Teetering on the Brink: Subversive and Restorative Learning in Times of Climate Turmoil and Disaster

Unchecked climate change poses a self-inflicted existential risk to humanity as it exacerbates the multiple-crisis syndrome facing global society. In international policy, education for sustainable development is widely flagged as transformative. To realize that transformative potential, sustainability educators are exploring the nexus between their field and that of transformative learning. They particularly call for a stretching of epistemology so that unsustainable practices are challenged, taken-for-granted thinking and assumptions disrupted, root causes of global dysfunction interrogated, values subjected to critical scrutiny, change potential of socio-affective learning unleashed, and paradigm shift thus catalyzed. The problem is the overall lack of consensus about what needs sustaining and what needs transforming. Seeking to address that problem, we call for subversive learning interrogating four key climate change drivers: economic growth, consumerism, denial, and climate injustice. We also call for restorative learning in three important areas: restoring nature intimacy, confronting despair, and reclaiming the good life