Environmental education is never neutral; through what is emphasised or ignored, education shapes how learners understand their relationships with the more-than-human world. This editorial introduces the Special Issue Beyond the Metacrisis: Educating for the Future World to Come, situating environmental education within a planetary metacrisis produced by intersecting ecological, social, economic and epistemic failures. Drawing on critiques of colonial modernity, neoliberal growth imperatives and Enlightenment dualisms that separate culture from nature, the authors argue that the metacrisis is an educational paradox: education systems reproduce normative conditions—like resource extractivism, alienation and technocratic optimism—that threaten collective futures. The metacrisis is conceptualised as an entanglement of multiple polycrises, including climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, international and local violences, toxic pollution, social inequity and public anxiety, whose planetary scale distinguishes the present moment from historic civilisational crises. This editorial synthesises contributions challenging assumptions of progress, neutrality and individualism. Collectively, the Special Issue papers engage with the problematic of modernity, neoliberalism and the marketisation of everything, the alienation embedded in the Enlightenment. Each essay has an introductory synopsis, categorised as an activation about neoliberalism, a response to collapse, and a reworking of the modern alienation between culture and nature. Instead of alienation, the papers foreground Indigenous, place-based, relational and post-growth approaches to environmental education, offering alternative pedagogies, curricula and institutional imaginaries grounded in care, reciprocity and ecological limits. Together, they position environmental education as a site for ethical re-worlding, supporting cultural regeneration, social justice and renewed human–Earth relationships.

Modern society is under the illusion that calculation and measurement amounts to control. Heidegger’s critique of the enchantment of modernity shows how the machinations of power are inhibiting the course of evolving change. People cannot reflect on the real failures of the many iterations of the polycrisis and learn from them. This failure to notice failure is at the core of the metacrisis. Modern society is under the illusion that progress as continuous exponential growth can proceed with its onward trajectory without having a profound impact on resources, pollution, socio-cultural and ecological well-being. Education remains entrapped within the enchantment of modernity, and continues to prioritise the calculation and control easily imposed on STEM subjects, and the development of rationality as “progress” over and above a more wholistic approach to education. But the pace of planetary cycles and laws of thermodynamics bind humanity as much as they do other species. Understanding how finance supercharges the economic growth cycle will help us to re-evaluate and learn from the failures of the metacrisis, and transition to a calmer, slow economic system and more egalitarian future.

This essay develops the notion of Dark Pedagogy as a framework for responding to climate and ecological disruption. It begins with the claim that climate breakdown exemplifies the metacrisis: a structural condition in which the very knowledge of ecological catastrophe coexists with inaction, denial, or disavowal. Climate disruptions thus reflect not only material devastation but also the erosion of social, political and cognitive frameworks that normally enable collective response. Dark Pedagogy foregrounds the parallel between the metacrisis and the psychological dynamics of disavowal, showing how familiar narratives of progress, harmony and control both obscure ecological realities and perpetuate ineffective responses. Against educational approaches that rely on hope or reassurance, Dark Pedagogy emphasises dwelling with unsettling affects as a means of confronting the uncanny instability of the world, using Giacomo Leopardi’s reflections on nature as an exemplary case. Anguish, in this context, is treated not as a symptom to be overcome but as a critical signal: it reveals the fragility of our assumptions, alerts us to the limitations of familiar frameworks and opens a horizon for education rooted in reflection, ethical engagement and attentiveness to the unpredictable, often hostile realities of the current geological era.

