Loyola University Chicago

Faculty Center for Ignatian Pedagogy

Sustainability Resources

This content was created by Dr. Amy Wilkinson, FCIP's 2023-24 Faculty Scholar for Sustainability and the Curriculum.

The following topics are covered on this page:

  • What is sustainability?
  • Why should I integrate sustainability and related topics into my curriculum?
  • Connections between Ignatian pedagogy and environmental sustainability
  • Glossaries of important terms
  • How do I integrate sustainability and related topics into my curriculum?
  • Sustainability and an aesthetic empathy

What is sustainability?

Sustainability can be defined as the connections between healthy environments, socio-political equity, and economic vitality that help create diverse, thriving, and resilient communities now and for future generations.  

A sustainability framework reflects the perspective that resources are finite and that long-term priorities should support ecological integrity, economic efficiency, and social, as well as intergenerational equity. 

Some other definitions of sustainability: 

 

Why should I integrate sustainability and related topics into my curriculum? 

Today’s complex, interconnected challenges of sustainability require integrated, collaborative solutions that draw on our collective knowledge. As a Jesuit University committed to expanding knowledge in the service of humanity, we are called upon to promote sustainable ways of living through environmental stewardship, education, scholarship, and service.  

Environmental sustainability requires a systems approach. As Donella H. Meadows (1999) notes, "Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in 'leverage points.' These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, and ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything." Developing sustainability curricula offers faculty a leverage point to help train leaders who will be prepared to tackle the most challenging issues of our time.  

 

Connections between Ignatian Pedagogy and environmental sustainability 

"Our Ignatian worldview and mission emphasizes 'finding God in all things,' with all this implies for the relation between religion and science, the economy, the polity, and other structures related to the current environmental and related crises" (Leighter & Smythe, 2019). Faculty at Jesuit institutions are uniquely positioned to engage students in an exploration of themes related to care for our common home via the Ignatian Pedagogy Paradigm, which calls for the integration of context, experience, reflection, action, and evaluation. Taken a step further, the IPP can intentionally link personal growth with a sense of civic duty and knowledge in the service of humanity.

Table 1. Ignatian Pedagogy Paradigm and Ignatian Pedagogy for Sustainability

Leighter, James L. and Smythe, Kathleen R. (2019). “Ignatian Pedagogy for Sustainability: An Overview,” Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal, 8(1), Article 3. Available at: https://epublications.regis.edu/jhe/vol8/iss1/3  

Putting Laudato Si into Action

 

Glossaries of important terms

CDP
As companies, cities, states, and regions journey towards net zero emissions, we must ensure consistency in benchmarks, science-based targets, and definitions of terms. This list demystifies acronyms and technical terms that surround climate change and other terms and is updated regularly. 

EPA – Glossary of Sustainable Manufacturing Terms 
This list covers terms related to sustainable manufacturing, which is the creation of manufactured products through economically-sound processes that minimize negative environmental impacts while conserving energy and natural resources. Sustainable manufacturing also enhances employee, community, and product safety. 

Glossary of Terminology used in Laudato Si 
Specific terms related to Laudato Si that reflect LUC’s Catholic identity. List succinctly helps illustrate points that care for the environment is a human and moral obligation, that global warming and pollution have an unfairly heavy impact on the poor and that a real commitment to ecology will entail individual conversion and changed political and economic priorities. 

Project Drawdown
Project Drawdown reviews and analyzes practices and technologies that can reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere and also are currently available, growing in scale, financially viable, able to have a net positive impact, and quantifiable under different scenarios. This glossary defines terms used in the solutions summaries. 

Tech Target 
Sustainable strategies require basic understanding of the fundamentals. This list contains essential business sustainability terms and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) concepts. 

Unicef Climate Glossary for Young People 
A glossary-style guide of the concepts and definitions that every climate activist, or emerging climate activist, needs to know. Contains essential concepts on climate change, climate action, instruments and human rights presented in a comprehensible and visually accessible way. 

 

How do I integrate sustainability and related topics into my curriculum?  

Sustainability is overwhelming in terms of the content that could come under its umbrella. It would be impossible to cover it all in a single course — so how do you decide which topics to focus on? 

One approach is to assess your existing core content and to select an element of sustainability that relates well to it, using teaching activities/assignments to explore that topic. Here are examples of core elements of course content that may pair well with activities related to sustainability (adopted from InTeGrate: Interdisciplinary teaching about earth for a sustainable future): 

  • Cultural influences, values, ethics, political systems  
  • Cycles, budgets, and feedback loops  
  • Decision-making  
  • Energy flow  
  • Human interactions with Earth's systems  
  • Importance of place, especially one’s local place 
  • Interdisciplinarity and the importance of collaboration 
  • Natural resources: where they come from, implications for use, limitations of resources  
  • Process of knowing, whether from the scientific, cultural, artistic, or historical perspective  
  • Resilience 
  • Risk  
  • Systems thinking and the relationship between systems 

There are numerous examples of how LUC faculty are merging sustainability with core disciplinary content. Using glossaries, case studies, role plays, art or research/writing projects, community collaborations, etc., are all ways of exploring related topics. Below are resources (beginning with those at LUC) that have been collected to help faculty find and utilize various curricular elements in their courses.

