The Eco-Certified Child is part of the Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment series edited by Alan Reid and Marcia McKenzie, which showcases and promotes current theoretical developments in critical interdisciplinary scholarship on education and environment. An essential and challenging inclusion in this series, The Eco-Certified Child problematises rarely disputed beliefs in the values and good intentions of environmental and sustainability education. Malin Ideland uses ethnological theory and methods to investigate how environmental and sustainability education can perpetuate harmful norms that serve to further entrench patterns of inclusion and exclusion in categories of citizenship. Ideland recognises that environmental problems are real and need to be urgently addressed. Working towards sustainable and environmentally friendly cultural practices, she argues, requires a nuanced understanding of what can unintentionally piggyback upon the good intentions to educate for a sustainable future. Without critical analysis, the best efforts can be undermined by unquestioned injustices and inequalities. By constructing the discursive figuration of ecological citizenship, Ideland deftly deconstructs how environmentally friendly understandings of how to be and act to organise our social, economic and political lives.

As an anthropologist working in conservation, I was particularly receptive to how Ideland skillfully put her own work and experiences in dialogue with the work of social theorists, including Sara Ahmed, Benedict Anderson, Hannah Arendt, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Nikolas Rose, Edward Said and Max Weber. Through a variety of conceptual lenses, Ideland unpacks the environmental discourses compelling certain forms of action in the world, the politics of evidence driving environmentally friendly initiatives, the technology of statistics in ethical decision making, the performative magic of numbers in cultivating citizens in-the-making, the domestication of emotions in elevating appropriate responses and sensibilities towards nature, the rituals and taboos of sustainability practices, the unintended consequences of hegemonic truths as they are rolled out in population-wide normative behaviours, the patterning of superiority and subordination in social orientations towards the rest of nature, who is heard and who is silenced in environmental agenda setting, the relationship between individuality and collective belonging in co-constructing personhood and nationhood under the sustainability banner, and the hidden coloniality of the sustainability project. What a juicy selection of topics to cover in just one book! Of course, that is not to forget the education theorists Ideland draws upon as well, most notably Thomas Popkewitz.

Malin Ideland shares hard-won insights that will benefit educators working in environmental and sustainability education. Thoughtful engagement with her book will help to transform nature education and conservation initiatives into more than just an investment in self-image and into a sincere and deep investment in a truly sustainable future. By asking what kinds of people are being made through environmental and sustainability education practices, Ideland challenges her readers to reconsider established curricula and pedagogies with a deep consideration of the broader social, economic and political commitments of schooling. A critical reappraisal, Ideland finds, is in order. Ideland’s analysis is elegant, piercing, and hopefully destabilising to dominant discourses in current environmental and sustainability education programs. By rendering visible how numerical technologies of scientific rationalism and logic depoliticise the political by making it appear objective, Ideland demonstrates how the aesthetics of environmentally friendly practices promoted by corporations and governments need serious and urgent critique. Problematising the seemingly incontestable is no easy task, but Ideland’s careful intervention successfully invites readers to reassess redemptive discourses permeating environmental and sustainability education.

The Eco-Certified Child is a short book, but not a fast read. I savoured chapters for a week at a time, reflecting upon the political ecology of sustainability messaging, reconceptualising familiar notions of nature education, and reformulating my own classes on conservation science, education and leadership. Malin Ideland, as well as Alan Crozier, who translated sections of the original book from Swedish into English, should be congratulated for communicating challenging academic material with such clarity. The English expression is seamless, which is no mean feat for a tome of such complexity and nuance. I was able to find new insights each time I returned to read passages again, and enjoyed many long pauses as I deliberated upon the content. My assessment, biased by my training as a cultural anthropologist, is that The Eco-Certified Child is a signature text and a must-read for those teachers teaching the teachers.