Planetary boundaries

Perhaps the clearest reminder of the poor health of planet Earth’s natural ecologies is the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s (SRC) model of Planetary Boundaries (Rockström et al., Reference Rockström, Donges, Fetzer, Martin, Wang-Erlandsson and Richardson2024; Steffen et al., Reference Steffen, Richardson, Rockström, Cornell, Fetzer and Bennett2015). The research of the SRC has shown that an increasing number of the planet’s key eco-systems boundaries have been transgressed. Somewhat starkly, this means that the planet is on track for large-scale, irreversible environmental change. In geological terms this change might broadly be described as a move away from the relatively stable and benevolent Holocene epoch, and towards an unstable, life-threatening Anthropocene (Rockström et al., Reference Rockström, Donges, Fetzer, Martin, Wang-Erlandsson and Richardson2024; Rockström et al., Reference Rockström, Gupta, Qin, Lade, Abrams and Andersen2023).

While the technical geological arguments about whether the Earth has actually entered a new epoch continue (Carrington, Reference Carrington2024; Gibbard et al., Reference Gibbard, Walker, Bauer, Edgeworth, Edwards, Ellis, Finney, Gill, Maslin, Merritts and Ruddiman2022; Zalasiewicz et al., Reference Zalasiewicz, Waters, Wolfe, Barnosky, Cearreta and Edgeworth2017), the reality for all forms of life on planet Earth is that humanity’s impact threatens the very stability of the biosphere. Such is this impact that carbon dioxide levels are at highs unseen for millennia, the temperature on the planet continues to increase, our oceans continue to rise and acidify, and key life-supporting systems for all species are under threat. In brief biological terms, the “Anthropocene” marks the sixth Great Mass Extinction event for life on Earth.

Social and political ecologies in the Anthropocene

The interconnected social impacts of our transgressing of planetary boundaries are already evident. With increasingly hostile weather events, it is more difficult to grow the human food crops on which people depend (Shiva, Reference Shiva2024). Droughts and food shortages, in turn, aggravate existing social dynamics, such as in the case of Syria, where a decade of “unusual” drought, coupled with the political turmoil of the Arab Spring, destabilised the regime of Bashar al-Assad and led to thousands of refugees seeking a better life outside of their native lands. As Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed has demonstrated (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2016), such events underline that biophysical triggers now increasingly influence Earth’s politics. Beyond the Syrian border, this country’s refugees sought shelter overseas, putting pressure on many European nations in particular. In the fallout of the refugee “crisis,” right-wing political actors demagogued a “hard-line” on those who might enter their country, and helped bring an authoritarian shift to many Western nations (Ahmed, 2016, Reference Ahmed2025). In the shadow of Anthropocene politics, fear has become a more potent political currency, borders have hardened, and civil liberties are increasingly threatened.

The authoritarian drift can also be linked to decades of neoliberal policy with its unrestrained enthusiasm for economic growth, trickle-down economics, and a privileging of those with existing capital (Higgs, Reference Higgs2017). Along with its focus on the market and weakened environmental regulation, neoliberalism has significantly heightened inequalities, especially in many Western nations, creating a fertile bed for authoritarians to leverage a rhetoric of dispossession into political power. The hegemony of neoliberalism has also meant that those on the political “left” have done little more than soften neoliberalism, and nevertheless contribute to increasing inequalities as well as ineffective government responses to climate change. The result is a hollowed-out state apparatus that is fundamentally ill-equipped to respond meaningfully to eco-destabilisation (Harvey, Reference Harvey2005; Stedman Jones, Reference Stedman Jones2012). In an act of interconnected fore-telling, the philosopher Richard Rorty even predicted this fate in 1998 (Rorty, Reference Rorty1998; Senior, Reference Senior2016) when he warned that the left’s retreat from an economic critique of capitalism would lead to a fixation on fragmented culture wars:

The miserable conclusion of neoliberalism foretold by Rorty above comes on top of a range of other critiques of the social context of such politics. Mark Fisher and Stuart Davies (Fisher and Davies, Reference Fisher and Davies2009), for example, noted a sense of dour inevitability in neoliberalism:

Fisher’s and Davies’ point maps something of the inherent despair of neoliberalism and its social contribution to the meta-crisis. Against a horizon clogged with debt, precarity, and endless crisis management, Fisher’s critique isn’t simply economic, it is ontological. The neoliberal subject is exhausted, stripped of agency by the relentless logic of the market, and increasingly submerged in affective conditions of anxiety, depression, and apathy. The personal is no longer political but pathological. This pathology goes even beyond misery in some contexts as Fisher’s pessimism seems reflected in the rise of Zombies across a range of literatures dealing with the neoliberal fallout in psychology (Vervaeke et al., Reference Vervaeke, Mastropietro and Miscevic2017), economics (Quiggin, Reference Quiggin2012), and education (Smyth, Reference Smyth2017; Walker et al., Reference Walker, Moore and Whelan2013).

