Existence at a crossroads
“How and why have we reached this situation, in which the question of ecology is driving us crazy? What paths have we followed, and what motives lie behind our decisions? … What would happen if we were to give entirely different answers to the questions that serve to define our relationship to the world?” (Latour, Reference Latour2017a, p. 38)
We—that is the multitude of human and nonhuman beings that inhabit Earth—find ourselves at a crossroads. The road we currently travel appears to be heading to closure—to a long fall into a perplexity of climatic, political, economic and moral problems, which together form an ecosystem of crisis dynamics (Morin & Kern, Reference Morin and Kern1999). Aside from some antiquated denialists, the question of how to sustain life on Earth has become the defining concern of our time. There is frantic motion, the taking, or at least talking, of alternate paths, everywhere we look.
The metacrisis is both exacerbated and structured by underlying metaphysics, most visibly in the discourse of sustainability. Once rooted in ecological sensibilities, “sustainability” has been rearticulated within economic and political frameworks and, in transition, has become unrecognisable (Brundtland, Reference Brundtland1987). As Luke (Reference Luke2005) observes, “sustainable development” often functions rhetorically, legitimising unsustainable practices such as “green” industrial expansion. In education, the term is further obscured through fragmentation of ideas about being and (sustainable) existence from numerous disciplines, into curricula and practices. Whilst sustainability continues to be debated in multifarious disciplines, this paper revisits the philosophical problem at hand. That is, when thought and action is aimed at sustainability, what we are actually doing is tangling with the question of how we understand existence, what is essential to existence and what existence “should” look like given the finite resources of the Earth, the ongoing threat to beings of diverse kinds and the uncertain future of existence.
What this paper proposes is not an answer to these vast questions, but rather more simply, to propose a way to zone into them with students. To do so it is helpful, this paper argues, to consider sustainability itself as a mode of existence, and what this might mean in an educational space. To take seriously this consideration, the paper’s argument detours from Friedrich Nietzsche to Bruno Latour to Hartmut Rosa, considering order and disorder, subject and object, and attempts to end up in a place far less binary than this sentence—in the place of the interpolated, entangled sobject. An existential revolution is emerging that calls for a collective transformation: reorientation towards a mode of existence that recognises the constitutive interdependence of all Earthly actors. Authentic transformation, this paper argues, will not arise from harmony or consensus but from engaging the generative dissonances through which we might move toward active reconfiguration of how we live, learn and co-create a more inhabitable world.
Order, disorder and modes of existence
Why are you writing this when it is getting so hot outside? my daughter asked me. Good question, if meant differently from a five-year-old perspective. Well, the way we talk about something matters to how we think, which matters to what we do. To follow Nietzsche (1873, Reference Nietzsche2025) briefly, in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, words transform into concepts, metaphors invented by humans, an act which human beings forget after inventing them and gradually form an order of meaning, of signification. To stay with Nietzsche a little while, we might say that the ways we understand the world become tied to the language we use to talk about it; there are many ways of perceiving meaning or “truth” that emerge out of the various ways we speak and orient ourselves in and towards the world. The way we put sustainability on the table — the way that we represent it and the words we use to describe it — matters to the way we perceive the sustaining of existence.
Of course, we could criticise this and point out that Nietzsche’s radical scepticism undermines his own claims—if there is no one common truth but only interpretations, then how are we to understand Nietzsche’s claim itself? (Trakakis, Reference Trakakis2006). One way to address this contradiction is to view Nietzsche’s rejection of objective truth not in terms of the risk of self-refutation or potential for nihilism, but instead in terms of what the contradiction points out about human existence. That is, that there are different ways of speaking in the world, different ways of claiming truth, of generating belief in meaning (of which Nietzsche’s own work is one). What Nietzsche suggests is that by co-existing and communicating through language, a linguistic order forms that is “a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical and obligatory to a people” (Nietzsche, 1893, 1968, p. 16). What we call truth from this perspective amounts to a set of linguistic agreements—a shared fiction that gives us the illusion of stability, but an illusion that we learn to live by. Chaos orders through linguistic repetition into a perceived stability, or what we might think of as habits of connecting words that create symbolic structures—meaning—that in turn evoke habits of being. This matters to our formation as “selves” in the world:
““Everything is subjective,” you say; but even this is interpretation. The “subject” is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.” (Nietzsche [1901], Reference Nietzsche1967, p. 481)
That is, who we are—subjectification—comes into being as we experience and encounter the world, which we do largely through language (thought, spoken, written or otherwise); we are articulated by the linguistic orders of which we are simultaneously product and contributor.
