Adult education has a critical role to play in combatting climate change, not only in supporting changes in behaviour but also, and much more crucially, in giving people the means to challenge, change and galvanize political will, argues Paul Stanistreet
You know that moment
in a disaster movie when a TV anchor conveys the terrible news that the world
is facing a catastrophic threat and hope is all but lost. Well, it happened
yesterday for real. The funny thing is, hardly anyone noticed.
4 April 2022 may go
down as one of the darkest days in the late history of humanity, a marker not
only of our inhuman treatment of one another, the harrowing cruelty of war, but
also of our failure to act on climate change, despite a mountain of evidence
and the starkest warnings yet from climate scientists that we are passing the
point of no return when it comes to staving off its worst effects. Continue reading →
The United Nations COP26 climate conference is an opportunity not only to galvanize political leadership but also to reflect on the role of education and the contribution of lifelong learning to climate action, writes Paul Stanistreet
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The future isn’t
what it used to be. Whereas once we imagined a future of chrome-plated,
high-tech convenience, limitless space exploration and driverless vehicles
scudding across the commuter-crammed skies of cities, it is now difficult to
imagine any kind of long-term future human civilization as we know it. Our
habits of production and consumption, our ways of living, without any sense of
planetary limitations, and our fetishization of economic growth are incompatible
with human survival. Humanity faces unparalleled global challenges, with the
future of the climate at their heart, and the warnings, from the United
Nations and others – and the consequences of further inaction
– are dire.
The need for
international cooperation is pretty much unprecedented; greater, I would say,
than it has been at any point since the United Nations was created to promote
and facilitate it. The COP26
climate change conference, held this week and next in Glasgow, is an
opportunity for leaders from across the globe to discuss ways of combatting the
effects of climate change and, crucially, of minimizing
further warming. Yet it comes at a moment when the spirit of
global cooperation has been in retreat. As UN Secretary‑General
António Guterres noted last month, vaccine
nationalism in the richer parts of the world is putting
global recovery at risk. The pandemic has not been the cause of nationalism, of
course – as in many other cases, COVID-19 has highlighted an area in which we
need to do better – but it has demonstrated how the leaders of the developed
world can struggle to act in a genuinely cooperative, multilateral way, even when
it is in their interests to do so. Continue reading →
The devastation caused by floods in Europe is a wake-up call with regard not only to climate change, but to lifelong learning too, writes Paul Stanistreet
At the time of writing, the death toll from the
sudden, catastrophic flooding in western Germany and Belgium has passed 170,
with many more people reported missing. Thousands have lost their homes, after two
months of rain fell in just two days, causing buildings to collapse and large swathes
of terrain to be submerged under water. Roads crumbled and landslides reshaped
the topography, all in a matter of hours. It was a demonstration both of the ferocious
destructive power of nature and of the reality of the climate emergency.
Experts predict that extreme weather will become more common as a result of climate change. For people in the Global North, largely sheltered from the worst effects of the climate crisis that have thus far fallen disproportionately on the poorest, the events of the past week have been a shocking, heart-rending lesson. As Malu Dreyer, the Minister-President of Rhineland-Palatinate, noted, climate change is ‘not abstract any more. We are experiencing it up close and painfully’. There are no safe places; no exemptions for the wealthy. Continue reading →