The zombies of psychology and economics respectively reflect how visions of undead approaches to both well-being and neoclassical economics haunt the specific fields. In the realm of higher education, the zombie reflects something of the potential meaningless of dwelling in the contemporary technocratic academy. For staff this means that the pressures to publish (or perish) and surviving the seemingly never-ending demands that come from teaching, assessment, administration, and research. For students, the expectations for vocational success after a university education have blotted out more meaningful learning and routinely create what Smythe (2017) has described as a “joyless” and lifeless (rather than miserable) struggle: “a joyless twilight world that, superficially at least, resembles a university, although in reality they are vocational charnel houses” (p.86).

Even since 2017, when Smythe made this point, the level of planetary and human misery facing young people within the university have increased alongside the meta-crises, underlining something of the context of miserable pedagogies in 2025.

From media ecologies to youth mental health

Authoritarians and zombies are poor avatars for youth mental health. In this late capitalist landscape, the rise of authoritarianism, right-wing popularism, and the MAGA-verse, has contributed to a media ecology where post-truth seems targeted against any form of ecological (or even left-leaning) agency. “Flooding the zone” is the term given to the tactic used by the likes of Steve Bannon and the Whitehouse’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller (Broadwater, Reference Broadwater2025). In the vacuum of trust and capability, post-truth politicians such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Viktor Orbán, have exploited the confusion with emotionally charged narratives denying ecological realities and scapegoating vulnerable members of the community (Stratford, Reference Stratford2017).

For young people, the post-truth political context is just one of the perils in a social media ecology that contributes to increasing alienation, anxiety, and misery. In a post-truth landscape where narratives proliferate faster than facts, young people have been left to navigate a digital terrain where reality feels both hyper-visible and utterly unstable. In the Anthropocene, social media has become a vessel for the ambient catastrophe of climate collapse, political unravelling, and existential fear, filtered into an endless doomscroll. The result is a generation left hyper-connected yet spiritually untethered, witnessing planetary breakdown in real time.

All these crises that come together to make up the constellatory Anthropocene meta-crisis have become a roiling spectre of existential dread, especially for the young. The alarming increase in the number of young people who are unhappy, depressed, and/or suicidal cannot be neatly attributed to the isolated factors of eco-anxiety or questions of financial or political security (McGorry et al., Reference McGorry, Gunasiri, Mei, Rice and Gao2025; Wyn, Reference Wyn2022). Instead, it reflects a more profound reckoning; a generation have begun to detect the extent of humanity’s self-destructive momentum, that has driven the planet and its social fabric toward what increasingly feels like an irreversible collapse.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Western universities were seeing a surge in the number of students turning to counselling services to cope with stress, anxiety, and depression (Abrams, Reference Abrams2022; Payinda & Stubbing, Reference Payinda and Stubbing2024). In 2024, the World Happiness Report registered a sharp decline in the mental wellness of youth from the English-speaking West (World Happiness Report, 2024), and the World Economic Forum connected these declining mental well-being rates outright to a combination of economic challenges, social and technological pressures, algorithmic alienation, climate anxiety, and accelerating political polarisation (Moose & Bhargawa, Reference Moose and Bhargawa2024).

Professor Laurie Santos, who teaches the most popular course in the history of Yale University, “Psychology and the Good Life,” has confronted these statistics for years (Santos, Reference Santos2025). Santos started teaching her popular Yale course in 2018, in the context of data from the U.S. Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, which has identified that as many as 44% of young people now report persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness (Adolescent Behaviours and Experiences Survey, 2024). Her Yale course, and subsequent online iterations of the same content, has directly addressed the poor mental health of young people, as part of the learning. Through a focus on applying the “science of happiness” in learning Santos has demonstrated that while increasing numbers of undergraduate students are arriving at university with poor mental health, what is done in the classroom can actually make a difference (Hood et al., Reference Hood, Jelbert and Santos2021; Yaden et al., Reference Yaden, Claydon, Bathgate, Platt, Santos and Vigo2021).