Whilst there is a certain sense of chaos and potential for nihilism in Nietzsche’s perspective, there is also a vital sense of plurality—to language, to truth. So, what if we were to take this plurality seriously, to take it further and look at different sets of linguistic agreements? The habitual orderings of the different tones, or modes, that we speak in that have established different ways of interpreting social activity and the world around us? We again might think of this in terms of the interdisciplinarity that complicates and compounds meaning around “sustainability”: it is multiple perspectives on what is “true” to the word that create the contradictions and confusions we encounter. Plurality of manners of speaking and determining truth matter most of all to sustainability education: our first job as educators, if we are to put sustainability on the table, is to tangle with the different ways that the term is understood. This is to tangle with the different ways that sustainability is articulated, politically, economically, scientifically, morally and so on and on.
But what if we didn’t stop there? What if we were to explore the relationship between the ways that we speak and the ways that we act (the ways that we move and orient ourselves in the world)? Systems of language in many ways connect with how we act towards each other, and towards the world. To our canons of desire, our sense-making of what is vital, obligatory to our existence. To discuss this further, I am now going to draw on a theory that I know has limitations in what I’m trying to do here, and one that is quite contentious relating to sustainability, but has great potential in discussing different sets of linguistic agreements as unstable orderings rather than a priori parts of existence. That is, Bruno Latour’s (Reference Latour2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME). This move is contentious because Latour’s earlier work in actor-network theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS) (e.g. Latour, Reference Latour2005) has been fervently accused of hindering climate science, or, to put it more strongly, “dithering while the planet burns” (Hornborg, Reference Hornborg2017, p. 61). Hornborg’s (Reference Hornborg2017) argument exemplifies a wider and vehement criticism of STS as anti-science, holding back efforts to address climate change. Hornborg claims that much writing in posthuman perspectives of environmental humanities lacks precision; that concepts are often slippery, metaphors overused and analytical distinction (for example between nature/social, human/nonhuman) blurred in ways that make it hard to see direct causal relations or power structures. Actor-network theory, particularly in its earlier form, theorises social and cultural trends by describing in fine-grain detail the practices of members of the social group, seeking associations of human and non-human actors from which social conditions emerge (see for example, Callon, Reference Callon1984). “Fact” and “agency” are viewed as distributed, performed into being through associations between networks of multiple actors (Law, Reference Law1994). This, Hornborg (Reference Hornborg2017) warns, risks diluting human responsibility—especially that of powerful economic actors and systems, and thus depoliticises critique: it becomes hard to allocate blame or push for systemic change.
Whilst this kind of criticism has been viewed as a misreading of actor-network theory and other post-human theories, which acknowledge the importance of science for understanding the world, but views science as part of a dynamic process of interactions (Simon & Thomas, Reference Simon and Thomas2022), the impact of such critique is undeniable. Latour himself recognised in interview (de Vrieze, Reference Vrieze2017, p.159) that his earlier “criticism of science had created a basis for antiscientific thinking and had paved the way in particular for the denial of climate change”. In the same interview, Latour hoped through his later work in climate science and existence “to help rebuild confidence in science,” still from the perspective of “science as action,” but within a perspective that can move from fine-grain descriptions of associations of actors to the interplay of different ways that humans have learnt to exist on planet Earth, in relation to its materiality. His own regret in this regard led to his theorising of sustainability (Latour, Reference Latour2017a, Reference Latour2017b, Reference Latour2018, Reference Latour2022) alongside a different theorising of existence that subsumes actor-network theory into a wider philosophy of existence: AIME (2013).
AIME explores how different domains (or institutions)—science, law, religion, politics, etc.—produce meaning by instituting distinct “modes” of existence. Based in Latour’s lifetime of ethnographic study of various social institutions, AIME is an open call to further distinguish the ways contemporary existence works, and other modes have been added, such as form (Gilbert, Reference Gilbert2020) and education (Tummons, Reference Tummons2021). Latour (Reference Latour2013) claims that distinction between modes is collapsing under pressure: ecological crises, biotechnology and globalisation reveal that these domains are deeply entangled. AIME suggests a way to describe the world that recognises these entanglements and therefore offers a way to explore climate issues from the perspective of understanding the complex ways that humans and the (other) materials of the world are habitually/necessarily/unnecessarily reliant.
