Geography and Education for Sustainability in Australia

Abstract

This article provides an antipodean dimension to education for sustainable development in that it gives an overview of geography in sustainable development education in Australia. The paper considers school level and university approaches to the teaching of this issue. It demonstrates that where sustainability education is becoming fashionable across all areas of HE, there is by and large no co-ordinated federal approach to its delivery.

Introduction

At the time of writing (late October 2002); much of Australia is in the grip of a protracted, El Nino-induced drought and the largest dust storm in decades has deposited approximately ten million tonnes of the country’s topsoil in the Pacific Ocean; the Green Party has won its first lower house seat in federal parliament; the Minister for the Environment has reiterated his government’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto protocol; and, as always at this time of year, the first TV reports of bush fire damage are hitting the local media. Australia, as a country on the global economic periphery and, in some ways, scarcely beyond the frontier stage of its economic development, is a land where issues of sustainability are both glaringly apparent and politically relevant. However, it is also a country of such size and diversity that uniform approaches, both to sustainability per se and to education in this area are unlikely to be appropriate or successful. What follows, therefore, is one perspective on a fragmented system of educational provision for sustainability in Australia. It will be coloured by my own disciplinary and residential locations (in Geography and in Western Australia, respectively) though the challenges and the responses are not greatly dissimilar in other academic fields and in other parts of the country.

School Level Approaches

Australia has six state and two territorial school systems. No two share identical age requirements for entry and progression through pre-primary, primary and secondary stages and they all devise and control their own syllabi and end-of-school examinations. Nevertheless, at least at the primary and lower secondary levels, most systems regard Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE) as one of four core streams of study (the others being English, Mathematics and Science). In high schools, the subject matter within SOSE is characteristically delivered by staff who also teach (and therefore are graduates in) History, Geography and Economics at the upper secondary level. While this structure ensures some degree of integration of the economics-environment-society sustainability triad, it also tends to separate sustainability’s science and ‘social studies’ components.

This deficiency may be slightly ameliorated at the upper secondary level where the Arts-Science divide is less apparent than is the case in the UK. Characteristically, students are required to take four or five subjects in the final two years of high school. In most states/territories, these must include at least one from an arts and one from a science list. Since Geography falls within SOSE at lower secondary level, it is normally classified as ‘arts’. The situation at the tertiary level (to use the Australian term) is, however, far more fragmented and complex.

Geography and Sustainability in Australian Universities

The Directory of Subjects of Study in the Australian section of the current Commonwealth Universities Yearbook (Association of Commonwealth Universities, 2002) makes no mention of sustainability as such. However, 39 of the 40 universities listed offer Environmental Science/Studies, the sole exception being the private, fee-paying Bond University. Slightly over half of the country’s universities also offer other sustainability-related subjects, such as Natural Resource Studies (24), Planning/Landscape Studies (23), Ecology (22) or Geology/Earth Sciences/Atmospheric Studies (21). More specialist topics, such as Development Studies (14), Population Studies/Demography (8), Wildlife Management (7) and Energy Studies (5) are also represented.

Geography is currently listed as a subject of study at 23 universities across the country, though four programmes have closed since 1998. What the Yearbook and its Directory fail to discern, however, is the extent to which disciplinary departments have disappeared from the Australian university scene in recent years (Holmes, 2002). The last single-discipline Geography department in an Australian university closed in September 2002. Many multidisciplinary Built Environment, Social Science, Geoscience and “Geography and…” departments have been created, with Environmental Studies as one of the discipline’s most common partners (Harvey et al. 2002).

This has tended, if anything, to make issues of sustainability more prominent in Geography curricula at this level, geographers seek common ground and work more cooperatively with a diverse range of new colleagues, depending upon where their university restructuring processes have located them. Most of the 23 groups teaching Geography in Australian universities are therefore increasingly involved in offering courses which focus on sustainability-related topics, though they may not necessarily mention sustainability by name in their course titles.

