Politics in environmental education is conspicuous by its absence. This article is a plea to make politics–the study of who gets what, when, and how–central to our field and the keystone of a better way forward.

This paper explores educational fallout from the realisation that the world system has planetary boundaries as limits that are real and that require different thinking and governance concerning how human beings ought to inhabit the planet. It will be difficult to have billions of people think about global concerns when they are focused on their own well-being. And so it comes to governance, locally, with bigger things in mind. Environmental education rhetoric has already begun to expand thinking to engage world systems as groundings for the politics that underpins decision-making above and beyond levels of theory/praxis. The educational challenge will be to lay out background theory and guidelines as we find ways to engage politically the problems amidst the power and control of the people that we elect as “leaders” at each level of educational and political systems. However, the challenge has been taken up and environmental education has created openings for exploring complexities of political ecology within environmental education.

The history of environmental education in Australia is political, and fraught with power battles. Indeed, environmental education in Australia (as in many places elsewhere) has always been political. The early calls for environmental education came as a response to the perceived growing environmental crises on the 1960s. At this time, it was seen as a scientific and social priority by scientists, environmentalists and academics, but it was not seen as an educational priority by education departments. Rather, environmental educators were treated as yet another adjectival education lobby group wanting space in an already overcrowded curriculum. There was a time when most state education authorities were engaging with environmental education, but the politicisation of the placement of sustainability as (an optional) cross-curriculum priority has enabled avoidance of the politics of environmental issues and thereby a political stance that is tacitly supporting the status quo of the current neoliberal political systems. This article argues that the times have changed and so has the nature of politics and power bases, and it is time to rethink approaches to environmental education research and recognise that the politics of the past may not be the politics of the future as the generations grow different.

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.

This paper reflects on the national referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament that took place in Australia in mid-October 2023. At the time of writing, the aftershocks from the failure of the referendum to gain the necessary majorities were still being felt keenly by many of the Voice advocates and supporters. The hurt and grief of many First Nations people were shared by millions of non-Indigenous “Yes” voters, while much reckoning continued in the subsequent weeks and months. The author here explores what might have been gained if more attention had been given to what an Indigenous Voice to Parliament might “sound like,” instead of the excessive focus on, and public discourse around what it might “look like.” Resources from the philosophies and physiology of voice, communication ethics, cultural studies, critical anthropology, Australian Indigenous writing and scholarship, and psychoanalytic politics are utilised to explore the connections between the human voice, vocal expression, hearing and listening, silence and song.

How does Australia’s latest Indigenous defeat relate to Environmental Education? The answer is direct complicity. This paper begins with the premise that the failure of Australia’s 2023 referendum on “The Voice to Parliament” is directly connected with education. The chapter builds on the proposition that local and Indigenous public knowledge could — and should — be the heart of environmental education. We apply a post-qualitative practice that is underpinned by innovative feminisms and the post-qualitative methods within a Multispecies Collaboratory, an experimental way of transforming our learning by attending to the responsive, relational world of all beings. We use this practice to think with while exploring socio-ecological relations, especially our own. Collaboratory colleagues include rivers with their kincentric ecologies, urban park ecosystems and backyard kin or families. Journaling, creative writing and photography record our learning journeys. The article concludes that continuing colonisation, epistemic violence and a culture of denial reinforce the dominant paradigm of silencing Indigenous voices. We argue that an Indigenous-informed onto-epistemology of living place can — and should — inform the heart and practice of environmental education, and an Indigenous-informed Multispecies Collaboratory is one way to deepen the multispecies engagement that underpins environmental education.

Settler-colonial futurity and colonial onto-epistemology are embedded across mainstream Australian public education institutions and schooling. While Country is central to Indigenous being, knowledges and pedagogy, Australian public and school education and curricula regularly fail to engage with Country and place in its historical, political, institutional, more-than-human, and relational dimensions. This paper investigates how colonial discourse and narratives permeate public and schooling education resources about mining and the Australian gold rush, including those presented in local Victorian gold rush museums. These support an influential story of Australia’s past/present that erases First Nations1 custodial relations with Country, strengthens settler-colonial futurity and celebrates and legitimises its colonising and extractive relations between people, Country, and ecologies. The paper presents an argument for attending to critical, relational geopolitics in education and environmental education to destabilise and shift these ways of understanding. It considers opportunities and challenges presented by Australian curricula in terms of their capacity to develop geopolitical understandings of past/present/future social and ecological in/justice, and to support new political understandings and sense of connection and belonging with Country.