The crux of AIME lies in its addressing of the limitations of actor-network theory. Actor-network theory is subsumed into AIME as one mode—a way of seeing the world from the perspective of describing the complex and dynamic interactions between actors that create patterns in existence. Another, complimentary yet opposite, mode is that of the “prepositional” which seeks patterns: the characteristics and nuances that give the other modes their distinctive form. It is the crossing of network and prepositional modes that provides the basis for the AIME inquiry and addresses many concerns of actor-network theory as losing sight of powerful economic actors and systems, such as in Hornborg (Reference Hornborg2017), discussed above. That is, we move from fine-grain situated associations between in-world actors to the social “habits” over time that these associations instil. These existential habits characterise how beings relate. However, as dynamic networks of actors (that form a sense of stable social characteristics through repeated association), such habits retain the possibility for intervention and change.
In each of these modes, linguistic orders are explored as more than language: as orientations towards existence in a socio-material world. That is to say that language engenders forms of being. This advancement of linguistic orders into the realm of being is important to understanding the way that different discourses of sustainability influence our positioning—our thought, actions, emotions—towards the term. This is something we can do with students. In Language and Literature lessons, we teach different structures and forms of language to give us words to describe the structure of our thoughts, so that we can analyse their nature and limitations, the meaning attempted and the tone of this meaning. Why would we not extend this to the forms of language that create who we are when we are part of a social—and material—world? It is my belief that the very first item that should be put on the table in discussions of sustainability is the idea of what it is that we are trying to sustain. What does it mean to exist as a human, as material, as both together, in this world? How has existence formed, ordered, in the many different ways we speak and relate to each other? How does social activity relate to material, and vice versa, until (I will later argue) one becomes wrapped up in the other? What does “existence” mean and therefore what is it that are we trying to protect?
To take part in such discussions is to encounter and interrogate existence as an active and dynamic subject, to consider in plurality social “habits” of existence from the perspective of how they orient the self to world and the world to the self (a world made of the simultaneous activity of people and materials). One important element of AIME is its ambition to look at crossings of modes of existence (Gilbert, Reference Gilbert2020; Latour, Reference Latour2013). At times we might speak or be in one of these habitual modes, in others we are caught in a confusion—a crossing—of two or more. Take, for example, the dilemma created between morality and legality in environmental protest camps on private land or causing public disruption. It is the intertwining of different modes of being-together-in-the-world that cause our divided reactions. In investigating what Latour (Reference Latour2013) refers to as category mistakes that occur through crossings of modes of existence, we might see how one mode influences and changes the trajectory, or truth conditions, of another.
Discerning modes of existence with students, we can begin to discuss the existential habits that inform what we mean when we talk about existence on earth. Are there modes that are essential to human existence? Relationships to the world on which we rely? That compel us more? That dominate or sway our desires? AIME helps us to get inside the ordering that has gotten us to this existential crossroads. It offers a way of seeing the chaos—the disorder—of this ordering that it will be necessary to unpack in order, as Nietzsche would have it, to create anew. We cannot create without disordering, and we cannot disorder without first understanding the order of things. We form different existential habits by first understanding how the current ones are ordered in the first place.
Separation and interlinking of different modes of existence has relevance to sustainability—to understanding how sustainability, crossed with different modes of existence, changes the way we think, act or be in the world or how one mode may conflict with the manner of orienting the existence of another. This relevance is extended in relation to education. When we teach, we enter a way of speaking, thinking and doing that speaks to educating. Whilst any interaction between the self, other and world may be seen as potentially transformational (as educational), when we speak of education in terms of teaching, we speak of intentional interactions, a curated gathering together of self-other-world. In teaching science, this educational mode is “crossed” with a scientific way of thinking and doing: we “zone in” to the ways of talking and being a scientist as much as we are talking and being educational.
To discuss sustainability in relation to other modes of existence, and to explore how these crossings meet with “being” in an educational sense, it will be first useful, perhaps necessary, to determine the mode of sustainability in its own right; as Latour (Reference Latour2013) would have it, to speak to sustainability in its own language. We can consider sustainability as a discernible mode of existence that has established through, as John Law (Reference Law1994) would put it, ongoing, never finished ordering. This is not a futile attempt to “add another mode to the list,” but rather a way of considering the mode of language, thought and action one gets into when addressing sustainability, from which educators can review how education, sustainability and the myriad fields that intersect with sustainability education relate. If we accept sustainability as a mode in and of itself (established by the habitual ways that humans and world relate), then we might be able to discern a few shapes in the clouds—to discuss what we generally mean when we talk of sustainability, how this thought-trajectory is recognisable, as well as how it is taken up and combined with, or sometimes mistaken for, other modes.
