Education for Sustainable Consumption through Mindfulness (PERL Toolkit 9)

Consumption is one of the greatest challenges for sustainable development. However, many of our daily consumer activities are routines and habits. Questioning these and establishing alternatives requires that we interrupt our automatic patterns and habits and explore what we want, what is good for us and how we want to deal with others and the surrounding environment. Opening up opportunities to develop new attitudes and behaviours in this regard is a major challenge for educators working to promote sustainable consumption and responsible lifestyles. The practice of mindfulness can be a helpful approach to partially meet this challenge. This toolkit derives from the three-year research project BiNKA (www.mindfulness-and-consumption.de) that investigated to what extent practices and philosophy of mindfulness may contribute to education for sustainable consumption. The toolkit offers a variety of ideas and suggestions for teachers, trainers and other pedagogical professionals who, together with those they teach or train, want to experience and try out mindfulness exercises related to sustainable consumption.