 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Good afternoon and welcome to Pacific Partnerships for Education here on ThinkTek Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. We're talking about all the interesting partnerships that happen around here on Pacific Islands that enrich people's lives through education. With me today in the studio here is Dr. Ko Ming-Wai. Welcome, Ming-Wai. Thank you. Ming-Wai is a colleague of mine at Prell. She's also with the new Center for Getting Things Started. As well as she has half a dozen other affiliations. She keeps very busy running all around doing all kinds of great projects. And we're going to talk about ecoliteracy and ecofluency today. Definitely. So, let's just maybe jump right into this, Ming-Wai. By talking, why have you tell us a little bit about this idea of education for sustainability? Sort of what that is. Definitely. Definitely. You know, education for sustainability is a design. You need to design for sustainability. And one of the reasons when the trouble we are today is because we didn't design for sustainability. We didn't design thinking about the seven generations or what next. And so, education for sustainability is very much design-driven. As well as considering some people call it the three E's. Your environment, or ecology, equity, as well as economics. And some people call it the three P's. People, profit, planet. So when we talk about education for sustainability, it always needs to have a more holistic view. Not just the environment. It's not just environmental education. It's not just economics. It's not just social justice. It's all of it together in a design that hangs really, really well for outcomes of a sustainable planet. That's what I said in the nutshell. My wife always says about everything's connected to everything else, right? Absolutely. You can't teach science without considering its connections to the people who are doing the science, the culture where it is, the place where it's being done. Especially the place, Ethan. You know, your wife there is right. Place is so important. We call it sense of place. And once you know your place, you start to know who you are. And now its place is changing due to development, due to climate change, sea level rise. Therefore, who you are changes. And once you know your place, you can start recognizing the changes and then start figuring out adaptations to either mitigate, improve, et cetera. But she's absolutely right. Places is crucial. And in our very rapidly transient community nowadays, the 21st century, people move around. What is place? Do you maybe have to create places wherever you go? Is Facebook page a place? We often talk about that. It's somewhere you feel at home. It's somewhere you feel safe. And so that is actually a huge issue in educating for sustainability. When we say cultivate a sense of place in the past, we actually thought of a place, a physical place. But now, you know, is it a cyberspace? Is that a place? That's very interesting. I hadn't thought of the places in the non-physical sense. But earlier shows, we were talking about some of the places in the islands were included. There have been massive changes. We were dealing with the nuclear legacy and talking about ruined dome and places that have been massively altered. And clearly, I was thinking about that in terms of this education for sustainability. That wasn't a sustainable thing, right? Completely obliterated to the islands. So what do people need to know? What sorts of areas of knowledge or literacies as you sometimes talk about do people really have to have to get this education? Right. You know, so when we talk about math, for example, one has to have math literacy. You do need your four functions. You need to know how to multiply, add, subtract and divide. And so that's a language in and of itself. Then you also have science literacies where you can discuss concepts in science. And so for educating for sustainability, for understanding the three E's, we say that you need ecological literacy. Ecoliteracy is short in term. And again, ecoliteracy is, I would say it's reading the book of nature. Yeah, I like that phrase. I really like that. Yeah, reading the book of nature and also interpreting these texts that nature provides, you know, texts again. So that can be everything from watching clouds, watching patterns on the water, looking at the trees or plants around you, the ground under your feet, right? Absolutely. So there are some very universal patterns in nature. And I think I sent some photographs about them. I don't even want to put them up. But those are universally recognized. So there are patterns like networks. So in the picture, you can see that's the pattern of roots. You know, and we also think about networks as in the internet. And in the picture, you can see nodes and you can see spreading and fractals. Neural networks. Neural networks to brain. So that's a very important pattern of nature that we can emulate, that we have emulated. The other one that is very obvious is what we call nested systems. So you think of economics as part of our culture, it really is part of society, and we are nested in planet Earth. Or even more basic, you have yourself as an individual in your family, in your extended family, in your community. So there are many nested systems. And you see that a lot in nature. It's a form of protection. It's a form of leveraging. There's many reasons behind nested systems. Then the one, of course, that's one of my favorites is cycles. So in the picture, you can see moon cycles. And we learn about water cycles. So nature is cyclical. There are all these different ways to look at it. And then there are three more that I also am very excited about. They're very universal. So we also have some pictures of them. When they come up, one of them is flows. So just understanding flows. Usually something flows from more concentrated to less concentrated. For example, we talk about that often in our water work. And then the pattern of growth. How do things grow? And yes, definitely, definitely. So looking at growth patterns. And then things