We are living in an era of market-driven, globalised economies characterised by reduced public investments in what, until now, have been considered public goods and services. In Australia and elsewhere, education, and higher education in particular, has seen steady declines in government funding. This has prompted universities to become much more entrepreneurial and to seek out new funding opportunities to support their teaching and research activities. This paper reflects on the personal and professional dilemmas and challenges we faced as two early career environmental education researchers who were commissioned to undertake research for a private corporation. As a result of issues raised during this process, we engaged in a critical reflection of our perceptions and feelings about our involvement in the project. In essence, dilemmas and challenges centred around two issues: (1) control/ ownership of the research; and (2) the clash between corporate and university values. This paper explores these issues and suggests that greater mindfulness on the part of individual researchers as well as the development of better university-corporate partnership processes and protocols might provide useful starting points for overcoming such dilemmas and for moving forward with university-corporate research partnerships.

It is important to distinguish between two sorts of greenies. First there are those who think that the environmental problem can be solved by more attention to clearing up, or minimising in future, the damage caused by industrial-affluent society. Most environmentally concerned people are in this category, calling for things like more pollution control, but having no recognition of any need to question our affluent lifestyles or the rate of producing and consuming and economic growth their society involves. The first part of the following discussion argues that this common position is mistaken, that there is no chance of solving the environment problem without facing up to drastic reduction in GNP and ‘living standards’.

Unfortunately there are at present few greenies of the second type; people who realise that environmental damage is just one more huge problem being generated by our unsustainable ‘growth and greed’ society. There is no more important issue for environmental educators to focus on than the question of whether it is sufficient to patch up the damage being caused while plunging on down the track to ever-greater affluence and GNP, or whether the problems can only be solved by fundamental transition to a very different society, a radical conserver society. The argument below is that there is no chance of solving the environment problem nor any of the other major global problems facing us unless we move to lifestyles, patterns of settlement, values, and especially to an economic system which permit us to live well on far lower rates of per capita resource use and environmental impact that we have at the present in countries like Australia.

Art is as old as human culture. For most of the time, art was part of an exchange between humans and the cosmic order. Art was meant as a gift to nourish the fecundity of life. Art was communication with ancestral creational powers — the invocation of a poetic space from which creation entered the material realm. This paper explores art as a way of tapping into the invisible forces of reality. I argue that humans can experience these forces as aliveness (joy/desire to give) and can transmit them by poetic creation. Through art, humans have a capacity to nourish life, in parallel to how natural productivity unfolds from the unseen into the embodied domain. This capacity is a source of artistic creation. It is a crucial means to participate in a life-giving cosmos. Although the Western understanding of art is far from this attitude, art has remained the domain where aliveness is accommodated not with empirical, but with imaginational means. In the current global crisis of life, it is crucial to remember the potential of art not only to relate but to contribute to aliveness. Programs in environmental education should build on the direct perception and expressive imagination of aliveness.

This paper explores the question of what matters and what is made to matter — the ethics of encounters in the intimate entwining of ontology and epistemology. Within an ethics based on matter and mattering, it explores the evolving symbiotic entanglement of humans with each other and with non-human beings, who, with us, make up the world. Our complex symbiotic relationality is discussed in relation to the limiting force of neoliberalism, where all that matters is economic growth and productivity. It asks what hope there is for the survival of the planet, when so many humans, including politicians of almost every stripe, have lost the capacity to think outside the neoliberal box. As things stand, as one scientist observed, it is as if we have a medical, terminal diagnosis, and, although there is a cure, we choose to ignore it. It asks what are those cures and explores the possibility that we humans might learn to respond — to be response-able to our planet, in its state of terminal distress.

The underlying ideologies which support higher education have received only limited attention in relation to our desired goals of social and ecological sustainability. This paper examines the current ideologies which drive higher education, and proposes a different ideological framework which can be used to support a sustainable higher education. Firstly, a criticism of the current convergence of utilitarian and neo-liberal ideologies is presented from the perspective of sustainability. Secondly, building upon the educational theory of John Dewey, an alternative perspective termed “environmental progressivism” is outlined as a possible ideological framework for a sustainable higher education. The paper concludes with some preliminary remarks as to the practical implications of environmental progressivism.

The School Strike 4 Climate New Zealand (SS4CNZ) movement have organised and led four strikes between 2019 and 2021. With each successive strike, adult support for students’ demands increased. Their most notable achievement was garnering sufficient support to pass Aotearoa New Zealand’s Zero Carbon Bill into legislation. However, tensions with SS4CNZ led to the Auckland Chapter announcing its disbandment in 2021. There were mixed responses to their decision. In this reflective essay I argue that this disbandment was a positive move forward because these youth were showing their willingness to re-build relationships with their Māori and Pacific Island activist peers. By disbanding, not only were these young leaders enabling their Māori and Pacific Island peers to lead future actions, they were acknowledging the connections between racism, colonialism and climate justice; responding to our relational crisis by demonstrating the importance of re-building robust and reciprocal relationships between humans and more-than-humans when advocating for ways to navigate towards a climate-just society.