This theoretical paper responds to concerns surrounding the fracturing and opaqueness of the term “sustainability” and the related metaphysical crisis that underpins an existential polycrisis. Drawing on Nietzsche’s work on order and disorder (1873, 1901), Latour’s (2013) philosophical anthropology of modernity and Rosa’s (2019) theory of resonance, the author proposes a way of considering sustainability pluralistically, as a crucial mode of existence amongst others. Revisiting the dualism of subject/object, the author proposes a more implicated, associative way of viewing how humans and non-humans relate, introducing the term sobject: interpolated, entangled being(s). As this mode of existence is explicated, the paper articulates how this could be useful in an educational sense. What is proposed is a way to “zone in” to sustainability with students; a mode through which we can learn to see our connections to and within the world, through which we can actively renew the many-pronged path of Earthly existence. Authentic transformation of dysfunctional existence on Earth, this paper argues, will not arise from harmony or consensus but from engaging the generative dissonances through which we might move beyond perpetual reconsideration of “sustainability” towards the active reconfiguration of how we live, learn and co-create a more inhabitable world.

We live in turbulent times. Humanity has become a geological force altering planetary conditions whilst notions of a universal abstract human have been challenged by the geohistorical formation of ecologies of power, capital and nature. Climate change, along with conceptualisations of education rooted in industrial framings of the world centring on human progress, testifies to multiple crises. This contribution attends to the connectedness of multiple crises and the complexity needed to address them by probing their marks, what is introduced as the etchings of metacrisis. In so doing, climate change and education are brought together to problematise the mindset of modernity and Enlightenment and the transhistorical continuity of -isms violences (capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, industrialism). Transoceanic thinking and Édouard Glissant’s notion of whirling encounters are mobilised along an affective approach to archives re-imagining environmental education. Such an approach prompts imaginaries of eco-relationality traversing the local and the global, the past and the present and re-vivifying the relationality of peoples and Land without downplaying violences of the -isms.

Humanity is facing a confluence of existential environmental and material crises threatening socio-economic sustainability and the web of life that predicates human existence. At the same time, the erosion of spiritual, social, political and economic assemblages is undermining social cohesion, the fabric of democratic societies and humanity’s ability to change course. The dynamics in which humanity now finds itself has been termed the metacrisis, an embodiment of a mythical, all-consuming Moloch, emerging from collective akratic actions. Here, the consequences of the metacrisis for education are discussed from Rupert Read’s (2017) thrutopian perspective, which sidesteps the paralysis arising from dystopian laments and major-utopian fantasies. This paper argues for a thrutopian curriculum that enacts Read’s call for attention to the present and a focus on adaptation through resilience building, environmental care, positive relations and enjoyment of the possible. Such a curriculum confronts dystopian visions as no longer avoidable challenges while pulling utopian concepts from the permanent deferral inherent in major utopias down to minor-utopian realisations in the daily here-and-now of adaptive survival. The paper contends that thrutopian thinking can empower curriculum writing, teaching and environmental education and defuse the rise of debilitating crisis anxiety across the age spectrum.

There has been an understanding of a disconnected relation between humans and nature in modern liberalism. The disengaged relation is closely tied to dichotomous perceptions of realities with a widening gap between humans and nature, subject and object and culture and nature. This article considers the disconnected understanding as a sense-making crisis of modernity and qualifies this as a metacrisis. Instead of the disengaged views and the dichotomous relation between humans and nature, this article claims that the relations between the human self and nature is culturally, socially and politically mediated. To elaborate on these phenomena, this paper examines the writings of two thinkers with diverse concerns: Charles Taylor and Antonio Gramsci. For Taylor, the self is mediated with nature through social imaginaries, language and reconciliation in labour. For Gramsci, the self is mediated with the natural world via common sense, socio-historical elements and work. This article argues that cultural and socio-political elements that mediate human-nature relationships are essential in environmental education.

