Reading Materials: 

8.1 New Media and Sustainable Development

In an increasingly image-saturated cultural environment, image communication can play an important part in promoting social learning and even in motivating significant policy, technological and life-style changes.For Stephen Shepherd, realistic future landscape visualizations in 3D and 4D offer important advantages in rapidly advancing people’s environmental awareness by enabling them to see in a vivid manner the possible consequences of climate change in a way that they can relate to personally and experientially.They can see and feel what may happen to their own backyards.

However a spectacular visualization of climate change may be, however much they may galvanize sentiment, or even mobilize a more cosmopolitan perspective and local—global solidarity, still or moving images, whether in an art gallery or on a television news broadcast, cannot entirely substitute for the processes of political debate and deliberation which must also inform the politics of climate change.

The politics of climate change, of the environment and of sustainable development is not the same as the associated image politics or visual rhetoric, although one does closely inform the other .Contemporary debate about sustainability and the environment is dominated by corporations, governments, NGOs, universities and other organizations which often have, or hire, sophisticated public relations outfits that often represent particular interests, values and perspectives in sometimes open and in sometimes covert ways.

The use of PR companies and techniques has increased phenomenally since the 1990s, with the big corporations often able to outspend other groups by wide margins.

In the period preceding the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, the powerful oil and gas industry in the United States increased its PR budgets by 50 percent. Companies heavily implicated in the fossil fuel business used the Paris climate talks to enhance their green image.

As news organizations cut their expenditure on investigative reporting, many journalists become increasingly reliant on detailed and ready-to-use media releases, which has arguably compromised journalistic values, the public sphere and the public interest.

Similar criticisms were made in 2015 at the time of the Paris climate talks. Richard Heede (2013), a researcher at the Climate Accountability Institute at Colorado, has shown that just ninety major companies or state-owned entities, such as Chevron, BP, Gazprom, ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco, have been responsible for nearly two-thirds of the world’s historical global greenhouse gas emissions, and a number of the biggest emitters have been active funders of climate disinformation campaigns.

In such a context, the concerned citizen, oppositional group or counter-public may find it difficult to get her voice heard within the traditional press and broadcasting media, leading commentators suggest that it is imperative that we read media output, whether an interpretation of a scientific report or a major environmental conference, politically,ideologically and critically, recognizing not only being said but what is also being left out.

The struggle for a mediated visibility that is to be heard and seen is therefore of critical importance for the future of sustainable development. John B. Thompson writes:

To achieve visibility through the media is to gain a kind of presence or recognition in the public space, which can help to call attention to one’s situation or to advance one’s cause. But equally, the inability to achieve visibility through the media can confine one to obscurity—and, in the worst cases, can lead to a kind of death by neglect. Hence it is not surprising that struggles for visibility have come to assume such significance in our societies today.

Mediated visibility is not just a vehicle through which aspects of social and political life are brought to the attention of others: it has become a principal means by which social and political struggles are articulated and carried out.

An increasing number of television and film documentaries, feature articles in popular magazines, and Hollywood blockbusters address some of the principal elements of sustainable and unsustainable development.

Leiserowitz’s (2004) impact study of The Day after Tomorrow, essentially a disaster movie/melodrama about climate change, suggests that the film did alter audience attitudes, although it was difficult to tell whether attitudes would remain changed. The film was seen by 21 million Americans at the box office and by many more on television and DVD, mainly because people enjoy blockbuster disaster movies. Leiserowitz concludes:The Day After Tomorrow had a significant impact on the climate change risk perceptions, conceptual models, behavioral intentions, policy priorities and even voting intentions of moviegoers.

The film led moviegoers to have higher levels of concern and worry about global warming, to estimate various impacts on the US as more likely, and to shift their conceptual understanding of the climate system towards a threshold model. Further, the movie encouraged watchers to engage in personal, political and social action to address climate change and to elevate global warming as a national priority. Finally, the movie even appears to have influenced voter preferences.

These results demonstrate that the representation of environmental risks in popular culture can influence public attitudes and behaviors.

Ecocinema overtly strives to inspire personal and political action on the part of viewers, stimulating our thinking so as to bring about concrete changes in the choices we make, daily and in the long run, as individuals and as societies, locally and globally.

