Ecological awareness is a global priority, and Green School initiatives seek to embed environmental education in everyday school practice. This study examines how the “Green School” is discursively constructed by interpreting visual materials from Indonesian schools designated as Adiwiyata (Green) Schools. Guided by social semiotic theory, we conducted a phenomenological interpretative analysis. The analytical framework follows three metafunctions: Ideational, interpersonal, and textual. We analysed images, icons, and posters associated with two recurring activity domains: (1) greening the school environment and (2) promoting environmentally friendly behaviour. The findings indicate that Adiwiyata discourse foregrounds ecological awareness, normalises pro-environmental practices, and positions students and teachers as key agents of environmental preservation.

This paper tells the story of the Kensington Food Forest, an urban ecological oasis where food production, forest growth, and grassroots activism intersect. Set within the Kensington Public Housing estates on Wurundjeri Country in Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria (Australia), it stands as a site of local regeneration against and beyond industrialised food and waste systems. Conducted with the Kensington Circular Economy Precinct Community Group, this research foregrounds the often-overlooked impact of grassroots initiatives within circular transitions by co-creating indicators that capture the ecological, social, and pedagogical values these spaces (re)generate. Together, the community and researchers position regenerative circularity not as a technological fix, but as an embodied, relational, and pedagogical praxis. By tracing the social-material flows and knowledge generation within this landscape, we show how communities learn with place, each other, and more-than-human worlds, revealing how Food Forest Pedagogies of Praxis can make circularity truly regenerative through practices of emancipation.

Through this post-qualitative inquiry, I explore what kinds of literacies do learners in an elementary outdoor program practice, and how are they shaped by the more-than-human world? I situate my research within the context of a socially and ecologically precarious world, from a posthuman theoretical perspective in conversation with Indigenous literacies, to build an argument for an embodied, sensory, multimodal, emergent, relational, and more-than-human conception of literacy. The study focuses on the experiences and literacy practices of fifteen elementary aged children in a multi-grade, forest school program in southern British Columbia, Canada. Using photographs and field notes, this study interrogates logocentric literacies and employs literacy as an event, a process-based concept with meaning-making and sense-making occurring relationally, often in surprising ways that defy prior predictions, and therefore contain multiple possibilities. Meaning and sense-making interact to create powerful literacy experiences that transcend language.

We designed and implemented a clay art-making workshop with teacher candidates called Change with the Earth in Mind, focused on listening to the Earth. Drawing on Bentz’s (Bentz, J. (2020). Learning about climate change in, with and through art. Climatic Change, 162(3), 1595-1612). Framework, we sought to engage teacher candidates in, with, and through art that evokes climate change themes. Leveraging this art education experience as a research study utilising a/r/tography and narrative inquiry, we drew meaning from our observations of the workshops and the resulting art pieces. Here we feature composite narrative reflections on how the teacher candidates were preparing and working the clay, leaving traces, creating clay leftovers, and how we engaged with decay of the clay. The contributions of this study to teacher education, art education, and environmental education are in how clay art-making pedagogies can become a generative medium, and a generative metaphor, for human relationships to the Earth, and for climate education pedagogies.

This paper explores the multiple stories and affective traces that wetlands and swamps generate in more-than-human environments. Situated on what was once a swamp, Naarm (Melbourne) provides the setting for the authors’ collective creative inquiry. This work explores more-than-human methodologies of knowledge creation, examines how these approaches impact multispecies justice and investigates how wetlands can serve as transitional, unstaged spaces that challenge and disrupt colonial infrastructures. While drawing back on memories and experiences of wetlands in Southern China and Southeast Europe, the authors incorporate poetic mappings and autoethnographic interviews in exploring the reminisces and encounters living with more-than-human pasts and presents. Following the way of wetlands, the authors seek to foster unexpected ecologies between water, land, species and a multiplicity of ontologies in the abundance of in-between spaces as a generative learning-creation site.

This article examines the intersection of environmental and testimonial injustice and everyday peace in the lived experiences of 43 LGBTQIA+ individuals in Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia). Expanding environmental (in)justice, testimonial (in)justice and everyday peace as Queer individuals of Bosnia establish and maintain shared community spaces, this article argues that increased homophobia in Bosnia reduces queer people’s engagement with socio-environmental spaces, and this leads to testimonial and environmental injustice in everyday spaces and restricts everyday peace opportunities with one another. Drawing on participant narratives collected through interviews that reflect their courage, resistance and personal risk, the article identifies five key findings that illustrate how queer voices are often discredited and silenced. The participants’ stories shed light on how they persist in their advocacy against social and systemic oppression by enacting personalised strategies of peacebuilding with community building, managing self-disclosure and fighting for a future where queer people can be visible, respected and safe from violence.

