Ecologically responsible policies are concerned only in part with pollution and resource depletion. There are deeper concerns which touch upon principles of diversity, complexity, autonomy, decentralization, symbiosis, egalitarianism, and classlessness.

In this essay, Andrew Stables notes that philosophies such as existentialism, humanism, and environmentalism come in either exploratory or active forms: that is, one can study the nature of existence or the human, or one can ascribe to a way of life in an attempt to improve the world. Among the major influences on active environmentalist thought are humanism, socialism, posthumanism, and post- colonialism. In many cases, however, such ways of thinking can be as damaging or unsuccessful as they may (...) be ameliorative and successful. The search for an environmentalist Way, Stables maintains, must transcend entrenched binaries, oppositions, and ideologies without lapsing into thoroughgoing antirealism or willfully ignoring current realities. Here, he explores the valuable contributions that Daoist and Buddhist texts and practices have to offer in this search. (shrink)

The authors critique C. A. Bowers' argument that education for sustainability must be inspired by the practices of pre-modern cultures, and cannot be promoted through the postmodern pragmatism of Richard Rorty. Environmental education must rather be grounded in contemporary cultural practice. Although Rorty, like many other postmodernists, has shown little concern for the ecological crisis, his approach is potentially applicable to it. What is required is a broadening of focus: the ecological crisis is a crisis of post-Enlightenment humanism as well (...) as of other aspects of modernity. (shrink)

The relation between education and sustainability cannot be an external, still less an instrumental one. Sustainability means humans, as individuals and societies, consciously trying to go with the grain of nature. Learning to understand the natural world and the human place in it can only be an active process through which our sense of what counts as going with the grain of nature is continuously constituted and recreated. This process cannot have its agenda set to subserve sustainability criteria which it (...) actually makes meaningful. The policy discourse, parameters and indices of operational sustainability are heuristics, and the conditions for deploying them intelligently are at one and the same time the conditions for a genuinely learning and for a deeply sustainable society. This suggests, too, a basis for reclaiming education in general from the instrumentalising approaches that currently beset it. (shrink)

This book examines “New Localism' – exploring how communities have turned towards more local concerns: my street, my town, my state, as an expression of dissatisfaction with globalization. It details the ideas that have created a political force that academics have often misunderstood and provides a template for further investigation with a strong focus on how to harness the motivations behind such changes for the benefit of individuals, communities and the more-than-human environment. The book discusses human progress, both individual and (...) collective, in terms of the interactions of the local and the global, the specific and the universal, and the concrete and the abstract. It also considers how forms of social progress can be understood and reconfigured in the context of the rejection of certain aspects of liberal intelligentsia orthodoxy over recent years. Developing his arguments with specific reference to the evolving, political landscape, the author helps readers to understand major events such as the Trump presidency and the British vote to leave the EU from a fully semiotic perspective. He also explains how educational processes can use and respond to such events in ways that are locally grounded but nevertheless not at odds with more abstract formulations of progress such as sustainability and social justice. (shrink)