Higher education is facing its greatest challenge in meeting its responsibility because humanity is at an unprecedented crossroads. Despite all the work we have done on environmental protection, especially in Western countries, all living systems are in long-term and increasingly rapid decline. We are severely disrupting the stability of the climate that made human progress to date possible, and there are huge social, economic, and public health challenges worldwide. This is happening with 25 percent of the world’s population consuming between 70 percent to 80 percent of the world’s resources. The crucial question for all of humanity is: How will we ensure that current and future humans will be healthy, that we have strong, secure, thriving communities, and economic opportunity for all in a world that will have 9 billion people, and that plans to increase economic output by a factor of four or five by 2050?

This is arguably the greatest intellectual, moral, and social challenge human civilization has ever faced. It is bigger in scope than the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan for Europe, the Apollo Project and the War on Cancer combined.

The cultural operating instructions of modern society dictate that if we just work a little harder and smarter and let the market forces run society, all these challenges will work themselves out. We need a transformative shift in the way we think and act. As Einstein said, “We can’t solve today’s problems at the same level of thinking at which they were created.” We currently view the array of health, economic, energy, political, security, social justice, and environmental issues we have as separate, competing, and hierarchical when they are really systemic and interdependent. For example, we do not have environmental problems, per se. We have negative environmental consequences of the way we have designed our social, economic, and political systems. We have a de facto systems design failure. The twenty-first century challenges must be addressed in a systemic, integrated, collaborative, and holistic fashion.

Unfortunately, the educational system is reinforcing the current unhealthy, inequitable, and unsustainable path that society is pursuing. As David Orr has said, the problem is not in education, it is of education. This is not intentional: it is because of deeply held beliefs that humans are the dominant species and separate from the rest of nature, the predominance of disciplinary learning and an implicit assumption that the Earth will be the gift that keeps on giving, providing the resources and assimilating our wastes and negative impacts ad infinitum. 

Hope and Possibility

Imagine a society in which all present and future humans are healthy and have their basic needs met. Imagine future scientists, engineers, and business people designing technology and economic activities that sustain the natural environment and enhance human health and well-being operating completely on solar/renewable energy. Imagine an industrial system in which the concept of “waste” is eliminated because every waste product is a raw material or nutrient for another species or activity, or returned into the cycles of nature. This is the concept of biomimicry: learning from and imitating nature. Imagine that we are managing human activities in a way that uses natural resources only at the rate that they can self-regenerate, reflecting the ideas embodied in sustainable forestry, fishing, and agriculture. By doing so, we could live off nature’s “interest,” not its “capital,” for generations to come.

Imagine that we know where all resources come from and where all waste goes. Our current ecological, health, and social footprint is largely invisible to most of us and is almost completely absent in the price of products. Currently, the price is the proverbial tip of the cost iceberg. For example, the best estimates of the true life-cycle health, social, and ecological cost of a gallon of gasoline is between $8 and $12. As a result, the average American does not know that through the economic system, we consume the equivalent of our body weight in solid materials daily, more than 94 percent of which goes to waste before we ever see the product or the service. For example, it takes about 5,000–6,000 pounds of material, most of which went to waste before use, to make a laptop computer. As a result, we practice a kind of group self-deception about the impact of our daily living. As we all know, we measure what we value, and we manage what we measure.
 
So imagine that we are making all these impacts visible (an important role of higher education) and everyone has accurate information on life- cycle health, social, and environmental costs of all resources and products. Consider these ideas as the design principles of a healthy, just, and sustainable society—principles based on a human consciousness in which we apply the Golden Rule to our dealings with all current and unborn humans, as well with the rest of life that evolved on Earth. To work, these principles must become the basis for society’s economic and governance framework.

Can we do this? Absolutely. Because we must. As we know, necessity is the mother of invention. Besides, some of it is happening in virtually every sector in society. There is a growing consensus among business, government, labor, and other leaders that a clean, green economy based on these principles is the best way to restore American economic leadership, create millions of jobs, and improve national security. And that is the only way to have all current and future humans survive and thrive.

The Role of Higher Education

What if higher education were to take a leadership role, as it did in the space race and the war on cancer, in preparing students, and providing the information and knowledge to achieve a just and sustainable society? What would higher education look like? A college or university would operate as a fully integrated community that models social and biological sustainability itself and in its interdependence with the local, regional and global community.

The educational experience would be aligned with principles of sustainability. The context of learning would make the human/environment interdependence, values, and ethics a seamless and central part of teaching of all the disciplines. The content of learning would reflect interdisciplinary systems thinking, dynamics, and analysis for all majors and disciplines with the same lateral rigor across as the vertical rigor within the disciplines. The process of education would emphasize active, experiential, inquiry-based learning and real- world problem-solving on the campus and in the larger community. Higher education would practice sustainability in operations, planning, facility design, purchasing, and investments connected with the formal curriculum. Higher education would form partnerships with local and regional communities to help make them sustainable as an integral part of higher education’s mission and the student experience.

The Higher Education Response

As you will see throughout this report, there has been exponential growth in distinct programs related to the environmental dimension of sustainability in higher education in the last decade. Exciting environmental studies and graduate programs in every major scientific, engineering and social-science discipline, business, law, public health, ethics, and religion are abundant and growing. Progress on modeling sustain- ability has grown at an even faster rate. Higher education has embraced programs for energy and water conservation, renewable energy, waste minimization and recycling, green buildings and purchasing, alternative transportation, local and organic food growing and “sustainable” purchasing—saving both the environment and money. The rate of increase is unmatched by any other sector of society.The student environmental movement is the most well-organized, largest, and most sophisticated student movement since the anti-war movement of the 1960s.

Unfortunately,higher education is doing a poor job in the health, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability. The overwhelming majority of graduates know little about the importance of sustainability or how to lead their personal and professional lives aligned with sustainability principles.

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