Learning Circularity By Networking Cultural Islands

The Gallatin School of Individualized Study provides a distinctive liberal arts education for a diverse student body. The faculty foster passionate intellectual commitments from learners and prepare them for a world in which managing knowledge is key to success.

Guided by the philosophy that self-directed learning is the key goal, the faculty seek to cultivate an environment conducive to intellectual exploration across traditional academic disciplines.

They insist on active student engagement in developing the direction of their own education. Its highly specialized and deeply engaged advisers guide students in their intellectual explorations toward an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving

Reliant on tourism and trade, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) were among the hardest hit globally by the economic impact of COVID-19.

Fiji and other SIDS could bounce back from the pandemic by building a sustainable blue economy that makes the most of their oceanic geography.

The Blue Recovery Hubs initiative, of which Fiji is a key participant, will examine SIDS to identify ocean-based and sustainable opportunities for growth.

A mantra for the green economy: 'as the poor get richer the rich get poorer'.

Amol Rajan explores what switching to a green economy may mean for the way we live and work and whether it’s compatible with financial growth. If, for the sake of the planet we need to cut production, consumption and perhaps profit, then how will we pay for the essential services we need in the future? There are some difficult choices to make that sound particularly tough amid a cost-of-living crisis. However, despite all the difficulties, there are those who foresee a cleaner, fairer and more enriching world.

Graihagh Jackson, presenter of the BBC podcast ‘The Climate Question’ is with Amol Rajan alongside guests Professor Tim Jackson, Bernice Lee, Najma Mohamed and Dr Rhian-Mari Thomas.

The full episode is available via the BBC website. If you have difficulties accessing the episode from outside the UK, please try Apple podcasts.

Podcasts→
Further reading
Let’s Be Less Productive—Restoring the Value of Care | Article by Tim Jackson for The New York Times
MARCH 26, 2020
Let’s Be Less Productive—Restoring the Value of Care | Article by Tim Jackson for The New York Times
Wellbeing Matters—Tackling growth dependency | Policy Briefing
FEBRUARY 28, 2020
Wellbeing Matters—Tackling growth dependency | Policy Briefing
The Post-Growth Challenge — Secular Stagnation, Inequality and the Limits to Growth | Working Paper by Tim Jackson
MAY 13, 2018
The Post-Growth Challenge — Secular Stagnation, Inequality and the Limits to Growth | Working Paper by Tim Jackson
Animation | Mental health in the context of growth-dependency and climate breakdown—Short-film animation
OCTOBER 9, 2022
Animation | Mental health in the context of growth-dependency and climate breakdown—Short-film animation
Why health should replace wealth as the heart of prosperity | Blog by Tim Jackson and Julian Sheather
NOVEMBER 5, 2021
Why health should replace wealth as the heart of prosperity | Blog by Tim Jackson and Julian Sheather
Paradise Lost?—Existential anxiety and the iron cage of consumerism | Blog by Tim Jackson
DECEMBER 23, 2018
Paradise Lost?—Existential anxiety and the iron cage of consumerism | Blog by Tim Jackson

Small Island States: educational models of cultural ecology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_ecology

Small Island Developing States are in actual fact vast oceanic States. The future of the planet depends, to a large extent, on their future. They are at the forefront in demonstrating the power of culture to forge responses for resilience and adaptation to extreme hazards and climate-induced disasters. Spanning from the Caribbean to the Pacific via other islands in the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean and South China Sea, the SIDS are a mosaic of diversity. Differing in terms of population size and densities, geographical spread and present differentiated development patterns. 30% of the world's ocean natural and cultural resources are under their custodianship and the safeguarding of these resources are becoming increasingly challenging as a result of multiple combined factors.

Forever chemicals: an introduction to #environmentalbiochemistry

In 1946, DuPont introduced nonstick cookware coated with Teflon. Today the family of fluorinated chemicals that sprang from Teflon includes thousands of nonstick, stain-repellent and waterproof compounds called PFAS, short for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances.
PFAS are used in a staggering array of consumer products and commercial applications. Decades of heavy use have resulted in contamination of water, soil and the blood of people and animals in the farthest corners of the world. PFAS are incredibly persistent, never breaking down in the environment and remaining in our bodies for years.

The Vulnerable Member States of the UN.

The United Nations Office of the High Representative for the ‘Least Developed Countries’, ‘Landlocked Developing Countries’ and ‘Small Island Developing States’ (UN-OHRLLS) supports the following groups of vulnerable countries in the United Nations System.

The 46 Least Developed Countries
The 32 Landlocked Developing Countries
The 38 Small Island Developing States

The imaginative and flexible nature of human social intelligence has created the vast and complex web of different cultures, societies and histories which exist today. Therefore, each vulnerable country has special challenges in relating culture to ecology and the wider, warming, planetary environment. Their vulnerability and relative isolation from the international political mainstream highlights the need for help to develop an educational framework that presents their individual, technical managerial needs for environmental protection. There is also a requirement for a grassroots syllabus highlighting cultural features that make each neighborhood a special place, where schools, and their communities can serve local sociality as environmental action-learning centres.

Discard Studies

Ethnographic and multi-species studies document the many ways in which human wastes are not only our problem, but become evermore entangled with the lives of not-humans and the future of the Anthropocene. In particular, discard studies need to engage with conservation management more closely and compare technical innovations in production, consumption and disposal of wastes to identify cultural opportunities and injustices.. #zerowasteeducation #circularity

Education in the Anthropocene
Education in the Anthropocene necessitates a specific pedagogy that provides opportunities for learning to engage culturally with ecology and ensure sustainable development. We now have to acknowledge that humanity exists in a more-than-human world where all life forms have coevolved within zero waste ecologies of circularity. The circularity of balanced ecosystems contrasts with the linearity of mass production, which accumulates waste. The transition of linear economies to circular ones is central to a syllabus of radical hope. The educational aim is to understand how the nonhuman and material worlds co-shape our mutual worlds. In particular, education in the Anthropocene needs to be interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, intersectional, ecofeminist, posthumanist, indigenous, and participatory with regards race and ethnicity. This is the complex learning framework of cultural ecology, a branch of applied anthropology that encompasses discard studies, Systems thinking about culture and ecology brings conservation management to the centre of curricula at all levels of education.

Defining the Anthropocene

The period between the great stink and the great smog saw the current geological age being increasingly viewed as a period during which human activity became the dominant influence on climate and the environment. This period, in which we live today, has been named the Anthropocene and it is the age of waste. Waste is not contained in some vague imaginary ‘out there’, but every place on Earth is a place of waste. We are inextricably entangled with waste in complex global patterns of economical, ecological, political, and corporeal inter dependency. Human togetherness always implies being also together with waste, and we share a joint future with it whether we like it or not.

Waste becomes a social problem #zerowasteeducation

The Great Stink was an event in London during July and August 1858 in which the hot weather exacerbated the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent that was present on the banks of the tidal River Thames. For centuries the Thames had been used as a dumping ground for the capital's waste and as the population grew, so did the problem. The hot summer of 1858 elevated the stench to an unbearable level and resulted in an episode known as 'The Great Stink'.

A century later the Great Smog was a severe air pollution event that affected London in December 1952. It was a period of unusual windless conditions, which accumulated airborne pollutants, mostly arising from the use of coal, to form a thick layer of smog over the city. It has been estimated that up to 4,000 people died as a direct result of the smog and 100,000 more were made ill by the smog's effects on the human respiratory tract.