OK!

Let’s get started on our first block.

PART ONE

A. Unit Outline.

Here I will pinpoint:

• learning outcomes,
• delivery mechanism,
• our programme schedule of classes & ‘blocks‘,

• Tonyversity website support

• principles and expectations (you of me – me of you)

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B. Me: Tony Jolley

• Who do you have in front of you?
• What am I doing here?
• Which languages will we be working in?
• What are my Sustainability ‘credentials‘?

• Contacting me: tjolley@gmail.com BUT please, in your email, would you give me your first name and family name and the course you are on – ‘Hi, it’s Dave’ doesn’t help much – I probably have 5 or 10 Daves per year in my classes!  Thanks.

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PART TWO: Over to You!

TASK N°1

Encounters with Sustainability Throughout your Education.

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To be done in class.

To be followed up by a short written synthesis of results in English or French:

One group report from GEPSAC

One group report from Librarianship students

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Thinking individually:

• [Approximately] how many hours of teaching and learning have you had throughout your school career on the subject of sustainability / environment / responsible citizenship (in its widest sense)?   .

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Then, Thinking together across the group as a whole, work together to address the following Qs and produce your answers:

• What was the highest and lowest individual figure in the class?
• Produce a class average figure of total hours spent studying this subject through your school and university career
  
• Divide this average figure by 15 (the number of years you will typically have been at school, college and university by L3) to get an average number of hours per year.
• Compare this number of hours per year with the hours attributed to learning French, or a second language, Maths, History or a science, say….
• These hours were part of what subject / which subjets for the mostpart?
• Did any of you have  specific course modules on sustainability, environment and citizenship / sustainable living [as opposed to a ‘transversal approach‘  which would see the issue given a few hours attention under other subject headings (Geography, History, etc)]? If so:
  • how many of you?
  • what % of the class?   
  • what co-eff did this unit carry
  • how does that co-eff compare to other units in the syllabus?

• In the light of the fact that most scientists and specialists feel that this matter is by far the most important and the most urgent and dramatic challenge being faced by the planet, its flora and fauna and mankind (and have been saying so most vocally since 1987 or even earlier), do you feel that the educational time and significance accorded to this subject in your ‘parcours‘ was:

• 0 = non-existent
• 1/2 = dreadfully lacking
• 3/4 = limited but rather less than adequate
• 5 = OK: not too bad … but not too good either
• 6/7 = adequate / quite reasonable
• 8/9 = pretty good
• 9/10 = excellent and entirely appropriate to the urgency of action that this issue demands of each successive young generation.

• What do you feel could and should be done (and by whom) in response to all the above?

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TONY-TALK:

