CHAPTER 1
THE PROBLEMATICS OF SUSTAINABILITY IN
HIGHER EDUCATION: AN INTRODUCTION
Peter Blaze Corcoran & Arjen E.J. Wals
The higher education community is called to respond to times of disastrous
anthropogenic environmental crises, failing political systems, religious intolerance,
and unsustainable and inequitable economic development. The scope and range of
the negative impacts of university-educated people on the natural systems that
sustain Earth are unprecedented.
Characterizing this crisis, leading environmental academic David Orr has written
“the crisis of the biosphere is symptomatic of a prior crisis of mind, perception, and
heart. It is not so much a problem in education, but a problem of education (Orr,
1994).” Orr goes on to say:
Education is not widely regarded as a problem, although the lack of it is. The
conventional wisdom holds that all education is good, and the more of it one has, the
better.… The truth is that without significant precautions, education can equip people
merely to be more effective vandals of the Earth. (Orr, 1994, p. 5)
Society has privileged institutions of higher education. We expect much of those
on whom modernism has vouchsafed such a franchise. In an essay entitled “The
Role of Higher Education in Achieving a Sustainable Society”, Tony Cortese writes:
Higher education institutions bear a profound moral responsibility to increase the
awareness, knowledge, skills and values needed to create a just and sustainable future.
These institutions have the mandate and potential to develop the intellectual and
conceptual framework for achieving this goal. They must play a strong role in
education, research, policy development, information exchange and community
outreach and support…. They have the unique freedom to develop new ideas, comment
on society, and engage in bold experimentation, as well as contribute to the creation of
new knowledge (Cortese, 1992, p. 5).
Surely one of the aims of education must be to sustain the possibility of a good
society of right living. Never has the opportunity to create the foundation for a
sustainable future been greater. Higher education can play a pivotal role in turning
society toward sustainability. We must rediscover and teach indigenous and ancient
truths, generate new concepts and ways of thinking, and we must inspire students
with a hopeful vision. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, has
argued that “our biggest challenge in this new century is to take an idea that sounds
abstract—sustainable development—and turn it into reality for all the world’s
people" (UN, 2002). Certainly the principle of intergenerational responsibility is at
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Peter Blaze Corcoran & Arjen E.J. Wals (Eds.), Higher Education and the Challenge of
Sustainability: Problematics, Promise and Practice, 3-6.
© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
4 PETER BLAZE CORCORAN & ARJEN E.J. WALS
the heart of formal education. But how might the concept of sustainability be
defined in terms of formal higher education? What is the challenge of sustainability
for higher education? What is demanded of us by moral responsibility to rising
generations?
The assumption of human culture has been that the beauty and bounty of Earth
would be transferred across generations, that the process of education would transfer
the values, skills, and knowledge to survive and thrive in the cultural and natural
systems of which we are a part. Universities have had, in the modern world, a
pivotal position in defining education for this task. Yet certain core ideas embedded
in disciplinary thinking and the practice of those ideas, are increasingly problematic.
Hence, a challenge to higher education is to reconsider its disciplines, its
institutional practices, and, indeed, its mission to account for economic and human
development that is sustainable.
To accept the notion of the importance of the concept of sustainability for higher
education is to accept something that constitutes a problem. In Part One, the authors,
taken together, articulate the problematics of sustainability as they relate to the field
of higher education.
The history of the concept, going back to its roots at the first United Nations
meeting that concerned itself with the relationship between people and their social
and natural environments, the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment
(1972) is outlined by Tarah Wright in Chapter 2. She relates sustainability
declarations to the international development of environmental education through
the Belgrade Charter (1975) and the Tbilisi Declaration (1977) and to the evolving
development of sustainability in education through Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 from
the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992). The
emergence of the view that higher education has a moral obligation to both teach
and model environmental sustainability and that universities are also obligated to the
communities in which they reside is described. Her analysis of the evolution of
sustainability declarations, she argues, helps us understand key priorities and paths.
She writes:
The identification of these themes and patterns furthers the understanding of what
universities believe are the key priorities to become sustainable institutions, and what
paths universities believe they should take on the journey to sustainability.
Indeed the intellectual history of sustainability in higher education as articulated
in these declarations provides the starting point discussing the problematics.
Richard Bawden writes:
The introduction of education for sustainability within the academy is not without its
dilemmas however. Not the least of these is its role in furthering the divide between the
understandings and professional discourse of the ‘expert’ and that of the ‘lay’ public
with respect to differing perceptions about the nature of the problematique….
In exploring this second path, a persuasive argument can be mounted in support of the
need for there to be far greater ‘engagement’ between those in the academy and those in
the citizenry, with the development of a systemic discourse appropriate to this ‘interface
domain.’ An ethos of “sustainabilism’ will be an essential characteristic of this new
inclusive discourse that will be focused on the search for democratic public judgment