Reading new films politically, or engaging with ecocinema sympathetically, are elements of a wider project to develop a synergy between media and sustainability literacy. Tomorrow by French ecological rights activist Cyril Dion and filmmaker and actress Melanie Laurent had its theatrical release in France to coincide with the Paris climate talks in 2015. It is essentially a global travelogue packed with good news stories of how communities are taking the initiative in combating climate change, food shortage and economic depression. The message is that people cannot wait for governments or corporations to do the right thing, so it is up to people to do it for themselves.

Despite the bleakness of the problems we face, the film’s message is a positive and hopeful one. Online film festivals such as Green Unplugged are making a considerable contribution to promoting this synergy.

For media educator Antonio Lopez (2012) who, influenced by Bill McKibben’s idea of creating a media equivalent of a farmer’s market, this means drawing on the educative potential of small and slow media such as discussion groups around specific films and books, peer-to-peer sharing of user-generated content on the Internet, practical media workshops, community-based radio stations and the creation of meaningful public dialogues on certain media messages, thereby helping to contextualize corporate media with a more localized situated knowledge.

The Internet is the media platform of the twenty-first century, and is the focal point for the convergence of virtually every other traditional and familiar media of communication—speech, still and moving image, news and information, political debate and campaigning, environmental monitoring, community access, public art, and, of course, advertising and marketing. It is potentially a“smooth”way of spreading ideas in a virus-like fashion.

For public communicators, including public relations specialists and marketers, the Internet allows global reach to be achieved at relatively low cost. Website visits, clicks on ads, products purchased and others recommended, and documents or videos downloaded can be counted and campaigns evaluated. Direct sales and customized marketing are now virtually ubiquitous:“customers who have bought X may also be interested in Y”or“ welcome, we recommend. . . ”.

Despite this, websites can be impersonal and invisible to those not looking for them, which means that Internet search engines are becoming increasingly important, commercially valuable and ideologically influential.

The Internet has also been used effectively by radical activists and campaign groups as new technology and open-access publishing of pressure group material has improved, and facilities for digital interaction, communication, debate and dialogue have expanded.

The real possibilities of the Net as an organizing tool became clearly apparent at the time of the anti-capitalist protests in Seattle in 1999. Bennett (2003) argues that the integration and growth of Internet communications has influenced the form and perspective of political campaigns – from being ideologically based to being more personal and with looser modes of association.

Political issues that tend to be relatively ignored by government or traditional media, such as food standards, environmental issues, labour relations, human rights and cultural identity, are picked up, often to the clear discomfort of corporate and government bureaucracies and politicians.

Communication practices become almost inseparable from organizational and political capabilities and, to a significant degree, serve to constitute many contemporary protests, forms of activism and social movements.

For example, patterns of digital communication allow the following:Campaigns can change shape and continue over considerable lengths of time.Digital communication campaigns are frequently quite rich in addressing identity and lifestyle issues. Digital hub organizations often become resources for other, emerging, campaign groups. New media can influence information flows and agendas in mainstream mass media news outlets.

   8.2 The Examples of Games, Televisions and Advertisements

A serious alternative reality game such as World Without Oil, funded in the US by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for ITVS, gained considerable media attention and acclaim as the first game of its type, drawing over 60,000 visitors and 1,900 registered in one month in the spring of 2007.

Computer games play an important role in making life for many people a more emotionally and creatively rich experience. Around three billion hours are devoted by the world’s gamers each week to playing computer games. For McGonigal, who was largely responsible for creating World Without Oil, they can help people work collectively and collaboratively, maintain optimism in the face of major global challenges and point to what a better world might actually look and feel like.

Used within an educational context, serious games such as energy planning game Enercities, can be highly effective in changing behaviour and values.

Paula Owen (2012) has shown how gamification has been successfully used to improve the sustainability performance of companies and cities. In Bangalore, Infosys Technologies has used gamification techniques to alter the commuting behaviours of their employees, which has reduced average daily travel to work time by almost twenty minutes, saving up to 2,600 person hours per day at their main factory.

 In the US, a start-up software business has worked with utility companies to foster competition among neighbouring householders to lower their utility bills. On average, a 2% reduction in energy costs was achieved by every participating household. Such examples have led academic scholars to review how the increasing availability of serious games can become major communication and learning tools supporting sustainable development.

