The story so far

Sustainability, in the most prevalent understanding of the word, is a modern fable designed to reassure. In its original, simplest version (Report of the Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), sustainability said that industrial capitalism could keep on making us wealthier and more “developed” as long as we reduced its impact on the Earth’s life support systems. Over time, the story expanded and ramified to encompass our hopes for more equitable and peaceful societies (Holmgren, Reference Holmgren and Caradonna2014). Today, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals proclaim the commitment of the world’s governments to ensuring that everyone is well-fed, healthy, housed, educated, employed and safe, on a planet with a stable climate, clean air and a robust, well-protected biosphere on land and in the rivers and oceans (Agenda, 2015, 2030).

It’s a beguiling narrative of progress, onethat understands progress as a teleological tale that assumes the future is always improving on the past, that believes that some mix of more technology, more rationalism and more economic growth will solve everything that ails, and that requires suffering to continue until the ever-retreating promised land is reached.But it is a narrative that is also rooted in fear and desire. The world’s haves, the middle and upper classes of the Global North and South, fear the loss, not only of material wealth and relative security, but also of the cultural narratives that allow them to see their lives as a success. They desire to hang on to as much as possible, and to change as little as they can get away with. Meanwhile, the poorer three-quarters of the global population fear, justifiably, that life could get even harder than it already is; they desire justice, security, stability, a living wage and a better future for their children. Even if no one quite believes in the promises made in sustainability’s name, it’s a story with broad appeal—one that lets many in the modern North and West sleep easier at night. It is also a story deeply imprinted by the ways of the metacrisis.

Sustainability and environmental education, as usually conceived, often chooses to work within this narrative. As a result education can point to problems that need to be addressed, but only if it can tell a compelling story about why they are problems and what possibilities might exist in response within the current framework and cultural assumptions. That obliges this ‘narrative bound’ form of education to affirm the capacity of existing political, social, economic systems to rise to the challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, mass migration, state failure and so on (Kopnina, Reference Kopnina2020). In the industrial democracies, education often places an emphasis on citizen agency, whether through the electoral process, pressure-group activism, or changes in individual behaviour (Leite, Reference Leite2022). And of course, there is always a lot going on, a wealth of complex issues and initiatives to learn about, exciting advances in science and technology, the latest conferences and campaigns. It’s easy to get caught up in it all, to let oneself believe that somehow all this knowledge and bustle can help make the planet well again.

In this form, sustainability and environmental educations fit comfortably with the prevailing ethos of public education. Schools value busyness. They encourage us simultaneously to accept the status quo and to imagine that, individually, we can surpass it. Learning consists of going over ground already thoroughly cultivated and organized by others, internalizing the notion that, somewhere, people who know what they’re doingare in charge, and if answers to particular questions and problems haven’t been worked out yet, they will be soon. Learners are being prepared to carry the culture forward… including this internalized conviction that in some version or other, whether progressive or conservative, low-tech or high-tech, centralized or communitarian, our familiar ways of inhabiting the world can secure the future.We made mistakes in the past, the message typically goes, but we have learned from them and are moving on. We ‘know’ better now.

In Canada, where the two of us live and work, there is a similar troublesome narrative of progress at play in terms of the state’s relationship with the Indigenous peoples who have inhabited the continent of North America “since time immemorial”. Historically, colonization in Canada was ostensibly about “modernizing” Indigenous communities and employed the progressive narrative as a weapon against Indigenous Nations and a method of placating the settler communities. Today, the descendants of those people bear the weight of the process of colonization that left them impoverished, stigmatized, marginalized, deterritorialized and displaced, and their lands stolen, subdivided and despoiled. Gradually, reluctantly, Canadian society has been compelled to acknowledge this history and legacy; a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) contributed to a shift in the national discourse over the last decade, whereby outright denial and deflection have been replaced by a subtler mix of atonement and affirmation (Gaertner, Reference Gaertner2020; Wotherspoon & Milne, Reference Wotherspoon and Milne2021). The prevailing narrative: we made mistakes as a country in the past, but we have learned from them and are moving on. We ‘are’ better now.