Discerning sustainability as a mode of existence amongst others
Seeking to understand interpolation (inter-pollution)
We can first seek sustainability (and the other modes of existence it crosses with) through AIME’s network mode and its crossing with its prepositional mode. That is, by examining the complex interrelations of actors that are the “cogs” of the mode, and the specific habits of existence these create that characterise the way of thinking, knowing and doing we enter when we think, do and act “sustainably”. AIME’s network mode decamps from the problematic human-centricity, perhaps egocentricity, that has put a spanner in the works of so many existences. For our journey to the current crossroads has been a forgetful and inattentive one. Post-Enlightenment, the subject has been separated from the object, humanity from nature. The plant, the atmosphere, the fossil, the molecule, have been thought distant from the minds that name, wield and catalyse their circulation in the world. Such bifurcation obscures the footprint of hordes of humans flattening, tarmacking and systematising life on earth, their internal imaginings and communal symbolisings thought separate from the physical world despite its presence in our breath, mouths, skin, eyes and ears. Such a train of thought has proved fertile ground for logics of progress, industry, growth and consumption, whipped endlessly into motion, spurred on by the Industrial Revolution and a steady expansion of capitalism. Education is incorporated into the map that exacerbates bifurcation, that guides progress (see, for example, discussion in Korsgaard, Reference Korsgaard2024).
Such bifurcation is rapidly unravelling. In Facing Gaia (2017a), Bruno Latour highlights the irony of this problematic relationship through the term Anthropocene, which recategorizes our journey to the crossroads as a geological era, one in which humans have abstracted the world whilst simultaneously creating a term that acknowledges the collective agencies of humans with matter. Viewed as simultaneously affecting and effected by human-matter relations, the climate polycrisis insists that we look differently—relationally—at subjects and objects. Human and world, subject and object, are tangibly, observably, tasteably interpolated (or one could say, inter-polluted). To talk in Barad’s (Reference Barad2007) much-cited terms, human and nonhuman are entangled. Latour takes up entanglement (Reference Latour2017b), seeking how humans are entangled with Earth systems. This includes examining how different collectives of actors imagine and negotiate their relationship with the planet, and the socio-material ramifications of these relationships. As in the Reset Modernity! (Latour & LeClercq, Reference Latour and LeClercq2016) project, existence is rather complexly implicated, or “scrambled” (Latour & LeClercq, Reference Latour and LeClercq2016, p. 21).
We might take as example the multifarious actors that created the habit of plastic: an intertwining, amongst other things, of chemical reactions between water, organic material, warmth and oxygen, wartime military innovation, consumer booms and changes in post-war work life patterns. Through this perspective, we might say that the main tone of a sustainability “mode” is one of considering interpolation, implication, scrambling. Crossed with education—a mode that discovers, that seeks—the classroom becomes a space of resuscitating the world from a passive, silent object of study, to a dynamic and vibrant symphony of many parts. How, I might ask my students, has Earth reached the situation it is in? What are the beings that have entangled to establish such environmental, economic, geopolitical threats to Earthly existence?
Here is where we need a new term, set apart from the dualistic subject and object. To speak to a “scrambled” subject/object, I suggest the term sobject, which casts a pathetic light upon its threatened existence. The sobject has a very specific mode of being. “Being”—an ever-slippery word in philosophy—here denotes the symmetry of actor-network theory (Latour, Reference Latour2005) and the entanglement of new materialist perspectives more widely (perhaps, more specifically, Barad, Reference Barad2007). That is, the idea that all actors—human, thing, idea, organisation—are afforded equal potential for agency and that they are entangled within one another. Things are full of people and people are full of things. The rotating blades of the wind farm are established by the people who design them, by histories packed with scientific discovery, materials gleaned and combined from the Earth, the wind that blows the sails. Similarly, the people who create and use them are articulated by, exist through, the ways in which they, over time and in different spaces, interact with these “things”, materials, object-embodied idea-histories, wind patterns and so on. Being, in a sobject sense, is thus neither subjectifying nor objectifying; being is neither human nor nonhuman. Instead, to speak to a “scrambled” subject/object is to seek the ways that actors associatively mediate each other.
