The SNJ columnist Karen Eberhardt-Shelton was born in California but grew up in England.

She now lives in Stroud and is currently working on an education project called Learn, Think, Act and is hoping to develop an eco-community land trust.

Her thought-provoking columns will focus on how we all have to take responsibility for our actions and for our planet.

A tantalising challenge

STUDENTS, here’s one for you.

Of course the education system in its current form wouldn’t dare go down this unmapped path, so you’d have to set your curiosity in gear and let rip on what it could be like if the freedom to explore and tune in to the power of creative imagination was on offer.

When my Awesome Earth Education project is finally set free to extend a full menu of provocative and mind-opening challenges, students would be able to pounce on an extensive variety of local and global realities that are testing most domains of human behaviour and continuance – not to mention their impacts on every category of life on Earth – and be amazed by what they were able to come up with.

Here’s a sample to encourage mindful inventiveness.

Look around you; what’s going ahead reasonably well versus what’s undermining the pillars of society?

What would you change if you could?

Do your surroundings blend with what we keep hearing about the future in terms of extinction, climate change, overpopulation, pollution, consumerism, deforestation.

Take pluses and minuses into account, and design a village where everyone assesses what’s working, what isn’t, and what parts of the current model might be compatible with the needs and demands of the future.

Redesign the functioning of the village to fit with what’s most appropriate in terms of the surrounding ecosystem, the availability of necessary resources, the visible impact of homes and buildings, the needs of other species, local productivity, etc.

Is there too much open pastureland, too few trees, no snakes or frogs, never the hoot of an owl to be heard, muddy streams, chemical-fed crops?

“Fix” the village to fit with nature as much as possible and convince residents of the logic and necessity of all this if they and their offspring are to survive in times to come.

Throw in a major catastrophe or two.

A storm with winds over 200mph, an earthquake that knocks the socks off all the local cows, demolishes the village church and the dear old cosy pub.

Imagine an entire summer without a single drop of rain. A monstrous terrorist attack stops all fuel supplies from coming through; petrol stations dry up, cookers snore, there’s no heat or hot water (unless you have an independent solar system), sheep’s tongues are hanging out. . .

Imagine the worst and come up with alternatives.

If the overall system, upon which we’re nearly 100 per cent dependent, were to collapse or fall apart, what could be done to create resilience, self-sufficiency, an escape from the greedy economic web?

The current generation running the show probably won’t need a backup plan for survival, but as the global quantity of humans continuously rises, the young people of today and their down-the-line descendants are likely to land on the conveyor belt of disaster and wring their hands in despair when nothing comes to save them.

You never know what lurks round the bend, so creating a blueprint for an environmentally sensible home turf intimately connected to the weave of its surroundings couldn’t go wrong.

Think about it, students.

A challenge with pudding on top.