Education for Sustainable Contraction as Appropriate Response to Global Heating

Abstract

Human-induced climate change is happening, opinions differing as to what window of opportunity remains to mitigate its direst effects. Responses to the climate change threat are characterized by denial and cognitive dissonance, the cultural pathology extending to those situated on the reform to transformation spectrum, including proponents of education for sustainable development. The climate crisis brings into question the usefulness and appropriateness of a lexicon of development. An alternative to sustainable development – sustainable contraction – is proposed. Nine propositions are nailed to the laboratory door to mark out what an education for sustainable contraction would entail. They call for an educational approach that: confronts denial by engendering disequilibrium in learning spaces; addresses despair, pain, grief and loss; combats consumerism and offers alternative conceptions of the “good life”; endows learning with a deep ecological paradigm; embraces intimacy and cultivates the poetic; folds marginalized “educations” such as anti-discriminatory, peace and media literacy education into sustainability learning; addresses emergency and disaster risk reduction learning; localizes and brings “denizenship” to prevailing “citizenship” discourse and practice; discards mechanistic thinking in favor of holistic and systemic ways of seeing, and acting in, the world. These propositions, it is suggested, constitute an appropriate agenda – that STEM is well-placed to help effect – for addressing the profound crisis in human ethics, values and worldview laid bare by potentially runaway climate change.