Sustainability: Along Networks and Across Scales

Achieving global sustainable development and sustainability requires a willingness to make significant changes away from current human behaviors and attitudes regarding overconsumption, exploitation and reproduction across all global societies.

To guide us in the right direction in a transition toward a sustainable future scientific research must discover the requisite socioecological goals and innovative technology to help get us there. Governance must implement policy to help support research and innovation into effective action.

The humanities and social sciences must also play key roles in this future by discovering how to most effectively bridge scientific knowledge, innovative technology and supportive policy into action on local, national and global levels. That is, along networks and across different scales from the local to the global.

Conversely, the humanities and social sciences can inform science and technological research as well as governance and policy as to the boundaries of human willingness and the human ability to make significant changes in behavior and attitudes toward sustainable development.

However, as importantly, through the co-development of valid and effective learning systems the humanities and social sciences can also help move those boundaries and change human willingness and ability into valid and effective action for sustainable development.

Research and development of valid and effective learning systems for sustainability for individuals, schools, communities, corporations and nations is what Ecosphere Net is all about.

EJ Wensing

ejwensing@ecosphere.net

US Virgin Islands

The Future of Learning for Sustainability

In corporations, in schools, and in our communities we have to learn how to become sustainable.

The future of learning for sustainability has to be done within collaborative communities and between collaborative cultures across our world.

Carlos A. Torre Ph.D. has been one of the original innovators of collaborative learning.

He calls it “An Ecology of Education”. It's a brilliant idea. A visionary concept.

He recently agreed to write a paper with me on the topic. It was published last month in the peer reviewed Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability.

To download and read the paper click here.

EJ Wensing

St. John, US Virgin Islands

ejwensing@ecosphere.net

The Women of Darfur

Human rights around the world are necessary for a sustainable future for us all.

The group Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has just published a report documenting the scope and long-term impact of rape and other sexual violence experienced by women who fled attacks on their villages in Darfur and are now refugees in neighboring Chad. This scientific study corroborates women’s accounts of rape and other crimes against humanity that they have experienced in Darfur, as well as rape and deprivations of basic needs in refugee camps in Chad.

To read the report and support PHR please click here.

EJ Wensing

ejwensing@ecosphere.net

Two Upcoming Sustainability Conferences

Ecosphere Net will be presenting at two upcoming international sustainability conferences in July.

The first at the University of Utrecht explores the global challenges of sustainable development.

The second at the University of Twente explores the intersection of philosophy, technology and global sustainability.

For more information click-on the highlighted links above.

EJ Wensing

St. John, US Virgin Islands

ejwensing@ecosphere.net

The Possibility of a Sustainable Future

How can we best achieve a sustainable future?

We have to change our behaviors and attitudes both individually and collectively across global societies.

How are we going to be able to do that?

Through education?

Research has shown that education for sustainable development and sustainability has had a minimal effect so far.

Through incentives?

Both punitive and reward incentives have had a minimal effect.

The answer is we have to change our very selves. Who we are.

This requires a recursive loop of brief navel gazing followed by action.

Introspection and then learning through action. Repeat.

That’s the only way. Learning through cycles of reflective collaborative action.

We have to get who we are and what we are doing.

We have to change our ways, through our ways of being, through our very being.

We have to become sustainability, individually and collectively.

We have to identify in not just with sustainability.

EJ Wensing

Ecosphere Net

US Virgin Islands

ejwensing@ecosphere.net