The parallels, in our view, are not coincidental. It’s not just that, in every way, the status quo built by industrialism and colonialism seeks to preserve itself. It’s that the mindset of modernity wants to make everything a story of progress, even in dealing with the disastrous legacies of the past, and to overlook or minimize whatever might disrupt that narrative. This is the guiding myth that haunts sustainability and environmental educations, as it stalks Canadian conversations on reconciliation. In both cases, it functions to obscure the ways we continue to perpetuate harm, not just in the structures and processes we have failed to change, but even in our attempts to make things better (Blühdorn, Reference Blühdorn, Gabrielson, Hall, Meyer and Schlosberg2016; Paquette, Reference Paquette2020).

A change of narrative

All indications suggest that, whatever may be achieved under the current rubric of sustainability, it will fall far short of what is needed in order to preserve a livable planet, both for humans and for the millions of species we share it with. As we have implied so far, and argued at greater length elsewhere, this stems fundamentally from an inadequate story about humans’, in particular those who adopt the progress narrative, relationship with the planet—and, indeed, our relationship with ourselves (Fettes & Blenkinsop, Reference Fettes, Blenkinsop and Jagodzinski2023a, pp. 94 – 98). Until that storyalters, the assumption will be that all we need is behavioural change, encouraged by tax cuts and subsidies, marketing campaigns and public education, intergovernmental agreements and domestic legislation. But none of this gets at the deeper question of how to be human, or perhaps be human differently, in the world.

It was Indigenous writer Thomas King, in his acclaimed 1994 Massey lectures (King, Reference King2003), who drew Canadians’ attention to the myriad ways in which stories shape the possibilities and directions of our lives. This was fairly early on in Canada’s reckoning with its history of colonialism, a generation before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) spelled out in wrenching detail the devastating impact and legacy of residential schools. Yet King was prescient in asserting the fundamental differences between a cosmology rooted in “a series of hierarchies,” as in the creation story of Genesis, and Indigenous cosmologies founded on “a series of co-operations… that celebrate equality and balance” (King, Reference King2003, pp. 23 – 24). The last thirty years have simply confirmed the deep resistance in Canadian politics and society to adopting the latter worldview—one where both Indigenous nationsFootnote ¹ and the more-than-human world are viewed as participants of equal dignity, worth and significance in shaping Canada’s present and future.

This, in a nutshell, is the challenge we see confronting education. The story of sustainability needs to change, if the term is ever to be adequate to its ambitions. In this article, we look to the same place for guidance—to the work ofIndigenous theorists and educators who can bring a different cosmology to bear on thinking about the current crisis. These are people committed to renewing and reinterpreting cultural teachings distilled from thousands of years of living in reciprocity and balance with particular landscapes, intricate and dynamic webs of relationship that embody and exemplify the workings of the Earth as a whole. Indigenous thought and scholarship are, of course, as situated and fallible as other human attempts at understanding, but they can help their readers step outside the usual foundational assumptions of modernity and push against the causal limits of the metacrisis. We are grateful for the opportunity,as two white male educators committed to exploring the transformative and emancipatory potential of land-based education, to learn from our Indigenous colleagues and endeavour to bring their thinking to bear on the knotty entangled problem of eco-social – cultural change (Fettes & Blenkinsop, Reference Fettes, Blenkinsop and Jagodzinski2023a). The journey is very nascent at this point but the encounters have led us to recognize that this is about being willing to change education all the way down if needed. And that is exciting, scary and overwhelming at the same time.

Our focus will be on the work of two Indigenous scholars from the northern part of North America: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Nishnaabeg, from the northern shores of Lake Ontario) and E. Richard Atleo, traditionally known as Umeek (Nuu-chah-nulth, from the Pacific coast of Vancouver Island). Simpson is a noted author of both fiction and non-fiction, as well as a musician and educator; Atleo is a hereditary chief who has written two well-regarded books on the traditional cosmology and spiritual and practical philosophy of his people. Both address a vast range of complex issues in their work, but they have also taken pains to distill some core guiding principles that lend themselves to discussion in a short paper such as this one.

