Beyond colonial futurities in climate education

ABSTRACT

Many pedagogies that seek to address the climate and nature emergency (CNE) promise hope and solutions for an idealized future. In this article, we suggest these pedagogies are rooted in the same modern/colonial system that created the CNE and other ‘wicked’ socio-ecological challenges in the first place, and thus they are not well-suited for preparing students to navigate these challenges. We also ask what kind of climate education could invite students to interrupt the reproduction of colonial futures, and deepen their sense of social and ecological responsibility in the present. As one possible response to this question, we offer an outline for climate education otherwise, which seeks to prepare students with the stamina and the intellectual, affective, and relational capacities that could enable more justice-oriented coordinated responses to current and coming challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• pedagogy
• colonialism
• wicked challenges
• sustainability
• futurity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Climate and nature emergency’ (CNE) summarizes a range of ecological crises beyond just climate change, including biodiversity loss, species extinction, and the degradation and pollution of lands and waters. The term is useful, but contested, as some have suggested that evoking ‘emergency’ can be mobilized to justify harmful, non-democratic decisions, and that it exceptionalizes the present in ways that erase the long colonial roots of the CNE (Whyte, 2020a, 2020b).

2 The terms ‘Global North’/’Global South’ are an imperfect and contested effort to acknowledge the ongoing impacts of European colonization and slavery that first divided the world and have since naturalized highly unequal flows of resources, knowledges, and people in ways that have benefitted what is now known as the ‘Global North’ at the expense of the ‘Global South’ (McGregor and Hill 2009). There is a risk that by describing these divides in this way we will reinscribe them, yet there is an even greater risk that we will reinscribe them by not describing them at all and thereby implying these divides either do not exist or are naturally occurring. There are also limitations to these terms given heterogeneities and inequities within both the North and South, which has led us to elsewhere emphasize that there are not simply the Global North and South but also further divisions: the North of the North, the South of the North, the North of the South, and the South of the South (see Machado de Oliveira 2021).

3 Elsewhere, we describe this as ‘depth education.’

4 Here, ‘high-intensity struggles’ refers to struggles organized around the imperative to defend one’s lands, lives, and livelihoods from active threats by the modern/colonial system, whereas ‘low-intensity struggles’ are generally efforts to ensure access to more resources and security within the modern/colonial system (see Stein et al. 2022a).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Mitacs; rare Charitable Research Reserve; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.