To return to our plastic example, we might on the one hand examine the historical events and scientific advances that shaped plastic, whilst also looking at how plastic mediates (for better and much worse) the existence of other actors: people (economies, health, social inequalities), oceans, fish, animals, atmospheric gases. We can complexly map the interrelation between plastic and several beings: its paradoxical usage to extend human life—in medical tools, hygienic packaging, life-saving electronics—and its detrimental reduction of life on Earth, feeding habits of overconsumption and a throwaway culture (for further discussion of plastic as a sustainability paradox, see Ray, Reference Ray2024). We might look at the birth of an actor that becomes immortal on human timescales, accumulating in oceans, soils and bodies, altering ecosystems and entering blood, lungs and placentas. Plastic and human entangle in ways that deepen global socio-environmental inequality, with poorer communities disproportionately bearing the burden of plastic waste (Vandenberg, Reference Vandenberg2024). Putting plastic on the table through AIME offers one way of holding environmental actors to the light and turning them over and over for inspection, engaging students in discussion of how, for example, some actors embody both innovation and destruction and exploring the blurred lines between the natural, the artificial, the political and the ethical.
Such implicated association expands exponentially what educators (and students) put on the table for discussion. Latour reminds us “to remain open to the dizzying otherness of existents, the list of which is not closed, and to the multiple ways they have of existing or of relating among themselves” (Latour, Reference Latour2017a, p. 36). Curricula and practices, in a crossing of education and sustainability, would remain open to discussions that gather and expand around the many mutually influential actors that are wrapped up in sustainability issues. In this “following the actors” (Latour, Reference Latour2005), students may encounter operators and operations: catalytic actors and events that entangle subject and object (Latour, Reference Latour2017a), forging reliances that determine the habits of other actors, into chains of action often difficult to break. One example is as follows. A student investigates the widespread use of glyphosate (a herbicide) in large-scale farming. Rather than starting with a top-down theory, the student “follows the actors” (Latour, Reference Latour2005)—farmers, crops, chemicals, machinery, policies, soil microbes, bees, lobbyists, weeds, supermarket chains. Glyphosate becomes a catalytic actor—not just a chemical, but an operator that changes farming practices (e.g., no-till agriculture), shapes crop selection (glyphosate-resistant GMOs), alters ecosystems (disrupts soil biodiversity, harms pollinators) and triggers regulatory responses and consumer activism. Its use entangles subject and object—farmers become reliant on chemical inputs, soils become dependent on treatment, weeds evolve resistance and corporations patent seeds.
Here is where we might begin to discuss such notions as power, control, enforcement, resistance and understand more deeply the entrenchment of modern existential habits. Students learn that environmental issues are not just about “bad choices” or “bad actors”, but about entangled networks of human and nonhuman relations. Changing one part (e.g., banning a chemical) often means disentangling many actors and habits, which requires more than scientific evidence—it demands social, economic, ethical and political reconfiguration. Exploring interpolation from a network-prepositional perspective addresses concerns raised by Hornborg (Reference Hornborg2017): this perspective can be used actively with students to illuminate, rather than obscure the cogs and machines of capitalism, power relations and unequal resource flows central to ecological crises.
Caring attention and an open gaze
My aim is not to dazzle or bamboozle, however (which is of course a risk of seeking networks of actors that perform existence). Sustainability and education share another modish feature, that of caring attention. As Quigley and Lyons (Reference Quigley, Lyons, Bellocchi, Quigley and Otrel-Cass2016) neatly put it:
“Current major environmental issues and their associated consequences are complex, with many conflicting interests and politics involved. The persistence and strength it takes to work toward preserving the environment require more than a cognitive knowledge of environmental concerns. These concerns for the well-being of the earth must be felt by the heart and will be developed by nurturing a deeply felt care”. (Quigley et al., Reference Quigley, Lyons, Bellocchi, Quigley and Otrel-Cass2016, p. 264)
In environmental education research, the need for generating an ethics of care with students often draws on the work of Noddings (Reference Noddings1992); educators are asked to employ care as pedagogy in considering the moral and ethical obligations of humans towards the environment (Fien, Reference Fien2003). What AIME offers to this perspective is the ability to discern and consider values that have formed around the notion of sustainability in different fields or modes—and what happens when these meet/conflict. The mode of sustainability thus requires an open gaze that care-fully considers existents and modes together, from the crumbling stone of the cliff pathway to the human mind that chose to walk it and the map made of trees, optical nerves, centuries of exploration, mathematical thought, symbolic evolution, political colonisation and opposable thumbs.
