Monthly Archive for March, 2010

How the Understanding of Nature Enriches Education and Life

Published on March 30, 2010 in Book. 0 Comments

ruyu-frontLearning Nature: How the Understanding of Nature Enriches Education and Life by Ruyu Hung is now available from the  On Sustainability imprint.

Learning Nature presents exciting scholarship on the exploration of the concept of nature and its implications for education. The author—Ruyu Hung—argues that “nature” is a rich and fundamental source of meaning to enable one to learn to live a meaningful life and yet that what is taught about nature in many conventional curricula is severely limited, resulting in an impoverishment of meaning. The central aim of this book is to provide different approaches to the understanding of nature in order to show the fecund meanings that have rich educational significance and the implications for pedagogy.

Interrogating the educationally meaningful conceptions of nature, this book identifies five themes to anchor our multifarious understandings of nature. Each theme with its implying polarities illuminates the significance of the human conceptualisation of nature as an on-going dynamic and dialectic process. The investigations invite the readers to envisage and reconfigure education so as to accommodate heterogeneous and plural views of nature and reveal the abundance of meaning to be had in different ways of experiencing nature in the context of one’s unique life.


The Overpopulation Myth: The Idea That Growing Human Numbers Will Destroy the Planet is Nonsense. But Over-Consumption Will

Published on March 26, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

From Fred Pearce, Prospect

Many of today’s most-respected thinkers, from Stephen Hawking to David Attenborough, argue that our efforts to fight climate change and other environmental perils will all fail unless we “do something” about population growth. In the Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking declares that, “in the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential… The world population doubles every forty years.”overcrowd3

But this is nonsense. For a start, there is no exponential growth. In fact, population growth is slowing. For more than three decades now, the average number of babies being born to women in most of the world has been in decline. Globally, women today have half as many babies as their mothers did, mostly out of choice. They are doing it for their own good, the good of their families, and, if it helps the planet too, then so much the better.

Here are the numbers. Forty years ago, the average woman had between five and six kids. Now she has 2.6. This is getting close to the replacement level which, allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. As I show in my new book, Peoplequake, half the world already has a fertility rate below the long-term replacement level. That includes all of Europe, much of the Caribbean and the far east from Japan to Vietnam and Thailand, Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Algeria, Kazakhstan, and Tunisia.

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