The hopeful art: Teaching sustainable economics

Abstract

Teaching sustainable economics requires a critique of the role of economies in contributing to or detracting from a high quality of life as well as sustainable resource use. While this critique necessarily includes discussion of contemporary growth-oriented economic theory and misleading notions of efficiency, it must also bring to the fore the ways our ideas about what economies do are based upon problematic and destructive assumptions likely to make their way into new approaches to sustainable development if they are not revealed and challenged. In particular, we must disentangle notions of well-being and the good life from the consumption of things and instead focus on provisioning and nonmaterial aspects of development, including community, human relationships, secure livelihood, local skills, resilience, creative expression, equity, and appropriate and sustainable relationships to nature and other living things, none of which should be understood as “side effects” of actual or potential economic systems. This chapter discusses the author’s experience of teaching these difficult ideas to US undergraduates in classes on sustainable development and makes recommendations for using what she has learned in these and other educational contexts.