Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education invited educational practitioners and theorists to speculate on – and craft visions for – the future of environmental and sustainability education. This volume explores educational methods and practices that might exist on the horizon, waiting for discovery and implementation. Throughout this project, our authors were concerned with how the collective project of imagining alternative futures might help us rethink environmental and sustainability education institutionally, intellectually, and pedagogically. Contributors used emerging modes of critical speculation as a means to map and (re)design the future of environmental and sustainability education today.

The future of environmental education is an urgent question in the larger context of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which human activities have become the dominant driver in the ongoing evolution of Earth’s biosphere. Our contemporary ecological moment is characterized by complexity, uncertainty, and ‘accelerating change’ (Wals and Corcoran 2012). While the global impact of anthropogenic climate change is undeniable, the pace of temperature and sealevel rise depends on ecological feedback loops that are not fully understood – and which may be increasing the rate of biosphere destabilization (Hansen et al. 2015). From a social perspective, the Anthropocene is an age of what humanities scholar Rob Nixon (2011) terms ‘slow violence,’ or ecological violence and environmental injustice that occurs on spatial and temporal scales that are hard to understand or represent, most often against the world’s poorest peoples. In light of such developments, educators need strategies for anticipatory engagement with changing socio-ecological realities – both in the present and future – in order to be effective within their various embodied contexts. This volume explores how environmental educators can engage in imaginative mapping concerning large scale global processes, as well as create useful, situated knowledge for dissemination within their respective socio-ecological contexts.

Here’s a link to book and its Table of Contents as well as to some of the content that is available through open access: Envisioning Futures

‘Social learning: Towards a sustainable world’ edited by Arjen E.J. Wals

Due the success of “Social Learning towards a Sustainable World” its publisher, Wageningen Academic Publishers, has decided to make the e-book ‘open-access’ as of October 2013! This means anyone can download the book for free here: Link to open access version

International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education (Stevenson, Brody, Dillon & Wals, 2013)

The environment and contested notions of sustainability are increasingly topics of public interest, political debate, and legislation across the world. Environmental education journals now publish research from a wide variety of methodological traditions that show linkages between the environment, health, development, and education. The growth in scholarship makes this an opportune time to review and synthesize the knowledge base of the environmental education (EE) field. The purpose of this 51-chapter handbook is to illuminate the most important concepts, findings and theories that have been developed by EE research and critically examine the historical progression of the field, its current debates and controversies, what is still missing from the EE research agenda, and where that agenda might be headed.

Sustainability & Learning Series Wageningen Academic Publishers

You can order a paper copy of the books published by Wageningen Academic Publishers with 10% discount when you use the email links below to order. Please mention the number of books you want to order and your full address details (you can also add your VAT number when applicable).

I want to order ‘Intergenerational learning and transformative leadership for sustainable futures’.

I want to order ‘Learning for sustainability in times of accelerating change’.

I want to order ‘Social learning: towards a sustainable world’.

I want to order ‘Young people, education and sustainable development’.

The acoustics of social learning is an open-access document that outlines some basic principles and applications of social learning in the context of sustainable development. The pdf can be found here: Acoustics of Social Learning

Key work on Transformative Learning:

Other books of interest:

Creating sustainable environments in our schools

Higher Education and the Challenge of Sustainability