Learning Science - Key to A Sustainble Future

 Students and teachers are challenged to make sense of all the claims and counterclaims about our future, especially with respect to issues of sustainability. For example, virtual science based on computer modeling is the basis for most predictions and scenarios about climate change, extreme weather events and biodiversity. But we do not teach modeling as a scientific practice in schools, we teach science in terms of discrete disciplines (physics, biology, chemistry) rather than as the practice of model building. When students are confronted with skeptical scientists who base their skepticism on data and observation rather than models, they are unsure how to evaluate evidence.

A concrete example may assist in making clear the point. All eighteen computer models of ice formations in the Antarctic suggest that ice sheets should be experiencing continued decline.  Each shows a decrease in each month, with the greatest multi-model mean percentage monthly decline of 13.6% in February and the greatest absolute loss of ice in September. The models have very large differences in the rate and extent of loss over 1860 – 2005. However, data collected through satellite observations make clear that sea ice has been expanding , with the September 2012 extent of 19,1702 million square kilometers being amongst the largest extent ever recorded (see here for data). The models are clearly wrong, but it is the model data and their gloomy predictions that gets the press not the optimistic data from real observation.

Similar issues exist between models and data for such things as polar bear extent (with the exception of two specific communities, the polar bear population is actually growing and is very healthy), extreme weather events (no established connection to climate change according to the IPCC’s analysis and other studies) and other issues with environment and sustainability.

What then do we teach students? Students are generally being taught that the Antarctic ice is melting, that polar bears are in decline and that extreme weather events are linked to climate change. They are not being asked to look critically at the difference between different kinds of scientific inquiry and evidence – e.g. between virtual science, experimental science and natural observation.

They are also not generally taught the difference between evidence based policy, such as the war on DDT fought by Rachel Carlson with selective and biased evidence use and the evidence based policy approach, which uses a systematic and inclusive approach to evidence so as to reach a comprehensive understanding of the challenge. Cold hard looks at evidence for Carlson’s claims (see here and also here) suggest that she used a very flawed approach to science. The same can also be said of Lord Sterns’s review of the policy implications of climate change (see here).

We have similar challenges in biology and medicine. Claims are made about homeopathy, for example, which have no scientific basis whatsoever, yet various health systems promote and enable its practice (see here) and some schools and colleges actually teach homeopathy as “an alternative medicine” (sic). Claims are made about new treatments and discoveries which, when looked at critically and scientifically are problematic, as reviews by the Cochrane Collaboration make clear (see here for useful columns by Ben Goldacre describing some of these challenges).

How do we encourage students to look at such claims and to look at skeptical responses to them? How do we teach the basis of scientific inquiry and skeptical analysis in a systematic way so that the educational process is not simply “buying in” to a politically correct narrative, but is actually developing scientific and critical skills?

This is a real challenge for those who are committed to sustainability and development. Unless we fall into the trap of buying into the narrative that the future is one in which we are doomed in ways which are “inevitable” according to science, we need upcoming generations to be able to reason scientifically, understand evidence, be able to be critical of science (especially pseudo-science) and be able to practice the scientific methods. We also need them to see science as informing public policy not determining it and to recognize the difference between campaigning and scientific inquiry – lines which, after the work of Feyerabend (e.g. Against Method, 1975) , have become blurred.

Students need the skills to recognize “bad” science, polemics and campaigning science and the skills to be able to undertake critical scientific inquiry. I am not sure that our current teaching of science is achieving these intentions. A sustainable planet needs schools, colleges and universities to produce scientists that understand not just their discipline, but the philosophy and history of science. Otherwise, progress will be inhibited by bias and polemic.

Stephen Murgatroyd

WIcked Problem of Growth - Are Educators Responding?

