Learning to be a conscious person: Bridging the gap between foundational learning, climate change and SDG 4.7

• In Event: Highlighted Session: The Radical Assumptions of Eco-Literacy: Foundational Learning During the Anthropocene Extinction

Proposal

Radhika Iyengar – Earth Institute, Columbia University:
This paper presents a story of the author's journey as a lifelong learner of living sustainably in a finite world. This involved learning that every life is part of larger social and bio-diverse ecosystems and that everything has consequences. Foundational learning is about the skills that enable one to become an active and engaged citizen and learn to live within the planet's natural boundaries.
The author's story begins when she is a young girl and is woken up one winter’s night by the cries of neighbors and the smell of gas. The trauma of those real-world events and the disconnect with what she learned about in school, which was supposed somehow to carry on as normal, even in Bhopal. Looking back almost 30 years later, with an education Ph.D., a position at Columbia University’s Climate School, and two children of her own, the author writes a review of the Indian school curricula through a “Bhopal lens” and discovers that there is still nothing but the most rudimentary knowledge about the Union Carbide Gas tragedy that was so formative for her life and one of the worst industrial disasters the world has seen. This sets in motion a chain of reflections about the purposes of education, our responsibility to care for one another, life on earth, and the planet. Further trips to India underscore the disconnect between education and our world and the need for self-confidence to work for change. On assignment in rural Mahbubnagar to help develop an ICT course for a women’s college, she’s alarmed to find that the environmentally-harmful and toxically unhealthy daily activity of burning rubbish on open pyres is something no one questions. Back home in New Jersey, Hurricane Ida hits the state with unprecedented ferocity, and the author takes her children on a downtown clear-up. She realizes that her children will live in a world that has changed and that maintaining the planet if they are to have any future on it, will not be something they have the option to ignore.

Author

• Radhika Iyengar, Columbia University - Earth Institute