Getting to Green

In my last post, I talked about how having to account for greenhouse gas emissions from off-campus behaviors started me on the path to realizing that you can't build a sustainable campus in an unsustainable city (or town, or countryside). Thus, while my official charge is to change the Greenback campus, my thought process focuses more and more on changing the Backboro metropolitan area.

Stories about how communities thrive in the resource-constrained environments that islands present may provide lessons about sustainability, but those lessons will need to be ported to the mainland if they're to have any significant global impact. Happily, sustainable mainland communities and sustainable island societies may have more in common than is immediately obvious.

I remember the thrill of reading Robinson Crusoe for the first time. Later readings may have surfaced infamous bits of wordplay and troubling social/racial stereotyping, but when I was ten or eleven the image of a lone individual not just surviving but (to an extent) thriving in a wilderness was captivating. No need for a never-ending set of interlocking puzzles as per Lost, no man/beasts created by Dr. Moreau, not even an almost-magical black stallion -- the (by current Hollywood standards) embarrassingly simple story of adversity and unfamiliarity overcome grabbed my childhood imagination and held it for years.

I'm still struggling with whether (how) the teaching power of stories can be used to change people's beliefs and expectations about sustainability. However, in the process of the research which is part of pretty much any struggle I undertake, I came upon a two-sentence passage that's simply too close to perfect not to share. In a heartbeat, it conveys the essence of what a successful story-telling strategem must accomplish -- not how to do it by any means, but how to tell if it's been successful.

The evidence that stories are effective and efficient teaching tools is generally based on test results -- improved reading, writing, science and math scores. But in terms of teaching sustainability concepts, stories have an additional advantage. To the extent that they describe real-world (or seemingly real-world, or even imaginably real-world) characters and actions, each story situation is inherently trans-disciplinary.

Just before the holidays, I started reading about the teaching power of stories. That's "stories" in the sense that probably first popped into your mind -- enthralling tales of interesting characters facing challenges in pursuit of a goal. Children learn to understand pattern, cause-and-effect, motivation, etc., not by having these things explained to them in some form of abstract exposition -- children learn these things (and many more) by seeing/hearing/vicariously experiencing them in action. Along the way, their brains learn to expect a certain sort of information in a certain form, and configure themselves to process and store such information efficiently. Memory works by story. Our lives work by stories.

When words don't suffice...

I may be the only person in Backboro who likes Limburger. (Maybe not, of course. It's unlikely that the local grocery stocks it just for me, but for sure there's aren't very many of us around here.) Smelly. Very smelly. But a lovely flavor, and you get used to the aroma after a couple of decades.