consume as we are. He did not talk about reducing our consumption, using less water and energy, living more densley in cities rather than continuously exanding in 1/4 acre blocks (they're an accident of history), sustainable agriculture and renewable energy. At my level of consumption I need about 2.3 planets, way too much but probably not as much as some. That's what we need to change. He certainly did not talk about changing his lifestyle. Yes population adds to the problem but if all the world consumed like Bangladeshis there would not be a climate change problem (although the poverty would lead to other envirnmental problems).
We consume too much and if we want to preserve the Australian (and world) environment it cannot continue. Population is one part of the problem but to only look at this totally ignores the enormous complexity of the issue. Increased population does not correlate directly with ruining the environment or decreasing quality of life. This assumes that what we have now is the right way, that this is the best quality of life we can have. Its not, it needs radical ethinking.

Living in a high density city, with areas with a sense of community, where you can walk to work, walk to the shops, know your neighbours (as you don't just get straight into your car), have easily acdessible countryside (as its not covered in suburbs), have hostpitals, libraries, leisure centres etc all close by could well be a better quality of life than living in a suburb with not real centre where you have to drive to the city centre for work, drive to the shops etc. And it is certainly better for the environment .

I could go on and on.

As you can see a great film to start a debate. This is the website for the population puzzle . It has lots of stats and links to other sites. The opinions page is also good with different points of view, good for getting a class debate going. I like comments by Amanda Mackenzie of Australian Youth Climate Coalition. And this is the Q and A website where you can download the program and look at the transcript. I'm with Suvendrini Perera, and there are also good points about the regions and immigration in general. Also global connections, our global responsibility vs responsibility to our own citizens.

Lots to think about over the weekend, Lucy

EDIT - Well I thought a bit more about this over the weekend. What it really highlighted was that we need a plan. I personally think its impossible to say what a sustainable population is as it depends upon how sustainably they live - if they reduce consuption and change agricultural practices etc. it will be much higher than if not BUT if Australia's population will increase (as it will) it needs to planned for. Where will they live, how will they live, how will they be supported, what policies would encourage more sustainble living, what import, export, agricultural policies, planning and trasport policies do we need to make this sustainable? If there is no plan and we don't think about the Austrlia that we want then we can't work towards achieving it.

I think our lesson 'Our Future' in The Big CONsumption gets students considering this. They envisage the future that they want here and then plan a series of steps in different aspects of life to achieve that. Maybe they can help the government with this?? Its a very different approach to to just looking at what is and then projecting the numbers out and working out how to cater for that, which is I think the main point Dick Smith was trying to make.

Lucy

Coincidences & landscape

Wow, isn't it strange how things happen.
Yesterday in the car on the way back from Perth I was having a conversation with Dave (he'd just come back from a surveying job in Newman, yes we contrast a bit on sustainability here!), about how mining so radically alters the landscape. How we dig up and totally alter the surface of the earth. Concreting over the earth to create cities is also pretty major but I think for me mining seems even more shocking as we are changing natural erosive processes which have taken millions of years and the material taken out is not going back. We are manufacturing (and quickly) a new altered landscape.
Here's where the coincidence come in..... Today in my inbox i got a news letter from the Green Pages magazine and one of the articles was about photographer Edward Burtynsky. His picutres are about exactly this subject, how industry transforms nature and landscape. Here's what they are about in his own words:
Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.

Edward Burtynsky

Here are a couple of examples of his pictures from Australia. They're taken from his website.


These pictures are of kalgoorlie and Lake Lefroy in Western Australia.

If you were doing a geography module on consumption these would be great pictures to use as 'Landscapes of Consumption' to compare with the end Shopping Mall 'Lanscape of Consumtption' that we would more often think of. They show quite shockingly the direct affect our consumer choices have on landscapes (i was going to say our landscapes but are they really ours to do this with, often they are other peoples' and always the plants and animals which would have lived here before this).

EDIT
Richard was just saying imagine how the water table and everything is affected all around, probably not just the mine itself but the ecosystems surrounding it for miles will also be changed by it.