Environmental education under siege: Climate radicality

1 To cite this article: Edgar J. González-Gaudiano & Pablo Á. Meira-Cartea (2019) Environmental education under siege: Climate radicality, The Journal of Environmental Education, 50:4-6, 386-402. To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2019.1687406 Environmental education under siege: climate radicality Edgar J. González-Gaudiano & Pablo Á. Meira-Cartea In small matters we may allow many small misses in order to benefit from the rarer chances of success, we may allow but few where greater things are concerned, and in the really great, irreversible ones, which go to the roots of the whole human enterprise, we really must allow none. Hans Jonas (1995, 71) (Free translation) Introducción The present article gravitates around the radical dilemma in which the evolution of the current human civilization has placed us. This route derives from certain global problems, such as most notably climate change, which have exacerbated the magnitude and complexity of the known socio-environmental problems. Avoiding the most extreme scenarios requires us to promote urgent structural social changes aimed at reorienting the course followed by the dominant development model, by undertaking a deep socio-ecological transition in an extremely short time – during the next 10 or 15 years–, or face an imminent collapse of civilization. The bases that give rise to this questioning are not recent. Since the late sixties of the last century, and more specifically after the publication of the studies carried out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Club of Rome on the limits of growth in 1972, discussions began on the false premises that support the concepts of prosperity, progress and well-being that we have assumed as universal aspirations of a historical nature. These debates and previous reflections gave rise to a tradition of thought nurtured by authors – whose views not always converged –, such as Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Huxley, Weil, Camus, 2 Arendt, Carson, Commoner, Meadows, Schumacher, Mumford, Illich, Marcuse, Gorz, Roegen and Castoriadis, among many others. Climate change represents the glaring effect of the radical crisis of this style of capitalist development, towards which we should align the whole range of efforts we might undertake in order to try to reduce the most drastic effects of the changes we are already facing, as well as those we will face with greater force during the next decades. In this process, education plays a role of the highest social priority, in which environmental education should set the course along which to travel, in order to modify the wastage of inherited natural assets and the human potential created. This desirably central role of environmental education contrasts with the weakness of the educational dimension in global, regional and national policies that attempt to address the climate crisis, more concerned with technological and economic solutions than with the radical social and cultural changes that we will be faced with. In fact, the proposals of the responsible international organizations continue trying to persuade us that with some adjustments in the functionality of the system and with appropriate techno-scientific developments, it is possible to realign or put an end to the pernicious effects observed. The route maps to reach the end of the century with a bearable climate also indicate that the change must be rapid to avoid that the inertia of the climate system leaves us with no options and with very little room for maneuver – only a decade. However, during the last fifty years, conventional environmental education has remained anchored in a set of environmental issues and problems to whose resolution it has contributed little, by promoting pedagogical strategies of individual change that lacked the necessary socio-political substrate and prospective vision that should stem from the increasingly evident environmental and social complexity. Likewise, we have insisted on greening the educational processes of a school system 3 that, in general terms, has exhausted its heuristic potential and that responds more and more – consciously or unconsciously – to the dictates of the interest groups and factual powers that have created the current panorama. What can environmental education offer in order to face these terrible conditions? What alternatives are there to promote a reflexive citizenship that can modify the collision course with the limits of the biosphere in which we live? What means and tools can we use as a contribution to at least mitigate the collapse, considering that education cannot do everything? These are the questions that we modestly try to answer with this article. A context of profound changes (for the worse) Fifty years ago, when the first issue of JEE appeared, the world presented a completely different picture than today. Although in terms of political polarization we were immersed in a Cold War that fomented the arms race between the blocs, there was also a number of social struggles and political insurrections for freedom and strongly countercultural civil rights: students; women; ethnic, racial and sexual groups, among several others. These initially marginal struggles spread until they impacted the historical foundations of the Western world, which were patriarchal, colonialist, capitalist and Christian, as well as euro- and logocentric. Within this framework of rupture, movements of a different nature also began due to environmental demands, based on critical questions about the modes of industrial production, demographic growth and development. The relevant reports of the Club of Rome, as well as the pioneering works of Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, among others, opened a new route of thought and action to analyze the trajectory we followed as a society to satisfy needs and desires, which was precisely the material bases and the quality of life of the development process. Thus, environmental education was inserted as a main factor in the mainstream of change. In the first issue of JEE (1969, 1), founding editor 4 Clay Schoenfeld stated that “environmental education does indeed represent a significant new scale in the interpretation of man-land relationships”. He characterized this new field as: Comprehensive, broader awareness, global, urban, indigenous concern, ecological, mancentered, universal, [supported in] social