Mainstream sustainability is not enough…

The misery young people are experiencing within the meta-crisis is compounded by a mainstream context that typically fails to engage with enough depth on the causes and solutions to these interconnected crises. While the comment from Rorty above (1998) highlights how the political left has failed to address neoliberalism or its authoritarian offspring, we can also observe something of this failure in relation to the broader sustainability movement. This is especially relevant in the context of the meta-crisis as the “hope” that some might otherwise pin to mainstream sustainability seems misplaced because so many of the features within this field lack the theoretical depth and transformational energy to even slow the momentum of neoliberalism’s reverence for the market and its associated contribution to the meta-crisis.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, for example, sit at the centre of mainstream insufficiency. While achieving the 17 goals themselves is seriously in doubt (United Nations, 2024), of greater importance is that the goals reflect an unsustainable neoliberal imperative for economic growth. Specifically, the SDGs seek to find “inclusive” and “sustainable” economic growth based on an essentially debunked theory that we can decouple the environmental footprint from economic growth (Hickel, Reference Hickel2019, Reference Hickel2020; Parrique et al., Reference Parrique, Barth, Briens, Kerschner, Kraus-Polk, Kuokkanen and Spangenberg2019).

The same questions that arise in relation to the mainstream sustainability movement carry over into Education for Sustainability (EfS). Mair & Druckman (Reference Mair and Druckman2023) have helpfully characterised higher education as being caught between frameworks that attempt to align with the mainstream sustainability of those attracted to the incrementalism of green capitalism, on the one hand, and those who seek a deeper, transformational approach, which is restrained by a political context that is hesitant at best (Mair & Druckman, Reference Mair and Druckman2023). Others have similarly demonstrated the limited extent to which sustainability has reoriented higher education (Filho et al., Reference Filho, Sierra, Price, Eustachio, Novikau, Kirrane, Dinis and Salvia2024), or indeed develop the level of depth required to realise anything like the “strong” sustainability some argue for (Kopnina & Bedford, Reference Kopnina and Bedford2022, Reference Kopnina and Bedford2024). In the section following, we detail something of what a transformational pedagogy is up against, not just in relation to the aspirations that have traditionally existed in EfS, but an arguably broader set of interconnected miseries that make up the meta-crisis. Hence, while sustainability is arguably not enough, the alternatives must help to break down a range of pedagogical miseries offered up by the mainstream.

Aside from sustainability, it is important at this point to emphasises that a range of other traditions exist, which do offer a more transformational approach to pedagogy and the development of an environmental consciousness. This includes, for example: eco-feminist approaches (Diehm, Reference Diehm2002; Plumwood, Reference Plumwood2002, Reference Plumwood2007), place-responsive pedagogy (Wattchow & Brown, Reference Wattchow and Brown2011), wild pedagogies (van Tol & Wals, Reference van Tol and Wals2025), and even traditional environmental education, especially from before the Brundtland report’s deposition of sustainability as a dominant approach to greening the curriculum across universities (Carter & Simmons, Reference Carter, Simmons, Alec, Shiner and Starlin2010; Irwin, Reference Irwin2008). While there is not space to detail specifically how each of these approaches might do more to reinforce the transformational, they have to various extents informed the development of the ecological worldview we describe below as Anthropocene Intelligence. In this regard we expect that our description of Anthropocene pedagogy below is also familiar to those working in these particular fields.

Miserable pedagogy 1 — “Active contributors”

The first of the Miserable Pedagogies refers to those that actively contribute to the meta-crisis. These pedagogies clearly “make matters worse.” Notably, the damage such pedagogies inflict is most obvious in relation to environmental or natural ecologies, but the potential for such pedagogies to contribute to the poor health of the planet across a range of social, political, or psychological ecologies is also acknowledged (Kemp & Barnett, Reference Kemp and Barnett2025).

Active Contributors includes, for example, mainstream economics teaching, and in particular, those approaches that do not sway from neoclassical orthodoxy (see also Table 1). Such teaching provides an uncritical endorsement of a market approach to economics, and an unfettered emphasis on growing the economy (Stratford, Reference Stratford2024b). While mainstream economists and politicians see no alternative other than to “grow” the economy, the evidence that economic growth is inherently “coupled” to humanity’s environmental footprint is increasingly understood from more critical and ecological perspectives (Daly, Reference Daly2005; Jackson, Reference Jackson2016; Victor, Reference Victor2008).

Table 1.