They suggest that the most popular profile for serious sustainable development games include the following characteristics: they are accessible online, are sandbox simulation games with 3D graphics, are played by an individual, and target young people who act as decision-makers solving environmental problems by using alternative technologies and considering economic consequences.

The United Nations is using the computer game Minecraft to facilitate community participation in the design of public spaces in twenty-five countries. A virtual reality game, Sea Hero Quest, is now being used by the charity Alzheimer’s UK to help in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease .

Established in 1984, Television for the Environment (short as TVE) is an independent nonprofit-making organization contributing to non-formal development education across the globe.

Its core funders and major donors include the European, ITV, the WWFUK, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), Islamic Relief, etc. Specific project funders range from BBC World News, the European Union, the Open University and the World Bank.

TVE productions ranging from public service announcements and shorts to half-hour documentaries in the long-running documentary series Earth Report and Life. Hands On reports are divided into five or six items, providing broad coverage of serious problems and people’s successful attempts to remedy them. Empowerment, participatory action and efficacy are the dominant motifs.

 A series of six 25-minute programmes were produced as part of the Future Food series which explored key questions of global food security using Peru, Kenya, India, Nigeria, China and the US as specific case study examples. TVE has embraced the opportunities afforded by digital technologies. It has its own YouTube Channel and has created multimedia platforms, such as Reframing Rio, that have been specifically focused on major global events.

 TVE’s editorially independent films have been broadcast across the world on global, regional and national TV such as PBS in the US, including international channels such as MTV International, BBC World, ETV in India and over thirty-two regional channels across Indonesia.

“Joined-up communications”to inspire and report on change is TVE’s basic aim. Porter and Sims (2003) argue that ending poverty, improving living standards, and protecting the environment and human rights are internationally agreed goals and the media has a duty to be objective but not necessarily neutral.In 1995, TVE helped co-ordinate a global network of women broadcasters, producers and filmmakers in the long-running project Broadcasting for Change.

Snapshots for Change, 32 short films made in 31 countries, were made to support the tenth anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing. Topics included women campaigning against sex trafficking in Nepal and HIV/AIDS prejudice in Fiji and Kenya.

Issues such as education, domestic violence, trafficking and women’s rights were addressed, and in 2005 a copyright arrangement allowed each individual member’s five-minute short to be available to the whole network.

For the price of making one short, broadcasters would have access to forty-four others.The series Earth Report and Life forcefully explore broad thematic issues such as health, global warming, the race to the bottom, development education, urban violence, pollution, environmental destruction, indigenous land rights, sustainable construction, fair trade, grassroots activism, world trade and gender inequality.

Two Life programmes, Holding Our Ground and Balancing Acts, have specifically given women in the developing world an international voice to tell their important and necessary Stories.

Marketing techniques can be applied in a range of settings for a wide variety of social, environmental or commercial purposes. They can be community- or neighbourhood-based, aimed at changing everyday behaviour in a given locality, or less obviously aiming to shift opinion or cultural predispositions regarding sustainable consumption.

A 2002 report produced by the consultancy firm McCann Erickson asked the simple question ‘Can sustainability sell?’The answer is yes, but it needs to be effectively promoted.

Advertising and marketing clearly influence consumer patterns linking producers with consumers, and the advertising, marketing and PR industries are renowned for employing exceptionally gifted creative talents. Even so, Ries and Ries (2002) suggest in The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR that advertising is in crisis.

Consumers know that advertisers are trying to sell you something and are automatically sceptical as a result. The authors believe that advertising has lost public credibility and that, if an organization wishes to build a brand or spread an idea, public relations activities, third-party endorsement, positive accounts in the press or other media, and word-of-mouth communication are probably more effective.

Advertising is best for keeping a product or service in the public eye once it has been established.The issue for sustainability practitioners is finding ways of harnessing advertising, marketing and public relations talents to produce attractive and engaging ways of encouraging people to buy sustainable products and adopt sustainable lifestyles.

