Recent reforms of curricula, institutional innovations, and actual experience from such change agents could be used to help design curricula that train students in seeing and seizing post-disaster opportunities for change towards sustainability.
But even this unprecedented disaster brings opportunity.
After being sacked as a shadow cabinet minister, he said: "There are no disasters, only opportunities.
"We welcome the chance to showcase Christchurch to the world as a city that is turning disaster into opportunity," says Lianne Dalziel, the mayor of Christchurch.
WHEN the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his shop, Frederick Meyer, a German-born cabinetmaker with links to the Arts and Crafts movement, turned disaster into opportunity.
And ultimately, he was fighting his own powerlessness, as a president castigated for failing to stop the nation's worst-ever oil spill tried to turn disaster into opportunity.
And, given India's abysmal record when it comes to even relatively modest rates of urbanization over the past few decades, the coming urban wave could just as well spell disaster as opportunity.
America, a provider of much military and other aid to Pakistan, is lending helicopters and providing other help, hoping to show ordinary Pakistanis that it is not the hostile bully many of them believe it to be.India, Pakistan's traditional foe, could also turn disaster into opportunity.
It was here disaster became opportunity.
From an evolutionary perspective, our brains may be wired to worry about where dinner will come from, not what disaster or opportunity lurks in the distant future.
My work arena, the textile industry, shifted to eastern Asia, making my job obsolete and signaling, in turn, disaster and opportunity.
