{"id":1330,"date":"2020-04-01T22:30:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-02T03:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ic4ml.org\/?post_type=journal-article&p=1330"},"modified":"2022-05-12T17:28:49","modified_gmt":"2022-05-12T22:28:49","slug":"the-journal-of-sustainability-education-editorial-overview","status":"publish","type":"journal-article","link":"https:\/\/ic4ml.org\/pt-pt\/journal-article\/the-journal-of-sustainability-education-editorial-overview\/","title":{"rendered":"The Journal of Sustainability Education Editorial Overview"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Special
Special Issue Co-Editors, (left to right) Jeff Share, Antonio Lopez, and Theresa Redmond at the National Association for Media Literacy Education biennial conference in Washington D.C. June 2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Foreword from JSE Editor-in-Chief, Clare Hintz:<\/h2>\n\n\n

The Journal of Sustainability Education marks its tenth anniversary year with an issue on Water Literacy (published in March) and this issue, Ecomedia Literacy. From a dream of several Ph.D. students at Prescott College (U.S.), we have come a long way to an internationally known, peer-reviewed journal, publishing two to three issues per year. As the main editor, and the second in the Journal\u2019s life, I have been privileged to explore special topics for nearly two-thirds of the journal\u2019s history. In this contemporary moment, I have been struck by the insights endemic to the topic of Ecomedia Literacy. This issue began as a reaction to the growing global attacks on journalism, the disinformation campaigns around climate chaos, and active fear and spite against science and learning in the United States. As we have worked across time zones and quarantines to bring you this issue, I have come to understand how essential it is that we think critically about what stories we are telling ourselves in our multitudes of communities. There is no other way to create a resilient future. Further, this issue has taught me that the way that we tell those stories shapes our current reality and our future just as surely.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I am, when not editing, a full time organic farmer. This experience always provides a test to the ideas and writings that come across my desk. Are the ideas I read worth bringing forward against a background of a direct lesson from nature: be diverse to survive? Does the thinking shared with me ring as truly as the drive to build healthy soils that will hold carbon, clean water, and nurture food and medicine?  Is the logic of authors\u2019 arguments as elegant as the language of the bees?  <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

In the U.S., there is no safety net to farming. Nature\u2019s intact systems are all I have. As a farmer I am keenly aware of the decoupling of relationships in the ecosystem of which I am a part: birds migrating out of season, pollinators awake before plants are flowering, unseasonable fall rains drowning harvests, winters disturbed and unable to reset crucial balances of insects and trees. I am shaken to my core. But my Anishenabe neighbors have taught me the power of persistence, despite the odds.  So has this pandemic. While human lives are upended across the world, not much has changed on my farm. The spring still demands long days of work.  The pastures still feed the pigs.  There are chicks. I am more carefully arranging my crops so that I can better save the open-pollinated seeds I have been planting for years. My Community Supported Agriculture group is strong, and I am growing more to feed additional families as industrial supply chains continue to collapse. My farm and this issue, Ecomedia Literacy, remind me that more than ever, we need new stories, artfully told, from the ground up. Resilient futures, sometimes ancient ones, already exist all over the world. We need to find them and share them. We are especially pleased to be partnering with the Journal of Media Literacy on this issue. In this tenth anniversary year of the Journal of Sustainability Education, I am honored to bring you some seeds.  <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