As the planet confronts an interconnected meta-crisis linked to natural, political, social, and psychological challenges, there are some pedagogical tendencies that should be challenged within university education. Drawing on the philosophical literature of the Ecological University, this article uses an eco-philosophical framework for considering mainstream university pedagogy. We emphasise that the increasing mental health challenges of so many young people at university is both a symptom and a feature of the meta-crisis and a key consideration for how we might respond as university educators. We argue that many of the existing neoliberal and liberal tendencies in university can be interpreted as “Miserable Pedagogies” — which typically fail to engage with the meta-crisis as a threat to the planet’s psychological, social, political, or natural ecosystems. We suggest that our “pedagogies of misery” need to be disrupted and radically contested with an ecological world-view we describe as “Anthropocene Intelligence.” After setting out the key features of Anthropocene Intelligence, we consider how an alternative teaching approach, used by one of the authors, reflects such an ecological worldview and potentially provides a basis for more meaningful and active ways of being and learning on this finite planet.

Here we develop the concept of metacrisology – a way of thinking shaped by crisis that examines the nature of crisis itself – by engaging with philosophers in the context of climate change, technological acceleration and symbolic misery. Beginning with a traumatic childhood experience of cosmic finitude, we reconceive crisis not merely as a path toward inevitable disaster but, in Kostas Axelos’s Heraclitean sense, as an improbable imperative that challenges passive acceptance. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s interpretation of krisis as a decisive moment, we argue that the metacrisis is fundamentally a crisis of time deprived of care. Yet against survivalist resignation, we advocate a pedagogy of the unexpected (anelpiston) that cultivates openness to the unprecedented as such. For this we search for a new experimental language to explain the situation. Byung-chul Han’s critique of Heidegger and his revival of the sublime also informs our discussion of beauty as a temporal suspension that resists the rush of technical time. We critique the fetishisation of wounds, whether symbolic or ecological, that forecloses futures and instead argue for a destructive aesthetics that can generate the untimely catastrophe from which, in Deleuze’s sense, a people-to-come might emerge.

Alarmed by the planetary crisis, Bernard Stiegler demands that a philosophy of education be reimagined to preserve knowledge and envisioned negentropic education as an essential response to the Anthropocene. This paper aims to chart a path for negentropic education in three ways. First, we examine the anxiety related to existential threats that shape life and learning in the metacrisis. We offer an existential approach to anxiety, drawing on Sartre’s ontology of human freedom, particularly his emphasis on resisting bad faith and nihilism as a critical step toward an authentic response, in the quest to reclaim our connection to others and the environment. Second, we turn to Dufourmantelle’s work on wise-risking and gentleness to develop teaching strategies for coping with anxiety. Her works offer ways to connect students emotionally and practically to the world-in-crisis. We then turn to Stiegler’s meta-analysis of how technology and capitalism are destroying teaching and learning, and his proposal for negentropic education as a way out of the metacrisis. Adopting Sartre’s and Dufourmantelle’s insights, we offer a brief sketch of some elements of a negentropic pedagogy, one that may facilitate the radical social transformation – what Stiegler calls bifurcation – that is necessary for post-anthropocenic education.

Today, there is a tendency within the field of environmental education to argue that the current global metacrisis is intrinsically linked to idealist traditions in philosophy and culture. The underlying intuition appears to be that idealism ultimately relies on a Cartesian distinction between mind and body: that it privileges the mind while neglecting the body, thereby enabling a view of materiality – or “nature” – as something to be used or exploited. A similar assumption can be identified in the call for papers for this issue, where modern idealism is linked to neoliberal politics and economics. In contrast, the aim of our paper is not to reject idealism entirely but to argue that the real issue lies in particular ideas and worldviews associated with specific understandings of reality. To open up space for alternative ideas and imaginaries, we propose that educational theory and practice must engage with a process we term mundification: the initiation of individuals – though education and other cultural practices – into what it means for there to be something at all, that is; a world.

