Confronting Environmental Issues

Abstract

To say that there are important questions to be asked about the nature, extent and seriousness of the environmental degradation we face, and about what can and should be done to address it, is not to say anything new or particularly startling. As David Orr (1994) comments, “the truth is that many things on which our future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity” (p. 7). Elsewhere, Orr (1992) concludes that the environmental crisis is “not only a permanent feature of the public agenda, for all practical purposes it is the agenda. No other issue of politics, economics, and public policy will remain unaffected by the crisis of resources, population, climate change, species extinction, acid rain, deforestation, ozone depletion and soil loss. Sustainability is about the terms and conditions of human survival, and yet we still educate at all levels as if no such crisis existed” (p. 83). Science and technology education, and in particular the kind of action-oriented approach advocated in this book, needs to grasp this particular nettle before it is too late.