Disruption! Rethink the system

A circular economy is one where “the goods of today become the resources of tomorrow at yesterday’s prices”. 

Economic Context: Scotland was the first nation to join Circular Economy 100.  In August 2013, Environment Secretary, Richard Lochhead, issued the statement: “Scotland’s economy will benefit from moving to a more circular model of production and consumption. Our Zero Waste Plan is already delivering important actions to make better use of resources, and we can accelerate progress if we join together with others on a global level.” By 2016, the Scottish Government issued Making Things Last:  A Circular Economy Strategy.

Using a Nature as Teacher where waste=food philosophy, the circular economy rests on three principles, each addressing several of the resource and system challenges. These are becoming increasingly more discussed and adopted, by large scale and SME businesses- aiming to disrupt ‘business as usual’ of the linear economy systems and encourage a rethinking of the status quo.

Principle 1: Preserve and enhance natural capital…by controlling finite stocks and balancing renewable resource flows.

Principle 2: Optimise resource yields…by circulating products, components, and materials at the highest utility at all times in both technical and biological cycles. This means designing for remanufacturing, refurbishing, and recycling to keep components and materials circulating in and contributing to the economy.

Principle 3: Foster system effectiveness..by revealing and designing out negative externalities.

Education Context: Many policies and publications* have nudged the core school curriculum (3-18years old) towards an overall aim to embed Sustainable Development Education in Scottish education.  The most recent construct is Learning for Sustainability, LfS (One Planet School Group, 2012) which comprises sustainable development education, global citizenship and outdoor learning.  The intention is that LfS in the curriculum helps to ‘nurture a generation of children and young people who know and value the natural world……. committed to the principles of social justice, human rights, global citizenship, democratic participation and living within the ecological limits of our planet.’ (One Planet Schools Implementation Group, 2016: 3).  As a contributor to LfS, Circular Economy, through Cradle to Cradle, is incorporated in the school certificate course ’Design and Manufacture’ (SQA, 2013)

University of Edinburgh is working to identify how the principles of the Circular Economy can be embedded into Research, teaching, operations across the whole university (UoE,2016). The university SRS department have been leading the concept of the university as ‘A living Lab’ to progress thinking and actions related to sustainability and social responsibility in all aspects of the university.

Several Professional Institutes have embedded the requirement for education for sustainable development and / or Circular Economy in their professional accreditation processes.

Prompts to explore and cause pause to ponder

Principles:: Values:: Responsibilities:: Practices::

Preparation for the GESA Reading group, please choose from these 2 papers and / or 2 videos

Webster, K (2013)   Missing the wood for the trees: systemic defects and the future of education for sustainable development Curriculum Journal 24:2, 295-315 http://www.tandfonline.com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/doi/full/10.1080/09585176.2013.802585

The circular economy. By Walter R. Stahel – Nature, 23 March 2016. http://www.nature.com/news/the-circular-economy-1.19594

and / or

Circular Economy: Thomas Rau at TEDxZwolle – ( approx. 20mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrb2v_f0ZYY

Rethinking Progress: The Circular Economy  (3 mins 11 secs)

https://www.youtube.com/user/made2bemadeagain

Questions: 

• Are principles such as those of the Circular Economy (Nature as Teacher, Waste = Food, material cascades, made to be made again, regenerative manufacture, sharing economies, nature as capital, design for disassembly, cradle to cradle thinking, bio-nutrients/ technical nutrients and closed loop cycles) considered realistic and feasible concepts to encourage a wide scale rethinking of systems ?

• What are the responsibilities of industry, commerce, business and enterprise in relation to ESD and Circular Economy principles? Who should / could take responsibility?

• Should school aged young people be exposed to Circular Economy principles, the sharing economy, social enterprise and for-profit approaches, or is this something for those entering specialist education at higher levels of study? Should educators display their own ‘frame of mind’ and values in relation to issues of sustainability and sustainable development when working with young people? What should be taught? Who should be responsible for this? Why?

• How should/could the Circular Economy manifest in practice? What needs to be in place to engage society (rich and poor, diverse cultures and communities), encourage innovation, inform and develop practice disrupt and rethink current systems?

Principles:: Values:: Responsibilities:: Practices::

Further links and readings can be made available for follow up for interested readers.

Check out the Disruptive Innovation Festival 7^th Nov- 25^th Nov 2016

https://www.thinkdif.co/

Indeed, there are jokes in PhD-land that only a very small number of people will ever read your final dissertation – your supervisors, your examiners, and maybe a very generous family member who is willing to read a bit further than the acknowledgements page.

