WEA Education Blog

10:10 annual update shows people are still getting on with carbon reduction

The 10:10 annual update (instead of an annual report) shows that, even after two years, there is momentum in the idea of making efforts around percentage reductions in CO₂


You can read their update here - very enjoyable and full of simple ideas. We need to get this back up the agenda in the WEA after a pretty good effort in 2010.

Can we learn from Copenhagen disappointment?

It is difficult not to be disappointed by the outcome of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. Expectations had been high for so long with the urgency and scale of the issue and because, at long last, of the involvement of the United States in the event. The failure seemed all the worse given that, these days, we’re often told we mustn’t fail. We’re used now to working all hours on projects until they’re complete and being told we need to stay in countries we’ve invaded ‘until the job is done’. There seemed no reason for the event to end without a result. Why couldn’t they stay on until they reached agreement? What else did they have to do that was more Urgent/Important in their little priorities matrix? The determination and speed at which the banking system was bailed out in 2008 doesn’t seem to be on offer to the planet as a whole.

 

Perhaps the agreement Obama worked on with China, India and South Africa will start move things. It is irritating for the US (or Europe) to lecture China on reducing emissions when so much of it comes from manufacturing products imported by western corporations to sell to western consumers. This exporting of pollution by the west to developing countries is a ‘market failure’ aspect of globalisation as much as the toxic debt that has crippled the world economy and exposed neo-liberal self-regulation ‘certainties’. Equally, I can’t understand how China, with a significant leadership position in the G77, will explain its reported refusal to move to an agreement to the rest of the group who have pressed for reductions by major economies.

 

It is depressing. However, although it’s taken over 30 years for the issue of climate change to be seriously debated, I do think that Copenhagen shows that governments are taking it seriously now. To some extent, 2009 has been characterised by people recognising that we can’t wait for, or rely on, politicians and we need make changes ourselves, in our homes, communities and workplaces. After all, we are the consumers and I suppose I’m not alone in wondering how I’ve managed to know about this stuff for so long and do so little about it personally. The 10:10 campaign, so far, has been brilliant in making a huge and demoralising issue more manageable, personal and showing it’s possible to act in any organisation.

 

Last year the WEA we made ‘Promoting Sustainability’ one of nine strategic priorities for the period to the end of 2013. We’d made some small steps about it early this year but moved forward more quickly with a ‘Forum for the Future’ Masters Scholar placement attached to the WEA for four weeks in the early autumn. Steven Bland worked with us and, as part of a very busy month, gave us the impetus to sign the WEA up to the 10:10 Campaign. Steven surveyed the views of over 10,000 WEA members, 2700 tutors and 600 staff and we had an overwhelming confirmation of the importance of this issue to people involved with the WEA. Usefully, this survey (the biggest mass e-mail the WEA has undertaken to date) has led to 600 people asking to be part of an e-mail network on Promoting Sustainability across the WEA. Incidentally, it also makes you realise what can be done in four weeks by someone with energy and enthusiasm. Steven’s work had far more impact, resonance and reach into the organisation than an army of consultants could have brought.

 

So, we’re readying ourselves for 10:10; getting our benchmarks in place. The 10% reduction will be tough and that’s why we wanted to be confident it was something that colleagues across the organisation would support. The WEA is a very dispersed organisation using hundreds of venues in communities and neighbourhoods across the country, with thousands of tutors and tens of thousands of students (one reason why the dismal Framework for Excellence ‘learner views’ survey is difficult to promote). We still involve our students and partners in determining the courses we run. We don’t control the energy use of most of our venues and we do have tutors travelling by car some distance to where they teach. On the other hand, the students have shorter journeys because our provision is so local and our classes improve the utilisation (and viability) of many community venues.

 

The relationship to the curriculum is more tricky than the organisational energy issues. Over the year, I feel that the issue for the WEA is how to share ideas and gain encouragement from each other so that sustainability and the personal and organisational responsibility it involves become a permitted and evident part of the Association’s work.

 

In honesty, we are only beginning to look to ways that the small number of courses and activities the WEA already runs on these issues can be linked up and tutors who are involved can share and develop their practice and the WEA can learn from them. However, I’m pretty convinced that this can’t be a centralised, micro-managed initiative. We’ll need some measures for our organisational impact and we’ll need to monitor how we’re doing but, more than that, we need to make this a permitted, encouraged and – possibly - celebrated (but not in a marketing/PR/ ‘let’s look at the communication plan’ sort of way) thread of activity.