Universities embody a fundamental paradox: they are institutions created to solve civilizational problems that have themselves become primary sites where such problems are generated. This paper develops “crack literacy” – the capacity to read institutional breaking patterns as information rather than failure. Through methodological engagement with kintsugi, the Japanese art of golden repair, we examine how universities operate as recursive systems where attempted solutions intensify original contradictions. Drawing on Byung-Chul Han’s temporal analysis, Isabelle Stengers’ concept of “learning to be affected,” and Bruno Latour’s hybrid networks, the investigation reveals why conventional approaches to institutional reform consistently reproduce the patterns they attempt to address. Following Yoko Tawada’s literary practice, this exploration allows itself to be shaped by the impossible conditions it investigates, developing forms of attention that conventional academic discourse cannot provide. Kintsugi doesn’t eliminate breaking but creates conditions for fragments to hold together differently. Universities practising crack literacy would learn to work with contradiction as structural necessity rather than problem to solve, developing temporal patience adequate to transformation that cannot be rushed.

Environmental education is being reconfigured in this era of runaway economic growth and social and environmental unravelling. The aim of this article is to articulate interconnected challenges confronting education in a time of polycrisis by articulating new conceptions of technology and technological progress, hopefully leading to a more refined critique of growth-based economics and technocratic solutionism. We begin by synthesising research related to the Anthropocene and post-growth discourses, presenting two simple heuristics that we have found useful in designing educational responses to the metacrisis and unravelling. Afterwards we discuss these heuristics in relation to disaster studies, land- and stratification-economics, as well as ancient/long-standing practices of resource/wealth redistribution (e.g., potlatch), highlighting implications for future research.

Imagine being in a university that functions in a place-based culturally regenerative way. In this concept paper, the authors bring together theory, practice, and experience, in the service of transforming universities towards place-based cultural regeneration. At present, Australian universities operate using an economic philosophy of neoliberal corporatism characterised by hierarchical management strategies, competitive tendencies, patriarchal values, and discourse characterised by bifurcation or binary thinking. These features illustrate a worldview that is entangled with the meta crises of our times such as climate change, species loss, hatred/intolerance, and unfathomable violence. The authors consider ways of moving towards a place-based, Indigenous-informed, practical, relational way of learning, being and knowing differently. The paper tentatively assembles a local, place-based culturally regenerative worldview based on living, vibrant, responsive places that embrace people who collaborate with Country – in the Indigenous sense of deep relationality. Within this worldview, the authors propose collaborative ways of governing, teaching, learning, and leading that is necessary for place-based cultural regeneration. In conclusion, the authors outline a pathway towards universities as places of regenerative cultures, which prioritise the nurturing of learning to live and work beyond the current societal paralysis on the road to collapse.

Martuwarra the Fitzroy River, is a living entity encompassing law, values, ethics and virtues who has laid the foundation for learning and self-regulation. Martuwarra foster peace, harmony and balance within a water system covering 93,829 square kilometres of the Western Australian Kimberley region. However, climate uncertainty as part of the unfolding metacrisis demonstrates the limitations of decades of colonial invasive development in the Kimberley. In this paper the authors illustrate Traditional Owner water knowledge, science and lived experiences as managers of the catchment from the beginning of time. Traditional Owner knowledge and practices, fine-tuned over thousands of years, carry water governance and management through First Law, the law of the land and not man. The authors advocate for this ancient knowledge to be learned by fellow citizens in the region, governments, industries and other parts of Australia, as it is essential to modernity. They propose a bicultural and bioregional governance model to create a better future for the greater good of all.

We are in a metacrisis caused by exponential growth, extraction and entitlement. When we strive to abolish the abundant absurdities of the current system (i.e., modernity) with rehabilitative or reformist responses, we risk reproducing, even reinforcing, the very dynamics we seek to transform. The sensing seed is a visual heuristic and practice of resonant embodied ethics to aid in unravelling the machinations of modernity. The seed identifies three polarities that reflect salient patterns of modernity: separateness, linearity and abstraction. The sensing seed is designed to surface the many materialisations of modernity while elucidating ethical entrées that are decolonially discordant with dominant dispositions by enabling reflexive, visceral and committed praxes of the many adjacent alternatives available, but largely imperceptible, even unimaginable, to modern humans. Through radical acceptance, attention to aesthesis and action, we can show up, cultivate connexion, kindle kin, grow groundward, tarry with trouble, abide in aporias and wallow in wiser lifeways akin to those of our pre-modern (i.e., primal) ancestors.

