Teaching Sustainability

On social media we see lots of ideas like the one expressed at left. I reject most of them on the grounds that, for everything we add to high school curricula, we need to take something away, because there are only so many school-hours in a year.

There is nothing wrong with teaching young people how to grow corn, vote, or balance a checkbook, but when this idea is taken seriously and implemented, some course must disappear, and, for some reason, Algebra 2 normally winds up on the chopping black: logarithms and exponents, quadratic equations, functions, sequences and series, and an introduction to probability and statistics.  If perpetuated, this means that, in a matter of a decade or two, there will be no more scientists produced in America, no engineers, no medical doctors, etc.  Those who care for our nation’s future don’t want that.

The approach I favor is to integrate the relevant aspects of sustainability into existing courses on civics, biology, chemistry, physics, social studies, history, and so forth.  In fact, if there is a theme to the books I’ve written, it’s been precisely this: addressing the subject from as many different disciplines as possible.

Here are a few examples of how this might work:

History: What did the founders of Western democracy, e.g., John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau say about our responsibilities to one another as participants in a res publica, i.e., our “republic?”  Discussion point:  We live around people who have no concept that they have duties to the society in which they live.  Does that seem right to you? Why? Why not?

Social Studies: How are industrialized nations and the developing world treating the problems of climate change and other forms of environmental collapse? Discussion point:  What’s fair here?  If the first world caused the problem, shouldn’t we pay to repair it?  Considering that we all share the same atmosphere, and that it’s being poisoned, does it really matter what’s fair?

Biology: What are the real problems associated with loss of biodiversity? Don’t we lose uncountable numbers of species to extinction every year, and hasn’t this been happening for hundreds of millions of years?  What exactly are we losing?  Discussion point:  What do our scientists say about the pharmacological value of plants and animals living today that will be gone in the next 50 years?  Would we prefer synthetic chemical agents from today’s pharma companies to natural remedies whose plants and animals that are going extinct?

Chemistry/Mathematics: The pH of our oceans is falling, i.e., they are becoming more acidic. The pH of our ocean waters has fallen in the last few decades from 8.2 to 8.1, or 1.2%. That, it would seem, is a very slow change, which would be true if pH were not a logarithmic quantity. In truth, the change from 8.2 to 8.1 is a loss of 26% of the H+ ions per liter that make up acidity.  Worth noting: Ocean life is quite sensitive to these changes, and, if the pH hits 7.9, the only ocean animal species that will survive will be jellyfish.  Discussion point:  Over 3.3 billion of the Earth’s people rely on fish for at least 20% of their animal protein intake according to Nature. How can we help nature stop ocean acidification?

Physics: We hear that “greenhouse gases” are a blanket that inhibits our atmosphere’s capacity to re-release our sun’s radiant energy back into space.  How exactly does this happen?  Discussion point:  What did James Clerk Maxwell predict about the electromagnetic nature of light based on his equations?  How was this supported by the actual experiments of Heinrich Hertz?

All worth considering, IMHO.  If anyone wants a speaker at his next schoolboard meeting, please let me know.