This study critically examines the implications of integrating Indigenous relational worldviews into the water governance framework of the Saskatchewan River Delta. Using a relational theoretical framework and community-based participatory research methodology, both Indigenous community members and non-Indigenous researchers collectively examine the negative impacts of Western water governance policies and practices on the Métis community residing in Cumberland House, located in northeast Saskatchewan, Canada. Through Indigenous traditional water story-sharing methods with Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers, our focus centres on Indigenous interpretations and ways of knowing the Delta. The community highlighted the pervasive influence of power dynamics and political agendas in the governance of the Delta. As such, we emphasise the necessity of challenging settler colonial systems and structures and reinvigorating Indigenous worldviews for water governance. By doing so, we advocate for the advancement of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination in their relationship with land and water, thereby promoting the meaningful implications of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action.

Population size is a significant variable that can be addressed to help combat climate change. If global fertility rates dropped by only 0.5 births per woman, almost a third of the emissions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change could be saved. This is equivalent to the annual emissions that would be saved from doubling the fuel efficiency of cars, increasing wind energy 50-fold or improving nuclear energy three times over. It accounts for over half of the Earth’s yearly emissions. Yet, is there a way to address population size without violating human rights? To what extent should individual reproductive practices change? These are live questions. However, various philosophers claim that procreators should limit themselves to having no more than one child. Doing so, they say, strikes the most appropriate balance between protecting reproductive justice for people who want to have children and achieving a sustainable future.

This paper pushes back on this claim. There are plausibly too many sexist, racist, classist and eugenic outcomes in demanding people limit their procreation to one child. Therefore, philosophers should relax their messaging about permissibility limits and be more concerned with helping people cultivate the right character to think through procreation and overpopulation.

This paper takes its cue from Koro and Wolgemuth’s conceptual writing on Apocalyptic Methodologies as an extended prompt to enact the utopian performative as a form of generative Queer Ecopedagogy. A utopian performative is the performance of future potential that critiques our present political moment, highlighting that the present is not enough. The paper offers a troubling of “nature” and place, in its suggestion that digital space can be a refuge for EE practice. It looks to virtual reality as a realm used to create space free from the constraints of colonial history or normative prescriptions of the non/human binary. The VR artwork Thalu: Dreamtime is Now, by Indigenous Ngarluma creator Tyson Mowarin is analysed to make a case that the digital realm can act as a reclamation and resistance to present colonialist realities, thereby enacting the utopian performative. By queering apocalyptic methodologies, the aim is to transcend traditional boundaries and reimagine the role of researchers, educators and custodians of the environment through apocalyptic imaginaries. In this endeavour, the utopian performative is only permissible through the digital space and therefore the political present, is not enough.

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.

This essay explores ways in which environmental educators might break with their existing traditions of research and pedagogy by critically appraising climate histories and anticipated futures depicted by SF (science/speculative fiction) in print and audio-visual media. SF has engaged the politics of climate change for at least two centuries and, as a form of public pedagogy accessible to all generations, provides alternative visualisations of the problems arising from humanity’s destructive transformations of Earth’s climate and possible ways of ameliorating them.

The need for more radical forms of learning-centred transformation is increasingly recognised in transformations to sustainability. Yet these approaches to learning remain under-developed and undertheorised especially from a politics and environmental education research perspective. This paper offers a review of an emerging politics of transgression in environmental education research, as developed through an extensive T-learning (transgressive learning in times of climate change) knowledge co-production research programme, spanning eight years, and continuing. The ongoing problem that the research programme seeks to address is how to do transgressive learning in/as environmental education research in times where the fall out of coloniality and fossil capital collide in an increasingly regressive political landscape which Akomolafe and Ladha (2017, pg. 820) describe as “the deadening ideology of late-stage capitalism and its corollaries of patriarchy, rationalism, white supremacy and anthropocentrism.” Through the paper, I seek to highlight a “low theory” (Wark, 2021) of transgressive politics in environmental education research, embodied in practices of transgressive politics as movement in co-engaged T-learning research, which I illuminate through a meta-reflective curational process from the ‘archive’ or T-learning knowledge commons collection.