The emerging field of critical forest studies necessitates more-than-human approaches to knowledge creation with forestscapes that makes their complex and expansive relationships sensible. This calls for a new ecological reading of the research image, and in turn, a new image of research which attends to Indigenous and place-based connections across bodies, geographies and temporalities. This paper explores this new political ontology of the image as a process of ecologisation that works towards decolonising ends. By putting machine imaging technologies such as drone footage, thermal imaging and spectrograms into conversation with Indigenous painting and storytelling practices, we endeavour to express ecological processes which often go unseen within forests. Our speculative analysis of these images disrupts modernist separations of difference from sameness, body from environment, myth from science and imagining from empirical fact, proposing pedagogies which connect material and metaphysical dimensions of sensing and learning with forests.

Critical Forest Studies is a rapidly growing field that takes multispecies relationships with/in forests as the starting point for critical and creative inquiry. Shaped by the contested political ecologies that emerge where different forest cosmologies, languages, histories, and ecologies meet, the field builds on related developments in the environmental humanities which explore multispecies relations through artistic, historical, philosophical, poetic, literary, and performative approaches. As the first special issue dedicated to Critical Forest Studies, this collection brings the field into direct dialogue with the theories, methodologies, and practices of environmental education. Environmental education has a rich and generative history of relational engagement with forests — from place-based and outdoor learning traditions to more-than-human and posthumanist approaches — and this collection builds on and extends that history. Indigenous and place-based perspectives are foregrounded throughout, bringing together diverse interdisciplinary understandings across four key areas: forest sentience, forest imaginaries, forest regeneration, and forest pedagogies. The collection bridges conceptual, artistic, empirical, methodological, and educational practices across these four themes, opening new possibilities for how environmental education might think, feel, and act with forests in times of ecological urgency.

The Planetary Boundaries framework aligns with Earth System Science to delineate the biophysical and biochemical systems known to regulate the state of the planet. Boundary ranges, as historically known, are scientifically likely to maintain Earth system stability and life support systems conducive to human welfare and social stability during the Holocene. The planetary boundaries literature brings a scientific understanding of Anthropocentric global environmental impacts into a framework for considering the state of the Earth system as a whole. Several boundaries have been transgressed while the others are close to boundary limits. As benchmarks for many scientific limits, boundaries may align to affect the Earth system boundaries as Anthropocentric activity related to the Earth’s overall state. Recent research also provides strong evidence supporting the conclusion that climate change and biosphere integrity, as core boundaries, are in a zone of rapidly increasing risks. This paper explores recent developments relating to ongoing activities of Earth system governance in navigating transformations that underpin the global sustainability agenda.

The study investigates the interplay between personal values and attitudes toward environmental responsibility (ER) among MBA students from two distinct cultural contexts: Australia (individualist) and India (collectivist). Drawing on survey responses from the University of Newcastle, Australia and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Kolkata, the study employs factor analysis and Multivariate Least Squares (MLS) to test whether cultural orientation moderates the predictive relationship between value priorities and ER attitudes. Findings reveal significant cross-cultural contrasts: Australian respondents prioritise security, conformity and power, whereas Indian respondents emphasise achievement, benevolence and universalism. Contrary to theoretical expectations, self-transcendence (benevolence, universalism) and self-enhancement (achievement, power) values exert a stronger influence among Indian participants. These results challenge universalist assumptions in sustainability education. The study offers actionable implications for corporate recruitment, climate policy and MBA curriculum design, highlighting how cultural value systems shape managerial attitudes toward ER.

