Tips for Communicating Sustainability to the Sceptical
By Jon Barrett, Converging Crises blog
Here’s a taster from the Activities Section of the ‘Sustainability through Experience Handbook’ currently in preparation…The book is a multi-authored theory and practice handbook on outreaching sustainability through experiential learning.
Sustainability through experience
By Jon Barrett, Converging Crises blog
You are deep in the woods at nightfall and it has started to rain. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been ‘volunteered’ for some sustainable-team-building-thingummy-whatsit that you only agreed to because you’ve just applied for a promotion. And now you are bracing yourself for a long uncomfortable night in a make-shift shelter a bit too up close and personal with your three unlikely companions...
Natural Connections…
By Jon Barrett, Converging Crises blog
We have arrived at a point in our infinitesimally short life on our 4.5 billion-year-old planet at which no part of the natural world remains untouched by human hand. So it might seem perverse that, at this time of peak human interference with natural biological systems, we are now discovering the benefits of getting closer to nature.
Envisioning Sustainability…
By Jon Barrett, Converging Crises blog
The first part of this article, Imagining Sustainability, discussed some of the institutional, social, and psychological barriers in Western societies that “continue to thwart meaningful measurable change”. It also highlighted failings of population-scale information campaigns intended to motivate such change and indicated the better potential for small group and inter-personal approaches that engage deeper values-based motivation in overcoming unsustainability. This second part considers in more detail some small group non-formal education approaches that show potential to achieve and maintain community-level shifts to sustainability.
Imagining Sustainability
By Jon Barrett, Converging Crisis Blog
So, if apocalyptic messages seems premature to us and we are unable readily to empathise with people we don’t know in far distant lands, what, short of enforced regulation or first-hand experience of impacts, could possibly mobilise us en masse to become sustainable?
Resistance is fertile
By Jon Barrett, Converging Crisis Blog
Even worse for our hopes for mass mobilisation, our current response suggests that, even were we all agreed that our crisis is real and urgent, we in our affluent democracies are not, as we like to imagine, free citizens who will easily resolve to combat an external enemy together. We are much more like nations already under occupation – by an enemy we prefer not to acknowledge but clearly evident all around us. Because the enemy is in our own desire to maintain as long as possible the status quo that is our lives today.
Predictions revisited: Fukushima
By Jon Barrett, Converging Crises blog
Hokusai’s famous 1820 painting of fishing boats battling through The Great Wave portrays a distinctly Japanese awareness of the vulnerability of human life amidst the tremendous forces of nature. In Shrine Shinto, the main Japanese Shinto tradition, certain places are held to be particularly sacred, where the ordinary and the everyday interact with the divine. But, needless to say, in modern secular times this ancient Shinto wisdom of respect for the sacred and for the power of nature has not been permitted to stand in the way of industrial progress.