The Sustainability Literacy Project

The Sustainability Literacy Project is where I shall be concentrating my campaigning from now on.
It is what is says – a campaign to make sustainability literacy a learning outcome for everyone. My starting point is with adults – in formal education or just wanting to get up to speed fast.

The first job is to finish my new on-line book What Does Good Look Like? before going on to expand the Project further.

It is all about implementation now, so I want to help you grow in confidence that you are doing the right thing for sustainability despite the perversity of others. As well as posts on the Front Page, and access to chunks of The Positive Deviant, I will be writing a new book on line. Pretty settled on the title What Does Good Like, and very keen for you to contribute thoughts and comments. All new entries anywhere on the site will appear on or be flagged from the Front Page.

People and organisations still claim the biggest barrier to implementing more sustainable ways of living and working is that they are not quite sure what sustainability is! If we don’t know what good looks like, they say, how can I know I am doing the right thing now? Thus, the first part of The Sustainability-literacy Project is about coming up with a good enough idea of what I call the ‘bare essentials’ for a sustainable way of life – the minimum conditions to ensure we humans can look forward to a happy relationship with nature and each other into the very long term. Something to give us confidence we are heading in the right direction. I hope to shape what will become a small book here, on line, and genuinely crave your help to make it all as short, clear and jargon-free as possible – please send in your comments here.
The other part of the Sustainability-literacy Project is to work with (mostly) post-school students who say that they want sustainability-literacy built into all courses, so they can contribute the best they can wherever they end up after graduation. More on this later.

My last book, The Positive Deviant: Sustainability leadership in a perverse world, was published in 2010. It is based on the MA course I designed and taught for 20 years at Forum for the Future, and is now used as a set text around the world. In a longer and more detailed format, the book’s purpose, like the MA, is to give you confidence to get on and implement sustainability – despite lack of cooperation from others! Here you will find an explanation of what it means to be a positive deviant, plus extracts from the book.