This research examines the stories and experiences of the Yazidis, the Indigenous population of Mesopotamia. It especially focuses on the intersections of their political resistance, cultural resilience and the impact of long-lasting epistemic and colonial violence. Although the Yazidi community has been subject to external invasion and systemic persecution since the 3rd century CE (Potts, D. T. (2014) Nomadism in Iran: From antiquity to the modern era (Vol. xxv, p. 558). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978 0 19 933079 9; Usman (2021a) Yazidis: A tale of a lost, found and misunderstood legacy in the light of mimetic theory. Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis and Culture (Vol. 28). Michigan State University Press, (2021b) History of Shia, Sunnis and Yazidi Conflict: A Political, Social or Religious Conflict and its Impact on the Peace Process in the Middle East (Ph.D dissertation, University of Innsbruck, Austria)), they were forgotten by most until they were last attacked in 2014 by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which resulted in abductions, mass murders, forced conversion and using rape as a genocidal tool to demoralise and humiliate the entire community and erase their identity. It is important to understand the voices and stories of Yazidi survivors and experts; therefore, while using a qualitative research methodology, this research gathers data through semi-structured interviews and a thorough literature review, which will then be analysed with the help of thematic analysis. As one of the objectives of this study is to deconstruct the idea of epistemic violence suffered by the Yazidis throughout their history, investigating and identifying recurring patterns of persecution, trauma and violence helps us understand the motives behind such atrocities. It is often observed that deep-rooted colonial legacies lack empathy and hinder the process of understanding the victims’ narratives, and Yazidis have suffered the same. Finally, this research contributes to an already scarce literature on the history of Yazidi sufferings and documents the stories of a marginalised community. It also encourages the international community to understand the complexity of Yazidi sufferings and treat the Yazidi genocide as a resistance of survival.

Our collective futures depend on ecological stewardship rooted in both understanding of and care for the complex relationships of forest ecosystems. In particular, nuanced insight into forests’ entwined link with climate change is integral to policies and practices that can mitigate the worst climate impacts and sustain resilient multispecies communities. To this end, we foreground a creative approach to critical data literacies in the context of the biodiversity and climate crises. As part of the project Forest Carbon Futures, we present three explorations into different creative avenues for representing data, which share common aims of exploring the value of storytelling and situatedness in supporting more palpable connections between people, forests, stewardship responsibility, collective agency and more resilient futures. We position this inquiry as a valuable facet within an emerging field of Critical Forest Studies that holds promise in fostering ecologically-attuned understanding and care in relation to forest landscapes. Through interdisciplinary co-inquiry grounded in design and creation methodologies, we offer a constellation of interlinked themes, strategies and insights to inform transformative approaches to environmental education in our current era of ecological disconnect and rampant mis/disinformation.

This article describes how relational processes of telling and listening to stories were central to the establishment of a doctoral project by a Larrakia traditional owner working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous supervisors. The project explores the topic of education about living with crocodiles, a totem animal for the Larrakia people. The first stage of the project involved a week-long visit by the research team to Larrakia Country, Northern Territory, in order to develop relationships with Larrakia people and Country, and to gain cultural permission prior to gathering data. Stories from the visit are recalled and their significance analysed using the Indigenous research methods Thought Ritual and Storying. The stories shared during the trip are shown to involve more than simple capture and retell; instead, through close listening and deep reflection on meaning, stories proved to be the main conduit for demonstrating respect, exchanging knowledge and building relationships. We argue for the value of such story-based approaches to education about crocodiles, including the reframing of crocodile-human relations as part of a web of connections with Country and all that live in/on it – a shift in perspective personally experienced by the research team during their visit.

Placing Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism,” in conversation with Tuck and Yang’s work, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” this paper examines affective attachments to mass tree-planting efforts, which encourage unquestioned faith in these initiatives, serving to enable their persistence despite their consistent failures. This paper questions how affective attachments to mass tree-plantings teach publics to remain invested in the ability of settler-colonial institutions to solve climate crises, thereby ensuring that climate crises remain meaningfully unaddressed. Drawing together decolonial scholarship, affect theory, Indigenous thought and scholarship on environmental education, I demonstrate that mainstream tree-planting initiatives do not challenge the logics that permit forest and land degradation, but in fact, reproduce these logics. Rejecting a model which considers the act of planting trees as a success in and of itself, I instead ask what is missed when the planting of a tree is more important than the life of the forest.