This article surveys critical scholarship that links the literature on sustainable business education and education for sustainable development goals (ESDG). It is assumed that ESDG is desirable in the business curriculum. However, it is argued here that ESDG erroneously fosters the illusion of successfully combining economic growth, social justice, and environmental protection, foregrounding “sustained and inclusive economic growth”, which is often dependent on the increased consumption of natural resources. ESDG rarely addresses industrial expansion that jeopardizes the opportunity for the resolution of environmental crises, ignoring the intrinsic value of nonhuman species and ecosystems and masking the root causes of unsustainability. ESDG places heavy emphasis on economic and social aspects of sustainability, at the cost of the environment. By contrast, some earlier forms of environmental education recognize the limits to growth and emphasize environmental integrity as a foundation for both social and economic activity. This article emphasizes the need to re-orientate ESDG towards genuine sustainability of ecopedagogy in the context of business education, emphasizing transformative business models based on degrowth, circular economy, and steady-state economy. It is argued that a more explicit pedagogical re-orientation towards the recognition of planetary boundaries, as well as toward a less anthropocentric focus is needed.

Environmental education (EE) can never be separated from politics and the relationship between the two is complex, has changed over time, and is understood and experienced differently. The field’s relationship with politics is both internal (its own politics) and external (political forces outside the field) to it. In this article, I narrate my story of engaging with EE, politics and the relationship between the two. I refer to my story as an autocartophilosography because it has been significantly influenced by my engagement with philosophy and by my movement in space and over time. My most recent engagement has been with scholars’ theorising in the posthuman condition, and I suggest that this present condition requires a different politics, an affirmative politics. I generate seven propositions towards an affirmative politics for EE: making kin, transversal subjectivity, new alliances, dis/identification, embracing slowness, ethical and intellectual stamina; experimental energy.

The Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development (OECD) works with countries worldwide to implement testing in the areas of science, mathematics and reading through the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) every three years, and this process is recognised to influence education systems through areas such as curriculum. Over the past decade, the OECD increasingly has acknowledged the need to include a greater emphasis on environmental issues, including developing student competencies specifically in this area. For the 2025 PISA round, we were invited as environmental science education experts to contribute to the Science Framework, which underpins the science assessment. This paper explains how we responded to that invitation, including foregrounding the urgent need to understand the competencies of 15 year-olds to address critical socio-ecological challenges such as climate change. We argue that this provides environmental education practitioners and scholars with a powerful opportunity to gain world-scale data for research and advocacy, which could enhance the visibility and leverage for our field in curriculum, whilst also recognising the political process within which we were engaged.

In recent years, China’s strong commitment to the political agenda of ecological civilisation has increased the presence of environmental education (EE) in the policy arena. Using the waste classification policy as an example, this research explores the implementation of EE policy in two Chinese primary schools. Through the use of a policy enactment framework, the findings reveal that contextual factors such as school enrolment, infrastructure and external influences from the District Bureau greatly influence the schools’ policy capacity. By exploring the internal policy flow and school artefacts, it was found that although the waste classification policy was enacted similarly in the selected primary schools, the outcomes differed significantly. These variations highlight the complexities and challenges of implementing an EE policy under ecological civilisation and contribute to the understanding of the tension between localised adaptations and the nationally politicised EE policy mandates.

Based on the critique of education for sustainable development (ESD) as a socio-political control element of ecological modernisation, we discuss the prefigurative potential of participatory photovoice research in schools in light of social-ecological transformation. We argue that engaging students in prefigurative practices of change in which (sustainable) counter-futures are explored in the (unsustainable) present can help to re-politicise ESD, and we view photovoice as a way to guide this transformative process. Drawing on examples from a participatory research project on the transformation of local food systems in Graz, Austria, we critically explored photovoice as a method of transformative education that creates power-critical spaces of possible futures in which (un)sustainable hegemony and collectively internalised patterns of thought and action can be questioned to envision and negotiate liveable futures for all.