One criticism of care as pedagogy is the risk it entails of failing to distinguish between teaching children how to care for the environment and indoctrinating perspectives, requirements or solutions (Johnson & Mappin, Reference Johnson and Mappin2005). Johnson and Mappin (Reference Johnson and Mappin2005) highlight the tension between ecology-as-science and environmental education as value-laden or advocacy-oriented. This raises the question of how environmental education should balance presenting ecological science with promoting ethical, civic or political values and whether “education for environment” implies implicit advocacy. What emerges is an argument for more than knowledge transfer; that environmental education should include active discussion of values, of care. Speaking, knowing and being “sustainable” in this sense becomes the development of a rich ecological literacy, civic literacy and environmental citizenship.
An AIME perspective also supports here by providing ways to access and generate plurality in discussions of care in self-others-world relationships. Modes of existence are not modes lived by others and studied as such, but modes that articulate us as human beings, that we often unconsciously inhabit, but that may, through the teacher–student relationship implied by the educational mode of existence (Tummons, Reference Tummons2021), be deliberately stepped into. Indeed, how to generate a culture of caring attention has been considered as reliant upon the crossing of environmental education with other ways of seeing and knowing the world. Fien (Reference Fien2003) advocates for an approach to environmental education that goes beyond traditional sociological and educational theories, emphasising the integration of arts, philosophy and ethics to foster a deeper sense of care for people and the planet. This is about cultivating a deeper care for others and the Earth, emphasising not just facts but meaning, values and emotional engagement, through modes of thought that support this. Fien and Latour’s work resonate: both advocate for pluralism, recognising that different modes (science, art, ethics) contribute uniquely to understanding and caring for the environment. Fien advocates for education that integrates ethical reflection, philosophical inquiry and artistic expression alongside scientific knowledge. AIME provides a philosophical framework that maps these different modes as legitimate and complementary ways of engaging with the world.
To discuss values in relation to our caring gaze, AIME’s mode of “attachment” or “attunement” (accounting for “beings of passionate interest”) is of great use (Latour, Reference Latour2013, p. 413). The mode of attachment refers to entanglements between worldly actors that establish emotional, affective and relational bonds. This is a very human (although many would argue animal) effect: people take passionate interest in and valorise certain ideas, things, others or attitudes. Latour’s mode of attachment is the emotional and relational core that makes Fien’s (2003) vision of caring environmental education possible and durable; discussing sustainability cultivates not just knowledge, but lasting bonds and commitments—the very ties that motivate people to protect and cherish the Earth.
However, affective aspects of care is also where AIME tends to unravel a little. Latour (Reference Latour2013) tends to treat attachments as mutual and symmetrical, often failing to address how some attachments are coercive, exploitative or imposed—particularly under conditions of colonialism, capitalism or patriarchy. Additionally, in the mobius movement of following existence as the rhythms and habit of socio-material actors, we lose sight of the individual human self and its peculiar second order desires that have woven, with others, such harmful habits of relating to the world.
Reading Hartmut Rosa’s (Reference Rosa2019) Resonance, itself resonant with network theories, I was interested to find space for further considering affective elements of sobject relations. Whilst Latour (Reference Latour2013) describes “modes” of existence, Rosa (Reference Rosa2019) provides potential for deepening this notion through his use of “tones” and “overtones” of existence. Rosa leans into the science of resonant modes of vibration to argue that in a world in which humans experience increasing alienation due to social acceleration and instrumental rationality, a fulfilling life that equally respects and sustains planetary existence requires resonant relationships—where the self and world are mutually responsive. Imagine a guitar string, an oscillating system that vibrates when “excited” (meaning energy is introduced). These vibrations do not happen randomly—they often settle into specific patterns: resonant modes that form a tone (the main note) and overtones (different-frequency vibrations that occur alongside the main tone), which together give sound its texture. Through this analogy, we might see both actor-networks and existential habits as dynamic systems that “excite” certain behaviours, through which human beings are connected, responsive and emotionally engaged. Each connection has distinctive qualities—tones and overtones—that evoke an affective, or existential “feel.” This feel is generated by a tone based on how we relate to it: resonantly (attraction) or dissonantly (repulsion), and overtones, which are secondary resonances that may be carried alongside or layered within a primary tone. Overtones may be thought of as echoes, nuances or background harmonics that subtly influence the overall quality of resonance. In discussing sustainability, this adds nuance: human experiences are layered, dynamic and not fully under rational control—they vibrate with meaning in complex ways. This can be used to understand, for example, how students relate to natural materials: exploring natural spaces through muddy play with a class of younger children may have a joyful tone but evoke uneasy overtones due to memory or learned discourses of “mud is bad” (Hayes, Reference Hayes, Sors and Unsworth2025).