Agencies like Futerra, a busy London-based communication and public relations company, specializes in innovative and creative ways of promoting sustainable development. Its Communicating Sustainability (2005) gives clear practical advice and guidance on how sustainability practitioners should seek to understand what motivates audiences, how to address them, and ways the big vision can be turned into personally meaningful and practical messages that also inspire a response.

 In recent years there has been a growing concern to integrate sustainability with marketing. Hurth (2015: 25) argue that a problem with the concept of value in the marketing discourse is that it is principally derived from economics when what is required is an interpretation that reframes the concept’s meaning to incorporate the principle of satisfying objective primary needs leading to the following advice to all those concerned with marketing sustainability:

Pursue a relentless focus on understanding and satisfying real primary needs through offerings which are environmentally, socially and economically sustainable.There is a growing imperative for producers to meet consumer needs sustainably, and many consumers are increasingly exercising discretion over what and from whom they buy.

Many consumers state that they would buy green if they had sufficient information about functionality and pricing to enable them to do so. The growth of fair trade and organic markets is testimony to this.

The United Nations Environment Programme (short as UNEP) argues that some of the most heavily advertised products are often highly resource-intensive, particularly food, personal transportation and to some extent household goods. For UNEP, sustainable lifestyle marketing covers three aspects:

• Responsible marketing: procedures and management systems developed to avoid promoting unsustainable behaviors.

• Green marketing: the design and promotion of goods and services with an environmental value added, which might include improvements over the life-cycle of a product such as environmentally friendly sourcing, clean production process, improved impact during use, reduced packaging, recycleability, reusability or existence of take-back schemes.

• Social marketing: programmes and campaigns raising public awareness in order to introduce more sustainable action, such as energy or water conservation, waste reduction, reducing car use, and promoting sensible Driving.

  

 8.3 The Features of “Education for Sustainable Development ” 

The UN Decade for Education for Sustainable Development (short as DESD), which ran from 2005 to the end of 2014, applied to all areas of education—formal and informal sector, schools, colleges and universities, adult and work-based learning, learning throughout life, from cradle to grave and in effect beyond.

The UN Decade clearly identified the main ESD tasks as to:

• act as the primary agent of transformation towards sustainable development, increasing people’s capacities to transform their visions for society into reality;

• foster the values, behaviour and lifestyles required for a sustainable future;

• become a learning process, facilitating decision making that considers the long-term future of the equity, economy and ecology of all communities;

• build the capacity for such futures-orientated thinking.

The education systems in different countries and regions tackle sustainable development issues in relation to the nature and the extent of their knowledge, cultural values, languages, worldviews and ideological perspectives in different ways. Indeed, the UN Decade suggested that culture, understood in a broadly anthropological and connective sense, would in large part predetermine the way that issues of education for sustainable development are addressed in specific national contexts.

The findings of two DESD evaluation reports indeed show that ESD manifests itself differently in different regions. In some areas, ESD may be about cultural survival or intelligent living; in others, such as Latin America, it may be more overtly politically contesting existing institutions that are perceived as being barriers to sustainable development.

Underpinning the continuing development of ESD is the perennial question about education itself. Is it about social reproduction or social transformation? Wals (2012) notes that the answer invariably correlates with a nation or region’s interpretation of democracy, inclusiveness and participation. There is also a danger that a more technical interpretation of sustainability, combined with the naturalization of environmental degradation and poverty—that is, an education that does not critique socioeconomic structures that have largely been responsible for them—will not engender the transformative learning and actions required.

Given that education, certainly higher education, is or at least should be about free enquiry and debate, the notion of sustainability as a heuristic dialogue of values is all-important.

Indeed, in their critical discourse analysis of various ESD declarations and the steady accommodation of neoliberal ideologies within them over the last thirty years, Sylvestre states: contestation around the concept should be seen as an opportunity to develop a plurality of divergent position in interaction with one another from out of which the potential for premise reflection and deep social learning may occur.

In Earth in Mind, the American educator David Orr (1994) notes that, with climate change, environmental degradation and species extinction, a great deal of that on which our future health, livelihood and prosperity depend, is under serious threat.

Significantly, he continues, this is not the work of ignorant people but of highly educated ones, often holding highly desirable and well-respected qualifications.