Miserable Pedagogies

Indeed, while economic growth has been responsible for so many of the benefits we have observed as a species, once we have crashed through our planetary boundaries, such growth is complicit in adding to the misery of the Anthropocene (Irwin & Stratford, Reference Irwin, Stratford, Peters, Green, Misiaszek and Zhu2025). By the same analysis, it is also fanciful to assume that humanity could, in the foreseeable future, manage any degree of decoupling that would reverse the extent to which we have already breached the planetary boundaries (Hickel, Reference Hickel2020; Hickel & Kallis, Reference Hickel and Kallis2020; Jackson et al., Reference Jackson, Hickel and Kallis2024; Jackson & Victor, Reference Jackson and Victor2019; Joy, Reference Joy2021; Parrique et al., Reference Parrique, Barth, Briens, Kerschner, Kraus-Polk, Kuokkanen and Spangenberg2019). This point is typically missed out from those delivering a miserable pedagogy version of economics.

Aside from those qualifications that teach students to be proponents of economic growth, other “Active Contributors” to the meta-crisis could include those that provide uncritical approaches to other forms of natural, social, and psychological exploitation. Hence, those qualifications that ready students for unsustainable approaches to agriculture, fishing, mining, and petrochemical extraction are likely to be “Active Contributors.” Likewise, those programmes that provide primarily “technical” knowledge for unsustainable practices might also be Active Contributors. This could include qualifications on “property development,” “artificial intelligence,” “marketing,” and “political science” which each, in their own ways, risk students contributing to the misery of the planet overall.

Miserable pedagogy 2 — “Ignore the issues”

Perhaps the most common miserable pedagogy is that which continues to “ignore the issues” despite the existence of the meta-crisis. While it is common for comments to be made about some element of the meta-crisis in most university classrooms, there are many subject areas ranging from the liberal arts to mathematics, business, and even many sciences, that can be predisposed to make very little connection between the diverse elements of the meta-crisis and the learning expected in their programme. For students taking such courses, the meta-crisis is usually left at the door only to be confronted again when the lecture or tutorial is over (see also Table 2).

Table 2.

Miserable pedagogies

Part of the reason for there to be so many potential “Miserable Pedagogies” in this category rests with the modernist liberal foundations of university education (Bowers, Reference Bowers2011). From such a perspective, the idea of taking a political, subjective, or even “activist” approach to knowing (and being) seems to break with some detached, idealised expectations of “objective” academic labour — to the detriment of those who try (Death & Joy, Reference Death and Joy2023; Dyke & Monbiot, Reference Dyke and Monbiot2024).

These stand-offish liberal foundations have been shaken by the planet’s arguable arrival in the Anthropocene. In essence, the Anthropocene is a crisis in the idea of progress underpinning Western science, technology, and society. Instead of this status quo assumption, the idea of “progress” has come up against the fact that for all the perceived benefits of Western thinking and lifestyles, such approaches have nevertheless radically destabilised the planet. As Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne (Hamilton, Gemenne & Bonneuil Reference Hamilton, Gemenne and Bonneuil2015) have said:

Hamilton et al’s (2015) perspective is a reminder that part of the meta-crisis is that the traditional, unconscious assumptions about what counts as “knowledge” — or indeed what it means to be human — are problematic. For so much of mainstream liberal pedagogy, this means reconsidering the traditional separation between humans and “nature.” It also means rethinking what it means to be “educated” when the world is actually on fire. To some extent, many in the humanities have already realised this through the development of a variety of green pedagogical practices (Fassbinder et al., Reference Fassbinder, Nocella and Kahn2012), including the rise of “environmental humanities.” As welcome as such areas are for students in need of a broader base of knowledge within the academy, the deeper point made in relation to the criticism of Hamilton et al. (Reference Hamilton, Gemenne and Bonneuil2015) is that such an approach to the humanities is not simply a matter of “greening” the existing liberal pedagogy with “environmental” ideas of writers, but of critically questioning and significantly updating Western modernism itself (Bowers, Reference Bowers2011).

There are many other points that might be raised here, specifically in relation to the humanities. The first is that the scale and depth of any environmental humanities approach is likely to be less “miserable” where it is reinforced by critical versions of postcolonial, posthuman, queer, and feminist scholarship (Braidotti, Reference Braidotti2013; Emmett & Nye, Reference Emmett and Nye2017). That said, even where such perspectives do provide some insight into an “ecological” worldview, questions of how student agency or meaning is realised still remain. Are students from such programmes seeing themselves less as individuals and more as interconnected beings? Do these students have a critical perspective on Western thinking and are they well-placed to do something about such a worldview? Or, are they passively developing knowledge of the world via a slighter greener version of “critique” (Latour, Reference Latour2004).