in dynamic balance. So nature obviously is not static. There's a whole dynamic element of it. And yet it's all in balance. And that's one of the challenges, if I may bring it in, about understanding climate change. To me, obviously, it's nature out of balance. The planet has a fever. And maybe we just left the planet, get rid of all the humans, everything will be fine. And they will revert back, but that's not possible. We are here. What are we doing to either stoke the fever, make it worse? Or could we put it back in balance? Could we try to cool the planet down through our understanding nature's patterns, through ecoliteracy? So those are great ideas. And they make a lot of sense to me. The idea of the networks. Networking is something that all life forms do. They all are networked in various ways, shapes and forms. To other life forms. Every cell in your body basically. It's hooked into other cells in your body. And then they're all communicating with one another. And then the idea of the cycles, that's what happens to all matter on Earth. It's constantly, whether it's the rocks under our feet, which are cycling very, very slowly. Or the water is just cycling considerably more rapidly, although still sometimes it's thousands of years for it to complete a cycle. Or some of the gases cycle very rapidly. So that's interesting. So then you take that next step and you want to think about design thinking. So is this like the Granton-Wiggins understanding by design? Yes, there's one element. Definitely, definitely. Working backwards from an outcome. So what are you designing for? What are the outcomes you want to achieve? So if the outcome here is a sustainable planet for our children and their children, seven generations, what are we designing for? How do we look at what nature is already doing that is sustainable and then emulate that? So one of the things I'm really struggling with and playing with is this idea of scale. So you know, sure you've got nature's patterns and all that, but at what scale? You know, you're designing for 1,000 people, 20 people. And I think that each setting offers you a sustainable scale. So for Hawaii, you know, we need to design for Ohana scale is what I call it. We're small islands. We may not be able to compete economically, say with a larger country. But why should we? If we design for our scale that we can sustain and I call it Ohana scale, then we are then designing for sustainability. So we have to think about what scale can we sustain ourselves and then look at the outcomes and then look again at inspirations from nature, the networks, like you say, the cycles and use that to design the work, to design the relationships, to design the processes. Right. So historically that is the Hawaiian islands were for eons totally isolated from any place else and yet they supported a population estimated to be somewhere around a million people. Right, depending on who you talk to. Now we have the same population and yet we import what 80 or 90% of what it is we eat and then we export 80 or 90% of what we grow, which is not a very sustainable model. Not at all. Huge costs on every sort of every aspect of that, right? The shipping costs, the packing costs, the labor costs, the materials costs, all these things, right? Just adding and all contributing to the carbon footprint on earth and leading to an unsustainable planet. Yeah. Your idea would be to refocus Hawaii on keeping its processes more within Hawaii. Right, and considering maybe back to one of the patterns that you could have a cyclical pattern, you could have nested systems, you know, even think about closed systems, you know, so if you designed for Hawaii being a closed system like it was, what does that look like in the 21st century? I'm not saying we get rid of the internet. I love the internet. I love keeping in touch with my friends. However, some of the other things that we can design for a closed system, for example, the food, you're absolutely correct. You know, importing 85% and then exporting just as much, that doesn't seem like a very intelligent design. Right, right. You know, so I completely agree that we have models that we can follow and, you know, starting from scratch, we have... Obviously, the Hawaiians did this for years, for generations and generations, very successfully, right? Yeah. They harmonized the island as their population grew and grew and grew. Yeah, so there's a great TEDx lecture by Dr. Sam Gon, and he talks about a thousand years of sustainability. You know, it's like TEDx, Honolulu, very recently. And he explains the realms, you know, the realms of the heaven and the land, back to one of the earlier things you said about how do you read the skies, you know, read the land, read the waters. And he explains that the Kanaka could do that. They were eco-literate. Right. You know, Hawaiians were definitely eco-literate. And by watching the land, watching the sky, watching the waters, they knew the correct cycles of planting and harvesting. They could predict, for the lack of a better word, seasonal changes that were maybe even anomalies, which is, again, what we're currently facing. Right. It's been raining nonstop in the Big Island now for a year. So that's an anomaly. And so once you have this literacy to be able to observe, to be able to read, to be able to interpret, what next? How do you go and do something? Right. We're going to talk more on that when we come back, but right now we're going to take a one-minute break here. I'm here with Dr. Ko Ming Wei. You're on Pacific Partnerships in Education. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. Stay with us, and we'll be back in a minute. Hey, Aloha. Stan Energyman here on Think Tech, Hawaii, where community matters. This is the place to come to think about all things energy. We talk about energy for the grid, energy for vehicles, energy in transportation, energy in maritime, energy in aviation. We have all kinds of things on our show, but we always focus on hydrogen here in Hawaii. Because it's my favorite thing. That's what I like to do. But we talk about things that make a difference here in Hawaii, things that should be a big changer for Hawaii. And we hope that you'll join us every Friday at noon on Stan Energyman. And take a look with us at new technologies and new thoughts on how we can get clean and green in Hawaii. Aloha. Good afternoon. My name is Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green, a program on Think Tech, Hawaii. We show at 3 o'clock in the afternoon every other Monday. My guests are specialists from here and the mainland on energy efficiency, which means you do more for less electricity and you're generally safer and more comfortable while you're keeping dollars in your pocket. And you're back here on Pacific Partnerships in Education with me, Ethan Allen, your host. And we're here in the Think Tech studios with Dr. Ko Ming Wei. Good to have you here. We've been talking about eco-literacy and now we're going to take that next step, I think. And so it's not enough just to read the book of nature and understand the text. You've got to do something with it, right? We're facing some very serious crises these days. The sea level is rising. The atmosphere is holding more carbon dioxide. The planet is getting warmer. Our oceans are being inundated with plastic. Many, many different challenges we have to learn from nature and start making decisions, hopefully well-informed decisions, and acting, which gets us to this idea that some people refer to eco-fluency, right? Yes, yes. So how do you propose we make that, start making that shift? Right. So exactly what you said about eco-literacy, you know, one can be literate and you can read, maybe even write, but that could be just an exercise. So what happens next? How do you look at something? How do you take action? And I believe that a lot of it again, coming back to your wife's comment, starts with place. So looking at your own place and looking at what small thing can you fix, can you solve? You know, very often myself included, we want to change the world, let's change the world now, you know? And that takes a lot of resources and that takes a lot of policy, that takes a lot of crowdsourcing. So my encouragement around eco-fluency is to start with something that's close to your heart and something that's manageable. And so for eco-fluency, we want to incubate ideas. We want to grow small ideas. So an example of eco-fluency is zero waste. Manageable, you can start at your own home, you can have it at school, you can have it at church, you can have it at a community center. But just an idea of the cycles, instead of thinking of waste as waste, what about thinking about it as a resource and within your own small setting, do something about it, take that action. Right, and again, you don't have to jump from what you're doing now to zero. That might be fairly hard, but you could set yourself a goal and say, I'm going to cut down the trash that I throw out by 50% over the next six months or something. Absolutely, and you know, if you work with children, make it a game. Right, sure. You know, make it fun. This is what children like, you know, make it slightly competitive. There's good competition. Who can do the best. Who can waste the least or recycle the most or build huge compost piles with your organic materials? But exactly. Start where you are and get your close friends and your family on board first. This is what I believe. Of course, you do want to change the world. You want to get everybody on board. However, as an individual, one has the most influence, I believe, on the people around them. So that can, you can start with your own personal call to action and then bring along your friends and family. Right, and this is, in a way, why the Pacific Islands are a great place to do this, right? Because they are small islands. If a really modest number of people get doing this, pretty soon it will network out. It has, like, networks, right? Yes. And get everyone, or at least a critical mass of people involved and the island will more or less start acting this way. On a huge continental land mass, that's much more difficult in a way, right? You've got this much bigger population and the bonds are not necessarily as tight between the people and your small group of people is proportionately much smaller there, right? Yeah. So, you know, the Pacific Islands hold a very crucial role in today's challenge for a climate change adaptation, climate change resilience. Because each island is its own self-contained lab. Exactly what you said. You can experiment in this island. You know it's boundary. So, back to design thinking, you're already very clear about boundaries. You have a very good sense of what comes in and what goes out. You know, we had numbers, like, importing this many percent, exporting that many percent. And so, islands lend itself to be excellent labs and especially in the Pacific. We are some of our low-lying atolls that canaries in a coal mine when it comes to sea level rise. If one could use that metaphor. So, what can one do in those islands and then continue to spread the message out or use small islands as a model? And we also were talking in the first half of the show about issue of scale. You know, people want to quickly scale up or scale out. Whereas, sometimes, again, back to sustainability, the scale has to be able to be sustained. And so, small islands provide that kind of scale for us to try experiments, modify, adapt, look at resilience. And it just blows my mind how people have populated these tiny little pieces of land in a vast ocean. How did they get there? They have survived this long. So, there's something in Pacific Islander's DNA that already is resilient. You know, and they already understand that you have to be very, very close not only to your land, but to your waters around you, which, of course, is connected to the skies. And so, I believe that the Pacific Islands has some ways of thinking that maybe land masses do not consider. Pacific Islanders are still very close to nature. You know, they practice daily fishing, going out in the waters. And so, they're still very, very connected. So, I really am excited. You know, a mixture, a mixture of trepidation and slightly