In Atleo’s earlier, foundational contribution, Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview (Reference Atleo2004), he showed how the principle that “everything is one” shapes many aspects of traditional Nuu-chah-nulth culture. In this paper we are primarily concerned with his subsequent book, Principles of Tsawalk, which applies that philosophy to think about today’s “global crisis” (Atleo, Reference Atleo2011), distilling a small number of key “constitutional principles” embedded in Nuu-chah-nulth traditional stories and contemporary life. Summarizing them, Atleo writes: “The first three are recognition, consent and continuity, and the fourth is iis?alk’ [pronounced ee-sok], a form of sacred respect” (Atleo, Reference Atleo2011, p. 159). He goes on:

In her 2017 book, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, Simpson sets out a wide-ranging argument for grounding Indigenous politics and culture in living relationships with the land—in her case, traditional Nishnaabeg territory north of Lake Ontario. We have drawn primarily on this work for the citations below; however, the direct inspiration for this paper was Simpson’s 2020 Kreisel Lecture at the Canadian Literature Centre, University of Alberta, “A Short History of the Blockade.” The title of the talk alludesto the ongoing efforts of the Wet’suwet’en, a people of northen British Columbia, to prevent a gas pipeline from being built across their territory, and the solidarity actions taken by Indigenous nations across Canada in the winter of 2020. But Simpson’s aim was larger in scope, drawing on Nishnaabeg traditional stories and contemporary life to encourage her listeners to “think through together” what kinds of actions and commitments can help bring into being “a world built upon a different set of relationships and ethics” (Simpson, Reference Simpson2020, p. 56). This, she said, is “living as a creative act. Self-determination, consent, kindness and freedom practiced daily in all our relations” (Simpson, Reference Simpson2020, p. 11).

Living well with all our relations: perhaps we could adopt that as an alternative working definition of sustainabilty and see where it leads us. And take to heart, as well, Atleo’s warning that this is not a feel-good philosophy, but one requiring sustained effort and discipline. Since our topic here is education, this seems promising. As in the Bildung tradition of northern Europe, we may find ourselves called not simply to pay attention to the world we inhabit, but to shape ourselves to that world’s calling: sustainability not just as a negative value (do not take too much, do not destroy what cannot be renewed), but as an ethical and aesthetic imperative guiding us to become the best version of ourselves, as enacted nodes in a living web of relation and responsibility. In our own journeys we have found this process to be rich and worthwhile not only for ourselves as educators but also as allies and activists.

Since space precludes an examination of all the principles listed by Atleo and Simpson, we will focus on just three, chosen in part to highlight the contrast with notions of sustainability reflected in the myth of progress. These are self-determination, consent and sacred respect. We will begin by locating each principle in Indigenous cultural context, then apply it to thinking about the practice(s) of environmental education in the conditions of contemporary schooling and society.

Self-determination

In Simpson’s work, the principle of self-determination is closely akin to Atleo’s principle of recognition. In her earlier work, As We Have Always Done (Simpson, Reference Simpson2017), she introduces the key idea:

Just as children were viewed as self-determining beings, “expected to figure out their gifts and their responsibilities through ceremony and reflection and self-actualization,” so were all of the other beings that shared the land. Each individual would find their own path to maturity in a way appropriate to their kind (whether human or deer or maple tree), in the context of broader nation-to-nation relationships, what in Western terms might be termed an ecosystem:

In this understanding, all beings have agency; all are engaged in self-determination; and everything around us is the outcome of that creative process. “Nishnaabeg society,” Simpson tells us, “is a society of makers, rather than a society of consumers. This is the foundation of our self-determination and freedom—producing everything we need in our families within grounded normativity within a network of caring and sharing” (Simpson, Reference Simpson2017, p. 80). This doesn’t make humans special—it aligns them with what everything around them is doing. “We didn’t just control our means of production, we lived embedded in a network of humans and nonhumans that were made up of only producers” (p. 80). Simpson’s emphasis on embeddedness is important to note: self-determination is not what individuals do independently of one another, it can only be accomplished in relation. Similarly, families are self-determining in a network of families, communities in a network of communities, nations in a network of nations. The process of self-determination doesn’t invoke the assumed self of western ontology; it is present at all levels of living self-organization,at myriad ‘selfing’ gradations between the individual being and the land that nurtures it.

