Ellen Macarthur Foundation. Rethink the future

Emerging Directions

• by Ken Webster
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• 21 Oct 2011
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How may we work to have most impact? Impact is a strange word, as it’s not an advertising campaign but then again we do want to get attention and we do want to see educators and learners benefitting from our work. To do that they have to know about it and then engage on their own terms for it to add to their sense of personal development. Impact it is, but not in a car crash way, you understand. Perhaps we can make a few key points…

What’s it all about? The circular economy framework.

Err… What’s it all about? How our relationship with materials and energy and living systems might change if we began to see the world as metabolism rather than world as machine and parts.

Hmmm…What’s it all about? It seems most abstract thought is metaphorical, and we have a tendency to adopt worldviews, deep metaphors around how the physical world works. The legacy of the Enlightenment was a sense of the world as mechanical.

So…What’s it all about? Exploring whether and how a shift from a linear ‘take, make and dispose’ economy to a ‘closed loop’ might offer useful insights at the end of the fossil fuel age…

… try again? The framework helps educators and learners get a better purchase on these big picture issues so that they can more easily rethink and redesign their world. Idealistic? We know.

So it’s a solutions package? What a horrible term/ Absolutely not. We are enthusiastic about the sorts of possibilities inherent in the framework but it remains just a toolkit, a coherent one, but there are several out there competing for attention.

As Groucho Marx said. “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others!”

Well, we are educators after all, but our specialty is seeing how this framework plays out. That’s the day job shall we say.

10 Foundation Inputs – or 10 key reference points in our work on the circular economy.

• 1 Lakoff’s ‘embodied realism’ – we think via frames and deep frames are based on metaphor. ‘Worldview’ therefore matters.
• 2 Recognising most real world systems are non-linear (full of feedback). So understanding the ‘rules’ of the non-linear is key. However, most thinking remains partial and linear by habit.
• 3 Using insights from non linear systems (especially living systems) as a jumping off point for modelling economic systems – in common with ‘cradle to cradle’, ‘biomimicry’, ‘blue economy’ – (relates back to points 1 & 2)
• 4 Resource constraints are assumed to be both real, imminent and that they are game changing – a linear economy will become largely unsupportable.
• 5 The overall notion (relates to 3) is that the economy could be rethought and redesigned to be restorative and increase well-being. Not ‘do less harm’ but ‘do good things’. More opportunity – jobs , income, profits, social welfare. But how?
• 6 The educational focus is on ‘systems and citizenship’ not ‘me and consumerism’ It questions guilt if disabling, recontextualises personal responsibility and prompts interesting questions around consumption, population, ‘recycling’ – critical and creative thinking.
• 7 Learning is assumed to be an iterative non-linear process, preferably developed between teacher and learner which explores worldviews (context) process and content continually.
• 8 Discusses the key role of optimising systems, including energy and materials cascades, the tension between efficiency and resilience (i.e. not maximising component and short run efficiency but “Whole Systems Design”)
• 9 Other system inputs include discussion around prices as messages ‘telling the truth’ the role of money at interest and money as debt.
• 10 Reflections on above (1-7) for the notion of schooling itself (as a classic example of a linear, partial model shaped by an earlier industrial model)

Intended very much for a specialist audience this ‘Inputs’ list does allow me to highlight in blue some of the required knowledge or understanding about a circular economy, or at least its basis. Much of it is perfectly obvious or can be derived easily from the basic assumptions (i.e. is based on modelling) and could be argued to be straightforward science, maths and economics and already waiting to be revealed, unfolded, to the curious student – or educator (1). It is obviously corralled in a particular way but none of it unusual:

The missing link in most curricula is the discussion around money and how it fits the model.