Excerpt from an environmental history paper to share
I like it when finally the words come out just right: Underpinning my choice of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainability as an environmental history research topic is this idea: that past and future are not so much distant points on a linear time scale as they are reflections of one another. When environmental history is approached in this way, it becomes clear that the “farsighted understanding” it provides about the present moment is crucial to sustainability efforts, and to educating future generations of leaders. The global and temporal scales of the DESD makes this point all the more salient. An additional assumption in this writing is that the Decade did not simply begin with a declaration; it stirred in the minds of world stakeholders long before 2005, and it took shape around a vision that may or may not have considered the lessons of environmental history, at least not to their fullest. The DESD imagines “a world where everyone has the opportunity to benefit from quality ...