Next Tuesday I’ll be teaching Foundations of Leadership in Sustainability for the fourth time. There are a bunch of things I’m excited about. Three stand out.
1. We have some new materials in this course. We will explore Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante to bring Indigenous people’s issues more to light. My co-teacher (more on her in a moment) and I wanted to ensure that we engaged in a deeper ongoing discussion about the rights of minorities (ethnic, racial, sex, and gender) and the relationship between minority oppression and the oppression of nature.
We will spend our week on systems thinking by watching and discussing Errol Morris’s Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara. It’s such a great example of failed systems thinking, one so expansive and sprawling that it raises incredible ethical conundrums about ingenuity and ignorance. Because sustainability literacy is built on working with very complex systems and “wicked problems,” it seems like a good way to get at systems thinking through a different problem: the Vietnam War. It will be a challenge to teach but I anticipate puzzling things out will be neat.
And then we will close the semester with Paul Hawken’s Drawdown. It strikes many of us–just as it did Hawken himself–that our the mindset and rhetoric around climate and sustainability is clogged up with crappy language. War metaphors, zeros, and despair. If you’re outside of the climate discourse you see angry and desperate jargon. Let’s change that. So we are moving the class toward doable approaches, none of which are easy but all are possible. If you don’t know Drawdown, check it out.
2. A new co-teacher will join me. Lucy is a graduate student with a background in a renewable energy company out of San Francisco. Her work now is in ecological tourism. She’s sharp, loves beautiful places and their preservation, comes from a scientific family, and will no doubt balance me out.
3. Finally, of course, I’m excited to meet new students. Every semester I find they bring me to see new things just as I do for them, that we help one another explore new ways of thinking, experiencing, feeling, wondering, engaging, and being in love with this world.
It’s a good gig I’ve got over here.
Peter Walks for Democracy 