FW: [ENVIROSOC] New article by Section Member
Harris, Craig
Possibly of interest . . .
Cheers,
craig
Orla Kelly, currently a Sociology PhD student at Boston College, has an excellent new article published in Social Forces. Title, link, and abstract are below.
Title: The Silver Bullet? Assessing the Role of Education for Sustainability
Abstract: The United Nations 2030 agenda for sustainable development calls on nation states to invest in national development trajectories that promote both human and environmental well-being. Given the complexity of this plan, and the increasing severity of the climate crisis, understanding the relationship between nations’ social and environmental outcomes is a critical task for social scientists. Raising national rates of educational attainment is a cornerstone national and international governance goal. This paper integrates Amartya Sen’s conceptualization of education as the expansion of human capabilities, with the ecological modernization position that more educated societies may be less ecologically intensive, and tests the resultant hypothesis that gains in education may support global sustainability. Specifically, this study uses two-way fixed effects longitudinal modeling techniques to assess the relationship between national educational attainment and the carbon intensity of well-being (CIWB) for 76 nations between 1960 and 2010. The CIWB ratio is a well-established metric for sustainability within sociology. The findings indicate that gains in educational attainment played an important historical role in reducing the carbon intensity with which nation states produce well-being for its citizens. Less encouraging, from a global sustainability perspective, is the uneven distribution of these desirable effects across regions, and the diminishment of the education effect over time in all regions outside of advanced economies.
Rees, William
Hmm...
I cannot assess the whole paper, but the abstract is more than intriguing.
In particular, if it were true that "more educated societies [are] less ecologically intensive", that "gains in education... support global sustainability" and "that [as this paper shows] gains in educational attainment played an important historical role in reducing the carbon intensity" then should not well educated high-income countries have the lowest carbon intensities and smallest ecological footprints?
In fact, the opposite is true -- trade-corrected carbon emissions and consumption-based eco-footprints are highly correlated with GDP/capita.
Am I missing something not evident in the abstract?
Bill
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2020 2:22:26 PM
To: sco...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [SCORAI] FW: [ENVIROSOC] New article by Section Member
- Too many emails? Send an email to rob...@orzanna.de to change to a summary/digest mode.
- Follow our news on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SCORAI_org
- Subscribe to the monthly newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dHXawz
- Submit an item to the monthly newsletter: lizb....@gmail.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SCORAI" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to scorai+un...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/scorai/MN2PR12MB40324800BE27320A39FE121BBB0E0%40MN2PR12MB4032.namprd12.prod.outlook.com.
Ashwani Vasishth
I guess my question would be....what does it
mean to be "well educated"? Is, for instance, the US
"well-educated"?
--
Ashwani
Vasishth vasi...@ramapo.edu (201) 684-6616
http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~vasishth
--------------------------------------------------------
Associate Professor of Sustainability
Convener, Sustainability Program (BA)
President, New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability (NJHEPS)
Director, Center for Sustainability
http://ramapo.edu/sustainability
Ramapo College of New Jersey
505 Ramapo Valley Road, SSHS, Mahwah, NJ 07430
--------------------------------------------------------To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/scorai/16d343ef03504693be5a8173ac5fcdba%40mail.ubc.ca.
Benjamin Sovacool
Bill, all, good point. A very interesting paper, too. I was struck by a short paragraph we put into our book with JHU press a few years back about some of the perils of education (Chapter attached). Here’s the critical bit:
Lamentably, formal education is often counterproductive in terms of instilling environmental awareness. Some research suggests that the educational system,
far from producing independent thinkers who want to change the world, more often than not serves to entrench the types of material consumption that
are responsible for many of our environmental woes.54 The educational system, according to one education historian, is about creating “masses of industrious
workers, loyal subjects, and faithful church members,” socializing them into the modern economy.55 It is therefore unrealistic and perhaps even counterproductive
to hope that “education” will solve energy problems, if it indoctrinates us into the global capitalist system underlying many of the energy problems identified in this book. Education is a good start, to be sure, but it remains an imperfect solution. This is why our other maxims are also needed.
Source: 55. Henry J. Perkinson, The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education (New
York: New York University Press, 1995).
This is also why, more broadly, we suggest six maxims for readers, of which education is only one:
1. Know the players: To reveal competing interests, understand where the power lies and how it manifests itself in energy decisions.
2. Inform yourself: To counter the rapidity of change, keep up-to- date and educate yourself about energy technologies and issues.
3. Be prudent about risk: To manage risk and uncertainty, attempt to make energy decisions that are based on clear ethical principles and are well-informed
by science.
4. Seek diversity and inclusivity: To avoid undemocratic exclusion and opposition by special interest groups, remember that energy decisions must
meet the needs of a broad spectrum of citizens and stakeholders.
5. Practice self-reflection: To understand underlying ideologies, strive to become aware of your own ideological frames that might prohibit a balanced
analysis.
6. Embrace technological agnosticism: To avoid energy evangelism, look beyond a given energy technology to the services
it provides, and recognize that many systems can deliver the same solution.
All the best from the UK,
Benjamin
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/scorai/16d343ef03504693be5a8173ac5fcdba%40mail.ubc.ca.
Tom Abeles
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/scorai/cd979f61-d665-2ecc-bf35-f8742d9728f2%40gmail.com.
Richard Rosen
--
Jean Boucher
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Sage. https://books.google.com/books?id=TPp4o2EpTK8C
It also seems that the paper uses production vs consumption-based emission, which means border adjustments are not considered. I also have trouble with the attribution of causation (over correlation): was it education that did it?
We know we've been decarbonizng for a while but energy expansion annuls this overall effect. York and Bell recently demonstrated this.
York, Richard, and Shannon Elizabeth Bell. 2019. “Energy transitions or additions?: Why a transition from fossil fuels requires more than the growth of renewable energy.” Energy Research & Social Science 51:40–43.
So, it seems at best that the paper is rather descriptive and offers some new packaging or frames, but what else? Am I being unfair?
--
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. -- Frederick Douglass
Ruben Nelson
Bill,
I suspect the reason that increased education does not result in increased sustainability is that education is not what it used to be. The abstract assumes a version of education that, by and large, we have abandoned. This paper integrates Amartya Sen’s conceptualization of education as the expansion of human capabilities,. Today our educational focus is not on increasing “human capabilities”. Rather, it is on glamorizing the power of STEM as utility maximizing rational actors who are pursuing increased profits. The result is as you suggest. No mystery here.
As Modern cultures we do not have the wit or the will to resist the direction that business money is driving us. Those university board who have the will to do so, are quietly being shut down.
Ruben
From: sco...@googlegroups.com [mailto:sco...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Rees, William
Sent: January 24, 2020 5:29 PM
To: sco...@googlegroups.com; har...@msu.edu
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/scorai/16d343ef03504693be5a8173ac5fcdba%40mail.ubc.ca.