As usually conceived and practiced, education – sustainability, environmental and beyond – is embedded in an overarching narrative of progress: increasing human knowledge leading us to make wiser decisions about our behaviour, as individuals and societies. This article outlines an alternative story that draws on the work of two Indigenous scholars, E. Richard Atleo (Nuu-chah-nulth) and Leanne Simpson (Nishnaabeg), who approach living well as a quest to co-exist in harmony and balance with all our relations (that is, the living world of which we are an integral part). Among the core principles they identify are self-determination, consent and sacred respect, understood both as operative in the functioning of healthy ecosystems and as guides to human development and relationships. We show how these principles are grounded in a quest for the mutual beneficial flourishing of free beings and trace some of their implications for environmental education. While stories of this kind are at odds with the current dominant conception of schooling, there are many ways in which they could begin to influence how we move beyond the metacrisis and further, how wethink about and practice education for eco-social –cultural change and the future world/s to come.

There are multiple intersecting crises afflicting society, from environmental devastation to the collapse of democracy, from economic exploitation to gratuitous violence, in the so-called “metacrisis.” Universities have both contributed to these crises in various ways, but have also tried to prevent them In this paper, we consider our responses to the metacrisis from our various disciplinary perspectives as four university educators from different scholarly traditions in one institution in Aotearoa New Zealand, We draw from our teaching experiences and our theoretical perspectives to engage in a reflective conversation with each other about how we may address the challenges of the metacrisis. Our conversation illustrates the potential benefits that such reflections, amongst colleagues who are intimately connected to a range of crises, may have to elucidate knowledge, power and performativity, and considers how humility, in a variety of forms, may be important to navigate the metacrisis.

Only through strengthening social networks might we face the myriad challenges of the metacrisis. Our research supports social engagement across perceived difference and prioritises relational intent to counter modern tendencies that atomise and isolate. We use Extended Realities (XR), which encompasses Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality formats, enabling us to work across time and space in ways that feel immediate yet distanced, where digital subjects appear to interact with viewers, despite being spatially and temporally absent. We invite visitors to safe and even playful encounters while seated at either real, virtual, or devised domestic dining tables with virtual women from different cultural backgrounds who speak in their own voices, in accordance with their own values. First encounters between indigenous (Māori) and more recent settlers, such as Pākehā (European immigrants) like the first author, are freighted with trauma and difficult histories that continue to play out and trouble our contemporary society. Common Sense, the subject of this article, features revered Māori elder, Irene Hancy, seated at her own dining table in rural Aotearoa. She speaks directly to this issue with grace and insight as she educates us about what constitutes authentic and meaningful interpersonal encounters scaffolded by traditional practice and rituals.

This article offers a response of hope to the metacrisis. Because of modernity’s philosophical premises, particularly Enlightenment concepts that separated humanity from nature, modern approaches to environmental challenges embrace a dualistic schism between culture and nature, fragmenting understanding through the compartmentalisation of knowledge. In our current situation, many feel bleak and too helpless to act. In response, we offer the experiences of Māori youth from a specific iwi (tribe) of Aotearoa New Zealand, Rongomaiwāhine. These young people speak of their holistic conceptualisation of humanity, the natural and the spiritual. Their values focus on taking responsibility for care in all realms, often through actions significant in community or land-sky-seascape settings. Their lives and ideas suggest the value of a framework grounded in Indigenous Māori philosophy from which others may learn. Thus, far from seeking new technological solutions we offer rememberings of how the ecology of relationships was and, for the rangatahi, remains. In this, the past, present and future are woven together in an understanding of the natural world of which humanity is merely a small part. The result is a hopeful framing of life in which relations of care protect ecological continuity.