Designing the Course of a Lifetime

Next week I am visiting Shanghai to teach a course on Environment and Sustainability at a High School related to Tongji University.

Yes, I'm taking a plane with a group of High School students from Prepa Tec to fly halfway around the world. We will live for a month where I like to consider as the New York of the XXI century.

The most exciting part of planning the trip is not organizing my personal belongings, nor fantasizing about my second visit to Shanghai. The most exciting episode has been developing a course from scratch. It is not an everyday course. It is a course that has the potential to change the course of modern civilization. Why am I certain of such a statement?

The relationship between mankind and the biosphere is an extremely new discipline. Worries about our impact on the environment, and how it underpines social, economical, cultural and political dimensions were born during the 1970s. For a mere 30 years scientists, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, and economists have focused their efforts on tackling global issues under the label of "sustainability". That means, that out of 4 million years of human history, only 30 have been devoted to analyzing the conservation of the planet. Striking isn't it?

Flat fact: Sustainability is an EXTREMELY broad concept that has been vaguely defined. It is difficult to specifically define sustainability since the concept implies thousands of variables related to both human and natural existence. Moreover, this is the first time in the history of mankind where we are able to change our future and that of the planet.

As I'm doing my research, I have encountered a HUGE, TREMENDOUS amount of information regarding sustainability. I have learned that I need to cover topics related to astronomy and cosmology since they analyze how our plane came to be. Then, I need to talk about ecosystems, natural resources, Ecology, social issues, Ethnography, History, Anthropology, Biology, Botany, Zoology, Philosophy, Law, Religion, Economics and Finance to provide a large and significant spectrum to the students for all these disciplines are related to sustainability. After that, we will have to analyze societies that have collapsed due to an unsustainable scheme. Yes, societal collapses have happened throughout history. There are more than 20 cases that exemplify this outcome. Finally, I will need to share my knowledge regarding Design, Architecture, Mathematics, Production, Demographics, Computer Science, Statistics, Ergonomics, and Marketing. It may seem daunting and ambitious, but the fate of human existence strongly depends on sustainability. As Jared Diamond, Pulitzer-Price author of Guns, Germs and Steel (one of my favorite books) declares "There is no single cause for the collapse of a society. It is an intricate and complex process with at least a dozen causes".

My efforts on teaching the best course I could have my hands on will not only impact students to promote a change. It will need to trigger a revolution that will guarantee the future of mankind as a whole.

I recommend the following article in order to grasp the complexities of sustainability:

http://cmsdata.iucn.org/downloads/iucn_future_of_sustanability.pdf

Tomorrow, I'm having a meeting to build the course's Final Project.

More info coming soon ;)