Posed with this question of impact, I reflected on how I might define PhD research that has ‘impact’: are there people out there whose PhDs will lead to significant reductions in carbon emissions in sectors such as food or transport? Will one of my colleagues take renewable energy technologies a significant step further? What about my research, a study about the motivations for, and practices of, community-based action on climate change in Scotland? If research impact is about making a ‘demonstrable contribution to society’, what will be the contribution of my research?

In a research impact masterclass with Sir John Beddington, chair of the Global Academies at the University of Edinburgh and who previously held the position of Chief Science Adviser to the UK Government, I was struck by the diversity of PhD topics in the room, and the possibilities for impact in so many ways. As colleagues, we discussed issues such as the demand for low-carbon food products in Scotland, mental health in female prisoners in Latin America and the safe disposal of plastic and electronic waste from solar products in Kenya. We considered how impact can include consumer-level behaviour change in order to reduce carbon emissions or input and change to local or national policies. I reflected on how my research about people’s motivations for community-level action on climate change could have impact in terms of how we influence and motivate a greater number of people, communities and companies to take action on climate change and how values drive climate action.

So, what do you think? How might your research have impact in 2025? Whether at Masters or PhD level, in what ways are you developing and carrying out your research so that the results will have an impact on society?

For more information about how the ESRC defines impact, see http://www.esrc.ac.uk/funding-and-guidance/impact-toolkit/what-how-and-why/what-is-research-impact.aspx

Alice Hague

Abstract

The overall aim of my research is to investigate the ways in which communities are involved with the issue of climate change at a local and national level in Scotland; to discover the underlying reasons and motivations for their engagement; and to investigate whether issues of temporality can play an important role in motivating action. Temporality is of particular interest because of the dominance of short-termism in western society in particular (economic quarters, financial years, 5 year election cycles) set against the long-term challenges of climate change (mitigation targets ‘by 2050’ and climate change impacts ‘in the latter half of the century’, for example). The working title of my PhD is “Faithful Advocates: What are the motivations, values and practices of faith-based climate activists, with particular regard to temporality?”

Biography:

Alice has a background in science communication and previously worked as a diplomat for the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office. As Head of Science and Innovation for the Nordic region, she was also responsible for climate change, environment and energy policy issues at the British Embassy in Stockholm from 2003-2008. She was seconded to the Climate Change Unit at the Swedish Ministry for the Environment in 2008-2009 (operating fully in Swedish) and was a delegate to the UNFCCC climate change meetings during this period.

Alice holds a BSc (Hons) in Environmental Biology from the University of York, an MSc in Science Communication from the University of Glamorgan, and completed an MDiv (theology/divinity) at North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, prior to starting her PhD in September 2013. Given this somewhat interdisciplinary background, she is delighted to be doing an interdisciplinary PhD (politics/divinity).

In this article Dr. Hamish Ross discusses the value of interdisciplinary conversations in policy and research, in organisations like GESA, and in his own discipline of Environmental Education.  He argues that at a time of rapid and complex planetary change, that education is vital to change management and in this sense, Learning for Sustainability becomes more a practice of Learning as Sustainability.

I have stolen the title of this blog from an excellent book I like to recommend  – Arjen Wals’ and Peter Blaze Corcoran’s (2012) Learning for Sustainability in Times of Accelerating Change, Wageningen Academic Publishers. I was wondering why interdisciplinarity mattered, since it is in part what the Global Environment and Society Academy (GESA) represents.  And I was wondering what was its utility to my own field, which is environmental education. Usually it is asserted that the real world does not arrange itself into disciplines and so neither should our educational institutions be so arranged.  But for educational purposes the world has to be packaged in some arbitrary way, so the point seems important but not entirely decisive.

However, working across disciplines is surely creative, and creativity might be necessary for planetary survival.  The academic discussion about learning for sustainability includes a significant co-evolutionary model of learning and socio-environmental change, which reads as follows.  We are unable to predict, or even process, what is happening or will happen in rapidly-emergent, complex, uncertain, risky and global systems.  What we can do, given some appropriate moral purpose, is make experimental interventions, or not, in our social and geophysical world, remain alert to their consequences, re-consider, try again, carry on.  Change happens and learning is central to the management of change.

The model has sometimes been referred to as ‘learning as sustainability’.  The more crisis-laden the prospect of (un)sustainability, the more intense, and perhaps creative, must be learning as sustainability.
I begin some of my classes with an exercise that was shown to me by the excellent Rob Bowden of Rosie Wilson of LifeWorlds Learning.  A student will recount her weekend to one of her peers for a minute or so, interrupted repeatedly by her classmate, and each interruption is nothing more than a random and unrelated word or phrase.  The recounting student must absorb this word into her narrative and carry on telling it.  In due course the pair swap roles.  After trying this exercise, most participants agree that it is surprisingly easy to absorb a random word into one’s narrative and surprisingly hard to think up a random word in the first place, let alone in the face of a narrative, let alone use it to interrupt someone who is speaking.