This article was prompted by a Ministerial veto (2021) of the Australian Research Council’s decision to fund a research project by the authors to explore the student-led climate movement in Australia. It was also prompted by criticism of the veto which accused the Minister of bringing “politics” into what was represented as a scholarly matter. It addresses two questions: How should we understand this idea of “politics” in the context of Australian climate politics since the 1990s? Secondly it considers dominant ways of thinking about “the political” devised by ancient Greek writers and politicians which still inform the European liberal tradition. We question how fit for purpose this approach is in the Anthropocene? Our key argument is that the western tradition of thinking about “the political” is deeply anthropocentric. Historical traditions have encouraged inegalitarian and anti-democratic accounts of who can be political by excluding different kinds of people from political life. The Anthropocene requires a new, critically reflexive account of “the political” that is inclusive of people currently marginalized and excluded as well as nonhumans and nonliving components of ecosystems on which we all depend. This extends the idea of democracy beyond the human and points to a politics of climate justice.

Over the last decade there has been a discernable global upsurge of nature kindergartens, forest schools, bush schools and nature-based primary schools; all with varying degrees of intent focused on (re)connecting children and young people in/with/as nature. Yet, not all of these educational endeavours are the same. The understanding of the role the natural world might play in pedagogy varies, the desire to work within the system or radically change it shifts according to commitments and philosophies, and the perceived divide, or lack thereof, between child and nature also has significant effects on curriculum and content. Still, there is a shared commitment among these educational movements to change existing relationships with nature and education. There is a desire and much work being done to ecologise education. In this Special Issue, with its primary focus on the west coast of Canada, we offer a pause to story, philosophise, expand, and disrupt as this ‘type’ of education presents a significant shift and fundamentally questions what school is and what education is for.

Throughout the world, Aotearoa-New Zealand is recognised for its extraordinary biodiversity. However, many species that make up this distinctive biodiversity are under threat of extinction due to human impacts, such as the ill-considered introduction of particular animals. Many New Zealanders participate in the protection and restoration of their environment, which involves the lethal control of these introduced animals. Primary school children (5–13 years old) engage in conservation education as part of their learning, which aims to develop their abilities to take informed action to protect and restore our environment, sometimes including lethal control of introduced animals. Recently, concerns have been raised that children learning about the lethal control of introduced animals does not align with the values that should be explored and encouraged according to Aotearoa-New Zealand’s national curriculum. We argue that conservation education, including learning about the lethal control of introduced animals, encourages children to explore and encourage these values, namely valuing the diversity in their heritages, ecological sustainability, participation for the common good, equity, innovation, and respect for others.

The past two decades have seen a proliferation of Indigenous philosophy in environmental education. Much of this anti and decolonial work has made significant advances in deconstructing western modernist subjectivities; re-embedding and re-situating Indigenous and western relational epistemologies into human-earth relationality, including critical inquiry into questions of positionality, power-knowledge and human and more-than-human agency. Less articulated, however is the potential of these practices to address large scale and interrelated global challenges associated with climate and cultural-ecological crisis which coincide with the intensification of late capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacism. Relatedly, at global levels human rights approaches to planetary wellbeing continue to predominate and prominent international agreements such as UNDRIP, SDG, IPCCC and the Global Compact for Migration remain siloed from one another. Providing a broad sketch of these themes I then propose a whakapapa or kinship-based approach to life as laying the conceptual foundation for three regenerative place-based strategies which I subsequently introduce. Each strategy treats contemporary global challenges as interconnected and positions Indigenous knowledges and lifeways as playing a crucial role in addressing these. Moving from Indigenous philosophy in environmental education to broad intersectoral action, these strategies also make the interconnections between individual, collectivist, and structural approaches to Indigenous-led intergenerational resilience as one means to support our collective action toward healing human-environmental relations.

The decisions and activities of engineers are often intimately connected with the choice of energy systems and their far reaching effects on society and the environment. Yet there is little or no explicit ‘sustainable energy education’ — that is, education about the rote that the production and use energy plays in modern society, including the related technical aspects—in most undergraduate engineering courses.

The significance of energy to modern society, the culture of engineering, and the future outlook for sustainable energy education are explored from a historical perspective in the context of environmentalism, feminism and industrialism. The current status of sustainable energy education theory and practice in Australia is outlined. Drawing on interviews with key practitioners possible approaches to sustainable energy education in engineering are discussed. Current courses and resources for sustainable energy education for engineers are summarised.

The benefits of beginning Education for Sustainability (EfS) in early childhood are now widely documented. With the support of their teachers, young children have shown that through engagement in sustainability practices they are capable of becoming active citizens in their communities (Duhn, Bachmann, & Harris, 2010; Kelly & White, 2012; Ritchie, 2010; Vaealiki & Mackey, 2008). Engagement with EfS has not been widespread across the early childhood sector in Aotearoa New Zealand (Duhn et al., 2010; Vaealiki & Mackey, 2008) until recently. One way of addressing EfS in early childhood education is through teacher education institutions preparing students to teach EfS when they graduate.