Taking sustainability to heart––towards engaging with sustainability issues through heart-centred thinking

There is still much to be done to motivate people to actively engage in issues related to sustainability (ICCiP). While it may seem obvious that thinking about the world in a different way creates the possibility of arriving at new awareness, this paper suggests that such a seemingly ordinary observation shines the light directly on a major obstacle to engagement with sustainability. More broadly, this paper demonstrates the importance of the humanities in helping to understand how human beings make meaning in the world (Kripal 2014) linking directly to issues of sustainability in terms of how people connect with each other and the world at large. Taking an imaginal approach, and honouring a metaphorical mode of investigation (Voss 2009), this paper positions the heart as an organ of perception able to comfortably move between different ways of engaging with the world. Using the metaphor of epistemological duality with reference to cultural history (McGilchrist 2009; Bound Alberti 2010) as a guide, this paper moves to explore two important ideas; first how a taken-for-granted, epistemological approach towards the world (McGilchrist 2009) could be creating barriers to engage effectively with sustainability, and second, how the separation of body from mind, and heart from brain, when taken as a metaphor, could further guide this understanding. This paper moves towards the suggestion that when re-considered as an organ of perception (Corbin 1971; Hillman 2007), the heart has a key role to play in guiding people towards different ways of understanding, and subsequently engaging with sustainability

Seeing historically: Goethe and Vygotsky’s ‘enabling theory-method’.

We can study dead forms from a distance, seeking to understand the pattern of past events that caused them to come into existence. We can, however, enter into a relationship with living forms and, in making ourselves open to their movements, find ourselves spontaneously responding to them, and in so doing, we can gain a sense of their character. In other words, from within our dialogically structured involvements with other living things, a kind of relationally responsive understanding, quite different from the referential-representational kind of understanding familiar to us in cognitive psychology, becomes directly available to us. Thus, rather than seeking to explain a child’s present activities in terms of their causes in the past, from the standpoint of an external observer, we can turn to a quite different aim: that of perceiving in a present behavior the possibilities and opportunities it offers for further developments. Orientation toward this aim is what I think is so special about both Vygotsky’s and Goethe’s historical methods of inquiry into the development of living forms

Renaturing science : the role of childhoodnature in science for the anthropocene

This chapter proposes that there is a need to examine childhoodnature experiences and the way in which these might be influential in shaping an agenda for science and science education in the Anthropocene. A renaturing of science places a much greater emphasis on, and recognition of, the interdependency and relational nature of the natural world in which humans are inextricably embedded and suggests the need for the development of a strong ecological identity (Thomashow, Ecological identity: Becoming a reflective environmentalist. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996). This suggests that there is a need for increased availability of childhoodnature experiences and a focus on the quality of those experiences, as well as the need to explore further lifelong opportunities for developing innate biophilic (Wilson, Biophilia. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1984) tendencies. The chapter examines the childhoodnature experiences of beginning undergraduate university students and how these influence their current relationship to the natural world. Literature suggests that the strength of a person’s nature relatedness can have an impact on the way they view the natural world and can, subsequently, influence the actions they take toward that natural world. This chapter describes a mixed-methods approach used to examine beginning university students’ childhoodnature experiences and how those experiences may have influenced their sense of nature connectedness. Data gathered indicates that there are statistically significant correlations between childhoodnature experiences and current sense of nature connectedness, although the qualitative data suggests that the form of those experiences may be of critical importance. Evidence from the study presented here suggests that exposure to childhoodnature, while necessary, is not sufficient in itself, and further research is required into the nature and quality of childhoodnature experiences. This concurs with previous studies, e.g., Vadala, Bixler, and James (J Environ Educ 39:3–18, 2007), which found that it was the particular qualities of the childhoodnature experience that appeared to play a significant part in shaping future interests, attitudes, and values