Friday, August 7, 2009: 8:00 AM
San Miguel, Albuquerque Convention Center
Background/Question/Methods Across hundreds of institutions of higher education worldwide, thousands have undertaken the arduous tasks of envisioning solutions to problems of ecological sustainability within the academic environment and in empowering students, faculty, staff, and administrators to implement those solutions through ecologically sound personal and institutional decisions — the “greening” of academia. However, this movement has been slow to emerge, has been prone to actions that are merely utilitarian green-washing, and remains challenged to address deeper systemic unsustainabilities of our society-wide institutional ecologies and economies, within which academia is embedded. These points were made over a decade ago by many very articulate people. So, what’s really new?
Results/Conclusions I offer that the present time three major global headlines now coincide that make sustainability the “hottest” topic of this century: (1) ecology — due largely to us, Earth’s ecological systems are changing in ways that to us are for the worse and for which we are not prepared, (2) economics — the finite supply of capital, both natural supplies of energy and materials as well as capital of human design, is currently being bartered and depleted in a chaotic myopic feeding frenzy with little regard to consequences beyond the next market day, and (3) the present generation has emerged from what I enjoin should be called the “decade of betrayal” due to details of (1) and (2), who are ready, willing, and able to lift us from our narcissistic nihilistic passion for neolithic exploitation and engineer a just and ecologically*economically sustainable new world order. Critical tools for this generation have recently been cast and include the vast resources of NGO’s such as the United Nations (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development) and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), new journals (e.g. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education), the emerging movement for a Green Collar Economy, and the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of Sustainability Science. To these efforts ecologists, as well as everybody else, needs to contribute — while there is still time.
Results/Conclusions I offer that the present time three major global headlines now coincide that make sustainability the “hottest” topic of this century: (1) ecology — due largely to us, Earth’s ecological systems are changing in ways that to us are for the worse and for which we are not prepared, (2) economics — the finite supply of capital, both natural supplies of energy and materials as well as capital of human design, is currently being bartered and depleted in a chaotic myopic feeding frenzy with little regard to consequences beyond the next market day, and (3) the present generation has emerged from what I enjoin should be called the “decade of betrayal” due to details of (1) and (2), who are ready, willing, and able to lift us from our narcissistic nihilistic passion for neolithic exploitation and engineer a just and ecologically*economically sustainable new world order. Critical tools for this generation have recently been cast and include the vast resources of NGO’s such as the United Nations (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development) and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), new journals (e.g. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education), the emerging movement for a Green Collar Economy, and the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of Sustainability Science. To these efforts ecologists, as well as everybody else, needs to contribute — while there is still time.
