Coexisting
Nature-Centered Leadership: Challenging the Rules of The Game
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Spencer S Stober
We may have entered a new period in geological history when humans dominate the Earth with uncertain consequences—the “Anthropocene” (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). Efforts to mitigate our environmental indiscretions are confounded by the lack of shared vision as to how humans and their organizations can co-exist within the natural environment. Nature-Centered Leaders (Stober, 2013) explore ways to promote dialogue among organizational stakeholders in an effort to find common ground for a shared vision—an “aspirational narrative” for the future (Stober, Brown, & Cullen, 2013). Earlier perspectives on Nature-Centered Leadership focused on the organization. This paper expands upon Nature-Centered Leadership with modern Stakeholder Theory as a framework to better understand the importance of the institutional perspective. Institutions provide the “rules of the game” by which organizations play (North, 1990). Nature-Centered Leaders promote dialogue around norms and values (the rules of the game) for environmental sustainability. Organizations need to be responsive to their stakeholders and the norms and values held by the larger community, particularly within the institutional space where organizations operate. We may aspire to protect Nature, but organizations are by people for people and it may be all too easy for us to allow those organizations to protect our human interests at the expense of our sister and brother species. This paper uses an analytic framework (Scott, 2014) to identify nature-centered norms and values among organizational stakeholders who are also actors in their many communities where the “rules of the game” evolve. Empowering these actors will challenge social barriers to environmental justice.
Digital Storytelling as a Pedagogy of Sustainability Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Derek Gladwin
The environmental activist, author, and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, maintains that the “real fight — all real fights — are over the zeitgeist. They’re about who controls the vision of the future.” David Orr, in his earlier work on sustainability, argued that the ecological crisis is fundamentally a crisis of education, where literacy must develop sustainable visions of communities and society. As McKibben and Orr make clear, how to alter the ways we perceive and imagine our environmental futures, and how we might advocate for them, depends upon who controls the story. This paper approaches environmental literacy education through digital storytelling as a pedagogy of sustainability practice and how it transforms social change. Drawing on methods in the environmental humanities, social practice, and sustainability education, I consider how storytelling has the power to change perceptions and behaviour and mobilize action through multimodal networks of digital media. When engaging in arts, creativity, and digital media, it is valuable to examine issues of production, language, representation, narrative, and audience to decipher meaning and then apply it to our social networks to imagine sustainable social and ecological stories of the future. As a case study, I will examine a viral UK Greenpeace media campaign titled LEGO: Everything is NOT Awesome (2014) – confronting drilling for oil in the Arctic – to illustrate how digital storytelling as a pedagogical approach to sustainability practice can generate advocacy and mobilized change on a global scale.
Jumping in Sidewalk Puddles: Eco-pedagogical Practices in the Urban Environment for Early Childhood Practitioners
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cayley Burton
According to Dorothy Blair (2009), “Today’s children lack experience with natural ecosystem complexity” (p. 17). For young children growing up in Western urban environments, what can early childhood caregivers and educators do in order to increase overall interactive, nature-based experiences for younger generations? While excursions into the mountains and forested areas are feasible for some families and school programs, not all children have access to these kinds of outdoor activities. Fostering an appreciative and “reciprocal” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 28; Mohawk, 2008, p. 129) relationship with the Earth from a young age should not be limited by the (in)ability to traverse beyond the urban environment, particularly when nature, plants and other eco-pedagogical opportunities are present in cityscapes. In my paper, I argue that, as early childhood practitioners, teachable moments exist in day-to-day urban settings that serve as preliminary education of the ecological world for infants, toddlers and preschool-aged children. Building on the environmental education literature, I will outline some practical, place-based pedagogical approaches for early learning practitioners. My analysis will disrupt the anthropocentrism characteristic of Western ‘progress’ narratives, both centring—without appropriating—Indigenous ways of knowing and illustrating the ways in which the world of play and the more-than-human world overlap. Drawing parallels between arbour and human communities (Kimmerer, 2013; Wohlleben, 2015) as a model for ecological and social change, sustainability education tailored to the early years can thus become an avenue for transformative and environmental justice.
How Young New Zealanders Have Changed Their Consuming Practices in Relation to Their Environmental Awareness of Natural Resource Depletion: People, Planet, and Consumption
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jo Bailey
Human consumption of planetary resources has led to accelerated rates of climate change, air and water pollution, deforestation, soil degradation, and species loss. With consumption levels of developed countries in ecological overshoot, there is considerable tension between planetary resources and consumer demand for products/services. This qualitative study investigates how an awareness of global ecological degradation is shifting young adults’ attitudes and actions around consumption. Through individual interviews, the New Zealanders’ aged between 18 and 28 years were asked to discuss how they are transitioning and responding to the challenges of daily living within the context of environmental change and the pressures imposed by the dominant social culture of consumerism. Using grounded theory, preliminary themes suggest that the young people have consciously changed the way and their levels of consuming because of a defining moment and also, their transition and actions have been strongly influenced by underpinning family/whanau values and environmental influences.