overwhelmed. And yet, I'm excited with the work we do at Parel, Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, my work with the Center for Getting Things Started, that our islands can provide some solutions, some models to solve this crisis of the planet heating up. Right, right. And there are a lot of sort of subtle ways that Islander sometimes think very differently from people in the mainland. So, the classic example that I ran into when I came out here was just how folks from the mainland typically view the islands. They view the small islands separated by these massive amounts of water. Whereas Islanders view them as small islands connected by these big patches of water. Yes. It's a seemingly, relatively subtle but very profound difference. Absolutely. Understanding that the ocean is basically the fabric for your networking, you know? You know, the Marshallese have these wonderful models. They're called stick charts. And they, for lack of a better description, models of wave patterns. Right. In the ocean. So, as a wave hits an island, it can reflect or it splits, you know? It refracts. And all those waves then form patterns in the ocean. And if you're just sitting there looking at it, you don't really see it, you have to actually feel it. Right. It's a very kinetic phenomena. Right. And so the Marshallese incredibly have mapped, for lack of a better word, or charted this area between islands. They charted the ocean. It's so incredible. Exactly. They don't see it as that which separates us. But they see it as that which unites us. It's our highway. So, here's a stick chart. Here's a pathway that you can get from island to island. Follow this pathway. Right. It's a very intriguing pattern in there because it's so subtle in the midst of a lot of noise because there's wind-driven waves that obliterate basically these underlying patterns, but they're still there. The patterns. And yes, if you spend a long time learning as I gather, and I gather that Marshallese navigators to play it on a train to small children are sometimes blindfolded and laid down in a canoe and basically taught just a... Feel. Yeah, to feel what this pattern is and then sort of see what this means. You're at the leeward side of this shape island. Yeah. Or you're out now beside this other kind of island or your front year on the oncoming waves and these are going to give you different feelings, different... Yeah. I finally got to actually experience it just a few weeks ago. I had the fortune due to the research we do in Prel along with my co-principal investigator. He is helping the Republic of the Marshall Islands develop the Atlas. So we went together on a research mission and we sailed on the Okeanos, which is a smaller version of the Hikianalia, the boat that accompanied Hokulea around the world. And I got to live on a boat for almost two weeks. And towards the end, I could feel a different wave. It wasn't just this. I could start to feel this. But I never felt it before. It was just an academic intellectual. Okay, there's four kinds of waves. I don't know. So to actually finally, after all these years to actually go, wait a minute, does that mean I'm more eco-fluent now? You're at least more eco-literate now. Exactly. And so, yeah, just... You know, the other thing about the call to action is to use the observations, to go out to nature, to really observe, to feel it, to become eco-literate so that then you can become more fluid. You can see where your role is in this call to action. I believe many people are overwhelmed, Ethan. This is a huge topic. And so what are we doing in education to support resilience? What are we doing in education to have our young people, our communities understand this call to action. What can they do? It's very overwhelming. It's easier just to forget about it or pretend it didn't happen. And yet, you know it's happening. And so I really feel that it's my... One of my jobs is an educator for sustainability to bring along my students, my teachers to observe, to be in nature. And then, like I said, to work in the scale that is most sustainable for yourself to do an action, to do something that... I believe we have the answers. We have not too much time left. There are different years before we get the tipping point where it's too late. And yet there's time. There's time for us to make a concerted effort to rethink our issues around energy, food, water, food, energy, water, our view. I believe we have the manpower and the womenpower, the human power to do it, the capacity to do it. We are certainly blessed with technology. I think it's that will element, this call to action. People maybe are so afraid that will is frozen. They're afraid to do something. They're very different competing interests because people who don't have that sort of ecoliteracy look on a very short time scale and sort of are looking to maximize their profit or their rate of exchange or whatever it is and without thinking seven generations ahead, without considering what kind of world they're going to leave their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren. And our system in the U.S. has really encouraged this. Yeah. Wow. This is deep. Big challenges, but as you say, reasons for hope and sequels are a great place to start. Oh, yeah. I think ecologically, act locally is a great mantra. Yeah, ecoliteracy, ecofluency. And I took some of the writings from one of my mentors, Jamie Cloud of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, and I modified some of her words. And she really encourages us to develop certain benchmarks around educating for sustainability. And one of them is to cultivate a strong sense of place, you know, really develop a strong connection to the place in which you live, and then you can recognize the value of some of the inherent elements in your place. Excellent. That's perfect. I wish we could go on here, but I'm told out of time. So Dr. Ming Wei, thank you very much for being here. Thank you so much for having me, Ethan. Join us again next time on Pacific Partnerships for Education here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, signing off.