Resnick Sustainability Institute’s “RESONATE” Awards Focus on Paradigm Shifting Work

The Resnick Sustainability Institute at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has announced that it has established an award that will honor cutting-edge work that addresses some of the hardest problems in energy and sustainability. The award winners will be announced in the Spring of 2014.

The Resnick Sustainability Institute’s “RESONATE” Awards will focus on innovative, paradigm-shifting work from individuals at an early stage in their careers, whose ideas are worthy of significant, widespread recognition. This work can be from many fields including science, technology, economics, public policy, or others. The intent of the awards is to draw attention to the innovators making significant strides in some of the grand challenges facing humanity, within the context of achieving global sustainability. These include meeting the world’s energy needs sustainably, providing water and food for a growing world population, cleaning the environment, improving people’s access to the natural resources they need to live a productive life, and others.

Education and Sustainability

The Guardian asks “Is sustainability a key part of education on it’s Environment blog:

“The UK has been ahead with the sustainability school agenda, but I’m worried that they’re now stripping back the work that we’ve spent 10 years developing with the schools,” says Anna Birney from Forum for the Future, a non-profit group promoting sustainable development.

For years, charities and non-profits have been encouraging and helping schools integrate energy into education. One of their main strategies is using energy efficiency projects in schools to teach children about sustainability, by making it part of their learning experience.

“Putting solar panels on the roof of a school building can be a way to show children how much energy can be saved,” explains Birney. “But teachers can also use it as an engagement tool for lessons in science and maths.”

Schools don’t have to create lessons dedicated solely to the environment and energy to teach them about these issues. The point is that this knowledge can be diffused in core subjects like maths, science and even literacy lessons. For example, students from Worcestershire and Warwickshire schools wrote letters to their local MP to voice their concerns about climate change and the environment as part of their literacy lesson.

Studies conducted by Ofsted have shown positive results from schools that integrated sustainability into their curriculum. In some cases, children were getting better marks and were seen as more positive about learning in general. According to Birney, children get excited to learn about real life issues and the prospect of making a change.

While some groups suggest that lessons on sustainability should be taught in higher education, it would appear that the ideal age to start engaging students in these issues is actually primary school. Mike Wolfe from CREATE, another non-profit dedicated to sustainable development, explains that interest on the subject peaks between the ages of 9-14. Later, students have less time to sacrifice as workload increases for GCSEs and A-levels.

Readers can find the article here.

Art and Science Unite at Stanford

By Angela Hayes, Peninsula Press

An excerpt from this article is below. Read the full story on the Peninsula Press.

Once emphatically separated from each other, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and art are connecting in exciting and enlightening ways. Stanford University, known for its strong science and engineering programs, is part of this trend. An increasing number of classes and exhibits at Stanford fuse the two fields, and students and faculty are developing new ways to showcase their artistically scientific works.

Now wrapping up its third year, the Senior Reflection in Biology course invites students to combine their artistic talents with their scientific interests. In this year-long class, students gain insight from mentors and workshop groups and create capstone projects. Final products range from paintings and sculptures to films and spoken poetry.

 

New Paradigm: Earth Democracy

Vandana Shiva has long advocated that we change our worldview from separation from nature to connectedness with it.  In this excerpt from her essay New Paradigm:  Earth Democracy, she addresses the root of the problem and urges us to again become part of the Earth community:

The same technological and economic systems that violate the planet also violate the rights of communities to her resources – the land, the biodiversity, the water. When land, biodiversity and water are reduced to tradeable commodities and privatized, not only are the rights of nature violated, the rights of communities are also violated. Pitting humans against nature and placing them outside the Earth community is an outmoded, fossilized legacy of capitalist patriarchy and mechanistic thought that gave us fossil-fuel based industrialism and colonialism and is now imposing militarized growth on communities. If our species is to survive, we must re- imbed ourselves in the planet and again become part of the Earth community. We must reawaken our duties to protect the Earth and our rights as Earth citizens to a fair share of her gifts. For this we need to revisit our concepts of growth and prosperity, we need to change the assessment of technologies to include the impact on the Earth and on society.

I’ve posted the entire essay here.