Reasons to be hopeful: Learning and becoming in a time of crisis

Abstract

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's stark and sobering new report (IPCC 2021) 1 on the climate emergency was published on 9 August 2021. It was launched as wildfires devastated parts of Greece, and just a few weeks after catastrophic flooding claimed hundreds of lives in Asia and Central Europe, and the West Coast of North America experienced an unprecedented leap in record temperatures. The much-circulated images of people being evacuated by ferry from forest fires on the Greek island of Evia (BBC 2021), 2 the sky behind them a shade of red best described as apocalyptic, may well be among the defining images of our era, a vivid indicator of our failure to act on climate change when we had the chance. However, as the IPCC report makes clear, this need not be the case. Although we are uncomfortably late in acting, and many of the changes we are seeing are "irreversible", at least in the short and medium term, it is not yet too late, and there is still much we can do, and much we can save. As Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, noted at the report's launch, "the power is in our hands at this point", and there is an onus on every business leader, politician and policymaker "to consider how to be a contributor" (Bedigan 2021). 3 The IPCC report -the definitive and uniquely authoritative word on the physical causes of global warming -finds it "unequivocal" that human activity is the cause

Criterion-Referenced Assessment of Intelligence as Adaptation to the Environment: Is It Possible, Plausible, or Practical?

“…On the contrary, individuals from upper-class backgrounds have the tendency to behave more unethically than their low-class counterparts, in part, accounted for by their more favorable attitudes toward greed ( Piff et al 2012 ). Similarly, the adaptive knowledge of indigenous communities around the globe has been well-documented ( Stanistreet 2021 ; Tom et al 2019 ). These communities can be seen as exemplars of deployment of adaptive intelligence based on “traditional ecological knowledge, farmer knowledge, and other forms of ecological knowledge [that] have served their populations for generations by facilitating thoughtful and deliberate human-environmental interactions leading to what is broadly referred to as environmental sustainability” ( Tom et al 2019, p. 12 ).…”

“…The instruction would be focused not just on the development of knowledge base—which of course would be important—but also on the development of creative, analytical, practical, and wise thinking for each of the world-level problems. Standards and criteria for the test could be expanded to instructional settings, establishing alignment among global priorities, education policies, and education systems (e.g., climate literacy, Stanistreet 2021 ). The existence of such standards also has the potential to enhance teacher preparation by outlining strategies and materials that teachers can use to enhance adaptive intelligence in school environments.…”