This book bridges the gap between two critical issues—environmental literacy and social norms – and explores various topics and case studies from Sinophone and Taiwanese perspectives. Each chapter includes extensive information on pro-environmental behaviors, and on people with working experiences, home experiences, and actual philosophies in their daily lives. In keeping with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), this book highlights our potential to contribute to social inclusion and environmental protection, and offers a comprehensive guide for scholars, students, practitioners, and entrepreneurs in environmental education and related disciplines.
This edited collection invites educational practitioners and theorists to speculate on - and craft visions for - the future of environmental and sustainability education. It explores what educational methods and practices might exist on the horizon, waiting for discovery and implementation. A global array of authors imagines alternative futures for the field and attempts to rethink environmental and sustainability education institutionally, intellectually, and pedagogically. These thought leaders chart how emerging modes of critical speculation might function as a means to remap and redesign the future of environmental and sustainability education today. Previous volumes within this United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development series have responded to the complexity of environmental education in our contemporary moment with concepts such as social learning, intergenerational learning, and transformative leadership for sustainable futures. 'Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education' builds on this earlier work - as well as the work of others. It seeks to foster modes of intellectual engagement with ecological futures in the Anthropocene; to develop resilient, adaptable pedagogies as a hedge against future ecological uncertainties; and to spark discussion concerning how futures thinking can generate theoretical and applied innovations within the field.
This volume is a collection of essays considering the relationship between the social sciences and sustainability studies. Contributions are drawn from a range of disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology (both scholarly and applied), political science, and media studies. It has been carefully edited to provide the reader with a range of commentaries to interrogate the evolution of ‘sustainability imaginaries’ in contexts as varied as urban planning, community gardens, bread-making, sustainable food movements in Italy, applied projects such as water projects in Bangladesh, and disaster studies. As such, this is a book which ultimately argues for the value of the social sciences in considering one of the more urgent and complex topics of our time – that of sustainability.
This open access book is designed and written to bridge the gap on the critical issues identified in environmental education programs in Asian countries. The world and its environments are changing rapidly, and the public may have difficulty keeping up and understanding how these changes will affect our way of life. The authors discuss various topics and case studies from an Asian perspective, but the content, messaging, and lessons learned need not be limited to Asian cultures. Each chapter provides a summary of the intensive research that has been performed on pro-environmental behaviors, the experience of people working in industry and at home, and their philosophies that guide them in their daily lives. We highlight humanity’s potential to contribute to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by understanding better the environmental psychology, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability and stewardship protection elements that contribute to responsible environmental citizenship. The content of the chapters in this book includes a discussion of the crucial issues, plans, and evaluations for sustainability theories, practices, and actions with a proposed management structure for maximizing the cultural, social, and ecological diversity of Asian experiences compared to other theories and cultures internationally. We intend that the data in this book will provide a comprehensive guide for students, professors, practitioners, and entrepreneurs of environmental education and its related disciplines using case studies that demonstrate the relationship between the social and behavioral sciences and environmental leadership and sustainability.
A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth. We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future—to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn to inhabit a longer now. Ialenti takes on two overlapping crises: the Anthropocene, our current moment of human-caused environmental transformation; and the deflation of expertise—today's popular mockery and institutional erosion of expert authority. The second crisis, he argues, is worsening the effects of the first. Hearing out scientific experts who study a wider time span than a Facebook timeline is key to tackling our planet's emergency. Astrophysicists, geologists, historians, evolutionary biologists, climatologists, archaeologists, and others can teach us the art of long-termism. For a case study in long-term thinking, Ialenti turns to Finland's nuclear waste repository “Safety Case” experts. These scientists forecast far future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, and more, over the coming tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands or millions—of years. They are not pop culture “futurists” but data-driven, disciplined technical experts, using the power of patterns to construct detailed scenarios and quantitative models of the far future. This is the kind of time literacy we need if we are to survive the Anthropocene.
