Education for Sustainable Development: the importance of fostering emotional affinity with nature

Today's Start the Week interviewed both Wendell Berry and Paul Kingsnorth who talk about the need to engage with our environment and not to objectify it as someone else's problem:
Futures Forum: Environmental voices on Radio 4's Start the Week >>> >>> "It's unlikely that this general election campaign will really touch on the deepest challenges to our accelerating industrial, global civilization."

Today, David Selby of Sustainability Frontiers, publishes a piece on how to engender this engagement in young people:

A new article by David Selby, 'Education for Sustainable Development, Nature and Vernacular Learning', has just been published online in the Center for Educational Policy Studies Journal, vol.7, no.1, 2017, 9-27. For the complete article, click here. For the abstract, click here.

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Here is the abstract:

Education for Sustainable Development, Nature and Vernacular Learning 

Mainstream education for sustainable development conceives of nature as a resource or commodity. The natural world is, for the most part, accorded only instrumental or utilitarian value. As a field it thus aligns itself with a longstanding paradigm in western thinking that sees humans as separate from and dominant over nature. The de-natured nature of education for sustainable development makes it unlikely that the learner will become motivated to care and act for nature. 

As an alternative, vernacular learning is proposed, i.e. place-based learning rooted in close intimacy and connection with the natural world, with nature perceived as being intrinsically valuable. The importance of fostering emotional affinity with nature is underlined, as are forms of multi-sensory learning that help the learner engage with both spirit and soul of place. Practical examples of vernacular learning activities are enumerated. The importance of nurturing a sense of wonder and joy in the young learner is put forward as vital in fostering an ethic of concern for the planet. Essentially, the argument goes, we only stir ourselves to protect what we have come to love, and thus cultivating a sense of oneness with nature is vital if we are to have any chance of transforming the global environmental condition. Passion is the harbinger of activism.


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