With the Industrial Revolution and, more profoundly, the globalisation process of the last decades, both tourism and environmental issues have become increasingly global in occurrence. Globalisation processes amplify or replace many regional or national forces of change. Human activities have become the main cause of global environmental change (GEC), hence our era has been designated the ‘Anthropocene’. The Earth System could be approaching a planetary threshold resulting in a rapid warming pathway. In view of tourism's global importance, worldwide growth, and its tendency to create interdependencies between countries, it is appropriate to devote a chapter to the global environmental impacts of tourism. As participation in tourism increases in and between countries all over the globe, many of its environmental impacts are becoming scaled up to a global level. Minimising these guarantees a more stable system, which is also essential for tourism.
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Bankrupting Nature: Denying our Planetary Boundaries by Andres Wijkman and Johan Rockström emerges from the original report of The Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth authored by Meadows and colleagues in 1972. This book demonstrates that an economy built on the continuous expansion of material consumption is utterly not sustainable. Based on the increased evidence of an uncanny correlation between escalating rates of global economic growth and environmental degradation, this book continues to raise worldwide awareness of environmental problems created as a result of anthropogenic activities. Bankrupting Nature demonstrates that political leaders are still in deep denial about the magnitude of global environmental challenges and resource constraints facing the world. The authors state that the challenges of sustainability cannot be met by simply tinkering with the current economic system, but will require major changes in the way members of political and corporate elites and the general public perceive and address environmental and social issues. As reported in a recent press release by The Club of Rome (2012), this volume lays out a blue-‐print for a radically new economic paradigm that links economics with ecology, arguing that this is the only way to generate growth in the future. https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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In de Solution Rooms bespreken studenten, docenten, beleidsmakers en onderzoekers uitdagingen en oplossingsrichtingen voor het vervolgonderwijs van de toekomst. Eén van de thema's is 'Duurzaamheid', waar Rolien Blanken een wetenschappelijke reflectie over schreef. Twee problemen zijn geïdentificeerd bij doorvoeren van duurzaamheid binnen de instelling en het onderwijs: de complexiteit van het vraagstuk enerzijds en draagvlak en effecten op de studenten anderzijds. Dit bemoeilijkt het duurzaamheidsproces. Inzetten op het gebruik maken van meetinstrumenten voor verduurzaming van curricula, transdisciplinair- en sectoroverstijgend werken en duurzaam burgerschap als uitgangspunt voor studentontwikkeling kunnen helpen om tot een succesvolle verduurzaming te komen. Aandacht voor duurzaamheid in het onderwijs kent een hoge mate van urgentie. De student ervaart hierbij negatieve invloed op het welzijn. Tegelijkertijd is verduurzaming een complex proces. Het doorvoeren van regeneratief onderwijs kan helpen bij het aangaan van genoemde uitdagingen. Naast het meten van de duurzaamheid van het curriculum is aan te bevelen breder in de organisatie duurzaamheid te meten en door te voeren. Het werken met integrated reporting kan hierin bijdragen. Transdisciplinair en sectoroverstijgend werken is een goede oplossing om duurzaamheidstransities te bereiken. Dit kan men toepassen door te werken in labs. In deze omgevingen zijn diverse stakeholders betrokken en kan de student zijn rol als wereldburger hier in co-creatie vervullen.
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At the age of a failing economic system and undeniable evidence of the effects humankind has had over the planet, it is necessary to look for alternatives to the way we live locally. This article explores the use of designing narratives and metanarratives to co-create imaginaries serving as the needed alternatives. This research starts by considering the historical factors to understand how industrialisation and the loss of traditional practices created a culture of disconnection from Nature in the Girona area, but also looks at why people start now reconnecting with it. The analysis is the foundation for speculative design practices to co-create a new local narrative of connection and regeneration. The project adopted the Integrative Worldviews Framework and used paradoxes to create possible future worldviews based on historical factors and literature. Citizens participated in conversational future-visioning workshops to develop and evaluate their local imagery of the previously created worldviews. This conversation-based exercise evidenced the potential of paradoxes in destructive futures to create imaginaries of regeneration. These imaginaries merge and form future stories. From the future narratives, the practice created cultural artefacts embodying a new culture of connection based on storytelling, traditional jobs, and a mythological understanding of Nature. Finally, as observed at the end of the project, these artefacts allow citizens to adopt them as their culture and expand their current worldview.
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This open access book states that the endemic societal faultlines of our times are deeply intertwined and that they confront us with challenges affecting the security and sustainability of our societies. It states that new ways of inhabiting and cultivating our planet are needed to keep it healthy for future generations. This requires a fundamental shift from the current anthropocentric and economic growth-oriented social contract to a more ecocentric and regenerative natural social contract. The author posits that in a natural social contract, society cannot rely on the market or state alone for solutions to grand societal challenges, nor leave them to individual responsibility. Rather, these problems need to be solved through transformative social-ecological innovation (TSEI), which involves systemic changes that affect sustainability, health and justice. The TSEI framework presented in this book helps to diagnose and advance innovation and change across sectors and disciplines, and at different levels of governance. It identifies intervention points and helps formulate sustainable solutions for policymakers, administrators, concerned citizens and professionals in moving towards a more just and equitable society.