• For the last 20 years I have been running this exercise with my students at degree and Master’s levels and I can tell you that respondents report that it is still possible for students to go through their entire school and university career without having encountered the issue of sustainability and what it should mean to us personally and professionally.
• The sorts of responses I get from year to year are:
  • half of the cohort (‘promo’) has virtually zero hours throughout their schooling
  • the other half is made up of:
    • a very small fraction that have had a considerable number of hours (but only if they have chosen a highly-specific ‘parcours’)
    • others who have had perhaps 10 hours in total throughout their school career.
  • the ‘average’ comes out at maybe 2 hours per year!!! – but that masks the fact that, as I’ve said above, very few people have quite a lot of hours and the vast majority have little more than nothing.
  • Very few have studied a dedicated ‘module’ / course on the subject
  • More often than not it is teachers of Languages that have addressed the subject – perhaps because in other subjects a list of topics is fixed, whereas in language learning the topic choice is very much open
• Surprisingly these figures do not seem to be improving much from year to year – though, of course, it takes time for school curriculum changes to result in students coming to university with more hours of learning in this area. [That said, the world – including France – signed up to the World Commission on Environment and Development’s findings (Our Common Future / Notre Avenir à Tous) in 1987 (reaffirmed at the Rio Conference in 1991) – surely 30-35 years is long enough for the Education Nationale to have got its ‘act‘ together and given this matter the time and importance it deserves within the national curriculum.  The recent views of the Ed. Nat. have been that ‘transversal mode of delivery‘ is the best option.  I do not subscribe to this view because:
  • it can easily remain an option or a ‘sideline’ for a hard-pressed teacher who barely has the hours to cover what is already required of him
  • The subject teachers are unlikely to possess the necessary subject / contextual knowledge of sustainability
  • it is then up to the student to ‘assemble’ these ‘chunks’ of learning delivered in different subject areas and to make of them a coherent whole. That (IMHO) is expecting too much of the student
  • Students (and parents!) use the signs of high co-effs to highlight where the learner can get the best return on his time investment.  No specific module = no co-eff signal => downplaying the importance and value of the subject.
  • I fear the transversality approach is simply a way of avoiding the costs and difficulties of introducing a new subject into the curriculum:
    • there would need to be more university courses on the subject .. and a new ‘Concours’
    • an extensive (and expensive!!) teacher-training and recruitment programme would be required
    • As no extra time can be added to the school day, time would have to be found by ‘poaching’ hours from units in the existing national curriculum – that is likely to encounter considerable resistance from the teaching profession. There will be an inevitable feeling that losing hours in whatever subject (Philo, Maths, French, other Languages, History, Sciences etc) will effectively look like a downgrading of that subject’s importance…  One can see the teaching profession in uproar!
    • It will be interesting to see if the government will change it’s stance because at the COP meeting in Nov/Dec 2021 in Glasgow, the nations participating (including France!) signed up to a commitment to deliver highly-focused education and training throughout school, university and life thereafter – preferably of a mandatory nature: « We commit to the integration of sustainability and climate change in formal education systems, including as core curriculum components, in guidelines, teacher training, examination standards and at multiple levels through institutions »]
• When I do this same exercise with Master’s students studying Environment, Sustainability and Social Responsibility, their results are only marginally better than the average…
• For my part in all this, I have two or three years to go before retirement and I am hoping to leave UHA with a fully-fledged base unit in this subject that can be used on any educational programme in our Faculty and UHA as a whole.  That is why I am more than happy to be launching this course as a ‘pilot’ programme on your two courses in 22-23 academic year.

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TASK N°2

 Carbon Footprint Testing

To start this off,  I want you all to do TWO  Carbon Footprint tests – only those TWO linked below please (in English, or French).  We should have the time to do this in class and share the results listed below (so make sure you record them AND that you understand what they mean):

• how many planets would we need if all the world’s population consumed like me / enjoyed my lifestyle?
• where do I stand in relation to the average in my country (France or UK will be fine – they are both very similar) and against the rest of the world average – am I performing better or worse than these averages?
• where do I stand in relation to the targets the nations of the world agreed in order to reduce CO2 emissions and keep the global temperature rise under 2°C for the century? [By the way, current general best estimates in the scientific community suggest that, as we are not even remotely close to hitting the targets we have been agreeing and commiting to, 2.3°C / 2.4°C is perhaps the most optimistic we can hope for as a fin de siècle temperature rise (when compared with a pre-industrial baseline].
  
• how much CO2 am I personally responsible for producing?
• What is my ‘Earth Overshoot Day‘….(this measure imagines that on 1st Jan, Mother Earth ‘gives’ every person on the planet and equal and fair share of the resources that it can provide – without reducing its ability to meet future generations’ needs in the future.  ‘Overshoot Day’ is thus the day of the year upon which you have no more of your share remaining.  Ideally ( = to stay within the Planet’s ecological means) we should all stretch these resources out until 31st December.  If we don’t do this, then effectively we are going into ‘debt’ to future generations who will not be able even to have the same ‘fair share’, let alone what we are merrily consuming.
  
• Taking all this into account, how do I feel about my results and their implications…?

The calculators you must use:

DO ALL THREE of these tests (the two first ones we will do in class – the third you can look at in your own time) and record your results and keep them (and share them with your colleagues – you MUST also use them in the introduction to the related Assignment: ‘Can the Planet Afford Me‘ – which I will tell you about in due course). The tests give you different outputs and I would like you to provide all of the indicators/results from the first TWO tests and maybe, later, some interesting things you have discovered from the third….

