Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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176 farther horizons
The second necessary change is a shift in our manner of education
that alters both the substance and process of learning, from
kindergarten through PhD. The goal is what Robert Jay Lifton
and Eric Markusen describe as “a modest yet far-reaching realignment
of elements of the self ” that extend “the capacity of an individual
self for concern, caring, loyalty and even love . . . to the
human species as a whole” (Lifton and Markusen, 1990, p. 259).
“Species [awareness],” in their words, “inevitably extends to the
habitat of all species, to the Earth and its ecosystem” (p. 275). The
problem they’ve identifi ed is not in education but of education,
and requires a more fundamental transformation of our concept
of learning relative to the health of the biosphere.
Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, describes
the problem of education in this way: “the academy remains
unwilling to fully embrace the multiple ways of thinking, the different
disciplinary cultures, orientations, and approaches to solving
problems that have arisen through hundreds if not thousands of
years of intellectual evolution . . . Hubris . . . is a major obstacle to
coming to grips with our situation” (“None Dare Call It Hubris,”
2007, pp. 3–4). The point is that education has long been a part of
the problem, turning out graduates who were clueless about the
way the world works as a physical system or why that knowledge
was important to their lives and careers, while at the same time
promoting knowledge of the sort that has fueled the destruction
of ecologies and undermined human prospects.
What would it mean for the academy to deal seriously with
the crisis of sustainability, including its underlying causes? Crow’s
answer, in part, is to “recognize our responsibility to use the knowledge
we advance for the good of society” (“American Research
Universities,” 2007, p. 3). Crow, however, goes further, aiming to
restructure the academy as a part of the larger effort to redesign
urban communities for sustainability, bringing the considerable
intellectual power of the university to bear on local and regional
decisions and problems. The 4,100 colleges and universities in the