The 50th<\/strong> anniversary of the founding of Earth Day is marked by a global pandemic, causing the world to pause and take stock of our planetary predicament. This culminated a period of ecological shocks across the globe: devastating fires in Australia, Amazon, Siberia, and California; accelerating ice melt; devastating hurricanes and flooding; and ongoing mass extinction. At the time of this writing, members of our editorial team located around the world are under quarantine to slow the spread of Covid-19. The collective, global response and actions being taken to limit the spread of the virus are in the same spirit and at a similar level of action that the climate emergency demands. Yet, even as we grapple with the immediate consequences of the virus, it\u2019s important to acknowledge that it is a symptom of our centuries of disregard for our planetary health. Consumerism and greed, combined with the lightning speed of transnational capitalism, are at the core of the global economy that is destroying our very systems of survival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not coincidentally, the spread of the virus is deeply connected to our environmental challenges. Under the guise of \u201cdevelopment\u201d and \u201cprogress,\u201d so-called modernization projects promote industrial agriculture and extractivism. New roads and settlements burrow deeper into isolated territories, leading to deforestation and to the loss of animal habitats. With the reduction of biodiversity, previously unknown diseases are pushed into human populations as viruses seek new hosts. This coincides with the traffic in wild animals, which also spreads novel contagions. Meanwhile, the globalized economy makes us more urbanized and interdependent, with frequent air travel enabling diseases to spread faster. The past 40 years of neoliberal economic policies have eviscerated healthcare systems and the social safety net of most countries, compounding efforts to treat and respond to the health crisis effectively. Finally, a major study links 80% of Covid-19 deaths to heavily polluted regions, demonstrating how pollution damages our health (Carrington, 2020)<\/a>. As systems dynamics teach us, a system remains invisible until a crisis exposes its structure and weaknesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To indigenous people throughout the world, the relationship between a global pandemic and current economic systems is more obvious. As occupants of land comprising 80% of the world\u2019s biodiversity, indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by the current system and know that it is not environmentally or morally sustainable. They implicitly understand that our current political and economic crisis is founded on the legacy of colonialism, extractivism, and slavery. For centuries they have warned those in the richer regions of the world that our economic system, currently manifested as neoliberal globalization, decimates a sense of care and collective responsibility that should be at the core of our systems of survival. And beyond frontline indigenous communities, environmental impacts on the poor and people of color throughout the world (rural and urban) include land grabbing, clear-cutting forests, radiation exposure, toxic waste dumping, loss of water rights and water toxicity, hazardous work, underemployment, substandard housing, toxic schools, lack of transportation infrastructure, economic disinvestment, deteriorating infrastructure, and biomedical experimentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Naomi Klein (2020)<\/a> suggests that Covid-19 could serve as an unveiling for the general public of \u201cthe pre-existing crises,\u201d such as economic inequality and global heating that have only worsened the effects of the pandemic and will still be with us after the virus has gone. From her research on disaster capitalism, Klein insists that crises create openings for radical possibilities. In a similar vein, Arundhati Roy (2020)<\/a> asserts that this pandemic \u201coffers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves\u201d and see this moment as \u201ca portal, a gateway between one world and the next.\u201d This is our chance to create a new path toward a more equitable, sustainable, and socially and environmentally just future. This portal is an opportunity for educators and students to collaboratively imagine and create a better path forward. Indeed, global quarantines are showing us what life is like when we slow down. Specifically, consumption declines, air pollution decreases as car and air travel are lessened, and we become aware of what is most important: life. (Ironically, the reduction of toxins in the atmosphere that result from global quarantines may save more lives than measures to protect us from the virus.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The virus teaches us that the climate emergency is really a conceptual emergency. What can we do as media educators to use this opportunity as our portal to the future we\u2019ve been hoping for? To face the climate emergency, we need a massive shift from destructive practices of unfettered capitalism to new policies of economic equity and sustainability, and from conventional media education that eschews environmental concerns to adapting ecomedia literacy that centers ecological perspectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as education mobilized to respond to the quarantine by moving coursework to online platforms, prioritizing the environmental crisis can promote education focused on media literacy and ecology. Many of the same climate science deniers have spread misinformation about the coronavirus across social media and even in mainstream news reports (Kelly, 2020)<\/a>. The so-called \u201cstimulus\u201d packages from Washington are more evidence that we can find the money for any crisis when there is the political will. The path to recovery should address not just the coronavirus, but also the bigger climate crisis that is linked to the causes and effects of the pandemic. In April, 17 European environment and climate ministers signed an open letter asserting that the \u201cEuropean Green Deal must be central to a resilient recovery after Covid-19\u201d (17 European climate and environment ministers, 2020)<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This rapid mobilization models the same urgency that media education can make to address the planetary ecological emergency. This is not to argue that going online is the solution, but simply to assert that through collective will we can respond to and make adjustments to how we work when faced with an immediate crisis. The problem up to this point has been our inability to contain the scale and timeline of the climate crisis as a predicament within our everyday perception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Critical media literacy educators are well versed in the problems associated with stereotyping, propaganda, consumerism, and culture industries, which is a critique at the core of many of our foundational theories and approaches. While some critical media educators extend the analysis of our techno-scientific-capitalist society to environmental concerns, these are rare occurrences. Instrumentalist media educators even less so. Meanwhile, the climate crisis is moving faster than our ability to build awareness or take collective action. The emerging planetary ecological emergency is now a foundational, intersectional crisis that challenges all media teachers to expand how media are conceived. This requires acting from a normative framework that our ecological challenges pose an existential threat to our students and need to be addressed system-wide. As other disciplines are doing, it\u2019s time for media teachers to expand methodology and curriculum design to incorporate practical methods and solutions for integrating ecological awareness into praxis. In short, the professional practices of media educators are badly in need of an ecological intervention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Increasingly more organizations are now declaring climate emergencies, including educational institutions. Usually it means a commitment to going carbon neutral and supporting the Paris climate agreement\u2019s meager CO2 reduction goals. But what does a media education climate emergency look like? What does a carbon neutral pedagogy entail? What would media education be like if its core ethic was the Lakota principle of  mni wi\u010doni (\u201cwater is life\u201d)? Should we follow Extinction Rebellion\u2019s dictum to tell the truth about climate science and the impending impacts if we don\u2019t change? Can media organizations and education be environmentally sustainable? There is a tendency to self-censor for fear of being disciplined by academia or other practitioners. This is not the place to do either. We have to be bold. This becomes important if we consider our chances for mitigating the climate crisis. As philosopher and Extinction Rebellion activist Rupert Read argues, the scientific evidence indicates that, \u201cThis industrial-growthist civilization will not achieve the Paris Climate accord goals; and that means we will most likely see 3-4 degrees of global rover-heat at a minimum, and that is not compatible with civilization\u201d (Read & Alexander, 2019, p. 4)<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While system redesign may be beyond the humble work of individual teachers, we could start by collectively examining all the different ways education impacts\/is impacted by the environment, from K-12 schools to universities. Changes that can be made include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n