Modes of existence, understood as having a habitual “tone” and varying “overtones” according to person, situation, culture or history, allows us to simultaneously discuss common existential habits that have evolved in a world of sobjects, and the individual or nuanced ways that relations between them occur. Each mode, as inhabited or lived, is an oscillating dynamic of tones and overtones that give character to the lived moment of being a person in the world. Such complexity is necessary to acknowledge if we are to take seriously the “mode” or “tone” we enter into when we think, discuss or act “sustainably”. For what is actually occurring in real-time, outside of the pages of this journal, is not easily capturable on the page. Sustainability is complex, fluid. It involves multiple, interrelated actors, whose multiple agencies collide, collude, conflict. Reliances and dissonances are formed: the world of sobjects is a rather dysfunctional family.
Kinship: attending to reliances and dissonance
The mode of sustainability cannot be opened for discussion without mentioning recent work looking to spiritual or kinship-based relations with Earth, drawing on Indigenous philosophy (see for example Williams, Reference Williams2023). Indigenous kinship theories view humans as interconnected with nature through familial-style relationships, emphasising reciprocal responsibilities and respect. These frameworks prioritise harmony, stewardship and collective well-being, integrating spiritual, cultural and ecological knowledge to sustain ecosystems and guide ethical environmental practices rooted in deep relationality (Styres et al., Reference Styres, Haig-Brown and Blimkie2013; Wildcat et al., Reference Wildcat, McDonald, Irlbacher-Fox and Coulthard2014)). Space is thus afforded for considering the caring attention of the sustainability mode from the perspective of affective and kin-like attachments as well as from the perspective of other modes such as scientific, political and moral reasoning.
From an environmental perspective, kinship refers to the recognition of deep, reciprocal relationships between humans and the more-than-human world—plants, animals, land, water and ecosystems (see for example the writings of Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2013). The notion of kinship resonates with Rosa’s (Reference Rosa2019) work and Latour’s (Reference Latour2013) AIME in challenging anthropocentric views by positioning all beings as interconnected and interdependent, forming part of a living community. This relational approach fosters environmental ethics based on responsibility rather than domination, highlighting the importance of sustaining relationships that nourish ecological balance, cultural continuity and spiritual connection to place (Tran et al., Reference Tran, Reed-VanDam, Belopavlovich, Brown, Higdon, Lane-Clark and Gagnon2025). Kinship thus redefines environment as a web of living relations formulated between the self, others and the world they together form (from our sobject perspective, “others” refers to the mutually entangled actors that that present as people, materials, ideas, institutions, etc).
To be web-like, or network-like—that is to relate and connect—in a kin-like manner is in part to form emotional connections, which can be seen as reliances in terms of how the activity of related actors unfolds mutual dependencies to continue to exist in their current form. In many coastal regions in Asia, for example, mangrove forests are deeply entangled with the lives of nearby human communities (Baharuddin, Reference Baharuddin2025). These forests protect shorelines from erosion, provide habitat for fish (supporting local livelihoods) and store vast amounts of carbon, contributing to climate resilience. Local communities often form emotional and cultural bonds with the mangroves —viewing them not just as resources, but as living kin that protect, provide and require care in return. Community-led reforestation projects frequently include rituals, storytelling or spiritual practices, which reinforce this kin-like attachment. This relationship becomes a web of mutual reliance: the community depends on the mangroves for ecological stability, food and cultural identity; the mangroves depend on human action for protection and restoration, especially under pressure from development and climate change. The continued existence of both human and mangrove is shaped by this entangled affective and practical relationship. This is not just ecology; it is mutual sustaining.
