Social Learning towards a Sustainable World now open-access e-book

The important and influential volume,  Social Learning towards a Sustainable World: Principles, perspectives, and praxis, edited by Arjen Wals and published by Wageningen Academic Publisher (2007), has become an open-access e-book.  To download the book, click here.The book contains a chapter by David Selby of Sustainability Frontiers: ‘Reaching into the Holomovement: A Bohmian perspective on social learning for sustainability’ (pp.165-180).

Chapter abstract: There is broad agreement amongst sustainability proponents that the world, as we know it, and our place in that world, is at risk. There is also considerable agreement amongst those proponents that transformation, and hence transformative learning, are vital for achieving sustainability. The problem is that, while we have the goal of transformation through learning, the processes and modalities of learning we employ continue to be informed by mechanism, arguably the root cause of unsustainability. Social learning for sustainability, therefore, calls for learning processes divested of mechanistic influences and residues, but we are straitjacketed in this regard by our failure to see, let alone address, mechanism within our thought processes. To escape the trap of mechanism, dialogical social learning based upon David Bohm’s conception of dialog is called for as a means of taking a quantum leap to quantum learning for sustainability.