 

It’s been quite striking to see how difficult a fit this is for the WEA. I suppose that’s true for all 10:10 signatories. Our finance system isn’t set up to account for our CO₂ ‘expenditure’ and Sector Subject Areas don’t generate the kind of data evidence for this work that we’ve been so encouraged to see as the measure of ‘success’ in the world of post 16 regulation and improvement. Moreover, the other stuff still keeps coming: new agencies, funding audits, procurement, ‘new professionalism’, revised inspection approaches - all the hyperactivity and churn of the last decade zooms past the collapse of part-time adult learning opportunities and the warming planet. Perhaps this issue can be the one where we say this is too important to leave to be directed from the superstructure to meet its ‘deliverables’.

 

In some ways, although I really hope we can progress with the development of the curriculum in a conventional sense, I’m more interested in the possibility that promoting sustainability can be a thread running through – and changing - all our provision. ‘Think Global, Act local’, is an idea that feels fairly modern and yet was coined by Patrick Geddes almost 100 years ago. He also talked of ‘place, work, folk’ and, in education, ‘head, hand, heart’. These ideas together seem a good basis for thinking and taking action for sustainable learning and local future.

 

I admire all the efforts being taken by people and communities taking action on sustainability and climate change through 10:10, transition towns etc. and I hope that the WEA can contribute to these actions in 2010 and beyond.

 

 

10:10, Sustainability and the WEA

The WEA's nine strategic priorities include one on 'Promoting Sustainability'. When the 10:10 campaign was announced many in the WEA wanted the Association to sign up straight away. We didn't then, partly because reducing 10% of emissions in 2010 is going to be pretty hard and mostly because hardly anyone involved in the WEA would have been involved in that decision.

We were lucky because we were just about to have a one month placement of a Masters student from Forum for the Future to help us sharpen up our plans for this priority. Steven Bland worked with us for a month and talked with many people across the WEA. In particular, he led an online survey of the views of WEA staff, tutors and members - the biggest survey we've ever done. Out of over 13,000 people we e-mailed we had a high response rate and over 600 respondents agreed to continuing to stay in touch on this issue in the WEA. It also gave us a clear mandate to sign up to 10:10 with over 56% of members, 63% of tutors and 61% of staff in favour and no more than 8% against in any of these groups.

So, we are asking WEA Trustees to sign the Association up to 10:10 and all it involves.

If you'd like to read Steven's report of his placement you can get it here: Download Forum for the Future placement report. 

Green New Deal

This week has seen the launch of a publication by the 'Green New Deal Group' which starkly addresses the key issues many of us worry about but often put to one side when faced with vital and well constructed initiatives to transform education to meet the needs of employers and the economy.

Perhaps the issues raised here are the 21st century version of the issues that brought the WEA into being.

The report is available from the New Economics Foundation http://neweconomics.org/gen/

I copy the foreword here:

"This report is a call to wake up to the scale of the menace posed to the natural
world, the global economy and all our livelihoods by a triple crunch: the present
global financial crisis, climate change and the rapid depletion of oil.

To develop innovative, sound solutions that will deal with the gravity of this triple
crunch we have convened a group of ‘new economists’ whose backgrounds range
from the City, to the oil industry and the labour and environmental movements. We
set out to envision a different future, and propose policies for renewal. This report
is the result. It is a call for a radical transformation in the financial and economic
model that has fuelled these crises. In it we propose a Green New Deal.

As our executive summary suggests, the Green New Deal is designed to address
these great threats confronting society and restore stability to our financial, political
and ecosystems.

In doing so, we hope to correct a number of critical oversights. These include the
ways in which environmentalists have tended to neglect the role of the finance
sector and economic policy; how those involved in industry, broadly defined, have
failed to grasp the malign effects of the finance sector on the overall economy; and
how trade unionists have for too long ignored financial and environmental concerns.
We hope that the publication of this report will help bring these diverse social and
industrial forces together, leading to a new progressive movement. We believe
that our joint signatories point to an exciting possibility of a new political alliance:
an alliance between the labour movement and the green movement, between
those engaged in manufacturing and the public sector, between civil society and
academia, industry, agriculture and those working productively in the service
industries.

Such a political alliance is vital if we are to challenge the dominance of the finance
sector in the economy, its threat to the productive sectors of the economy, its
corruption of the political system, and its corrosion of social and environmental
values.

By proposing a Green New Deal, this report acknowledges the limits to our
ecosystem; that ‘the biosphere that supports us is finite, non-growing, closed and
constrained by the laws of thermodynamics’, as the environmental economist
Herman Daly put it.

The Green New Deal promotes ‘joined-up thinking’ about the four systems that
dominate our world: the market, the state, civil society and the ecosystem. We hope
that it will lay the basis for a radical transformation and renewal of our financial,
political and ecosystems."

Is this an alliance that the WEA should be engaging with and a debate that staff, tutors, volunteers and students would want to join?