Professor Martin Ashley
I retired from full-time academic work in 2013 and have finally decided that it’s no longer appropriate to maintain the website of a working academic. I do still enjoy writing, so I have decided that the occasional “essay” is probably the best way to keep my interest in philosophy (and brain) active, so I’ve kept my website going for the time being. My career has been, to say the least, eclectic. Looking back over fifty years of teaching in schools and universities, researching, publishing as well working in broadcasting, holding church organist appointments and volunteering in heritage rail, I have had time to evaluate what I might have done if I had focussed on but one thing. Without a doubt, it would be environmental education. Why? Because our planet and its future inhabitants are in real trouble and that, right now, is what matters more than anything else.
We, and the immediate future generations particularly, are in such trouble because of overshoot.
Beginning with the industrial revolution, we have been living ever more beyond our ecological means and have finally reached the point of bankruptcy. Click here for an introduction to overshoot which will take you through mitigation (the chance we had to do something) then resilience building (where we are now) and finally to anguish (where scientific consensus suggests the generations of the immediate future will be).
When I began work on my PhD in 1994, I was a geography teacher working in environmental education. In those days “sustainability” was a relatively new word whilst people (such as myself) who practised environmental education were somewhat on the margins of mainstream schooling. If our work was reported at all, it could be portrayed (albeit benignly) as the work of the wearers of woolly jumpers or “bunny huggers”.
On the day I wrote these words in August 2026, almost the entire lunchtime news was taken up with reports of catastrophic wildfires across Canada and Europe, severe drought across almost the whole of England and the evacuation of over a million Chinese citizens as the “massive” Typhoon Dolphin arrived. Climate change has become mainstream and features constantly in radio programmes such as Any Questions. A search on YouTube will fill the screen with endless analyses of and warnings about our now dire predicament.
Is there anything useful I can now add to this? I believe so.
An original contribution to knowledge. Value as a Reason for Action in Environmental Education was the title of my 1998 PhD thesis.
Almost thirty years later I have come to believe that we are ecologically bankrupt because we have never valued the natural world sufficiently. It is time to revisit the topic ask new questions and seek new insights.
A radical position on The value of energy. Neither have we ever nor do we value energy sufficiently. It may be swimming against a strong tide to claim so but, owing to catastrophic ignorance of the topic and a near universal refusal to recognise the fact, we are not paying too much for our energy, we have been and are paying far too little. I first made this claim during the 1990s. My present studies of overshoot lead me to believe I may have been right, so where next?
So is it all doom and gloom?
1.) Climate change denial in any form is clearly unadulterated stupidity but the alternative right wing response of fatalism is equally wrong. Scientific papers have long held caveats of "it's not too late", though these are increasingly looking ritualistic rather than realistic. Nevertheless, we owe it to future generations to continue doing all that we can.
2.) Predicting the future is at the best a perilous occupation! Read more.
3.) We have to live for the present and maintain our sanity, so I have found room on this site for my other interests: Early Music and Male Voices.
Heritage Rail.