Ecological intelligence for sustainable development

By Debapriya Mukherjee

Former Senior Scientist
Central Pollution Control Board, India

The present anthropocene is witnessing numerous global crises such as climate destabilisation, population explosion, conflicts, increasing level of inequality among the people, economic uncertainty, mounting public health threat, and recently the Covid-19 pandemic. These global crises, which are slowly tipping the balance, provide an opportunity to the scientific community and political system for deeper understanding of the causes of these global crises.  The major contributor to the global crisis is the environmental problems arising mainly from the ignorance of the consequences of consumption, inattention to human dependence on ecological realities and the exceeding of planetary boundaries.

 Among many adverse impacts of environmental degradation is the spread of zoonotic diseases including Covid-19 , which is a huge, complex and systemic challenge. In addition, different stakeholders provide conflicting information pertaining to the spread of disease, medical care, and preventive measures as well its relevance and impacts. As a global issue, the implications and solutions need to be looked at both locally and globally. Furthermore, the challenges of maladaptive behaviour and the cultural and emotional aspects make it difficult to find efficient solutions to the problem or predict the results and ultimately it leads to the complicated and alarming sustainability challenges.  

The major sustainability problems cannot be solved on the basis of our current way of living and will require a shift from traditional ways of thinking, and acting upon environmental and socioeconomic problems. The environmental crisis as a vexed problem and signal of severe sustainability challenges requires carefully considered responses which factor in the root causes, and are based on a systemic understanding, participatory, transformative and transgressive. Transformative learning and education, challenging societal paradigms and the re-thinking of education to be more responsive are regarded as imperatives in sustainability education. Ecological intelligence, a holistic awareness of interconnectedness and systems thinking have been regarded as essential in sustainability education and as the core competencies needed for solving the wicked problems related to sustainability. In this context it is pertinent to mention that dichotomized thinking, that is, dividing and separating ideas and objects into two opposing parts, is regarded as typical of the modern era.

Despite decades of efforts to develop effective environmental education and education for sustainable development, severe gaps remain between education and sustainability. The inconsistency between the reality of educational practices and the rhetoric of environmental education has been a real challenge.

Dilemmas as regards the mismatch between sustainability and education can be understood as related to a fragmented world view and the modern dualistic understanding of humanness. These include the gulf between humans and nature, knowledge and action, the rhetoric of environmental education and educational practice, the researcher and the object, knowledge and power, etc.

The modern era characterised by the scientific and industrial revolution is seen as the beginning of increasing consumption and unsustainability. Anthropogenic activities such as deforestation, agricultural practices and the burning of fossil fuels, have resulted in large shifts among carbon pools related to global warming; they have originated from the modern era and the philosophical revolution of the Enlightenment. 

Human alienation from nature, socially produced reality and local action and solutions neglecting global impacts or the impacts on distanced localities has resulted in severe sustainability challenge. Due to globalization, distant ecological and social consequences and impacts of consumption on other people and ecology have become obscured. A modern dualistic worldview and alienation have replaced the perception of man as an integral part of nature. Consideration of nature as an object of instrumental benefit has led to attitudes of indifference and overconsumption. In the anthropogenic era, human activities impact the environment on all scales. Thus, everything in the world is different from what it would otherwise “naturally” be. People have made every spot, on earth, manmade and artificial through land use activities, producing pollution and waste, and altering geochemical cycles, and changing the climate.

The maladaptive behaviour, the social and psychological aspects of environmental problem, has brought sustainability problems to a wicked level. Therefore, pedagogy of interconnectedness must aim at promoting human interconnectedness through enhancing awareness of interconnectedness in educational practices. This means seeing the world and humans as interconnected: the interconnectedness of the individual and social, nature and culture, the local and global, and the integration of art and science to create new insights and alternative ways of understanding. The neglect of ethical and emotional dimensions of environmental problem makes environmental education meaningless and inefficient.

Redesigning education for sustainability necessitates the consideration and development of new learning approaches. Collaborative, participatory learning and exploring real-life issues could integrate individual and social realities, foster active agency and relational systems thinking. The emotional aspect of learning should have a focus in education as emotional awareness, since emotions affect learning and thinking.

In addition, emotional and embodied literacy are important for creating a common vision of sustainable well-being. What is good life goes primarily through emotions. Therefore, new ways of thinking by discovering connected identities and creating new ideas and alternative visions of sustainable life are needed because this critical environmental problem cannot be solved with the traditional knowledge that has resulted in problems.

There is an emergent need for complementary and recursive use of artistic, embodied, experiential, symbolic, spiritual, and relational learning, especially in the vital educational task of reconnecting learners to the earth while enabling them to discover their connected identity and realize their full potentials. The role of science, philosophy and education is to provoke the dismantling and deconstructing of dichotomies, to create pathways as theories, concepts and practices in between dichotomies, and to promote the understanding of interconnectedness, common goods thinking, interdependence and the nature of the eco-social human being. With the focus on interconnectedness, the various approaches together can create a powerful response to environmental problems as the burning sustainability challenge of our time.