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• http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/

  • My scores (honestly!):
    • I am using 79% of my ‘allocation’ (i.e. what is ‘fair’ for me to use according to the world targets – which I don’t think have been updated since 2020 –  they should be in line with COP26 Glasgow targets which should be more stringent / tighter)
    • I produce 8.2 tonnes of CO2  about 20% less than the upper limit…. though still tons more than I should be producing: we are trying to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, but I am still adding to it!
    • My impact is 50% LESS than the UK average (NB. France is just a little bit higher than the UK), BUT 50% MORE than the world average.  So my score may ‘look good’ – but it isn’t relative to so many people in the world who still can’t consume like me [and the world would be in far greater touble were they to do so – better that I lower my impact to theirs than the inverse].  Perhaps the ‘American Dream‘ that the country has sold to the world is to always have more, whereas, in reality, the dream we in the richer countries need is to be content with less and to share more fairly what we do have.

• http://www.footprintcalculator.org/

  • My scores:
    • my personal ‘overshoot day‘ (because I am consuming more than the Earth can provide in any given period if everyone lived like me) – was 3rd Sept in 2017 … but by reason of air travel in 2018  this date had advanced to 17th June (my birthday, ironically) – i.e. it got much worse.   In 2019/20, with no parents to fly off to visit and with a more sane and local consumption I was almost at the beginning of October – a full  three month’s short of what Mother Earth required of me.  For the rest of the year it is as if I have nothing left in the ‘bank‘ and I am going into an unauthorised ‘overdraft’ (découverte) situation – which I (or my kids and grandkids) will have to repay/bear the costs of.  During CoVid I stretched my consumption well into November…perhaps even further towards using no more than my ‘fair share‘.  BUT …. will I go back to ‘bad old habits’ once the CoVid ‘brakes’ are finally off….?
      
    • we would need 1.5 – 1.7 Earths if everyone were to live and consume like me ... better than the average for England or France  (which is nearer 2.5 – 3) but, of course, the problem is that we will only ever have the one planet Earth and we have to share it with more and more people every day: just take a look at the live ‘World Population Counter‘ … and be prepared for a shock [we are almost at 8 Billion and by the end of the century it will have risen to 11 Billion].  I am writing this in the middle of the afternoon, and already the day has seen births exceed deaths by 250,000…. suggesting that more than three populations the size of France’s (67,000,000 x 3) get added to the sum total of humanity every year….  Sharing of life-critical resources [food + water + energy] is going to become more and more of an issue…. especially if climate change and war means that yields of fundamental foodstocks go down (so prices go up above the level that a high proportion of the world’s population is capable of paying).

• https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46865204  .  Scroll down to the middle of the article. Embedded there you will find a calculator of absolute and relative food environmental impacts that, for everything from an apple to beef gives you an idea of its impact in terms of nutrition, C02, water consumption and shows you how much of the world’s land surface your consumption requires.  Have a look – it is quite startling (and I say this with a good dose of British ‘understatement‘!)

I am going to ask you to ‘pool’ your results in class and we will see what our class averages are for each measure (and the highs and lows) and how this relates to the Earth’s resources.  I suspect you may be shocked by the results – I was shocked by mine! 

Taking your own, personal results into account and an honest reflection about your life vis-à-vis sustainability, rate yourself upon this scale (we will also do an average for the group as a whole).  Please be honest here, I am not marking or taking a view of your personal sustainabilty achievement – I will respect all views and perspectives offered:

Based upon a scoring system of 1 – 10 where would you place yourself? What is the range and the average performance across the group:

1. Don’t know anything about ‘sustainability’ / ‘responsibility’.
2. Vaguely aware but uninterested and disinclined
3. Reasonable awareness of sustainability but not that interested in getting involved
4. Aware, reasonably interested, but not to the extent of doing much if anything.
5. Aware and trying to some extent on some measures, but with limited success
   
6. Aware, reasonably committed and succeeding reasonably well on some measures.
7. Aware, committed and totally succeeding on some measures.
8. Aware, totally committed, and making considerable efforts and largely succeeding over a range of measures in most, if not all parts of life and consumption.
9. All of 8, above, and trying for 10 below…. but not yet made it.
10. I am Mr/Ms Responsible. I live in a Passiv Haus, I export electricity to the grid, I seek always to buy responsible/eco/bio products on the local market from small suppliers. I purchase based upon my needs and not my ‘wants’. I try to make / produce things to meet my needs without transport / import and intermediary costs. I am ‘zero impact / zero waste man’. My attitude to consumption ‘lies within the Planet’s ecological means’ (Notre Avenir à Tous 1987 – World Commission on Environment and Development). My carbon footprint < 1.00.  If everyone lived like me, we could survive, the planet’s resources would not be diminished and we would be sharing things fairly.