More than four thousand kilometres to the west, Atleo notes a similar understanding among his own people, as well as among the peoples of the Peruvian Amazon five thousand kilometres to the south. “Both experience plants and animals to have intelligence. Both consider plants and animals to be like people” (Atleo, Reference Atleo2011, p. 83). The Nuu-chah-nulth term for such beings—humans, plants and animals alike— is quu?as [koo-us]; they are understood to have arisen from a common root, and thus to be entitled to equal recognition and respect.Relationships among quu?asare to be developed and tended in ways analogous to respectful and caring relationships among the members of a human community:

There is a radical implication, line of flight, here: sustainability education is just as much about the relationships between all the human participants—teachers and learners alike—as it is about the ecological networks of relationship in which humans are embedded. If we cannot practice self-determination amongst ourselves, with all the effort that implies (balance and harmony as “hard won” and needing constant attention and care), then we will likely lack the skills and commitment to practice it with our more-than-human kin. This implies a kind of schooling fundamentally different from that experienced by Simpson (and so many others):

We are being offered a glimpse here into how most current forms of schooling may be teaching unsustainability and alienation right from the moment a child walks in through the door even in classrooms where thoughtful and skilled teachers are trying to do the opposite. And this means, among other things, that there is a clear impoverishment of the range of potential interests (including anything one might be drawn to beyond the posited curriculum), potential teachers (including any and all beings of our larger more-than-human communities) and potential subjects (including self as subject and possibility) that might be explored in schools. Now while these topicsare beyond our scope here we have addressed them in other recent work (Fettes & Blenkinsop, Reference Fettes, Blenkinsop and Jagodzinski2023a; Reference Fettes, Blenkinsop, Judson and Dougherty2023b). More positively, though, one can see, in fact we have seen, how shifts in classroom pedagogy, in diversifying content and outcomes, in actively seeking to not employ an extractive epistemology, in reconsidering our sense of self-determination,and in expanding the breadth of who is considered teacher establishesmore robust conditions for exploring a vast range of topics as aspects of the quest for balance, harmony and possibility among self-determining beings. Learners bring insight to such explorations from their own experiencesof this quest, and its various degrees of success, struggle and failure,in their lives inside and beyond the classroom; conversely, their growing understanding of the world in this light enriches classroom relationships and the experiences of others. Nothing in the curriculum would be understood on a purely performative level, as simply “giving the teacher what they ask for”; all learning becomes integrated with daily practices of respectful co-existence, embodied, emotional and intellectual at the same time.

Note, too, that “the classroom” here should be understood as denoting a much larger pedagogical sphere than the term usually implies. To stay within the confines of school buildings is to only encounter the intelligences of human teachers and one’s peers, depriving learners of the benefit of the intelligences that exist in the ecosystem as a whole.Self-determination could lead us to takeseriously the concept of nature as co-teacher (Blenkinsop & Beeman, Reference Blenkinsop and Beeman2010; Jickling et al, Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Sitka-Sage and Timmerman2018), thereby undoing some of the anthropocentrism and human elitism that exists in much of mainstream education. To think of each nation of beings as having their own knowings, understandings and ways of teaching is to make knowledge, from the human perspective, much more diffuse, incomplete, ever-expandable, intraconnected and shared—which has, in itself, deep implications for how we think of sustainabilityand environmental educations today.

Accepting their role as co-teachers means that human teachers would have to release some of the control they tend to exert not only with respect to outcome but also in relation to expertise – an intriguing proposition for professors like us. In the interaction of free self-determining beings, outcomes can’t be pre-set, unexpected encounters/thoughts/imaginings must be given space and humans can’t be positioned as all-knowing or the only knowers. In order to help learners successfully navigate this complex relational terrain, discovering more about their own gifts, capacities and challenges in the process, the human teacher would also function as a kind of identity worker (Blenkinsop & Kuchta, Reference Blenkinsop and Kuchta2024)—a holder of space for identities to be explored and grown through encounters with diverse others, human and more-than human.

Consent

In As We Have Always Done, Simpson shares a traditional Nishnaabeg story titled “Our Relationship with the Hoof Nation”. It tells of a time when all of the hoofed animals—deer, moose, caribou—have disappeared from Nishnaabeg territory, resulting not only in starvation for the people but general disruption: “everything starts to go in the wrong direction.” Eventually some representatives of the Hoof ClanFootnote ² agree to speak with “a delegation of diplomats, spiritual people and mediators,” and after “several long days of listening, of acknowledging, of discussing, and of negotiating,” an agreement is reached that includes rituals to be performed when a member of the Hoof Clan is killed, and a commitment “to share land without interfering with other nations” (Simpson, Reference Simpson2017, pp. 60 – 61). Simpson comments:

Consent, therefore, is an ecological principle in Nishnaabeg thought, governing not only interpersonal relations but coexistence in general. While the story condenses the process of negotiation into a few days, this can be read as a metonym for many generations of interaction between the Nishnaabeg and the Hoof Nation—interactions that are not only material but imaginative and spiritual, as people seek to humbly learn what they can from their elder kin. Consent is not so much an act as a process that relies on the patient deepening of relationship over time, and alertness to everything that can weaken, damage or sever that relationship.