Of course, it is rare that any familial bond is a bed of roses. Or at least, there are thorns in rose beds for a reason. Without protective thorns, many roses would not survive. An important part of the tones and overtones evoked by caring attention and development of kinship in a world of interrelated sobjects, is dissonance. For Rosa (Reference Rosa2019), dissonance is not simply negative or something to be eliminated—it plays a constitutive role in how we experience and seek resonance. Conflict, rupture or tension can provoke resonant experiences. The polycrisis, put on the table in classrooms, brings with it discomfort, strong emotions, resistance. To destructive patterns of waste water disposal, to ideas contained in policies, to the thought of changing habits of existence. However it is through this dissonance, rather than despite of it, that an authentic path may be taken. For dissonance is not alienation. Alienation, according to Rosa (Reference Rosa2019), denotes a breakdown of connection and a fall back into bifurcation of human versus a mute or indifferent world (we might think of Sartre’s La Nausée). Dissonance rather represents the struggle within a living, responsive relationship; a dissonance that challenges the resonant note, that jostles order into disorder, and offers a way in for students to firstly consider their reaction, the aspects of existence they are strongly tied to, that are desired, essential. Then to question why, to question how and what might be a suitable response, whether we ourselves buy in to Latour’s (Reference Latour2017a) suggestion of rematerializing in a thousand different ways or the pedagogies of collapse of Servant-Miklos (Reference Servant-Miklos2025). Harnessing dissonance as part of kinship echoes directions taken in EE research and practice, with arguments made for the inclusion of critical emotional awareness in EE programmes (Ojala, Reference Ojala2023) and emotionally responsive pedagogies (Dunlop & Rushton, Reference Dunlop and Rushton2022).
The final truth condition of sustainability as a mode of existence is, then, its ability to open spaces for thinking and speaking with and through kinship and the complex pull-push emotional movements of reliance and dissonance that kinship involves. Looking to emotional reliance and dissonance as part of the truth conditions of the “mode” of sustainability brings to the fore in classroom discussions how relationships grounded in care, responsibility and emotional investment are crucial to sustaining actors and Earth systems.
Practical challenges and concluding remarks
There are several challenges for educators when thinking from the perspective of sustainability as a mode of existence. The dizzying nature of focusing on interrelation threatens to overwhelm both educator and student, emotionally and cognitively. The sheer knowledge required for this endeavour requires a way of interdisciplinary working that we just don’t have right now: a way of sharing in less fragmentary terms information from diverse fields. Additionally, both Latour and Rosa advocate for slowing down, for ceasing growth or reconceptualising it. With education trapped in cogs of progress and growth, there is never time to linger much on anything, let alone to consider complex problems by systematically tracing actor implication.
An existential revolution looms that cannot just be laid in the laps of teachers and students. The mode of sustainability critiques the modern ideal of the autonomous subject, instead emphasising how Earth’s actors are constitutively dependent. We may in our schools discuss the possibilities of a “new order” through (dis)order and (dis)junction, but perhaps quite frustratingly lack much of the power needed to mobilise change. “Being” sustainable from this perspective is rather to zone in to the mode of sustainability with students, to discuss and hold to the light the tones and overtones of existence. That is, to be a caring and active citizen, aware of how existential habits and resonant/dissonant connections establish and influence; one who seeks the plurality and interconnectedness of existence in order to rethink it. This is not a proposal of a specific educational programme or a measurable solution. However, it is a response to Latour’s (Reference Latour2017a) suggestion that “There is no cure for the condition of belonging to the world” (p. 13). What this paper ultimately gestures towards is not such a closure but an opening—an exit that multiplies into many possible pathways. If our modes of existence in this world are indeed dysfunctional, then they will not be cured by harmony, consensus or comfort, but through the generative work of dissonance. It is through the friction of contradiction, rather than despite it, that authentic transformation becomes possible. The challenge ahead lies in cultivating a stance from which we might finally move toward active reconfiguration of how we live, learn and co-create a world worth inhabiting.
Acknowledgements
This theoretical paper acknowledges the role of all educators in educating for, with and about sustainability and hopes that the paper goes some way to supporting considerations of the complexities of their endeavours.
Funding statement
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Ethical standard
Nothing to note.
Author Biography
Ruth Unsworth is Lecturer in Education at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Her research interests and publications centre around new materialist studies of social practices, philosophy of education, and the role of place in outdoor learning.
Open access
