Education for Sustainability
Jon Jensen, Luther College
How can I be a better teacher? How can I make my community and the world a better place through my work? Perhaps I am hopelessly idealistic but I believe that all of my colleagues in education share the goals embodied in these two questions. At one level they are simple questions, reflecting desires to do good work and to make a difference. But anyone who has spent much time in the classroom knows that the answers are rarely simple and the work involved in answering these questions is never complete.

Geology and Sustainability
Mary Savina, Carleton College
I think most geologists would say that sustainability is at the root of our discipline, though we certainly didn't invent the word or define the concept. Geology considers the earth as an open system of gases, liquids and solids, distributed from the outer limits of the atmosphere to the earth's center. We know that within this system are many interacting subsystems that involve the transfer of energy and materials from one area – and state – to another. Resources – minerals, fuels, water, soils and others – all exist within the earth system that geologists study. Geologists study how these resources are created, how they are altered, and how they move from place to place. Just tracing the routes of water on the globe, for instance, involves the atmosphere, the earth's land surface (sometimes called "the critical zone"), the oceans, the ice caps, and the crust and mantle of the solid earth. Humans alter many of the transfer processes and at the same time they alter the amounts of resources in storage. It may be true, as the physicists say, that matter can neither be created or destroyed, but matter can certainly be changed from an un-usable state to a usable one (think mining and smelting) or from a usable state to an un-usable one (think gasoline and carbon dioxide).

Teaching Sustainability Through History
Derek Larson, Saint Johns University
Derek Larson, Environmental Studies, The College of St. Benedict/St. John's University Our environmental studies department was created 20 years ago with the specific intention of interdisciplinarity in its ...

Making Sustainability Visible
Thomas Beery, University of Minnesota-Duluth
Thomas Beery, Center for Environmental Education, University of Minnesota-Duluth Sustainability is about people and the choices they make, ultimately it is a question of human behavior. A deliberate effort to ...

Why Sustainability Education Needs Pedagogies of Reflection and Contemplation
Marie Eaton, Western Washington University; Kate Davies, Antioch University McGregor; Sarah Williams, The Evergreen State College; Jean MacGregor, The Evergreen State College
This essay sets out a rationale and framework for pedagogies of reflective and contemplative practice and makes an argument for why they are critically important to sustainability education.

Sustainability and Understanding Time
Mary Savina, Carleton College
Mary Savina, Geology, Carleton College When I'm talking with students in geology courses about sustainability, I don't use the word much. As one of my colleagues, Aaron Swoboda, puts it, we know ...

The Relevance of Place and Sense of Place to Sustainability
Steven Semken, Arizona State University at the Tempe Campus
Steven Semken , School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University In response to sprawl and globalization that challenge integrity of ecosystems and diversity of cultures (i.e., environmental ...

Finding Interdisciplinary Common Ground for Sustainability
Brenda Bowen, University of Utah
Brenda Bowen, Geology and Geophysics & Global Change and Sustainability Center, University of UtahThe grand challenges facing society today-- climate change, depleting natural resources, environmental ...

Teaching sustainability through project based learning
James Stone, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
James Stone, Civil and Environmental Engineering, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology My approach to teaching sustainability revolves around an interdisciplinary sustainable design senior/graduate level ...

Sustainability and Me
Jim Farrell, St. Olaf College
Curiosity brought me to sustainability, and it still keeps me interested. Many years ago, Alexander Wilson wrote a book called The Culture of Nature,a title that seemed so strange to me that I decided to teach it (which is what I often do to satisfy my curiosity). My first step was a course by that title in the first year writing program. My second was an interdisciplinary course on "The Environmental Imagination," meant to introduce the Humanities as part of our Environmental Studies major. In both of those classes, I encouraged students to think about their own place, St. Olaf College.