As important as consent is its opposite: the right of refusal. In the story, it’s the refusal of the Hoof Nation that awakens the Nishnaabeg to the need to mend the relationship. In the history of Crown-Indigenous relations in Canada, it has often been the refusal of Indigenous nations to accept injustice that has brought about lasting change (Simpson, Reference Simpson2017, p. 34). Refusal offers a different way of understanding the current mass extinction crisis, one that acknowledges more-than-human agency: nation after nation of other beings actively refusing to be part of the instrumentalizing, destructive, hierarchical world of global capitalism. And at the close in,particular situatedness, of the classroom this means making different choices with regard to “designed” encounters with the natural world and the expectations learners and teachers might bring with them as they engage with and encounter the places and beings that make up their more-than-human community.

To explain the concept of consent in the context of Nuu-chah-nulth culture, Atleo cites the common expression “q ^w aasasaiš”, which he variously glosses as “that’s just his way,” “that’s just the way she is,” or more generally, as an acknowledgement of the legitimate expressive uniqueness of self-organizing beings (Atleo, Reference Atleo2011, pp. 93 – 95). In a governance context, he says,

This principle has special relevance for the exercise of power. Atleo shares a traditional Nuu-cah-nulth story in which the great spirit-being Son of Mucus is miraculously born in a mussel shell and becomes the son of the local chief, in order to save the community’s children from the depredations of the evil giant Pitch Woman. Although Son of Mucus “had the power to force himself into any situation… if he had chosen that route he would have violated an important principle of Nuu-chah-nulth life—the principle of consent” (Atleo, Reference Atleo2011, p. 99). Instead,

Here, as with Simpson, we see that consent is predicated on relationship. It seems significant, too, that Son of Mucus enters the community as a helpless newborn. Throughout Tsawalk and Principles of Tsawalk, Atleo emphasizes the importance of humility on the path towards understanding and right relations. Little is to be gained from a relationship that one enters in a spirit of pride and self-sufficiency. And here, perhaps, we approach the core challenge of education: to cultivate knowledge and skills without simply reinforcing the image of human mastery over the natural world. The entire modern era has been shaped by imperatives of dominion, extraction and exploitation—all representing the polar opposite of consent. Here, for example, is Simpson on extraction:

The extractivist mindset is rampant, for instance, in discussions of how technology might help us “solve” the climate crisis. In subtler forms, it permeates a great deal of our thinking about how human wellbeing can be assured on a finite planet. Yet neither good intentions nor good science are sufficient to establish consent. Thus, when consent is brought into the centre of education, it calls into question all kinds of things we take for granted. Do farmers work with the consent of soil and water, insects and wildlife? Do educatorswork with the consent of rocks and ants, watersheds and habitats they encounter alongside their learners everyday? Do cities work with the consent of the land they occupy? And since the answers to these questions will usually be negative, we are called to ask how things could be different. In part, this entails listening to and supporting Indigenous and other local communities with a deep knowledge of the land developed over generations. In part, it also calls for schooling grounded in place-based inquiry, where students and teachers alike work with community knowledge holders and the local nations, hoofed, winged and otherwise to build the kind of relationships that allow for meaningful consent.

Environmental educators, then, need to ask: am I working with the consent of the place and the beings who live here? Are learners coming to know these myriad others as they would have themselves be known? Such questions disrupt the very epistemology upon which education often rests—for example, the assumption that knowledge is at the very least ethically neutral, no matter how it is gathered, or that knowledge is the purview of humans alone (more precisely, expert humans). The principle of consent challenges the human educator to pay close attention to the process of learning rather than simply prioritizing the outcome, and to provide space and time for quieter voices and slower ways of knowing to play their part. Hearing and accepting refusal is a crucial aspect of learning in this context. So might be witnessing the consequences when consent is not sought or refusal is not respected—such instances will not be hard to come by, whether locally, regionally, nationally, or on a global scale. As with self-determination, learners can be encouraged and guided to make connections between such events and their own experiences of consent and refusal.

