Mar 28, 2024

Beyond Buzzwords: Making Sense of Sustainability

A Sustainable Future Begins in the Science Classroom 

(Part 1 of 5)

"Sustainability” is seemingly everywhere, on advertisements, woven into corporate taglines, or thrown about in debates and conversations, but we rarely dig deeper than surface-level slogans.

While sustainability is undoubtedly crucial and deserves attention, it has also become somewhat overused and generalized. This overuse threatens to distract us from achieving noble goals that ensure the health and well-being of future generations. 

The term "sustainability" has been applied to a wide range of contexts, from sustainable development and agriculture to sustainable fashion and finance. While all these areas share the overarching goal of sustainability, the specific challenges and solutions within each field differ significantly. This lack of differentiation contributes to the generalization of the term and reduces its meaning to a catch-all phrase.

Sustainability is a complex concept, 
not a catch-all phrase

Sustainability is a complex and multifaceted concept encompassing social, economic, and environmental dimensions. However, its precise definition can be elusive, leading to varied interpretations and applications. Too often, we pose sustainability challenges with generalized statements and questions without context. For instance, the world’s population will reach nearly 9 billion by the year 2030 and in another 20 to 30 years may reach 10 billion before it stabilizes (Population 2024 U.N.).

Not to say there is no cause for concern. The United Nations Sustainability Goals lay out a series of considerable challenges related to meeting a growing planet’s sustainability and resilience needs:

• Droughts are estimated to displace 700 million people by 2030 (Drought 2024 WHO).
• 1 in 10 people worldwide suffer from hunger and 1 in 3 people lack access to adequate food. Furthermore, an estimated 149.2 million children under the age of 5 suffer from stunting due to chronic malnutrition (Fact sheets - malnutrition 2024 WHO).
• To feed the estimated 9 billion people by 2050, crop production will need to increase proportionately. However, 90% of global deforestation is due to agricultural expansion and eutrophic events have increased because of the rapid rise in intensive agricultural practices, industrial activities, and population growth (COP26: Agricultural expansion drives almost 90 percent of global deforestation 2021).
• Oceanic dead zones have spread exponentially since the 1960s and have been reported in more than 400 receiving waters, affecting more than 95,000 square miles worldwide (SDG indicators 2024).

Conceptualizing numbers like these is a challenge, especially when a general rule is our brain’s count: one, two, three, many. Consider this scenario: When it comes to comprehending the data linked to Sustainable Development Goals, we often grapple with the enormity of a million, a billion, and a trillion, we know these numbers are huge, but we struggle to fathom the profound differences between them. 

Problematically, these figures are usually accompanied by dire questions such as: How will we feed that many people without destroying our planet? How do we, instead of simply raising student anxiety about these issues, provide them with the tools, skills, and strategies to address these challenges?

To get started, we should meet our students where they currently are – in our classrooms making sense of phenomena and working to solve meaningful problems that engage students with complex and compelling questions involving people, tradeoffs, the environment, and competing needs.