It is therefore logical to deduce that there is something wrong with the education systems dominating the advanced and developed nations of the world. One cause may lie with the root metaphors and assumptions informing our scientific worldviews—the world is like a machine, the mind is separate from the body, the planet and all its wonders are just there for humankind to exploit and destroy.

Orr also suggests that it is imperative to confront a number of common myths.

First, that ignorance is a solvable problem. It isn’t; it is part of the human condition and so it is something we have to live with.

Second, that with sufficient knowledge and technology we can manage the Earth and all the problems we have given it. However, the ultimate complexity of the Earth’s natural systems means that the best we can manage are our own desires, emotions, policies, economies and communities. We must reshape ourselves, not the planet.

Third, that our stock of knowledge is increasing. However, in fact, with the information explosion, much traditional and local knowledge is actually being lost or discounted under an avalanche of new data.

Fourth, that contemporary unreformed higher education can restore what we have lost. Unfortunately, progress in developing transdisciplinarity has been slow, uneven but nonetheless discernible and, despite the positive and growing actions of staff and students alike, higher education-sector impacts have been modest and are still in clear need of overall repurposing.

Despite this, transdisciplinary learning has been shown to have clear beneficial results of a practical nature as discussed by scholars where service learning projects in urban sustainability with the City of Vienna opened up dialogue between the academic and non-academic worlds gave students a sense of agency and integrated formal with non-formal and informal learning.

 Fifth, the purpose of education is to provide its students with the means for upward mobility and economic success, however defined. What the planet really needs, however, are more peace-makers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of every kind.

Finally, the arrogant and misinformed myth is that Western culture is the highest achievement of humanity. Learning to live well and sustainably is not a once-and-for-all activity.

Orr, like Sterling (2001), considers that education’s response ought to be a major rethink, a paradigm shift, offering a combination of humility and reflexivity, creativity and renewal.

To this end, Orr identifies six possible principles to guide such a rethink:

• All education should in effect be environmental education.

• The goal of education should be self-mastery rather than mastery of subject matter.

• With education and knowledge comes the duty to see that the planet is well used.

• Knowledge can only truly be said to exist when we can understand the effects of knowledge on people and their communities.

• Educational institutions together with their staff should be models of care, mindfulness, integrity and responsibility.

• Learning should be active, enquiring, sensitive and sensual, formal and informal.

An eco-literate person is not just a person who thinks and feels; at the base of his or her ecological perspective must be a practical competence that enables action and the generation of knowledge derived from the experience of doing. To this end, eco-literacy is more likely to be developed non-formally in community-based action-orientated learning activities than in formal settings like schools.

 So, as David Orr (1992: 92) notes, “knowing, caring, and practical competence constitute the basis of ecological literacy”, with Earth-centred education constantly seeking to nurture that quality of mind that seeks out connections. ESD must therefore broadly ensure that cognitive, affective and aesthetic domains of learning are not compartmentalized.

An understanding of the signs and symbols, metaphors and stories, tools and technologies (traditional and emerging) that bind people into networks of understanding and which constitute new relationships between self and others, and self and the ‘natural world’ are required.

The Foundation for Environmental Education established the Eco-Schools International Programme as a response to the needs identified at the 1992 Earth Summit. Officially starting in 1994 with the support of Germany, Denmark, Greece and the United Kingdom, it now includes India and many countries in Africa, and in 2017 it runs in 64 countries linking up over 49,000 schools.

Participating schools work towards certification in nine areas, including: energy, water, biodiversity, school grounds, healthy living, transport, litter, waste and global citizenship. This work, the programme claims, enhances the National Curriculum and can save money, too. In England over 18,000 schools are involved in the scheme with over 12,000 schools gaining bronze, silver or Green Flag awards.

Some interactive websites provide an entertaining and informative guide on how to make a school ecologically sound. Local education authorities in some regions in London have registered over 85% and 95% of their schools with the scheme. In the United States, the Sustainable Schools Project aims to work with schools and communities to cultivate responsible and informed future citizens.

The campus and community are in effect extensions of the classroom. For example, SEED Collaborative, a social-purpose company, and their experience of creating learning spaces that are ecologically inspiring in which people are considered and treated as an integral part of a wider ecosystem which is the foundation of education for sustainability.Capra and Stone (2010) write:

Sustainable living is rooted in a deep knowledge of place.

