Making a Sustainability Perspective Second Nature in Education

This blog is part of our Inspired Ethonomics series. It's co-authored by Second Nature President Anthony Cortese and Senior Fellow Georges Dyer.

In Part 1 of this series, we noted that our dominant economic system is not only failing to deliver, it is destroying the life-support system of the only planet we've got. With population on track to grow to 9 billion by 2050 and huge increases in consumption and demand from the developing world, a dramatic rethinking is overdue. Higher education must lead this rethinking. It must transform its teaching, research, operations, and service to communities if we are to have a chance at a thriving, peaceful, global society. There are key academic innovations that can and must happen to prepare graduates--3 million per year--for 21st century business.

Georgia Tech's Center for Biologically Inspired Design brings together biologists, engineers, and physical scientists to facilitate research and education for innovative products, such as more efficient Internet hosting informed by honeybee colonies. The Gund Institute of Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont is taking a transdisciplinary approach to examine the relationships among ecological, political, and economic systems, such as evaluating the Genuine Progress Indicator as a better metric than Gross Domestic Product.

The University of Pennsylvania's Engineering Department, with a focus on global citizenship, pairs technical expertise with educational opportunities to support an array of projects, from improving the water supply in part of rural Cameroon to constructing a biodiesel processor at a high school in Philadelphia.

The Center for Sustainable Enterprise at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School is helping students learn how to bring profits to a triple bottom line and identify new market opportunities through sustainable development. At UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, the Center for Responsible Business is bridging theory and practice, focusing on strategy, metrics, and social enterprise in the business arena.

Here are engineers, biologists, business leaders, designers, economists, and more working together around the central questions of our time: How can we as a global society continue to develop and prosper on such a small planet? Is physical growth necessary for improved wellbeing, or can we foster the growth of value without the growth of stuff? (All central themes of Tim Jackson's new book Prosperity without Growth)

Last year a group of leading thinkers who have been grappling with these questions for decades--professors in economics, architecture, the sciences, engineering, philosophy, and the arts--along with college presidents and others--came together to produce a report called Education for Climate Neutrality and Sustainability. This report focuses on the various ways institutions can incorporate a sustainability perspective into the educational experience for all students. Education for sustainability is a key component of the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment, a collective effort more than 665 colleges and universities in all 50 states working to create climate neutral campuses and ensure their graduates are prepared to address climate change upon graduation.

They found that to do this, the educational experience would reflect an intimate connection among curriculum, research, operations, and the broader community. Human/environment interdependence, values, and ethics would be a seamless and central part of all learning. It would promote interdisciplinary systems thinking within and across all disciplines. Active, experiential, inquiry-based learning and real-world problem solving would integrate and complement formal classroom learning. Colleges and universities would “practice what they preach” by modeling sustainability in their own operations and partnering beyond campus to move all of society towards sustainability.