OVERVIEW

During this five week course the students will be developing knowledge, awareness, and the ability to succeed in the practice of positive environmental change. The subject will be taught using examples, discussion, and problem solving with a high importance placed on student participation.

To begin to understand the concept of Sustainability, the students will learn about Global Warming, its causes and effect. We will practice the three spheres of Sustainability; ecological, social and economical to address the issues of Energy, Water, Shelter, Waste, Food, and Transport.

In the classes the students will be called upon to be creative with their use of critical thinking. They will be in situations where they must make decisions and take action that will aid in creating a sustainable ecosystem and society.

Once the foundations of Sustainability are understood, the students will create their own Sustainability Action Plan, an efficient process defining the problem, its needs and issues, and developing resolutions. This model can be used in a variety of situations and reapplied to new problems, therefore creating an efficient way of researching, planning and implementing Sustainable change.

SUSTAINABILITY ACTION PLAN

1. Finding an issue and defining why it needs to be changed
2. Its effect on a global scale; environmentally, socially and economically
3. How this interconnects to your local environment (Mae Sot)
4. Developing a resolution using your creativity and critical thinking
5. Defining your proposed ideas for change
6. Implementing
7. Evaluating and reflecting

FOCUS AREAS

*OUR EARTH the big picture

This seminar will look into the various explanations of why the world we are living in is unsustainably minded, the cause and effect of this and how we can try to change it. Sustainability itself is expressed as meeting present ecological, societal, and economical needs without compromising these factors for future generations. Sustainable living can therefore be described as living within the native carrying capacities defined by these factors.

• Global warming, Climate Change
• Changing our energy habits- Renewable and unrenewable energy
• Coal, Oil, gas, nuclear
• Wind, hydro, thermal, solar, bio fuel
• Clean air, water, land

*SUSTAINABLE LIVING bringing awareness to our daily practices

Followers of sustainable living aim to live their lives in ways that are consistent with sustainability, in natural balance and respectful of humanity's mutual relationship with the Earth's natural ecology and cycles. Sustainable living is an attempt to reduce ones carbon footprint by altering methods of transportation, energy consumption and diet. This seminar we will be looking into the values that society places on us, the rules, the methods, the accessibility, and how we can try to adapt these to fit a sustainable lifestyle.

• Green housing
• Consumer nature
• Plastic and water issues
• Food genetically modified, fertilizer chemicals
• vegetarianism and dietary choice
• Transport

*SUSTAINABLE LIVING in the home.

This seminar is about bringing awareness to the objects and food that we bring into our home, the production, distribution and the ways society disposes of them. Often people choose to believe that if you pay money for a product, it must be guaranteed safe and good for you. However to live sustainably you must understand what you are putting into your body, where it comes from and where it will go to. We must consider bringing the waste into our own hands and dealing with it in our home by composting and minimising our purchases of heavily packaged products.

• Reduce, reuse, recycle, rethink
• Build your own organic garden, composting, separating waste
• Chemicals in cleaning products and beauty products

SEMINAR RESOURCES

CLICK TO VIEW TRAILER	Imagine a home that heats itself, provides its own water, and grows its own food. Imagine that it needs no expensive technology, recycles its own waste, and has its own power source. And now imagine that it can be built anywhere, by anyone, out of the things society throws away. Shot over three years in the USA, India and Mexico, Garbage Warrior tells the epic story of maverick architect Michael Reynolds, his crew of renegade house builders from New Mexico, and their fight to introduce radically different ways of living. A snapshot of contemporary geo-politics and an inspirational tale of triumph over bureaucracy, Garbage Warrior is above all an intimate portrait of an extraordinary individual and his dream of changing the world.
Click to Watch Garbage Warrior Full Length Documentary (87 minutes)
CLICK TO VIEW TRAILER	Set in a dystopian future, Wall-E (2008) shows a possible future and the potential impacts of issues in Sustainable Living where humanity has abandoned earth because it has become covered with trash from products sold by the powerful multi-national Buy N Large corporation. WALL-E is a garbage collecting robot, left to clean up the mess. One day, EVE, a sleek (and dangerous) reconnaissance robot, is sent to Earth to find proof that life is once again sustainable. WALL-E falls in love with EVE and ends up returning to the human's mothership, which is carrying all of the humans who evacuated Earth 700 years earlier. The people of Earth ride around this space resort on hovering chairs which give them a constant feed of TV and video chatting. They drink all of their meals through a straw out and are all so fat that they can barely move. The auto-pilot computer mutinies and tries to prevent the people of Earth from returning by stealing the plant.
CLICK TO VIEW TRAILER Content	Food, Inc.

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