 

Our blue planet earth is a self-renewing factory of life orbiting the sun from which all its energy is derived. One species in the complex web of life has acquired remarkable powers to change the earth with exponential (geometric progression, repeatedly doubling) growth of its own numbers and of its impact on the natural systems of the planet. Paul Ehrlich’s formula I = P x A x T summarizes this impact (I) as a function of three exponential trajectories: population (P) affluence (A) and technology (T). The force of this human impact is now so great that ‘business-as-usual’ seems unsustainable. The capacity of the earth is finite and the exponential growth in its finite space can only be sustained until that space becomes full. This is the ‘wicked problem’ now facing our world-changing species.

In the following diagram the horizontal line represents the finite limits; the curved line the exponential increase in P x A x T that applies to population growth, economic activity, resource use, pollution, loss of bio-diversity and all the other concerns about the limits to growth.

For more than four decades this schematic overshoot has been forecast, as it is a mathematical law and the globalization of economic activity has now raised the stakes to a planetary scale. When the problem becomes global it assumes a ‘wicked’, uncontrollable nature as there are no global institutions capable of dealing with the fundamental driver of exponential economic and technological growth. Although contradicted by the laws of both physics and ecology, conventional economic theory assumes that growth and capital accumulation can be unending as do the promises of most national leaders.

Recently evidence has become available of how close some of earth’s systems are to finite limits or even overshoot. The Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) has identified nine ‘planetary boundaries’ three of which are already overshot. Human well-being and that of other species is at stake as global capital and credit move electronically around the world seeking to maintain the highest rate of profit and economic efficiency. Since the 2008 financial crisis it has become clear that credit-based ‘wealth’ is to a large extent illusory and increasingly concentrated in the hands of the rich and super-rich within and between nations. As wealth has accumulated it seems that social justice has not kept pace.

In February 2012 a wide-ranging  Oxfam Discussion Paper on sustainable development, the SRC visual representation of the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ was juxtaposed with eleven ‘social boundaries’, limits to human deprivation that threaten the well-being of a large proportion of people around the world to the point of social breakdown.  ‘A safe and just space for humanity’ lies between these environmental and social boundaries what they term ‘the doughnut’ framework. (See the report at: http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/dp-a-safe-and-just-space-for-humanity-130212-en.pdf)   Like many advocates of the ‘green’ and more equitable economy, the Oxfam framework implies that there can still be sustainable development or growth that stays within these boundaries, even though the SRC concludes that the planetary boundaries for greenhouse gases, nitrogen cycle and bio-diversity loss have already been overshot. The very idea of sustainable development is now being challenged.

The World Economic Association, is a group of scholars who radically oppose the assumptions and policy prescriptions of conventional classical economists and the prevalence of ‘free market ideology’. Their recent conference (http://sustainabilityconference2012.worldeconomicsassociation.org/)  included papers critical of the very concept of sustainable development. ‘Sustainable growth’ is seen as an oxymoron. Some papers see that the only way to stay within the laws of nature is a process of economic ‘de-growth’ towards a sustainable ‘steady state’ global economy. In brief, three distinctions are as made:

·         Sustainable growth – technological innovation greatly increases the efficiency in the use of natural resources, substitutes non-renewable with renewable resources and redistributes wealth to increase equity and eradicate poverty

·         Steady state – ‘development’ for a stable global population is seen as qualitative improvement without increasing the demands on the physical world, a ‘circular economy’ in which recycling of resources replaces most natural resources and large-scale redistribution of wealth is achieved

·         De-growth – slowing down and scaling down of human activity and a decline in global population to the point where relatively localised communities can enjoy ‘prosperity without growth’ and where global trading is largely curtailed

The so-called ‘ecological footprint’ of human activity on the planet is judged by some to indicate that since the 1980s humans have been consuming ‘natural capital’ equivalent to one and half earths’ supply. As one writer puts it, the sun-powered factory of the earth is now destroying the fabric from which it is made, in order to satisfy the insatiable demands of its ever-expanding population of consumers. If de-growth is to be viable as we add to the planet 1 billion extra humans every 14 years and double economic growth even faster, then we have a truly wicked problem on our hands. But are these wicked problems addressed adequately by educators around the world? And should they be?