He’d be deeply embarrassed if you said it, of course, and find it odious for minimizing the role of diversity. But nevertheless, it does give a sense of the challenge he is facing.

He is responsible for creating a system to train the world’s 59 million teachers in how to promote sustainability.

He has been appointed to the chair established at York University in Toronto by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for the purpose of ``reorienting teacher education to address sustainability.’’

Establishment of the chair was in response to the finding at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 that education was key to achieving sustainability world wide.

A secretariat for the project has also been established at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, headed by Rosalyn McKeown, director of the university’s Centre for Geography and Environmental Education. McKeown has moved to Toronto for a year to work with Hopkins.

Fundamental to everything he hopes to achieve, says Hopkins, is the realization that needs are different everywhere on the globe. In some areas, where the average length of time students spend in school is only four months, the primary need is to improve basic education. In other areas the need is for a more sophisticated understanding of economics. In all areas, values underlie and shape educational systems, and they determine what can be tried.

To accommodate such diversity, Hopkins and McKeown decided that all initiatives would have to be ``locally relevant and culturally appropriate.’’ That ruled out decreeing solutions from on high.

Instead, they have persuaded educational institutions in 35 countries to develop local plans. Hopkins and McKeown will then use each plan as a case study, saying to institutions around the world: Here are 35 examples of what can be done. Please use them as a source of ideas and inspiration to create your own programs.

To illustrate how interwoven are the needs of communities, and the impossibility of addressing education without also addressing social, economic, and cultural issues, Hopkins referred me to Lalit Pande, director of the Uttarakhand Environmental Education Centre in Almora India. 

Almora is about 400 kilometres northeast of Delhi, near the western border of Nepal, and about 150 kilometres south of the border with China.

In an e-mail, Pande described how providing daycare -- preschool centres, he calls them -- was the key to developing sustainability programs, because it gave women the free time to participate.

There are about 300 villages involved, he wrote. ``Women have to accomplish not only household chores and child rearing, but farm work and the collection of fodder for cattle, wood for heating and cooking, and water for domestic use, from community land.

``All this takes 15 hours a day. The problem is further accentuated by deforestation and land degradation, population increase, and male migration in search of jobs.

``The first interest of the women was child care, freeing them…to go to the forests and look after their crops. (We) encouraged them to form village committees to manage the preschool centres, with a little guidance and teacher training from us.

``The committees also provided a platform to discuss issues like the management of forests and grasslands, access to safe drinking water, sanitation, health and education, and social issues like alcoholism among men. Thus, the child care centres, besides laying a foundation for environmental education in preschool children, became centres of social change, community involvement, and gender sensitization.

``Strongly motivated, these women are most concerned about the quality of life in their villages, and their futures. In other words, about their sustainable community lives.’’

It’s a wonderful story, and I don’t know of a better one to demonstrate how economics, the environment, and human well-being are inseparably intertwined.

NEXT WEEK: The educational tool kit