AASHE videos are up!

Didn’t make it to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education conference back in November? Well, they’ve just posted the videos of three of the conference’s keynote speakers. Sadly, Vandana Shive’s audio was flubbed, so there’s no video, but they do have some audio.

Lester Brown started the keynotes off, followed by an enthusiastic and warmly welcomed Van Jones. You may have heard of Jones in the political/environmental circles. He’s working with the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, and is helping the Obama administration design its green collar economy.

I urge you to take an hour to watch Peter Senge’s speech. It’s incredibly eye-opening. He discusses consumerism, the age of machines, education and, of course, sustainability. He’s a systems analyst from MIT, although he says that it’s a technical and cold term.

“Systems is a crappy word. A better way to say it is interdependence. How do we understand the world as an interdependent phenomena?” Senge said.

He blames much our sad state on our system of management, or how we’ve been trained to live our lives. From daycare to school to a job to retirement to death, our lives are completely laid out for us. Combined with a disposable economy - if you don’t like something, buy a new one - and you’ve got the making for an environmental disaster. Just remember, every time we turn on that blender, a little black puff of smoke bursts from a coal factory.

“I don’t know anyone who gets up in the morning, works hard doing whatever they’re doing in order to heat up the planet,” Senge said. “Do you? Yet that’s what we’re doing, because the larger system in which our day to day lives play out are largely invisible to us.”

Watch it. It’ll blow your mind.

Just as a warning, the video quality sucks. The audio track doesn’t even sync with the video in the last 15 minutes. Just listen in the background while you sew your reusable grocery bag from organic hemp.