As I mentioned last week, Ken Webster and I shared a platform yesterday in Cambridge, at a Climate Histories seminar hosted by the wonderfully named CRASSH – the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities.
Ken explored the work that the Ellen MacArthur Foundation is now doing (including the DIF), and I offered a perspective on how hard it was to find a curriculum niche into which circular economy ideas could wriggle into. Inevitably, Ken's slides were more colourful and design-rich than mine, although (unusually for me) I did have a nice (Guardian) cartoon that was pertinent to my very brief exploration of the dire state of economics teaching in universities. Here it is:
Ken's were full of flows and cycles, sinks, loops and squiggles (well, maybe not squiggles), and you could have spent an hour on some of them. And they certainly engaged a diverse audience who asked excellent questions (well, it was Cambridge) of both of us. It was stimulating and most enjoyable.
One member of the audience asked about a point I'd made about primary schools being more fertile ground than secondaries for the sort of cross-disciplinary, holistic, integrated, approach that a consideration of the circular economy demands, and we though that a simplified (but not simplistic) version of one of Ken's slides would be excellent at getting to the heart of the issues in a way that youngsters could make meaning from. This is the comparison of biological and technological material cycles and how these relate to our current very linear economy. It would likely help teachers see sense about recycling – what Ellen MacArthur calls "the loop of last resort".
If I can extract it from Ken, I'll write some more about it.
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