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Teaching sustainability invariably involves teaching about energy – its use, its sources, its environmental impacts, and its social implications. This paper explores how one renewable energy alternative – biogas – is adapted and applied across scale and culture. Biogas is made by capturing the methane released during anaerobic digestion of organic matter such as manure, sewage, and food waste. In Nepal, biogas is a household scale technology used to create a cooking fuel that replaces firewood and improves both environmental and human health. In the United States, biogas is used as part of large-scale waste management systems for livestock, wastewater treatment, and landfills to create electricity for on-site use and for sale into electric grids. In Sweden, biogas is used as part of a regional effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel usage by using locally generated biogas for district heating, electricity, and vehicular fuel. By comparing these three cases, we gain insight into how one technology is adapted across diverse needs and from household to regional scales in the pursuit of more sustainable energy practices. Such an exercise can be an asset in the classroom to teach students about the importance and relevance of place-based solutions that address diverse cultural and economic realities.
Introduction
There is a growing global awareness that sustainability -- how to live gently on this earth
such that all beings can live a full life with dignity without robbing contemporary or future others
of their ability to do the same -- is a critical practice that needs to be adopted globally and
enacted fairly. To discuss sustainability in the classroom is to ask students to critically reflect on
their own lives and places as embedded in a wider global network of social and environmental
systems. A recurring theme in sustainability discussions is energy; teaching sustainability
inevitably means teaching about energy. The finite fossil fuel energies that power modern life
and are used “behind the scenes” to produce the food and products we consume emit high levels
of carbon dioxide making a society dependent upon them unsustainable. Teaching sustainability
is more than teaching energy choices and their social impacts, it is also a method to improve
living conditions, alleviate poverty, and move towards more environmentally and socially just
communities. Teaching sustainability involves teaching alternative ways to structure society that
may vary by place, culture, and scale -- there is no one global solution.
Rather than asking how a community becomes sustainable, we can instead choose a
method that is deemed “more sustainable” than current alternatives and explore how that one
method is adapted across scale and cultural contexts in the pursuit of sustainability. Biogas
capture and use is one technology capable of moving societies in the “more sustainable”
direction. Biogas is made by capturing methane from anaerobic digestion. It has proven to be
versatile in that it has been successfully adopted at a variety of scales, in both rural and urban
areas, and in a variety of cultural contexts in both the Global North and Global South. In my
own extensive qualitative fieldwork in Nepal, I have researched the use of biogas as well as its
promotion and the public perceptions surrounding biogas and sustainable development. When I
incorporate discussion of sustainable development and renewable energy in the college
classroom using biogas in Nepal as my example, students often inquire about the use and status
of biogas in the United States. Based on such student inquiries, I shifted from teaching “this is
how one place is working towards sustainability” and instead focus on “this is how one
sustainable alternative technology is used and adapted in different places from Global North
(developed countries) to Global South (developing countries).” In this article, I examine how
biogas has been implemented as a renewable energy alternative in three separate contexts: Nepal,
the United States, and Sweden. Following some summary remarks and commentary, the article
concludes with a discussion of what we can learn from such comparisons and how such concepts
can be incorporated into college classroom learning.
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