General resources

Climate change/environmental sustainability related podcasts

  • A Matter of Degrees: Join Dr. Leah Stokes and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson as they tell stories about the powerful forces behind climate change — and the tools we have to fix it. 
  • Black Earth Podcast: An award-winning interview podcast celebrating nature and inspiring black women leaders in the environmental movement. Rooted in science and the black experience, we create informed, inspiring, and authentic conversations on what it means to care for our planet. 
  • Fatal Conveniences: Host Darin Olien defines Fatal Conveniences™ as the things we may be doing every day because the world we live in makes us believe we have to, but in reality, these conveniences are harming us and the planet. 
  • For What It’s Earth: Environment, climate change and sustainability podcast making big issues bite sized. We explain the science and explore the things that we can do to make a difference. By Emma Brisdion and Lloyd Hopkins. 
  • How to Save a Planet: Journalist Alex Blumberg and a crew of climate nerds offer smart, inspiring stories about the mess we're in and how we can get ourselves out of it. 
  • Joy Report: By Intersectional Environmentalist, a climate justice collective radically imagining a more equitable + diverse future of environmentalism. 
  • Mothers of Invention: Podcast on feminist climate change solutions from (mostly) women around the world. 
  • My Climate Journey: Today, MCJ powers collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem-solving capacity. We’re a platform for the flow of information, ideas, and capital needed to accelerate individual climate journeys and enable collaboration. 
  • Ologies: By Alie Ward, a comedic science show that finds insight from experts in their fields. 
  • On Being with Krista Tippett: "What if We Get this Right?" In this episode, Krista Tippet interviews Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and asks her about her book and perspectives on how to approach climate change. 
  • Outrage + Optimism: Explores the stories behind the headlines on climate change, talking to the change-makers turning challenges into opportunities. Delight in progress, question greenwash and get to grips with the difficult issues. 
  • The Climate Question (BBC): A global programme that reflects the variety of takes on climate change, how best to understand it and the world’s attempts to avert it, temper it or adapt to it. It is not about questioning whether climate change is happening, it’s about finding the best ways to respond to it. 
  • TILclimate Podcast (Today I Learned: Climate): Award-winning MIT podcast that breaks down the science, technologies, and policies behind climate change, how it’s impacting us, and what we can do about it. Each quick episode gives you the what, why, and how on climate change — from real scientists and experts — to help us make informed decisions for our future. 

 

Sustainability and an aesthetic empathy

In 2005, in an article titled “What the Warming World Needs Now Is Art, Sweet Art,” 350.org founder Bill McKibben wrote that although we knew about climate change, it had yet to become a meaningful part of the culture. “Where are the books? The plays? The goddamn operas?” McKibben’s point is that to effectively heal the planet and humans’ relationship to it, we need to go beyond an intellectual understanding of scientific facts. We need to wholistically approach climate change with our imaginations - often the domain of artists and creatives. Art has the power to make us feel in ways that quantitative data – numbers, metrics, and statistics sometimes do not. In this way, art can help us develop aesthetic empathy, what Emily Dzieweczynski (2022) defines as “an unconscious physiological reaction that causes us to enliven the world around us.” According to Dzieweczynski, aesthetic empathy is the “visceral blurring of self and world that occurs when we experience something other than ourselves.”  

Importantly, aesthetic empathy can help us feel into science and data when art manifests data as an object that we see in relationship to our bodies. This centering of the body’s response to art is profound. As Abigail Rose Clarke suggests, in tumultuous times, the corporeality of our bodies can provide solace and strength. However, this requires a recognition that we are living, organic entities intricately connected to the natural world—not separate from it.  

By utilizing visual and performance art, the language of poetry, or the rhythm of music to describe numerical data’s felt reality, we can transcend some of its limitations (or sterility) and balance the emphasis on objectivity frequently associated with common scientific method traditions. Merging art and numerical data can also incorporate cultural knowledge that has historically been left out of the natural sciences.

In summary, incorporating aesthetic empathy into environmental sustainability curricula beyond arts disciplines is rooted in the following concepts:  

  1. Art is often multisensory (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) and therefore promotes a bodily response, which is essential to the concept of embodied cognition, or the idea that knowledge acquisition can be grounded in our bodily interactions with the world.
  2. Art frequently elicits “feeling” and can manifest a response to data that is too complex to represent numerically. Significantly, it is the emotional salience of data that is often the most capable of driving us to action.
  3. Art allows for the incorporation of voices that have historically been on the margins of the natural sciences – an element of environmental justice.
  4. Encounters with art often require one to sense something outside oneself, creating an opportunity for reflection on an individual’s relationship to the whole – important aspects of both climate action and environmental justice.

The following resources can be linked to existing core curricular elements within or outside of traditional arts disciplines to provide arts perspectives on a variety of climate change and/or sustainability topics:

  • Artists & Climate Change Blog - Posts featuring artists of all disciplines and their work exploring various issues related to environmental sustainability and climate change. 
  • Climate Change Theatre Action - Anthologies (available for purchase) of short plays on the Green New Deal and the climate change crisis. 
  • Climate Visuals - All images are captioned with an explanation of how they fit with the seven Climate Visuals principles, and why they work. Each image is linked to its original source, and many are available to download for free under Creative Commons licenses for use in blogs, articles, and campaigns. 
  • Dance Film: 7Y89D - A hypnotic outdoor dance counting down the days till irreversible climate catastrophe. 
  • Dance Film: Leaders of the New Regime - Lorde’s climate-conscious track travels to COP26 by wind power with high-flying choreography from Corey Baker. 
  • Dance Film: The First Touch - Five windswept dancers get down and dirty with nature. 
  • Dance Film: Trawl - A personification of extinction and the natural environment. 
  • Eco Opera - A collaboration between composers, sound artists and filmmakers, Eco Opera sees sonic tubes placed at locations in Australia and the UK to collect and filter sounds from rural environments and botanic gardens. These recordings are synchronised with location video to create evocative sound art in which audio and image coalesce. 
  • Five Indigenous Poets/Poems Exploring Impacts of Climate Change on Native Lands - 5 poems from Indigenous writers providing perspectives on loss of Native lands.  
  • Nowness Short Films - Series of short impressionistic art films exploring humankind’s ecological impact on the planet. 

More arts perspective resources: