REGENERATIVE Education - How much can we learn and teach, how quickly, to help mobilize global climate action?

• In Event: Responding to the Climate Crisis: Decolonial Imaginaries and Regenerative Education

Proposal

In 1972, the Club of Rome commissioned The Limits To Growth report by a team of 17 researchers led by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. The report concluded that, without substantial changes in resource consumption, "the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity". Although its methods and premises were heavily challenged on its publication, subsequent work to validate its forecasts continue to confirm that insufficient changes have been made since 1972 to significantly alter their nature. Twenty three years later, the first UN Climate Change Conference was held in 1995 in Berlin.[5][6] United Nations Climate Change Conferences are now yearly conferences, organized around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change(UNFCCC), of the UNFCCC parties (Conference of the Parties, COP) to assess progress in dealing with climate change, and beginning in the mid-1990s, to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol to establish legally binding obligations for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.[1] From 2011 to 2015, the meetings were used to negotiate the Paris Agreement as part of the Durban platform, which created a general path towards climate action.[3] A new UN IPCC report – written by hundreds of leading scientists and agreed by 195 countries - noted that immediate and deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are needed across all sectors if we are to preserve a livable climate. In other words, the gap between agreements and action remains large and the severity of the consequences of such inaction multiply each year. Is it too late?
Recent international and US studies (e.g.- Brookings, Kwauk) suggest that few K-12 or even university school systems around the world feature human ecology, climate science or sustainability as elements of core curriculum preparing cohorts of 21st Century students for the challenges and disruptions of the current Anthropocene Era. This gap in the transmission of essential knowledge about the climate, earth biosphere and the relationship between humans and the eco-context is a glaring example of this inaction. What would the politics of the climate debate be like if citizens of all countries were better informed about this issue? What would education focused in this way look like? Is it too late to take this inter-generational approach?

This individual presentation is one of several individual presentations updating us on the current climate and biosphere situation, the general state of education content and practice on the climate issue, and a number of promising examples of regenerative education that suggest what is possible.

In this presentation Michael Gibbons from American University will share information about four examples of regenerative education in the US:

Future University in West Virginia https://www.future.edu,
College of the Atlantic in Maine https://www.coa.edu,
Soul Fire Farm in rural New York https://www.soulfirefarm.org , and
Herb N’ Soul Sanctuary, Atlanta https://herbnsoulatl.com .

Elements of these approaches will be explored as emerging principles of the praxis we are calling “Regenerative Education”.

Author

• Michael Gibbons, American University