Development and the environment

Development and the environment
 

Development and environment has become a vital, heated and contested area; in one way very simple, but behind that immensely complication as well as vital. It is tempting to leave it to the more passionate and focused among us, and the bodies like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and to see green politics as a ‘single issue’ subject not really to do with learning and learning cities.

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Global warming and climate change have certainly arrived on all policy agendas and can no longer be ignored, even though climate change deniers and others who have an interest in maintaining the status quo are not silenced. For a Network with the mission and beliefs of PASCAL however it is impossible to leave the environment to others, as if it is not something that embrace and might engulf us all.

This OTB Website area takes three initial Themes which are likely rapidly to break down into several more discrete yet connected "Topic areas":

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Lifelong Learning and active civil society participation...

We have chosen to begin in this year 2015 that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) expire with the new UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) soon to be adopted. This Theme is opened by Bruce Wilson whose regional and inter-regional work running an Australia-based EU Centre includes getting Civil society participation in working for the SDGs.
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6 Lifelong Learning and active civil society participation in achieving the new UN Sustainable Development Goals from 2015
by Chris Duke
Nov 9 2015 - 16:46
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Eco-sustainability

This theme addresses Eco-sustainability, including a deeper ethical approach to the crises of global extinctions.

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Steve Garlick will open and facilitate a Forum Theme on Eco-sustainability. This will include a deeper ethical approach to the crises of global extinctions of species as well as the trials and discomforts that most directly and obviously impact upon humans. Garlick’s work probes the value and ethical underpinnings not only of ‘green politics’, green jobs etc., but by implication also of all our work as PASCAL.
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3 Climate Change: Action after Paris
by Chris Duke
Dec 19 2015 - 12:29
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Food security, local production and sustainability

Pat Inman, supported by Peter Welsh and others, will focus more specifically on Food security, local production and sustainability. This is something that commands geopolitical strategic concern in terms of the ownership, exploitation and degradation of natural resources.

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There are also ethical as well as serious knowledge concerns to do with the break-up of traditional communities, economies and life-styles, and the perhaps permanent loss of practical grounded wisdom that even now may depend on memory and ‘indigenous folk ways’ rather than written manuals and courses. Will the new interest in food miles, organic non-chemicalised food and health, and the economics of factory vs small mixed-production farms be channelled into the kind of localism that permeates much of the work of PASCAL and, we may predict, dialogue through OTB?
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7 Local-global, private-public – pragmatic reconciliations or unholy alliances?
by Chris Duke
Jul 5 2015 - 08:37