Discovering earth and the missing masses—technologically informed education for a post-sustainable future

Abstract

Climate change education (CCE) and environmental education (EE) seek ways for us humans to keep inhabiting Earth. We present a thought experiment adopting the perspective of Earth-settlers, aiming to illuminate the planetary mass of technology. By elaborating Hannah Arendt’s notion of ‘earth alienation’ and Bruno Latour’s notion of technology as ‘missing mass’, we suggest that, in the current Anthropocene era, our relation to technology should be a crucial theme of CCE and EE. We further suspect that sustainable development (SD) and the education promoting it (ESD) are problematic, because the green growth proposed is inextricably linked to the unattainable goal of decoupling growth from environmental impact. We therefore suggest education for post-sustainability (EPS) that critically re-evaluates the connections between technology and sustainability. But can educators critically question technology, since educational institutions seem to be unconditionally committed to promoting technological progress? While tracing this professional dilemma, we call for educational responsibility and autonomy to question technology when it is at odds with sustainability. To this end, we outline technological literacy that introduces the arts of (a) seeing technology, (b) living with technology, and (c) delegating or sustainably assimilating technology.

Keywords:

• Climate change education
• environmental education
• post-sustainability
• earth alienation
• technological literacy

Disclosure statement

There are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

Notes

1 Heikkinen (2020) aims to widen the perspective of vocational education by asking how human work and industries should serve the living earth-economy of all earthlings.

2 Here we explicitly mean technologically intensive modernism that, unlike many non-modern cultures, is struggling to establish stable relations with the surrounding reality: ‘During its less than 200—hundred-year reign, fossil modernism has not created even one small-scale example of sustainable life.’ (Vadén, 2021, p. 177).

3 Bicycle-based mobility or paper-based studying may be challenged by social contempt or the incompatibility with city infrastructures or educational practices, revealing technology’s multilayered determinism.

4 During the industrial revolution, Ralph Waldo Emerson admired both sublime nature and nascent industry seemingly unaware that while ‘[man] paves the road with iron bars’ (1836, p. 17), he is also paving the way for a future without wilderness. Environmental educators need to cross-examine their pedagogical technology to check if it truly agrees with a wooded future.

5 The mentioned research can be seen to include the three dimensions of seeing, living with, and delegating technology in education: ‘[i]f we “flatten” the hierarchy of the materialities of school, and give attention to the more neglected things that participate in classroom life, alternative forces compared to the official school become visible. […] [T]he phone can be seen as operating as an agentic and powerful actor in the classroom’ (Hohti et al., 2019, p. 91).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Maj and Tor Nessling Foundation under Grant 202100031 and Kone Foundation under Grant 201801313.

Notes on contributors

Pasi Takkinen

Pasi Takkinen researches the connections between educational philosophy, post-sustainability and technology in Tampere University.

Jani Pulkki

Jani Pulkki, PhD, associate professor, is a philosopher of education who defended his dissertation on the educational problems of competition 2017 in Tampere University. Currently, he is working on his project on Ecosocial philosophy of education in Tampere University in 2019–2022.