Education for Sustainable Development – 2.docVIP

The article was first published by The Teacher (11/2009), the magazine for English teachers in Poland http://www.teacher.pl/ James Hindson Aleksandra ZaparuchaEducation for Sustainable Development in an English classroom We’re trying to solve the problem – is it working?The previous article highlighted the fact that planet earth is well and truly in a mess and that this has been caused largely by the hugely wasteful systems that we have developed over the last few hundred years to create and support a particular lifestyle that we consider “developed”.Of course, humans are not completely stupid and there are a growing number of attempts by the global community to tackle the major environmental issues and to ensure that we can pass on a sustainable planet to future generations. These efforts include the world environment conferences of Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002 out of which came a number of agreements, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity to protect biodiversity and the Kyoto Protocol, and the forthcoming conference in Copenhagen to tackle the challenge of climate change. The European Union and national governments have also been active in developing legislation to enforce and encourage a reduction in the impact humans have over the planet, and business are working hard to develop new green products. However, as the first article showed, these attempts, whilst producing a lot of good news and positive development, have largely failed. This chapter has two activities that will help you and your pupils to discover why! Activity OneConsuming less stuffMany people think that one solution to sustainability is to consume less stuff! Step OneDivide the pupils into groups and ask each group to make a list of things that they “saved” recently – ways in which they have reduced, for example, energy use, water use, maybe travelled by bus and not by car and so on. Step Two Ask them to look at the advert in Resource A about saving energy and make