Environmental Education After Sustainability : Hope in the Midst of Tragedy

In this article, I discuss the challenge posed to environmental education (EE; and education for sustainable development) by the thinkers who see the situation of the world as so severe that ‘sustainability’ is an outdated concept. My approach is interdisciplinary and I discuss especially the connections between EE and eco-psychology. Based on psychological research, I argue that the wide-scale unconscious anxiety, which people experience, should be taken very seriously in EE. My discussion thus contributes in a new kind of way to a long-standing key issue in EE, the gap between people’s values and the perceived action. Scholars of eco-anxiety have argued that instead of not caring, many people in fact care too much, and have to resort to psychological defenses of denial and disavowal. Thus, the question in EE is not anymore whether EE should deal with anxiety, for anxiety is already there. The prevailing attitude in EE writing is right in emphasizing positive matters and empowerment, but the relation between hope and optimism must be carefully thought about and a certain sense of tragedy must be included. Therefore, my article participates in the discussion about the role of ‘fear appeals’ in EE. My discussion is directed to anyone who wants to understand the reasons for inaction and the ways in which these may be overcome.Peer reviewe

Online Checkpointing with Improved Worst-Case Guarantees

Abstract. In the online checkpointing problem, the task is to continuously maintain a set of k checkpoints that allow to rewind an ongoing computation faster than by a full restart. The only operation allowed is to remove an old checkpoint and to store the current state instead. Our aim are checkpoint placement strategies that minimize rewinding cost, i.e., such that at all times T when requested to rewind to some time t ≤ T the number of computation steps that need to be redone to get to t from a checkpoint before t is as small as possible. In particular, we want that the closest checkpoint earlier than t is not further away from t than pk times the ideal distance T/(k + 1), where pk is a small constant. Improving over earlier work showing 1 + 1/k ≤ pk ≤ 2, we show that pk can be chosen less than 2 uniformly for all k. More precisely, we show the uniform bound pk ≤ 1.7 for all k, and present algorithms with asymptotic performance pk ≤ 1.59 + o(1) valid for all k and pk ≤ ln(4) + o(1) ≤ 1.39+o(1) valid for k being a power of two. For small values of k, we show how to use a linear programming approach to compute good checkpointing algorithms. This gives performances of less than 1.53 for k ≤ 10. One the more theoretical side, we show the first lower bound that is asymptotically more than one, namely pk ≥ 1.30 − o(1). We also show that optimal algorithms (yielding the infimum performance) exist for all k.

Arts based approaches for sustainability

The arts encompass a broad and diverse landscape of interrelated creative practices and professions, including performance arts (including music, dance, drama, and theatre), literary arts (including literature, story, and poetry), and the visual arts (including painting, design, film) (see UNESCO, 2006). They have been explicitly linked to sustainable development in higher education at a global level through UNESCO’s Road Map for Arts Education (UNESCO, 2006) and The Seoul Agenda: Goals for the Development of Arts Education (UNESCO, 2010). Specifically, the arts have been deployed to promote human rights, enhancing education, promoting cultural diversity, enhancing well-being and, most broadly, “to resolving the social and cultural challenges facing today’s world” (UNESCO, 2010: 8)..