Sacred respect

At a number of points in Tsawalkand Principles of Tsawalk, Atleo refers to the principle of iis?alk’. Although he sometimes glosses it as “sacred respect for all life forms,” he also describes it as “a potential principle of life” that eludes fixed definition or translation and is a matter of practice more than belief (Atleo, Reference Atleo2011, pp. 117 – 8). Elsewhere, he connects it to the idea “that creation has a common origin” (Atleo, Reference Atleo2011, p. 72), and “that the self is part of a greater whole and that this means that itmust be considered a part of the self of each plant, animal and life form within the natural environment” (Atleo, Reference Atleo2011, p. 160). With a modest interpretative leap, we might say that to practice iis?alk’ is to witness and respond to others – a living practice of sacred respect – both as self-determining beings embarked on their own developmental journeys, and as kin that we have responsibility towards and who have something to teach us about who and what we are and what we might become as individuals and communities. It is important here to recognize the difference between this idea of becoming in relation vs the narrative of progress which assumes individuality but also some state of achievable perfection that is completely absent in sacred respect.

The second part of this is of crucial importance. Atleo notes how prone humans are to “distortion of self,” “fancying [themselves] greater than others of [their] kind” (Atleo, Reference Atleo2011, p. 119) and “to prefer the ‘quick fix’” (Atleo, Reference Atleo2011, p. 164). In his view, our current global crisis has its origins in these common human failings:

Against this, iis?alk’reminds us that balance, wellness and wisdom are always to be found beyond the boundaries of the merely human. “The journey to attain integrity of being is a developmental process, a maturational process and a process of discovering the integrative nature of creation” (Atleo, Reference Atleo2011, p. 119). By gaining a proper perspective on ourselves, through relationships of sacred respect with other beings, we are “potentially able to live together in a mutually sustainable way without violating personal boundaries”:

In Simpson’s work, similar themes appear in her frequent references to the Nishnaabeg word Aki. Sometimes she translates this simply as “land,” but it refers to much more than just a physical place. “Aki includes all aspects of creation: landforms, elements, plants, animals, spirits, sounds, thoughts, feelings and energies and all of the emergent systems, ecologies and networks that connect these elements” (Simpson, Reference Simpson2017, p. 161). As “the foundation of Nishnaabeg thought” (p. 215), Aki is central to a vision of a sustainable Nishnaabeg future:

Educationally, then, Aki is “both context and process”—learning happens within the network of relationships that constitute Aki, and through participating in those relationships. This is “an intimate, unfolding process of relationship with the spiritual world,” unfolding on the basis of consent and deep engagement—embodied, intellectual and emotional.

To me, this is what coming into wisdom within a Michi SaagiigNishnaabeg epistemology looks like. It takes place in the context of family, community and relation. It lacks overt coercion and authority, values so normalized within mainstream, Western pedagogy that they are rarely ever critiqued. The process of coming to know is learner led and profoundly spiritual in nature. Coming to know is the pursuit of whole-body intelligence practiced in the context of freedom and when realized collectively, it generates generations of loving, creative, innovative, self-determining, interdependent and self-regulating community-minded individuals. It creates communities of individuals with the capacity to uphold and move forward our political practices and systems of governance. (Simpson, Reference Simpson2017, p. 151)

Both Atleo and Simpson, then, view engagement with the land’s intricate web of living relations in a spirit of sacred respect as essential for the building of sustainable cultures. Simpson’s focus is on her own nation and its present and future wellbeing, while in Principles of TsawalkAtleo is concerned with the future of the planet as a whole, but they point in similar directions. Sustainability, as they conceive of it, requires an abandonment of key tenets of the modern Western worldview, above all the idea that humans are wise enough on their own to make sensible decisions about how to co-exist with other beings. They are clear that we are not—not in the aggregate and not over the long term. That kind of wisdom can only be gained through sustained practices of sacred respect and relationship with the more-than-human, begun when we are young children and lasting throughout our lives and supported by the ways we organize and educate ourselves as cultures and societies. Remember though that this is also not a progress-based narrative but a constant and ongoing living negotiation across the eco-system. Open eco-systems that are constantly encountering the new, the unexpected, and the very old at the same time.

