Carlos Alvarez Pereira, , is a high-level professional who combines over 30 years' experience in research and innovation, entrepreneurship and business management, with a passion for complexity thinking and transdisciplinarity. He is passionate about complexity thinking and transdisciplinarity. He wishes to explore the cultural transformation needed to cross the threshold of equitable human well-being within a healthy biosphere.
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Why is it important to create a “Learning for Sustainability” circle today?
Multiple, simultaneous crises are disrupting the daily lives of billions of people, who may feel helpless and unable to shape their own future. Fear, apathy and denial can be natural reactions to a global state of emergency, when we feel unable to understand what is happening, let alone act. It is urgent to say and show that everyone is capable of learning and creating new responses to the challenges we face.
By engaging in new learning processes, everyone can help to bring about desirable futures. These will take the form of equitable human well-being within a healthy biosphere. And this won't happen in a top-down, rigid way, but by drawing on community contexts, ancestral wisdom, modern science and everyone's infinite capacity to engage and create, as long as we allow ourselves to do so. Yes, we can 🙂
What do you think the priorities of this circle should be?
We have much to do, but let's start by paying attention to the people who are already trying, often in unconventional ways, without any support, and who dare to take on great challenges in their own communities. They are on the front line, where young people, women, people in most countries of the world, vulnerable communities, social activists, innovators in pedagogy and learning processes are to be found. Our first objective is to identify and support existing initiatives of this kind.
By listening to them and creating a safe space for open dialogues, we'll be able to identify better questions and turn the current model of knowledge creation on its head. All sources of knowledge can be useful, but the key is to highlight our blind spots. Well-being comes from taking care of our relationships with others, with all living things and with time. This does not require the exploitative and destructive lifestyles currently presented as the legitimate (and frustrating) aspiration of everyone. Our second priority is to seek out practical, localized cases where the footprints of desirable futures can be revealed in their infinite richness.
Thirdly, and not least, the Circle will also push for the transformation of existing educational institutions. Their contribution to a future of sustainable well-being is of course essential, but there is an urgent need to reframe learning processes, and the pace of reform is often too slow. How can we accelerate the change in questions, frameworks, worldviews and processes? To shift our mindsets towards well-being in the biosphere, we also need to change the core of education.
What are the ideal circle results?
In the short term, the Sustainability Learning Circle can generate quick wins by connecting individuals and organizations and making many latent synergies explicit. Innovators who need support and supporters who need bolder-than-usual projects: let's make sure they meet in the circle.
In the medium term, we aim to catalyze relevant projects to develop new methods and tools to support learning processes of a different kind: it's high time to bet on mutual learning, radical engagement and design, and the (self-)liberation of everyone's potential to learn and act.
In the long term, the ambition is nothing less than to help incubate the conditions for a genuine revolution in education, making it the most powerful instrument for the emergence of an infinite variety of processes of equitable human well-being within a healthy biosphere.
