Through Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), Can We Learn Together to Restore the Living Landscapes of Southern Africa?

In this dialogue centered session, Prof Jim Taylor commences by reflecting briefly on the sessions that Sharescreen Africa has presented for the Environmental Education series, and emphasises a few key learnings from the sessions. 

He then introduces Prof Rob O’Donoghue who discusses The living landscapes of southern Africa. These landscapes were disrupted during rapid social political and ecological changes during colonial modernity. Such changes developed during the sustained period of change and environmental degradation that came with colonial impositions. We now face further degradation and disruptions through global climate change.

If we are to achieve future quality of life in more just and sustainable future conditions, we need to be thinking in terms of the climate and living landscapes of Southern Africa. This talk examines how, what we think of as natural landscapes, were an outcome of how, over thousands of years, people lived within and transformed ecosystems to create living landscapes.

Our challenge today is to understand how the regional landscapes that are at risk today, are a creation of how people learned to live within the life support systems of Southern Africa. We thus pose the question, with a renewed understanding of the past, can we learn to live together on living landscapes that we restore and sustain together?