The Deep Sustainability Specialization addresses the increasingly urgent need to position academic and professional work within an environmental context. Students within this specialization learn about important and intimate interconnections between self, consciousness, and world. Courses prepare students to be environmentally awake community mentors for the necessary transition toward a life-sustaining civilization that respects and serves human and planetary needs.
Why “Deep” Sustainability? Depth psychology looks beneath surface behaviors and attitudes to their roots in unconscious motivation. Deep Ecology moves beyond unsophisticated, quick-fix approaches to ecological problems by inquiring into the underlying strengths and pathologies of our relationship to nature and Earth. Deep Sustainability incorporates discoveries from the study of Living Systems, cybernetics, and Complexity Theory that offer new perspectives for understanding complex problems. These scientific theories show us that complex problems such as environmental sustainability must be addressed on multiple levels from multiple perspectives, that disciplines must talk to and amplify each other; and that chaotic events and crises represent possibilities for the emergence of new cycles and forms of order. “Deep” grounds the inquiry in the human capacity for creative innovation: the capacity for consciousness. Deep Sustainability aims beyond technical fixes, new “green” purchases and habits, and linear economics—important though these might be—toward the transformation of our relationship with the environment, and therefore with ourselves and with each other.
No other academic program puts consciousness and its potential for training in complex, systemic, “deep” approaches to sustainability in the center of its educational efforts.
Courses Units
Core (9 units):
Issues in Science and
Consciousness: Living Systems Theory (2)
Consciousness and Sustainability
(2)
Living Systems (2)
Planetary Psychology (3)
Exploring Professional
Identity A/B (2,1)
Elective (7 units):
Electives include courses such as From Farm to
Table, Art and Healing, Visionary Leadership, and Ecological
Medicine.
Students completing the Deep Sustainability Specialization will be able to:
Mentor their communities of origin in the psychological, scientific, philosophical, and systemic dimensions of sustainability. This includes a capacity for translating ecological concepts into understandable terms and educational images in a variety of media.
Conduct
critical analyses of the scientific, financial, and political discourse
surrounding sustainability, localization, alternative energy, food
production, and climate change.
Share the results of these analyses with coworkers, community leaders, and other interested parties.
Discuss and utilize sustainability practices drawn from a variety of cultural and scientific sources.
Discuss and illustrate usually hidden connections between consumers and products, including food and energy products and the role of advertising.
Dispense offline and online sustainability resources while remaining aware of the many current perspectives on human relations with the environment.
Challenge and change entrenched attitudes and biases that prevent adaptation to environmentally wise solutions and habits.
Career opportunities for graduates of this specialization include work for nonprofits and other organizations dedicated to the transition to “green and clean” business practices, work in companies offering alternative energy sources (solar power, wind power, etc.), work in organizations dedicated to organic growing and permaculture, community education and organization (including formal teaching), consulting (environmentalists, scientists, and business leaders stand in dire need of communication methods for talking to each other), environmental activism, and a range of entrepreneurial pursuits. Of students now interested in entering the new specialization, one is already writing a curriculum for educating her community in how to purchase authentically green products, another is putting together a series of workshops to study the impact of local ecological health on the health of human relationships and communication patterns, and a third plans to set up a school garden to educate children about where healthy food comes from and how to grow it. NOTE: It is important to bear in mind that the old philosophy of pre-given, long-term jobs into which graduates can be slotted is vanishing before our eyes, and that the future of viable employment belongs to those with the kind of strong entrepreneurial capacity for innovation that our specialization is designed to train and encourage.
For more information contact Craig Chalquist at 925-969-3137.Craig
Chalquist, PhD
Core Faculty, JFK
University
Visit
Chalquist.com:
Catching
the World by the Tale