23 October 2021

A Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority bioethics teaching document¹ wrongly implies that humans are currently living sustainably with respect to the planet.

In a unit for Years 9 & 10 students about the value of reasoning, students are invited to write a reflection on the value of understanding opposing points of view on a bioethical topic that interests them. Among the examples supplied is whether to abandon Earth “to live on space stations or other planets when Earth’s resources are exhausted or the planet becomes uninhabitable”. The opposing positions cited are that (a) “the increasing feasibility of abandoning Earth relieves pressure on humans to ensure sustainability of the planet” and (b) “humans nevertheless should continue to act sustainably”.

This framing strongly suggests both that humans are currently acting sustainably, and that whether or not we should continue to do so is a legitimate question for ethical reflection. What’s missing are an acknowledgement of the extreme unsustainability of our current lives, and the devastating impacts already affecting people who have no option of abandoning Earth.

In a recent opinion piece for The Guardian, George Monbiot writes:

“What would we see if we broke down our conceptual barriers [for example between climate, biodiversity, pollution, deforestation, overfishing, and soil loss]? We would see a full-spectrum assault on the living world. Scarcely anywhere is now safe from this sustained assault. A recent scientific paper by Plumper et al. entitled ‘Where Might We Find Ecologically Intact Communities?’ estimates that only 3% of the Earth’s land surface should now be considered ‘ecologically intact’. We are doing too much of almost everything, and the world’s living systems cannot bear it. But our failure to see the whole ensures that we fail to address this crisis systemically and effectively.”

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¹ ‘Levels 9 and 10: Distinguishing between the ethical and non-ethical in complex issues’. Teaching bioethics in the Victorian Curriculum F–10 activities, Foundation to Level 10, VCAA. Previously at https://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/…/Pages/TeachingResources.aspx (no longer available online as of 2 September 2022)