By Tommie Owen/reporter
Only a dozen hands were raised on South Campus after Chuck Hopkins asked who knew anything about Education for Sustainable Development.
“Don’t feel bad. No one on NW Campus raised their hands,” Hopkins, a former teacher and principal, told the crowd.
Over the next hour, he filled in the gaps for the other students. ESD is about development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, Hopkins said.
“My goal is to find ways to train 70 million teachers and have them promoting progress within the limits of the earth’s natural resources and then, in turn, training their students,” he said.
His quest began after an encounter with a Mongolian farmer who questioned the educational system that produced educated people destroying over 3,000 years of civilization. Now he is senior adviser of ESD and coordinates a network of teacher institutions in over 70 countries. The answer was always teaching them to read, but students never made the transition to use reading as an information gathering tool for a greener planet, Hopkins said.
Sriya, a 10-year-old girl in India, decided to run with the idea of ESD. She inspired the Handprint Around the World program, which focuses on what people can do to restore human impact on earth in contrast to the ecological footprint that measures how much impact people have.
The goal of ESD is to teach more than reading, writing and cosines. Things like conscious efforts to save water and field trips to the local farmer’s market could easily be included to make a greener curriculum, he said. This would teach children at a young age to support small-scale producers and not take what the Earth produces for granted. Hopkins encouraged the audience to become aware of the issues in their community and become knowledgeable voters.
This lecture made the wheels start turning for Norma Dominguez, a freshman education major.
“I’m typically not into the green movement, but hearing Hopkins’ ideas on ESD has made me realize we are all in this together,” she said.