From a slightly different perspective, we might also ask if students from such programmes are prepared to respond to the complex, psychological aspects of the meta-crisis — including their own mental health struggles? In anticipation of being called out as coldly instrumental by humanities departments around the world, it is arguably the humanities that are best equipped to engage with the human “misery” dimensions of the meta-crisis. Indeed, this is why “ignoring the issues” is so miserable because the humanities, in particular, can do better. We see possibilities for less miserable pedagogy aimed at developing meaning, purpose, and connection across natural, social, or psychological ecologies. As discussed above, Laurie Santos’ Yale course, “Psychology and the Good Life” is one such example, but others that actively address the health of our psychological ecologies include teaching aimed at development friendship (Stratford, Reference Stratford2024a) and even those that actively support students to live a meaningful existence (Dreyfus & Kelly, Reference Dreyfus and Kelly2011; Vervaeke, Reference Vervaeke2025).

Miserable pedagogy 3 — “Overly optimistic”

The third category of miserable pedagogies are those that promote an overly optimistic frame towards the meta-crisis. The most prominent member of this group are those techno-sciences that foster technological solutions as an overly hopeful way to “modernise” our way out of the ecological crisis. Other forms of teaching that can be included in this category are those that argue, suggest, or even imply that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are anywhere near enough to significantly shift the economic and political barriers for reducing the environmental footprint of humanity (see also Table 3).

Table 3.

Miserable pedagogies

Overly optimistic miserable pedagogies could also include courses in Environmental Management, Renewable Energy, or Climate Change. While this sub-section can’t provide an analysis for the nuances of every “overly optimistic” pedagogy, some of the key tendencies we see here involve casting students as individual saviours who can contribute their skills to build a better world. This is especially the case in teaching that emphasises technical solutions to ecological problems within a somewhat untouched status quo system.

Similarly, the global efforts to reorient University Education in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) often fail to provide students with the depth of understanding needed to adequately wrestle with the interconnected causes of the meta-crisis. The SDGs, for example, typically side-step the deeper realities of our economic system. As has been introduced above in relation to mainstream sustainability, the SDGs optimistically present countless examples of how we might “progress” a greener educational future while never providing students with enough critical resources to grapple with the economic failure of the meta-crisis. The result is an approach to SDGs which very much reflects a lack of transformational energy amongst otherwise welcome and well-meaning incrementalism. We can read about such cases via a range of United Nations publications. For example, the 600-member International Association of Universities has published a range of ways in which each of the SDGs can be realised through higher education (International Association of Universities, 2020). Specific initiatives in this publication include one university setting up second hand shops to another which now offers a Master’s degree in “Innovation, Enterprise and Circular Economy.” While some of the examples speak to, at best, moderately green and optimistic possibilities for higher education, the overall set reflects an underwhelming list of possibilities within the status quo of (neoliberal) economic growth.

Miserable pedagogy 4 — “Describe reality”

While the miserable pedagogies so far have failed to fully grasp the nature and depth of the meta-crisis, the last example has the opposite problem. “Describe reality” is perhaps the least commonly found example in university education and is connected to those programmes that clearly articulate the nature, scale, and depth of the meta-crisis. While many areas of university teaching present facts about the meta-crisis, teaching that critically interconnects its economic, natural, social, and psychological impacts is less common. Typically, such courses also struggle to mobilise student agency once “reality” has been described (see also Table 4).

Table 4.

Miserable pedagogies

University pedagogies that “describe realities” are often found outside of the normal degree structures. These courses might be electives related to environmental studies or ecological economics, and which run counter to mainstream disciplinary positions. Teachers in such programmes tend to therefore be more free to provide students with more inter-disciplinary and critical analysis of economics, planetary limits, and political unsustainability (Blühdorn, Reference Blühdorn2007, Reference Blühdorn2013, Reference Blühdorn, Gabrielson, Hall, Meyer and Schlosberg2016) than their more conventional colleagues. Somewhat miserably for students, the realistic content of such courses, with its tendency towards what appears as a pessimistic range of content for those hoping to be alive after 2050, can take a toll on student well-being. As Mike attests, his nickname among faculty and students alike is, only half-jokingly, “Dr Doom,” as his own version of “Describe reality” (when he teaches in traditional university courses) covers off such content as: the delusions of “green growth” and the extent to which humanity is (increasingly) breaching planet boundaries.

Like many other faculty “describing realities” to their students, university structures tend to limit the opportunities for students in such courses from realising any agency in response to this reality. This can be frustrating as students typically cannot apply their knowledge of “reality” to the deeper causes and effects of the meta-crisis. Overall, then, students can leave such teaching more “miserable” than when they arrived. Occasionally, they might even tell you how much you have contributed to their thoughts of self-harm (not a joke). Luckily, for Mike at least, his teaching in other contexts, as set out in the following section, shows that there are pedagogical options that don’t need to be so doom-laden.