When people get to know a particular place well, they begin to care about what happens to the landscape, creatures, and people in it.

When they understand its ecology and diversity, the web of relations it supports, and the rhythm of its cycles, they develop an appreciation for and a sense of kinship with their surroundings. Well-known, well-loved places have the best chance to be protected and preserved so that they may be cherished and cared for by future generations of students.Sustainable schools must directly involve and engage pupils.

Ideally, many initiatives should be pupil-led, as this develops a sense of possibility and encourages practical learning, teamwork, group dialogue and decision making, and action and a predisposition to care. Developing a sustainable school can transform that school into a creative and innovative learning environment for the pupils, raise standards of attainment and put it at the heart of a vibrant cosmopolitan community. Through school, it is possible for children to become eco-literate citizens and members of a community that values and respects the wider environment.

Krasny and Tidball (2007) refer to the civic ecology aspects of ESD in their discussion of garden mosaics of cultures, plants and planting practices within urban community greening activities in South Africa and the US. These community garden projects empower learners through building community resilience, enhancing existing individual, social and environmental assets, and nurturing the experience of inclusion and cooperation, skills of social learning, and the capacity to grow in a world of change and uncertainty.

Research on sustainability in primary education in Australia show that sustainability learning is most effective when schools work in partnership with their local communities and are rooted in their geographical locality.

PhD. students from the University of Leeds in the UK undertaking work on bioenergy and low-carbon technologies embarked upon a number of community outreach programmes, one of which included helping to develop children’s awareness and understanding of energy and climate change issues.

The result was an intriguing graphic novel designed by comic artists but incorporating much of the children’s artwork. With funding from a UK research council, the University of Leeds printed 2,500 copies of A Dream of a Low Carbon Future, which was launched at the important Thought Bubble Comics Festival in November 2016. Education is therefore supremely important, with a great deal to do.

Worldwide, there are literally thousands of ESD projects. Some can be categorized as essentially‘add ons’to existing school structures, curricula and pedagogies, and others may be characterized by their attempt to develop and implement a ‘whole system redesign strategy’which looks to challenge traditional approaches to disciplinary-based educational content, teacher-centred learning processes and hierarchical school organization.

Those whole-school approaches to ESD are an attempt to operationalize a systemic redesign. Schools wishing to become‘eco-schools’ or ‘green’ or “sustainable”schools act on a range of different elements often simultaneously using networks of recognized schools, school labels and certification schemes as their guides.

However, for ESD to become truly embedded within the formal education system of a nation or region, whether at primary, secondary or tertiary level, it is often the case that the educators must themselves first be educated.

To this end, some higher education institutions are working with NGOs and other international bodies to develop generic sustainability competences, educational toolkits and guides that can be applied, with suitable modification, to both formal and informal community-based learning environments.

The United Nations University project to establish a global network of Regional Centres of Excellence in ESD can be seen as a part of this process, although its success to date has been rather uneven. In addition, ESD is beginning to be recognized as an important component of economic development and well-being, skills development, job and knowledge generation.

Some universities, such as those in Australia and Canada, have identified a set of graduate attributes that students should acquire through their studies in order to act effectively, sensitively and sustainably in our increasingly stressed world. Building very much on the Delors report on Lifelong Learning, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe has outlined an array of ESD competences that educators need to develop in order to advance ESD effectively in their respective spheres. The competences are based around the three major characteristics of ESD.

Summary

We can learn through good communication, and communicate through learning and both need to resonate with the transformative practices that affect both self and others. Learning can be informal or formal.

It is possible to study formal college or university programmes on sustainable development or watch serious documentaries or become immersed in exciting Hollywood movies, and an increasing number of computer games, which take sustainability, or more likely crises emanating from unsustainability, as their central theme.

Fine art, theatrical performances on stage or in the street, marketing and advertising, photography, serious journalism and blog posts on the Internet, can all play a part in spreading pro-sustainable messages and entreating people to think and act differently.

Indeed, media literacy is itself a form of citizenship education for all of us who now inhabit Education for sustainable development (ESD) has gradually increased its influence on teaching and learning practice, but it is not yet mainstream or even universally applauded. All education is, in effect, environmental, and sustainable education is, by design or by default, here to stay.