In the coming decades, the general public will be required ever more often to understand complex environmental issues, evaluate proposed environmental plans, and understand how individual decisions affect the environment at local to global scales. Thus it is of fundamental importance to ensure that higher quality education about these ecological issues raises the environmental literacy of the general public. In order to achieve this, teachers need to be trained as well as classroom practice enhanced. This volume focuses on the integration of environmental education into science teacher education. The book begins by providing readers with foundational knowledge of environmental education as it applies to the discipline of science education. It relates the historical and philosophical underpinnings of EE, as well as current trends in the subject that relate to science teacher education. Later chapters examine the pedagogical practices of environmental education in the context of science teacher education. Case studies of environmental education teaching and learning strategies in science teacher education, and instructional practices in K-12 science classrooms, are included. This book shares knowledge and ideas about environmental education pedagogy and serves as a reliable guide for both science teacher educators and K-12 science educators who wish to insert environmental education into science teacher education. Coverage includes everything from the methods employed in summer camps to the use of podcasting as a pedagogical aid. Studies have shown that schools that do manage to incorporate EE into their teaching programs demonstrate significant growth in student achievement as well as improved student behavior. This text argues that the multidisciplinary nature of environmental education itself requires problem-solving, critical thinking and literacy skills that benefit students’ work right across the curriculum.
Through the presentation of visual and textual insights, this book chronicles the experiences of Quechuan bilingual college students, who strive to maintain their ethnolinguistic identity while succeeding in Spanish-centric curricula. The book merges decolonial theory and participatory action research in pursuit of mobilizing Indigenous languages such as Quechua and depicts the ways in which these Andean college students deal with limited opportunities for Quechua-Spanish bilingual practices. It provides an overview of their collective efforts to mobilize Quechua in higher education, efforts which will help all who read it understand the maintenance of the Quechua language beginning at the grassroots level. The author advocates for engaging language researchers in critical collective forces at the core of conditions which promote Quechua in higher education, a collective effort which must reflect decolonial, non-Eurocentric, non-fundamentalist Indigenous concepts in combination with action-oriented cultural wealth for the benefit of minoritized languages and peoples.
Most, if not all of the global biogeochemical cycles on the earth have been broken or are at dangerous tipping points. These broken cycles have expressed themselves in various forms as soil degradation and depletion, ocean acidification, global warming and climate change. The best proposal for an organic solution to fixing the myriad broken cycles is a deliberate investment in solutions that first acknowledge the historic roles played by both the subjugated peoples, and the economic beneficiaries of the environmental exploitations of the past. Ever since Europeans made contact with the West, a series of global circumstances including the genocide of the indigenous people of the Americas, the enslavement and global subjugation of Africans, and the emergence of Western concepts of trade dominance and capitalism, have led to deleterious impacts on the global biogeochemical cycles. Addressing the broken biogeochemical cycles should be done with a clear understanding that it was not only human subjects which were subjugated, but also land, water, and air. These three global stores must be replenished from the ideological position that poverty is not simply the absence of money, but is also the lack of access to non-polluting energy sources, to clean air devoid of runaway greenhouse gasses, and to local conditions devoid of climate change instabilities. With this in mind, the global powerbrokers can enter into a new deal with developing nations, shifting the paradigm toward a new ecological approach that rewards good behavior and sets new standards of worldwide relations based on ecologic inclusivity rather than the exclusive economic arrangements currently in order. Harnessing a forward thinking approach to analyzing the current global environmental crisis, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable development, political ecology, sustainable agriculture, climate change and environmental justice.
This volume explores themes of ecotheology, ecofeminism, environmental pollution and degradation, climate change, human and environmental rights, sustainable development, human-animal relations through totem and taboo, sacred sites and spaces, and other environmental topics in ways that add immeasurably to the study of African environmentalisms and the interaction of law and religion. In terms of religion, the capability of humans not only to sin and destroy the earth, but also to repair and redeem it, is very much in evidence across Christianity, Islam and Africa’s many indigenous religious and cultural traditions. In terms of law, the need for effective policies and for states and governments to work with indigenous groups and communities towards environmental solutions is also apparent.
