Conclusion: The Promise of Opportunity

Human parents have not only summoned their children into life through conception and birth, they have simultaneously introduced them into a world. In education they assume responsibility for both, for the life and development of the child and for the continuance of the world. … the child requires special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the world. But the world, too, needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed....

Obstacles to Sustainability

This chapter identifies a variety of human obstacles to achieving sustainability, and in doing so provides a deeper understanding of the challenges of sustainability, and the means by which these challenges might be overcome. Human attributes, practices, norms, settings, structures, cultures, institutions, systems, and policies may all be conducive or not conducive to sustainability, so the obstacles surveyed include structural determinants of the footprint intensity of consumption, cultural and social factors, systemic failures of public knowledge, aspects of human cognition, emotion, and motivation, and limitations of environmental governance. The character of these obstacles to sustainability demonstrates the need for a multi-scale and coordinated public response to problems of sustainability, but also self-organized collective efforts to create conditions favourable to global cooperation. The chapter concludes that agreement on fair principles of cooperation is essential to sustainability.

Managing Complexity: Three Case Studies

This chapter identifies problems of sustainability as systemic action problems and presents illustrative case studies in environmental governance: the management of energy, water, and food systems. It begins by examining the widely discussed idea that problems of sustainability are wicked problems, and argues that systemic complexity and decisional complexity are the factors fundamentally involved in such problems. This opening discussion of the nature of sustainability problems and the case studies that follow bring together and illustrate thematic strands of the preceding chapters, including the costs, benefits, and hazards of complexity, the respective roles of market and government mechanisms, and trans-boundary environmental governance. The illustrative cases concern the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Australia’s National Water Management System, and the changing patterns of food production in the Mekong Region of Southeast Asia. The cases progress in this way from the local and regional to the national and international, and all are concerned in one way or another with relationships between water, food, and energy systems: the widely discussed water-food-energy nexus.

Complexity and the Structure of Opportunity

This chapter critiques three categories of institutions that are basic to personal and collective well-being: epistemic or knowledge-producing institutions, educational or personally formative institutions, and workplaces as institutional settings in which personal qualities are expressed in activity that is more or less characteristic of living well. It addresses the ways in which these institutions should ideally contribute to the creation and sustaining of opportunities to live well, and it goes on to consider how these institutions actually do function in increasingly complex contemporary societies. Joseph Tainter’s model of growing social complexity and declining marginal return on investments in complexity is examined and discussed in connection with equal opportunity, credential inflation, academic specialization, and the structure of educational systems. This extends and deepens a critique of existing institutions that runs through the entire book. The chapter ends with proposals for reforming selected institutions to make them more conducive to sustainability. Ideals of flourishing, transparency, social reciprocity, the inherent satisfactions of good work, and problem-focussed collaborative research play important roles.

What Sustainability Is and Why It Matters

This aim of this chapter is to clarify the idea of sustainability, and to do so in a way that supports a coherent and ethically compelling understanding of sustainability. It identifies the long-term preservation of opportunity to live well as the normative core of the idea of sustainability. It defines a primary ecological concept of sustainability and distinguishes several other concepts, including throughput sustainability and socio-political sustainability. This provides a basis for detailed inquiry into the ethical core of sustainability and the relationships between several forms of sustainability that people have reason to care about. The chapter concludes with a survey of causes and manifestations of unsustainability that are undermining opportunities to live well.

An Education in Sustainability

This chapter concludes the book by arguing that education should equip individuals and societies with understanding, capabilities, and virtues conducive to sustainability. It reviews the current state of sustainability instruction and related educational policy, answers criticisms of UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development(ESD), and goes on to argue that a sound education in sustainability (EiS) is essential to an adequate education. This is grounded in general accounts of justice, human well-being, and education. The first argument is that students are entitled to an education in sustainability that offers them substantial opportunities to live well in a context of increasing ecological and societal risk. A second argument is that the need for global cooperation to advance sustainability makes EiS desirable. The chapter concludes by proposing curricular integration with a focus on the dynamics of interacting systems, problem solving, critical and inventive thinking, and global civic education, all brought together in collaborative project work through which student learning can engage real problems.

Sustainability Ethics and Justice

This chapter identifies the basic elements of an ethic of sustainability, showing how principles of sustainability ethics can be derived from core commitments of common morality to respect others as rationally self-determining persons and to take care not to harm others. It goes on to define some cardinal virtues of sustainability ethics, frames a conception of politics as an art of sustainability, and outlines a theory of justice and just institutions that provide and preserve essential bases for living well. Some limitations of John Rawls’s theory of justice are examined as background to this approach, which can better conceptualize and guide the long-term preservation of opportunity to live well. Kant, Locke, Plato, and Aristotle also serve as philosophical points of reference. The approach is a methodological hybrid of moral naturalism and constructivism, and the pivotal claims about what is universally essential to human happiness and flourishing are based on decades of empirical studies in psychology.