Recently environmental education (EE) literature has been supportive of pluralistic rather than goal-oriented learning. Researchers argue that sustainability is not fixed but socially constructed and that sustainability issues should not be represented as indisputable targets. Countering this trend in environmental education research, this article argues that unsustainability should be treated as a concrete challenge that requires concrete solutions. The author will argue that there is a need for clear articulation of (1) what (un)sustainability is; (2) what are the key challenges of (un)sustainability; and (3) how the sustainability challenges can be meaningfully addressed. This article will outline a number of helpful frameworks that address obstacles to sustainability, ranging from population growth to unsustainable production and consumption practices. Solutions include investment in family planning to counter the effects of overpopulation, and alternative production frameworks, such as Cradle to Cradle that differs from the conventional frameworks. This article will conclude with the broader reflection that without goal-oriented critical learning explicitly providing sound models of sustainability, open learning may never permit transcendence from unsustainability. This article will develop a number of comprehensive frameworks targeted at solutions to sustainability issues both from ethical and practical perspectives. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in "Environment, Development and Sustainability". The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-014-9584-z https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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To what extent can the application of blockchain technologies be employed toward civic empowerment, organizing local civic and circular economies, reinstating trust in civic institutions, or, perhaps, creating entirely new types of institutions?
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At the end of the 20th century, hacking was bleeding edge. When the ideas, practices and pranks of this experimental niche of technophiles attracted the attention of a handful of activists in Italy, they understood that information and communication were what would give shape and voice to social, political, and cultural processes in the near future.+KAOS is a cut and paste of interviews, like a documentary film transposed on paper. It describes the peculiar relationship between hacktivism and activism, in Italy and beyond, highlighting the importance of maintaining digital infrastructures. While this may not sound as glamorous as sneaking into a server and leaking data, it is a fundamental topic: not even the most emblematic group of hacktivists can operate without the services of radical server collectives.
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