Furthermore, now that sustainability is a fashionable topic, and in what is becoming an increasingly intense competition for undergraduate and graduate students, many Geography programmes highlight their sustainability credentials. For example units (or modules in ‘UK speak’) that might once have been termed Introductory Human and Physical Geography are now (e.g.) Population, Globalisation and Social Justice and Footprints on a Fragile Planet at Adelaide and Technological Revolutions and Natural Hazards at Curtin.

The Wider University Context

Geography is, of course, by no means the only discipline offering tuition in the area of sustainability. As the Commonwealth University Yearbook noted, courses in sustainability per se, are the exception, though the Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy at Murdoch University offers bachelors degrees and postgraduate qualifications in Sustainable Development.

Sustainability is more likely to be linked to specific topics, such as Sustainable Tourism Development at Adelaide University. Indeed, Tourism is notable, both as an Australasian academic growth area in which many geographers have recently found employment and as a discipline with a strong sustainability focus in its teaching (a possible case of cause and effect?). The nationally designated Cooperative Research Centre in Sustainable Tourism, which provides research funding and postgraduate scholarships to sixteen universities plays a major role in directing research and therefore, indirectly, in influencing university teaching in this area.

Indeed, the bumper sticker claim that “Geography is Everywhere” (recently distributed through the Australian (school) Geography Teachers Association) could now be more accurately applied to sustainability in the university context. Searches using the word “sustainability” in university websites produced the perhaps surprising hits of “Accountants are examining the issue of sustainability” (Edith Cowan) and “the Cement Sustainability Initiative” (Curtin) to place alongside more predictable finds, such as “Sustainability and Economics in Agriculture” (University of Western Australia).

This increasingly widespread awareness/fashionability of sustainability can lead to welcome cooperation, such as the recent introduction of an Environmental Business Management major within a Bachelor of Commerce programme. But the very fact that sustainability issues are relevant across so many subject areas can also lead to turf wars. In recent years, cost-cutting in Australian universities has been even more severe than that in most of the English-speaking world (Marginson and Considine, 2000; Coaldrake and Steadman, 1998) and some academic areas have therefore sought to claim sustainability as their own in order to compete for new students. For example, at my own university, a Centre of Excellence in Cleaner Production, which focuses primarily on Industrial Chemistry, recently objected to a Sustainability Studies stream in a Social Sciences graduate programme.

Conclusion: Within and Beyond Academia

The failure of the objection cited above is, perhaps, an internal acknowledgement of the increasing ubiquity of sustainability perspectives in important worlds beyond the universities. This is notably the case in the area of government rhetoric, if not, as yet, government action. Following the publication of a State Planning Strategy (Western Australian Planning Commission 1996), which explicitly adopted a sustainable development framework, the Western Australian government has recently released a Draft State Sustainability Strategy for comment. The latter document emanates from a Sustainability Unit in the state premier’s office and is intended to apply across all spheres of government activity.

While the Western Australian state government is actively working to ensure that sustainability is pervasive, rather than ghettoised within a single department, the federal government (which controls the universities) would seem to have achieved the same result in academia through benign neglect. National priority areas are identified (and frequently changed) for research and universities are expected to hit student enrolment targets ever more accurately. But, at the undergraduate level, it is generally more important, in funding terms, to achieve institution-wide goals than to conform to subject/disciplinary profiles, while postgraduate coursework is seen as a fee-paying exercise where universities can set their own targets. There is, therefore, no clear government direction with regard to education on sustainability, and furthermore no controlling professional body for sustainability studies and no clear academic location for its teaching. Most Australian universities now have Divisions or Faculties of Business/Commerce, Humanities, Science/Engineering and Health Sciences. The first three can lay claim to the economic, social and environmental components of sustainability studies respectively, while new, but related, paradigms such as Ecosystem Health (Jones, 2001) are of interest to the fourth. Given the growth in public/student interest in environmental issues, education in sustainability related areas has therefore grown in an increasingly diverse manner within an increasingly market-driven national university system.

Australian geographers, as a result of the integrative nature of their discipline, are playing an important, if uncoordinated, role in its growth. And it is, perhaps, fortunate that the issue of sustainability provides them with this opportunity at a time when traditional academic disciplines are under threat across the Australian university system.