What are we thinking about? Happiness. Education. Sustainability. Progress. An awful lot.

Ryan, Ryan, Gabrielle, Melissa, and Neil – our lions – are now in Jamaica. We’ll be updating regularly now with as much about them as we can. But before we get rolling, we want to share some of the sustainability materials that we’ve been looking at.

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of Jamaica’s independence from Britain. Over those 50 years, it has undergone incredible development pressures, some positive, some not, and many controversial in the nation itself. We hope to understand some of the dilemmas island nation face in the light of sustainability. So we will be exploring Jamaica’s culture, agriculture, biodiversity, and much more over the coming weeks. But in order to create a frame, we have explored islands and sustainability in several ways.

We can’t hope to share all of it with you, but here are a few things we’ve done so far and how we are approaching them. Here’s a quick rundown in no particular order of importance.

What is happiness? What does sustainability mean to us? What is the purpose of our education? We have explored these three questions (and invite you to do the same) to get at our assumptions and beliefs. Most of us agree that connection to other people, our health, and the opportunity to take meaningful action make us happy. Sustainability, like justice or freedom, is a big concept whose definition can be elusive. One of our members Ryan Walker, though, compared it to stewardship, implying a kind of responsibility to use and care for ourselves and the rest of the planet. But we know this is a rabbit hole that we will tumble down for weeks to come. And our education is the vehicle to achieve our place in society, primarily our professional aspirations. However, our own Gabrielle Reese wrote that education is also a way to learn about ourselves.

Could education be a way to better citizenship for us the globe? Should the purpose of education be to create a more sustainable culture? Or could we incorporate that purpose into education more fully?

One of the authors we have spent some time with is David Orr (picture at left). In his seminal book, Ecological Literacy (1992), he argues education needs to be transformed to help foment an ecologically literate citizenry. That is, people need to become critically aware of the consequences of how we (mostly the developed the people of the world) have lived and continue to live today. It should follow that an educated person become skilled in living well in their places to create a healthy economy and happy society in harmony with nature. To understand the many challenges before us in this class, then, we have examined different views of important concepts behind sustainability and ecological literacy by asking questions about some of our cherished concepts.

Are the sustainability crises Jamaica faces today in agriculture for example, the consequence of unfettered economic growth? Are we humans just restless creatures whose essential nature drives us to toward unsustainability? One of our members wondered with some equanimity whether humans are “parasites?” It’s not uncommon to wonder these kinds of things. If we are, what does that mean for us?

What would progress be? Like sustainability, it’s an amorphous term whose definition seems to slip around the corner when you think you’ve found it. So to get at it, we read pieces by three very different authors on progress. Bjorn Lomborg, something of a cornucopian, thinks technological progress, though responsible for many of the environmental woes we face, is “the only game in town.” Vandana Shiva, urges us to rethink progress as technological progress precisely because of its role in the ecological and cultural crises before us like climate change. She argues that we need to bring human labor freed from industrial machinery back into the economy so that people have meaningful work. It’s as if people have become tools for the tools they made, slaves to machines instead of the other way around. Finally, Derrick Jensen says that we are “high on progress,” and like addicts, have indeed become slaves to an economy and civilization that might need to collapse in order for the rest of the biosphere to thrive. Progress is an Orwellian term to Jensen. Up is down and down is up. Progress is regress.

So what other ideas or questions do we start to ask? Can we develop better technologies with a different definition of progress guiding us? How can a system like Natural Step help shape our problem solving toward a more sustainable world? What should we value in our “one world”? Can we ethically “manage” or “operate” planet earth? What is the right thing to do in a warming world? How should we do it? What skills do we need? Does humanity, or some part of it, need to undergo a spiritual awakening to realize a sustainable civilization or civilizations? So many questions.

And even if we answer these questions, could we become people armed with good intentions unwittingly sending many of us to proverbial hell? Ivan Illich certainly thought so. It can all be rather disorienting.

Island nations face stresses different from continental nations. Their resources are fewer, their boundaries tighter, and their cultural and biological diversity special and unique. To get a handle on how sustainability and sustainable development are playing out on island nations, we read the United Nations report Trends in Sustainable Development: Small Island Developing States (linked here). Development has brought urbanization, natural resource exploitation, changing demographics, and new energy demands all of which create sustainability issues. Climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, ocean acidification, and rising sea levels – all the result of the global economy if you follow David Orr and Vandana Shiva – confront islands in their own ways. We will see how some of these play out in Jamaica and how people are dealing with them.

So in the weeks to come we will be mulling over these and many other things. We hope you continue to check back in, get to know each of us better, and share in the excitement.