In this article, we discuss our investigation of children’s imaginative sense-making and its materiality in climate change education. Drawing on a new materialist approach, our research contributes to knowledge about the material significance in children’s sense-making related to climate change. During a project called Riddle of the Spirit in a Finnish primary school, we invited children to explore the concepts of global warming and carbon dioxide through narrative, playful and multimodal activities. Inspired by postqualitative methods, our relational analysis, based on video materials, maps and examines two episodes of children’s small group inquiry. Our findings unfold the material–discursive intra-actions, through which a prop turned into a whale’s head, the Titanic film appeared, and water and carbon dioxide became important to children’s bodies. With these specific events, the study illustrates how various materials conjoined and came to matter in the children’s sense-making of the concepts.

More-than-human refusal, as an expression of agency, plays an active role in constructing boundaries. In this article, I address what kind of environmental education is made possible by the productive constraints of respecting more-than-human boundaries and refusal. This is intertwined with how humans can practice being attentive to the intra-actions of more-than-humans when they are not physically present, are only speculated to be present or are present through artifacts. I rhizomatically analyse my relationship with a leafcutter bee (Megachile spp.) nest as a situated example of practicing a relational ethic of care. Through queering the boundary between myself and the leafcutter bee, nature becomes not something that I (human) experience, but as something we (bougainvillea-leafcutter bee-nest-human assemblage) produce through our human-and-more-than-human relationality. Rather than seeing limited proximity as prohibitive, environmental education can use this productive constraint to know-with more-than-human others in a way that disrupts the nature/culture binary — to blur the boundaries between humans and more-than-humans without violating the agency asserted by more-than-humans.

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.

Anthropogenic climate change is a significant driver of disasters, such as tropical storms, floods, drought and loss of biodiversity, amplifying their frequency and severity worldwide. The annual incidence of extreme weather-related events increases with growing human exposure to risks. The Sendai Framework and its associated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognise the interlinkages between disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and sustainable development. However, despite the best intentions of disaster planners, the current efforts are suboptimal in promoting implementation. Education is a critical goal to achieve sustainable development. Environmental Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) seeks to equip students with the knowledge, skills, values and agency necessary to address the complex challenges of climate change and global warming. One example of such an educational programme is the “Speak to Me in Numbers” programme. This interdisciplinary ESD programme educates 9th graders in SDG-related scientific content through scientific data analysis. It strives to inspire students to develop their agency and become responsible future citizens by taking local climate action to bring about sustainable development in their communities. Empowered young people who become agents that bring about global changes are crucial in the context of the climate crisis. However, such efforts should be undertaken cautiously to avoid doing more harm than good by evoking climate anxiety. These implications are discussed.

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 explores the potential for extending relational ontologies to include a specific focus on human-plant relations. We theorise the emergence of a vegetal ontology, as a novel way of working and remaking theories around human-plant relations that can be applied to the field of environmental education. A vegetal ontological approach, as applied in the environmental education research project that informs this article, abandons hierarchical comparisons of plants, which are often historically positioned as “lesser species,” mere “objects” and “resources” even. We start our paper with a modest review of key theoretical approaches informing past and recent environmental education studies on child-plant relations. We then return to the discussion started within the introduction to the paper on how we have theorised a vegetal ontology as a mode of a relational ontology focussing particularly on human-plant relations and drawing on posthumanist, new materialist and Indigenous approaches. To conclude the paper, we then put this newly named vegetal ontology to work. We apply it to a recent study on childhood-plant encounters where researchers engaged with young children and their families in a botanical garden setting and a group of environmental education elders reflected on the significance of plant relations in their childhoods.

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.

While Indigenous knowledges have long recognised forests as sentient and caring societies, western sciences have only acknowledged that trees communicate, learn and care for one another in recent years. These different ways of coming to know and engage with trees as sentient agents are further complicated by the introduction of digital technologies and automated decision-making into forest ecosystems. This article considers this confluence of forest sentience and digital technologies through a pedagogy and ethic of immanent care as a relational framework for analysis and praxis in environmental education. The authors apply this framework to three key examples along Birrarung Marr, an ancient gathering place and urban parklands in the city of Naarm (Melbourne). These include an immersive theatre-making project exploring forest communication networks with young children; the Melbourne Urban Forest data set, which hosts digital profiles for over 70,000 trees; and the Greenline masterplan which aims to revitalise the north bank of the Birrarung over the next five years. Exploring the ethical and pedagogical contours of these examples leads to propositions for rethinking the role of environmental education in navigating the current confluence of animal, vegetal, fungal and digital life.

How well do we know how non-humans experience environmental stressors and how do we communicate that knowledge as educators? This paper addresses these questions by way of an auto-ethnographic account of the author’s experience of attempting to listen to the Great Barrier Reef, off the Queensland coast. Through a series of methodological failures and roadblocks, this paper discusses the difficulties in understanding non-human sensory worlds. Following the auto-ethnographic account, the paper explores how anthropological pedagogies can contribute to environmental education of non-human experiences more broadly. The paper uses anthropological pedagogy to draw an analogy between ethnocentrism/cultural relativism and anthropocentrism/ecocentrism. Utilising practices of “third place” then demonstrates how the latter terms of these relationships are correctives to the former terms rather than oppositions. This paper concludes by suggesting ways in which the lessons learned can be applied to environmental education. It recommends creating a third space environmental curriculum which defamiliarises human experience and creates a zone of contact between humans and non-humans. The use of mediating technologies and artistic practice in conjunction with scientific education is recommended to maintain a critical perspective of human knowledge and biological limitations in creating experiential relationships with the environment.

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.