A letter from one of Jaimie Cloud's students.
Educating for sustainability is something you've been doing for a long time. What was your path into it?
JAIMIE CLOUD It began for me when I came to school for the first day of the sixth grade. In Evanston, Illinois. I was in the first experimental class in global education, and our teachers came into the room and said, "Welcome. We are here to prepare you for the 21st century. And to do that, you have to take responsibility for your own learning.” This was 1968.
WHITNEY SMITH That’s a shot across the bow. You were how old?
JAIMIE Eleven. Then they got into more detail. “We're tracking the trends we believe will characterize your experience in the 21st Century, and we want to prepare you for that future. Why? Because the state of the planet is not in such great shape now, and you're going to need to do something about that. Then they said, “We don't know what kinds of jobs you're going to have available or what kinds of technology there will be. So the best thing we can do for you is to teach you how to learn to learn, and how to think about your thinking and how to stay open minded.”
We stress the importance of the tension required to keep the vision firmly in our minds and how not to get distracted by what’s wrong or bleak.
WHITNEY Quite the first day of school.
JAIMIE For sure. Within the first few weeks I realized something that had never occurred to me — that school was actually for learning. Before that I thought school was just about doing time.
WHITNEY And where did all that send you when you went out into the world to work?
JAIMIE I went into the field of global education because I thought it was the edgiest and most 21st century way of thinking there was. Then in 1987 this new term, “sustainability”, or “sustainable development,” came up in a UN report called Our Common Future. As soon as I saw that word, I thought, “Since I was 11 years-old I’ve been tracking state of the planet data, and now I understand it's unsustainable. So right there and then I shifted my focus from global education to education for sustainability. I thought it would take a few years. Thirty years later, it's finally something that exists more tangibly than it ever did before. Still, we have a long way to go.
WHITNEY How does this work when you go into a school and explain what they can do with your approach?
JAIMIE When we talk to teachers or curriculum designers in schools, we introduce them to a set of three things: enduring understandings, standards, and performance indicators. These three are essential to educating for sustainability (EfS), and the principal goal is to embed these things into existing curriculum. Once that’s done, the orientation of the curriculum changes so that it can prepare kids to participate in the shift toward a sustainable future.
Third Graders at Mason Elementary School in Gwinnett County, Georgia reduced food waste by an average of 53% as part of The Food Waste Warriors program sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund.
WHITNEY So when a school leader says, “Yes, we want this,” how do you proceed?
JAIMIE It begins with an introduction designed to achieve three outcomes: First, a shared understanding and vocabulary regarding what “sustainability” and “education for sustainability” are; second, a personal rationale for why the educators and their students should get involved in doing this; and third, to become inspired and hopeful about contributing to the shift toward a sustainable future through education.
Once we have an inclusive set of stakeholders in the school community supporting these outcomes, we ask for a first cohort of students teachers who will become early adopters. These teachers students have agreed that they are ready to “sustainabilize” a unit of study and demonstrate how it works and in the end show the value of doing so.
An example might be that students might want to contribute to biodiversity in their local community or in their schoolyard. In Georgia, we had third graders, eight years old, who figured out how to reduce food waste in their school cafeteria 52%. Kids have banned plastic bags in their community, or lobbied for solar panels on municipal buildings.
A student in Vermont shifted her school from burning oil to burning wood chips, which saved her school $90,000 over the course of her time there. From that she created a coalition that received $20 million from the state legislature to grow pellets in the state of Vermont for fuel, and because pellets are in the short carbon cycle, burning them doesn’t contribute to global warming and climate change, as well as being more affordable for Vermonters. Through this the pellet stove market went from one stove a week to 1000 stoves a week. These examples of learning and action done by students was all done during their time in elementary and secondary school.
WHITNEY Tell us about your book, Response-Able: How to Live Well Over Time on Planet Earth. What audience is it aimed at?
JAIMIE The book is geared toward young people. Teachers can read it and teachers can use it in the classroom, but it’s written for young people, starting at the age of 11 and up to 35.
WHITNEY Eleven years old, that magic number. That particular age can tell a lot. In our Wild Culture Questionnaire that some of our writers fill out, we ask what they were most engaged by between the ages of 10 and 12. Interestingly, it’s often something that is relevant to what they are now doing as adults, as it was for you.
JAIMIE Bingo.
Judge Rules in favor of Montana Youths in a Landmark Climate Case (New York Times, Aug. 14, 2023 — "A group of young people in Montana won a landmark lawsuit on Monday when a judge ruled that the state’s failure to consider climate change when approving fossil fuel projects was unconstitutional." ... "The ruling means that Montana, a major coal and gas producing state that gets one-third of its energy by burning coal, must consider climate change when deciding whether to approve or renew fossil fuel projects."
WHITNEY In terms of how your book is organized, what are the steps you take to inspire your readers? I’m assuming such steps would form the pillars of education for sustainability.
JAIMIE Yes. The book is organized into three sections (we like threes!). The first is about visioning and the importance of visioning, and that a key premise of this visioning is that we’re in game on mode, not game over mode. With this more positive outlook on the future, we stress the importance of the tension required to keep the vision firmly in our minds and how not to get distracted by what’s wrong or bleak. Once that frame of mind is established, then we can figure out how to get from here to there.
Then we ask the question, “What got us into trouble in the first place, and what are ways of thinking that drive unsustainable behavior?” From there we consider what strategies can help people reframe their way of thinking to get to a different result.
The last section is about ways of thinking that serve as antidotes to what’s driving us toward an unsustainable future. A good example of this is: How do we recognize and protect the commons — the places and things we share and that we all depend on — and are all responsible for. Oceans, libraries, community, the Internet, trust in others, sidewalks, the climate — those sorts of jointly enjoyed things.We have rights to them, and that which means we have responsibilities for them, too.
WHITNEY A final question. What do you say to someone in an elevator who wants to know what you do?
JAIMIE When people ask me for my elevator speech, I say, “Let's take the stairs. This kind of work does not lend itself to elevator speeches.”
WHITNEY I’m going to use that one.
JAIMIE Actually, I can tell you a story from the other day when I was explaining what education for sustainability was to a group of 350 students in Hong Kong. This young man said, “Yes, but what exactly do you do?” Because I guess he didn't think education was a thing to do. He thought some more and said, “Do you clean beaches?” I thought that was pretty funny, but understandable. What I did say to him is that we're trying to make school more relevant for you, so that you are learning what you need to learn, so that you can thrive over time.
I guess we could have been in an elevator for that one! ō
Response-Able: How to Live Well Over Time on Planet Earth
by Jaimie Cloud
Pre-sale ordering availaible here.
JAIMIE CLOUD is a sustainability educator and advocate in New York City, New York. Cloud has been recognized for her contributions to the fields of sustainability education and school reform. She is the founder and president of the nonprofit Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, chair of Communities for Learning, Inc. and co-chair of the Harbor Education Task Force of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance. Cloud also serves on the Ecozone advisory board of Eco Media, Inc., and on the editorial board of the International Journal of Education for Sustainable Development. She lives in New York State.
WHITNEY SMITH is the publisher and editor of the Journal of Wild Culture, founded in 1986.
All images courtesy of the Cloud Institute for Sustainable Education.
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