English Is Not The World's Language!

Somewhere near the start of this project I imagined having the website in multiple languages. I knew from my Postdoc that the widely-held perception of English being a de facto standard for the world's population is, of course, completely unfounded. Moreover, this misconception actually inhibits progress and particularly in Education.

So I asked a few friends if they could translate the website. As my own language abilities are truly lacking then I'm afraid I expect my own contributions will be mainly in English (we're all hypocrites :) However, it looks like a dear friend will try to translate the main pages to French. C'est une excellent début!

Should anyone want to try to translate the main web pages to another language, particularly one that is spoken by a wide cross-section of the world population, please do get in touch. We may be able to reimburse you for your time and effort.

I do believe there's a need for 'the message' to be spread far and wide and especially not just to English speakers but to some of the people on our planet who may actually be the ones currently suffering the most from our collective ills.

Innovation

From early in the project I was always interested in the Sustainable Earth or planet idea... I didn't have a clue how we would be going about it, just that soomething would happen in the coming weeks and months. Now that the idea is a game - a really innovative way to get our message accross to all ages if worked properly.
The idea of the Blog came about after discussions with Tim and what he wanted as an outreach tool. It's come together slowly and hopefully in the next 2-3 weeks, the Blog will be fully functional as a Current and Latest News page. I was supposed to keep a blog of the things that i am currently doing, so I may be starting up my own Blog, for the project and then in the future as a record of what I'm doing. It's a really great way to see for yourselves where you are and what you are doing. It means that we can update the science4sustainability members and general public quickly of any news.
If some of you want to know who I am and what I do, check out the Google Groups archive. For the time being, I'm going to say bye (partly because i'm not that sure what to say but mostly because i've got a meeting with Tim tomorrow and he won't be happy unless i do the work he asked me to do over the week!!).
Divaker
(or just D)

Our Planet Earth

Some momentum has been building with the project recently. Firstly, several teams (loosely defined) have 'emerged'. These are what I am, for the moment, calling

• An Adminstrative Team
• An Online Research Team
• A Stakeholder Team
• A Face-to-Face Team
• A Core Research Team
• A Game Development Team

So, secondly and as the team constructions hint, we are proposing to develop a game for this project! The obvious intention is to make learning fun, motivating and relevant to the context. So, to achieve particularly the relevance, we will actually be developing a Toolkit, or the 'design of the design' for a game. This Toolkit will be named Our Planet Earth. Therefore, to help develop the Toolkit, we are hoping to explore the game design in the context of the Rift Valley in Kenya. A colleague, Dr. David Harper, has a long-standing interest in the ecology and more recently Sustainable Development of this region. I recently interviewed David and probably will do so again. David and a colleague have also produced many films of the region which he currently uses for education purposes. More of this later...

Finally, the idea of the game is to model the local systems relevant in multiple contexts (hence developing a Toolkit which can be used to 'localise' a game), particularly in Africa. Obviously there will have to be enormous limits to achieve this though and, ultimately, make the game playable. So, if you have any ideas as to what you think might make a good game for Education for Sustainable Development or have already played some of the games that exist and have thought of ways to improve them please do share your thoughts here.

As I keep emphasising, and the Toolkit name implies, there's only one way to address these problems we are all facing and that's together.

The Problem

Why should we be concerned about Science's contribution to Sustainable Development?

The problems currently facing the long term health of our planet have arisen from the impact of the evolution of the human population. Our species moved from being organised around principles of small, autonomous and nomadic groups directly connected to nature to being highly complex and extremely large groups, interrelated to varying degrees but increasingly disconnected from the natural environment. This development, particularly since the start of the Industrial Revolution, has increasingly led to unreasonable demands upon the various earth systems. Thus we see, for instance, the global water system failing to respond to changes in other systems, such as the atmosphere, brought about by current human population demands.

There is, anthropocentrically maybe, a lot of Science in these statements. The irony is that Science itself is partially responsible for our current predicament as, for example, it fuelled the Industrial Revolution. However, Science can also be a force for good in that, used appropriately, those same methods and their outcomes can be used to address our past failings. So, morally there is an argument for a Science which is oriented towards Sustainable Development. Furthermore, the hope is that when young people - the future custodians of our planet after all - see that Science can solve problems as well as create them then they may well be encouraged to play a part in all our futures.

No News is Good News?

Hi and welcome to the science4sustainability Blog! Excuse my initial brevity but, really, not a lot has been happening that we can talk about at least! Not that its all hush hush at all. Quite the opposite, we'd like as many people as are genuinely interested involved. And that's the point of this Blog.

I won't go into all the background to the project, there is more information elsewhere about that. Except to say that a few teams are now emerging to work on the project. Many thanks to them.

Its early days yet and, to be honest, we're all just finding our feet but, rest assured, when we really do have something to say you'll be the first to know! Cheers, Tim :-)

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