Climate scenarios are produced through modelling, scientists draw on previously collected data and directions retrieved from governmental reports. In this article, an environmental data scientist and an artist-researcher reflect on their long-term art/science collaboration. They examine how certain models operate in forest ecologies. The concept of the “possible” by French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) accompanies them in questioning the idea of a future that would be already predetermined or resolved. This is to offer alternative views of the climate emergency, notwithstanding its unprecedented importance and scale. Climate modelling remains open to change, as does the experience of various types of imagery in art. With the notion of the “data-image”, the authors delve into a local/micro incursion about tree carbon quantification visualisation techniques. This is discussed through an immersive outdoor art installation, according to experiential learning in place-based and arts-based interdisciplinary collaboration with digital media. The process of questioning how these images are produced and disseminated are ways to support visual literacy as it moves towards ecoliteracy. A thematic overview of responses by publics who experienced the art installations is included, to highlight the role of creativity and imagination with art in environmental education.

Attenborough’s 2021 documentary: Breaking Boundaries transitions from the scientific analysis of the planetary boundary hypothesis to the solution, which is a global awakening of planetary consciousness. David frequently speaks directly to the camera, reassuring the audience that even though tipping points are irreversible, there is still time to save us. This documentary demonstrates the essential contradiction that we find ourselves in. We have moved from the stable environmental conditions of the Holocene, that lasted from 11,700 years ago to 1952, and in which human civilisation thrived, to the unstable Anthropocene, which will destabilise the living conditions upon which we rely, yet we don’t know what to do. The research question for this paper is: What is the best course of action in the Anthropocene? In this paper, I outline: (1) How the emotional-reactive states that the tipping points can produce are alleviated through teaching and learning about the complex ways in which humans live, dwell and become in the Anthropocene; (2) Unique human creativity is still alive, yet annihilated by perpetual calls for productivity and the performance-driven environments in which we find ourselves in, and that leads to a mode of burnout through overproduction in an attempt to respond.

New challenges and opportunities are emerging to support young people to learn about socio-ecological risk. While experiences with risk are a daily occurrence, a new phase of history defined by global environmental change will transform lives in complex ways. All young people need to be provided with the knowledge and skills to critique the failings of modernity and learn to manage risk. For that reason, environmental pedagogies need to be balanced with critical understandings of risk across different societies. Forest research in Australia, Nepal and Switzerland highlights that understanding local perceptions of value and risk generates vital knowledge to inform conceptions of sustainable forest management, while providing critical knowledge and processes to support active learning. There are opportunities to guide education systems to help people develop understandings of how beautiful, biodiverse, forested landscapes can be managed sustainably within local socio-cultural contexts. Educators can utilise constructivist pedagogies to identify the values and risks of forests with walks, rides, explorations, monitoring, and analysis of different conceptions of sustainable management. In such a manner, learning about socio-ecological risk develops knowledge and skills, but also supports young people to become advocates and actors for positive change in the forest and beyond.

This article advances a story-driven, theoretical exploration of how entanglements of agony, exile and Land relations can reconfigure understandings of justice. Opening with autobiographical vignettes of “in-betweenness”, the article illuminates the unfolding of exilic life between Palestine and North America, naming the ruptures of writing about Palestine from afar as an ethical site of dwelling in the middle. Drawing on relational ontology, Indigenous and decolonial scholars, alongside posthumanist and new materialist thinkers, the article highlights convergences and dissonances in conceptualising Land as more than property: as kin, teacher and agentive being. From such relationality, this article argues that Land-bodied rights offer a framework for rethinking justice and education beyond the abstract, hierarchical assumptions of universal human rights, grounding learning in human and more-than-human relations. The final section explores diffractive pedagogies, suggesting that storytelling and more-than-human educational entanglements can foster an ethic of reciprocity and accountability towards the more-than-human justice. In envisioning rights through rupture, environmental education can become a site where ecological and decolonial justice are rethought and enacted through relational, Land-based and story-driven pedagogies.

For many First Peoples, language is indissociable from living relationships within interspecies communities where humans are not the only ones who feel, think, listen and speak. Words not only carry meanings attributable to human language but also carry the spirit of a place, as both a material and metaphysical transmission of sentience across species and generations. This article draws on ecolinguistic research into the Indigenous language of the Dayak Ngaju people and its role in regenerating peatland forests in Central Kalimantan. The study employs an Indigenous research methodology led by the first author, who is a PhD student and member of the Dayak Ngaju community. This methodology situates Dayak Ngaju language within an animistic reality inclusive of nonhuman creatures, objects and spiritual beings. Attending to the complexities of Indigenous PhD studies, the article proposes the cultivation of “new animisms,” which recognise the future-making pedagogies of Indigenous ontologies and ecolinguistic systems.