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There is increasing evidence that humans are not living sustainably. There are three major drivers of the unsustainable approach: population, consumption and the growth economy. There is widespread denial about these issues, but they clearly need to be addressed if we are to achieve any of the possible sustainable futures. The first and second versions of the ‘World Scientists Warning to Humanity’ both highlight the problem of increasing human population, as do the IPCC and IPBES reports. However, all have been largely ignored. The size of an ecologically sustainable global population is considered, taking into account the implications of increasing per capita consumption. The paper then discusses the reasons why society and academia largely ignore overpopulation. The claim that discussing overpopulation is ‘anti-human’ is refuted. Causal Layered Analysis is used to examine why society ignores data that do not fit with its myths and metaphors, and how such denial is leading society towards collapse. Non-coercive solutions are then considered to reach an ecologically-sustainable human population. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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As many in society work towards global sustainability, we live at a time when efforts to conserve biodiversity and geodiversity, and combat climate change, take place simultaneously with land grabs by large corporations, food insecurity, and human displacement through an ecological breakdown. Many of us seek to reconcile more-than-human nature and human nature and to balance intrinsic value and the current human expansion phase. These and other challenges will fundamentally alter the way people, depending on their worldview and ethics, relate to communities and the environment. While environmental problems cannot be seen as purely ecological because they always involve people, who bring to the environmental table their different assumptions about nature and culture, so are social problems connected to environmental constraints. Similarly, social problems are fundamentally connected to environmental constraints and ecological health. While nonhumans cannot bring anything to this negotiating table, the distinct perspective of this book is that there is a need to consider the role of nonhumans as equally important stakeholders – albeit without a voice. This book develops an argument that human-environmental relationships are set within ecological reality and ecological ethics. Rather than being mutually constitutive processes, humans have obligate dependence on nature, not vice versa. We argue that over-arching ecological ethics is necessary to underpin conservation in the long-term. This requires a holistic ‘justice’, where both social justice (for humans) and ecological justice (for nature) are entwined. However, given the escalating environmental crisis and major extinction event we face, and given that social justice has been dominant for centuries, we believe that in many cases ecojustice will need to be prioritized. This will depend on the situation, but we feel that under ecological ethics, holistic ethics cannot always allow social justice to dominate, hence there is an urgent need to prioritize ecojustice today. Accordingly, this book will deal with questions of both social and ecological justice, putting forth the idea that justice for both humans and nonhumans and their habitats can only be achieved simultaneously. This book will explore the following questions: What is the relationship between social and ecological justice? How might we integrate social and ecological justice? What are the major barriers to achieving this simultaneous justice? How can these barriers be overcome? What are the major debates in conservation relevant to this? doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-13905-6 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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We summarize what we assess as the past year's most important findings within climate change research: limits to adaptation, vulnerability hotspots, new threats coming from the climate–health nexus, climate (im)mobility and security, sustainable practices for land use and finance, losses and damages, inclusive societal climate decisions and ways to overcome structural barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C.
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Hoewel de klimaat- en ecologische crisis de grootste bedreiging voor de volksgezondheid is, krijgt deze in geen van de Nederlandse zorginstellingen de hoogste prioriteit. Steeds meer zorgprofessionals doen vanuit hun beroepseed aan klimaatactivisme, ook als dit vreedzame burgerlijke ongehoorzaamheid omvat. Ze ondervinden vaak weerstand omdat dit als onprofessioneel wordt gezien. Dit betekent echter niet dat activistische zorgprofessionals onprofessioneel zijn, maar dat het idee van wat professionaliteit is moet worden aangepast aan het beroep dat wetenschap en wereld in tijden van klimaat- en ecologische crisis op de zorgprofessional doen. Zorginstellingen zouden klimaatactivisme daarom moeten faciliteren of zelfs toejuichen.
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Building on the Millennium Development Goals, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Education for Sustainable Development Goals (ESDG) were established. Despite the willingness of many educational institutions worldwide to embrace the SDGs, given escalating sustainability challenges, this article questions whether ESDG is desirable as “an education for the future”. Many challenges outlined by the SDGs are supposed to be solved by “inclusive” or “sustainable” economic growth, assuming that economic growth can be conveniently decoupled from resource consumption. Yet, the current hegemony of the sustainability-through-growth paradigm has actually increased inequalities and pressure on natural resources, exacerbating biodiversity loss, climate change and resulting social tensions. With unreflective support for growth, far from challenging the status quo, the SDGs and consequently, the ESDGs, condone continuing environmental exploitation, depriving millions of species of their right to flourish, and impoverishing future generations. This article creates greater awareness of the paradoxes of sustainable development and encourages teaching for sustainability through various examples of alternative education that emphasizes planetary ethic and degrowth. The alternatives include Indigenous learning, ecopedagogy, ecocentric education, education for steady-state and circular economy, empowerment and liberation. “This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in 'Journal of Environmental Education' on 01/20/20, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00958964.2019.1710444 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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