Even interdisciplinary conversations, then, might not be as interrupting as we hoped. But the ambition and courage to creatively interrupt must be as important to learning as sustainability as is the ambition to simply better represent the world.

Dr. Hamish Ross is a lecturer in Social Studies and Environmental Education at Moray House School of Education. Hamish’s principal research interests are in the field of citizenship and environmental education.

Dr Robbie Nicol

Sitting amongst the lush, flowering machair, this rare European habitat, I find time and space to ponder.  The vast expanse of sandy beach below is empty of people who will no doubt appear a little later given the sunny forecast. For the moment I have the place to myself and the rising sun provides intermittent pulses of warmth and welcome relief from the chilly early morning air. A light south-westerly wind ruffles the papers beside me. One of these is David Farrier’s earlier blog on this site and I am fascinated by the question ‘what is the role of emotion in environmental ethics’? My own interest in this question is the extent to which experiences in the outdoors, and their dependence on direct encounters of land and waterscapes, can provide moral impulses for people to live more sustainable lives.  As an educator and academic my professional life at the University is spent developing educational responses (perhaps ‘interventions’ is a more appropriate word) to this intriguing issue.

The machair itself provides some guidance in responding to David’s question.  The understanding of substances, their properties and composition (chemistry) helps us understand how the shell-bearing sand created lime-rich fertile soil conditions. Botany helps with the identification of the variety of plant species currently surrounding me. History provides a record of how people came to farm this land, and from which, in the 18^th Century, some of them came to be ‘cleared’ to make way for more profitable sheep. These snippets of information provide valuable knowledge of this landscape.

Creating bodies of knowledge in this way has been a cornerstone of academia as we, the world’s human inhabitants, have striven to understand our surroundings.  However, thinking of knowledge in this way is part of a bigger problem.  The environmental philosopher Andrew Brennan has written about the divisions which compartmentalise subject based curricula and how this leads to divisions in the way people think and make sense of the world.  So, when I look at the machair surrounding me I do not really see chemistry here, biology there and history somewhere else. The danger of ‘reducing’ the land and seascape in this way is that we separate strands of knowledge that are in fact related.  It is perhaps more because of institutional convenience (i.e. the way we have organised our school and educational systems) rather than philosophical principles that things have turned out this way.  However, the fact that we have already done so means we run the risk of failing to understand the planet as an integrated whole.  (Note: In passing it is worth noting that the Global Environment and Society Academy, GESA, is itself an institutional response to provide a forum for interdisciplinary thinking and action.)

There is a further danger that scientists (social and natural) are intimately involved with their subjects but not intimately involved with what they describe.  This is one of the problems when we decontextualise studies and teach them remotely from the land and seascapes they refer to. There is a growing body of scholarly activity that suggests we can overcome these ‘second order expressions’ through direct, nature-based experiences.  It is based on the view that fundamentally there is no real separation of the affective and the cognitive because they are part of the same whole (most certainly at the level of the individual human organism).  It is within this understanding of epistemological diversity that the opportunity for moral impulses appear because sea and landscapes provide places in which we might develop and exercise what the environmental philosopher Simon James has termed ‘the virtue of attention’. I take this to mean that the moral significance of our relationship with land and seascapes is based, and ultimately depends on, the attention we pay to it.

Emotion is therefore centre-stage of any discussion regarding environmental ethics. I find it impossible not to be emotionally aware sitting amongst the machair. The sensorial stimuli of this amazing habitat, and the book on my lap that informs me in another way, infuses my being.  At this moment, at the cutting edge of experience, I want to learn more and feel more deeply.  The selfish reductionist in me does not want the moment to end and wishes to preserve it for what it means to me – forever.  The holist in me appreciates that this moment will not simply pass but morph into yet other moments creating links with the past, present and future.  I have been informed by thoughts and feelings of this incredible Harris landscape to the point that the machair has now become part of me. This consciousness now makes me want to speak of it and, should the need arise, act on its behalf (or should I say our behalf).

Dr Robbie Nicol is a senior lecturer in outdoor environmental education at the School of Education.  His article about moral impulses (Entering the Fray: The role of outdoor education in providing nature-based experiences that matter) has been published in the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory and is available electronically.  A further article (Fostering environmental action through outdoor education) has just been accepted by Educational Action Research. Robbie also co-authored Learning outside the classroom: Theory and guidelines for practice (2012).