The Value of Sustainability and Sustainability as a Value

1. The Value of Sustainability and Sustainability as a Value Teaching Sustainability: Sustainable Teaching Rufus Howard Director of Sustainable Development 1st March 2019 Open

2. Overview • Personal Reflections • Values and Sustainability • Recommendations “I am moved by strange sympathies. I say continually: I will be a naturalist.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

3. The Nature of the Problem

4. What have I learnt? • Science, Law, Values • Organisations: Individual decision makers • Geography: Behaviours, values and cultures • Scale: Micro/local scale value vs impact, macro scale theoretical or ideological value vs impact. “Landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me – only the people in the city can do that.” Plato

6. Sustainability, Development and Change • Bad or Good? Necessary or Inevitable? Who makes the decision? • Ownership? Public vs Private? Tragedy of the Commons? • Perception vs Reality? Rights vs Privileges? • All decisions are value laden and biased. “I love not man the less, but Nature more.” Lord Byron

7. What are Values? • Motivations? • Needs? • Traits? • Beliefs and Ideals “Come, O men, to see the miracles that such studies will disclose in nature.” Leonardo da Vinci

8. Values Defined • Values are enduring, a Value is a belief • A Value is a belief upon which a person acts by preference • A Value is a preference as well as a ‘conception of the preferable’ • A Value is a conception of something that is personally or socially preferable (Rockeach 1973) “An important place to begin in philosophy is this: a clear perception of one’s own ruling principle” Epictetus

9. Universalism - Constellation Universalism: Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature Altruism1 Public interest3 Human dignity3 Sustainability3 Common good3 Social cohesion3 Protection of rights of the individual3 Stakeholder or shareholder value3 Balancing of interests3 Equal treatment1,3 Justice3 Social justice1 Equity3 Fairness3 Protection of minorities3 Voice of the future3 1 Schwartz (1992) 2Witesman and Walters (2014) 3 Jorgensen and Bozeman (2007)

10. Values in Higher Education • ‘they [universities] create the knowledge, capability and expertise that drive competitiveness and nurture the values that sustain our open democracy’. (Johnson* 2016) • “the value concept, more than any other, should occupy a central position across all social sciences – sociology, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, political science, education, economics and history.” (Rokeach 1973). • ‘[Values and Motivation responsible for] generating intellectual distress and philosophical confusion’ (Hodgkinson, 1996). *Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2016. Success as a Knowledge Economy: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice. HMSO.

11. Recommendations • Use data / arguments transparently to engage stakeholders and seek consensus on actual issues (versus perceived issues) • Focus arguments on the value of sustainability using language and levers appropriate to stakeholder. • Sustainability cannot be separate, it needs to be integrated by design, into projects, organisations, communities and society. • If the decision makers value sustainability, sustainability will be valued. “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Albert Einstein

12. Final Thoughts 1% Control 90% of the Power. 99% of the 1% went to University. Teach the 1% the Value of Sustainability. @Rufus_Howardhttps://uk.linkedin.com/in/impactassessment “I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals. Being at one with nature.” Mikhail Gorbachev