Approached in this light, education may yet have a fundamental role to play in this project of eco-social – cultural change. In contrast to the,often disempowering,ways in which teachers are positioned in our current industrial system of schooling—first and foremost, as managers of classroom order and deliverers of an approved curriculum—this vision suggests that they need to tuneinto an always and already present web of more-than-human connections, interdependencies, entanglements and engaged responsibilities, so as to be able to teach with and in response to this larger living context. The kind of change we are pointing to here necessarily requires education at its heart. But not just any education. One that has begun to “do the work” and/or is re/membering ancient forms such that the assumptions of progress, anthropocentrism, species elitism, individualism and instrumental resourcism or extractivism and troubled or avoided altogether. This will take time—time to undo colonial assumptions of human superiority and privilege, time to build new skills of awareness and relationship, time to allow other voices and ways of knowing to take the lead, time to re-create themselves as teacher and human. Fortunately, our experience as both researchers and educators suggests that this process can be undertaken even as educatorshold space for their learners to do the same. Complete knowledge and perfect wisdom are not expected or required. They are in fact indicators of a hubris that has missed the meaning of sacred respect. But still there are many ways of doing this work—as critical educator, community educator, change educator, care/coeur educator (Fettes & Blenkinsop, Reference Fettes, Blenkinsop and Jagodzinski2023a; Reference Fettes, Blenkinsop, Judson and Dougherty2023b). Rather than sustaining the assumptions of the modern fable and narrative of progress, education of this kind will be weaving a new story—that of a questfor mutually beneficial flourishing with all our Earthly kin.

Education for eco-social – cultural change

Worldviews—cosmologies—are tenacious things. To our eyes, contemporary Western culture seems desperate to cling to its old stories; for some groups within Western societies, the reigning desire is even to revert to prior, starker versions of those stories, shorn of recent complications. This is only to be expected in a time of stress, uncertainty, crisis. Compared to such reductive moves, sustainability in its current form may well appear like progress, a story worthy of our allegiance, offering a way through the current crisis to a more hopeful future.

As we have sought to illustrate in this article, this appeal is based on an illusion. Sustainability in this sense is just a variation on the underlying myth of Western modernity that positions humans as uniquely knowing against the backdrop of a non-sentient nature devoid of intrinsic meaning, purpose, or worth (Kopnina, Reference Kopnina2020; Stein et al., Reference Stein, Andreotti, Suša, Ahenakew, Čajková, Pedersen and talt2023). What is needed are fundamentally different stories, potentially of the kinds shared by Indigenous culturessuch as we have engaged with here, and likely others around the world. We can recognize such stories by how they position humans as co-learners, co-knowers, not the lords of creation but joyful participants within it. Because such storiesareepistemological,ontological, axiological and developmental—shifting our understanding of what knowledge is, what humans are, how they grow into maturity and what is ethically important—they carry implications for every aspect of education.

By the same token, of course, these stories cannot be readily transferred to schools and classrooms as they currently exist. Perhaps widespread systemic change will only become possible at a more advanced stage of eco-social crisis. Yet even now, in ways both large and small, these stories could begin to influence how we think about and practice education—not just “sustainability” and “environmental” education as one curricular focus among many, but education for sustainable cultures. We have written elsewhere about the need to reimagine schools so that they might foster minds and imaginations more adapted to the complex reciprocities of the living world (Fettes & Blenkinsop, Reference Fettes, Blenkinsop and Jagodzinski2023a; Reference Fettes, Blenkinsop, Judson and Dougherty2023b). There are countless ways to step into this work; a shared cosmology, a foundational story of what is at stake and why, can help inspire and guide such efforts.

The present crisis, Atleo suggests, represents one worldview coming to the end of its natural lifespan, while its successor(s) must necessarily “begin with darkness and move towards light” (Atleo, Reference Atleo2011, p. 169). Eventually, what can emerge is “the realization that what is beyond the apparent confusion and fragmentation of a physical universe is a unified diversity of being.” Such a transition “does not happen without challenge, struggle, hard work and passion, all of which appear to be necessary to healthy growth and development at all levels—personal, familial, communal, national, and global” (Atleo, Reference Atleo2011, p. 169). A worthy vision, surely, of what education, appropriatelyreconceived, could aspire to become.