Education in a Time of Social and Environmental Unravelling

This book argues that the root of education’s failure to address the complex problems of human-induced climate change lies in the stories we tell.

At once too complex, too simplistic, and overly focused on communicating and accumulating scientific facts, the stories we tell about climate change often reduce the problem to singular issues, such as CO2 emissions, while advocating out-of-this-world technofixes. Against this challenge, the term “polycrisis” has emerged to describe the interconnected environmental and social crises we are confronting in the 21st century. The polycrisis encompasses much more than catch-all terms such as climate change and global warming, connecting issues as diverse as biodiversity and habitat loss, water and food scarcity, pollution, and resource depletion, as well as growing economic and social precarity. Through a series of essays and interviews with scholars, scientists, artists, and activists, this volume seeks to articulate existential and educational responses and interventions to the polycrisis. The author presents a terrestrial vision for critical eco-pedagogy, arguing that educational freedom in this time is not unlimited or unbounded, but rather cultivated through an engagement with limits and limitations—most fundamentally, the limits of a planet with limited resources and carrying capacity.

This timely volume will be of interest to researchers and teachers interested in environmental education, as well as posthumanism, decolonizing education, arts-based research methods, and postgrowth theory.