The questions will then be: what are we all prepared to DO about it in our personal and professional lives? ….. and what if we do next to nothing or not nearly enough? 

It might help were we to use the AIDA approach:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

There can’t be many people who can legitimately claim they are NOT AWARE of what Laurent Fabius called « The greatest challenge ever faced by Mankind » at the Paris COP in Dec 2015. But does that automatically mean that anyone who is aware will be interested … interested enough to want to do something about it and capable and willing enough to actually ACT upon this Desire?  Sadly, no. Some are bored by the subject. Others hate being made to feel ‘guilty’. Still others rail that it is not their fault it is that of previous generations and that clearing up others’ mess at their expense is not something they are prepared to do.  Some are demotivated about the fact that even their personal improvements may be cancelled out by others in countries which are not really engaged with the issue. Some may be interested but not have the resources, the knowledge or the support to do much about it.

We can call these things ‘inhibitors‘.

Once you have done the first two footprint tests:

• What do you think might be the ‘inhibitors‘ which are preventing you yourself from acting more consistently in keeping with a life lived within the the limits of the Planet’s environmental/ecological means….
• What could and should you (with the help of others?) do to overcome such inhibitors?
  • what can you actually do yourself that you can and will determine to do (you don’t need any more persuasion, support or forcing – you are doing it today and from now on. Egs.  You could decide that you will cut your shower time to 3 minutes … You could decide to waste less food … reduce consumption of meat.  You might decide to visit a Repair Café to see if they can repair a broken article rather than throw it away and buy a new one.  All of this and many other things are entirely within your choice and control. TJ example: I have a recycling bag (itself made of recycled dogfood bags by a lady at the Repair Café) and every time I am temped to thow something away, I am now asking myself: ‘Might I need this ‘if the bomb dropped’… can I reuse or re-purpose this before I consign it to being recycled (with all the necessary extra energy that will require)?
  • what would you do for yourself with a little practical advice, help or persuasion (carrot) – what is it you need, in what form and from whom? Egs. If your local commune subsidised composters and rainfall water collectors and helped you to fit them, might that persuade you to get one? [Brunstatt has been doing that, by the way].  If your employer allowed you to work from home and NOT use your car to commute to work, would you choose to give up the car? TJ example: We decided to lease one new hybrid car and share it (getting rid of the two, older polluting cars we had).  In part this was down to the ‘remise’ of several thousand euros offered by the state.  Not a bad ‘carrot‘.
  • what is it that you simply choose not to do unless and until you are given no choice / forced to (the stick) – what is it that will need to happen such that you change? TJ example: we got ‘burned‘ with advice to fit a heat pump (pompe à chaleur) in our home: we didn’t know, but it was never going to be able to work in an old house with massive spaces/volumes and old radiators.  We had to rip it out and put in a Gas boiler.  Until and unless thare is a free and independent sustainability advisory service, I won’t be changing our heating system or insulation.
  • are there things that are 100% intractable constraints that prevent you from acting within the planet’s ecological means, even with all the carrots and sticks applied?  What are they and why? For many of you this might mean living in your parents’ home on a very limited income: they perhaps will buy what they want and without a reasonable salary you might have difficulty in choosing often more expensive, planet-friendly items.  TJ example: We might like the idea of investing solar power, but the orientation of our roof is such that very little of it’s surface area faces South / South-West.  We might like the idea of a 100% electric car, but as we have neither garage nor off-street parking, charging at home is not possible…. mand maybe not economically desirable if the war in Ukraine continues with energy prices going through the roof.  The idea of Hydrogen Fuel Cell transport technology is very appealing, but very few manufacturers are producing such cars (see Toyota Mirai), the prices are higher than hybrids even and the infrastructure isn’t yet in place.

• Q. Where does all this take you?

• A. To the ‘Can the Planet Afford Me‘ assignment