studies, in quest for quality, public involvement, open-ended options, adult education, all media, research-based and with a sense of urgency. That is to say, it assumes a much deeper approach from the philosophical, pedagogical and sociopolitical point of view than the reductive version that is usually given of the beginnings of EE in a “naturalistic” or “conservationist” key. In the same issue of JEE, Professor William Stapp warned about the changes that had taken place during the previous fifty years in the United States, that it had become an eminently urban country, as well as about the growing citizen concern for the environment and its problems. He also established the concept of environmental education that would give rise to the general constitutive features of this field: “Environmental education is aimed at producing a citizenry that is knowledgeable concerning the biophysical environment and its associated problems, aware of how to help solve these problems, and motivated toward their solution” (Stapp, 1969, 3). We emphasize in this definition the element of citizenship and its concomitant cultural and political substrate. This element gradually became less present in subsequent approaches that focused mainly on the individual change of a subject of education presumably homogeneous, without roots and without emancipation. The extreme case of these different approaches, over these fifty years, has been education for sustainable development formulated on the platform of the field of environmental education, as a palimpsest. The same process of neutralization of the potential components that come into conflict with the economic system, noticed in the most recent profiles of the field of environment-related education is also patent in wider areas of environmental claims. A high-level political operation led to the abolition of the eco-development proposal formulated by Ignacy Sachs, 5 which had begun to be stated in the Founex Seminar (1972) and more specifically in the Cocoyoc Symposium (1974), chaired by Barbara Ward (Naredo, 2004). The participants in this symposium recognized the unjust international economic “order” and the inequitable relationship between the center and an immense periphery that is what allows to sustain the wastage and hyper-consumption of wealthy countries. The Cocoyoc Declaration concludes: “We have faith in the future of mankind on this planet. We believe that ways of life and social systems can be evolved that are more just, less arrogant in their material demands, more respectful of the whole planetary environment. The road forward does not lie through the despair of doom watching nor through the easy optimism of successive technological fixes. It lies though a careful and dispassionate assessment of the outer limits, through cooperative search for ways to achieve the inner limits of fundamental human rights, through the building of social of social structures to express those rights, and through the patient work of devising the techniques and styles of development which enhance and preserve our planetary inheritance” (IIED-UNCTAD/UNEP, 1975, 10). Although some authors (Estenssoro, 2015) tend to argue that ecodevelopment is a precursor of sustainable development, the truth is that these notions have a weak relationship with each other. Both linked productive activities with the protection of the environment, but under different theoretical and political frameworks. Ecodevelopment emphasized ecoregions as the scale on which the use of resources should be made compatible with the conservation of the integrity of ecosystems, with the participation of the local population to favor endogenous and self-managed development with a territorial approach (Sachs, 1982); that is, a development that harmonizes social, environmental and economic objectives (Sachs, 1998). These factors were later included in the conceptualization of sustainable development. 6 However, sustainable development, although popularized through the Our Common Future report generated by the World Commission on Environment and Development led by Gro Harlem Brundtland, published in 1987, actually stemmed from an idea formulated by the World Bank. On November 12, 1981 in Washington, D.C., the president of said institution, A. W. Clausen, made a presentation entitled “Sustainable development: the global imperative” in The Fairfield Osborn Memorial Lecture in Environmental Science. The three premises around which this presentation gravitates are very eloquent about his intentions: “first, that if our goal is sustainable development, our perspective must be global; second, that human development must allow for continued economic growth, especially in the Third World, if it is to be sustainable; and third, that sustainable development requires vigorous attention to resource management and the environment” (Clausen, 1982, 2). Sustainable development was disseminated as a universal spell to respond to criticism against development programs promoted by international organizations since the end of the Second World War, because they were excessively focused on economic growth. This had been assumed as a universal solution to meet the basic needs and aspirations of people. To this end, the environmental dimension (and presumably also social equity) was added to protect the present generations and guarantee that future generations would not be less able to meet their own needs. Since its inception, sustainable development has faced a lot of criticism (Bifani, 1999; Grinberg, 1999; Reboratti, 2000), from various positions, since it was seen as an artificial stratagem to relaunch production and consumption within a framework of economic globalization, as well as the unceasing expansion of the power of corporate companies and financial speculation. The best evaluation derives from its results. In the more than 30 years that have elapsed since 1987, the rates of social inequality and environmental degradation have increased substantially and the gap 7 between the so-called developed and underdeveloped countries has not only not been reduced, but rather it has increased both between countries and internally (Morawetz, 1977). For this reason, critical views have emerged that call for degrowth (Latouche, 2008), decoloniality (Quijano, 2011; Santos, 2017) and post-development (Escobar, 2014; Sachs, 1992), as radical reconsiderations of the development concepts of progress and prosperity, turned into spearheads of economic hegemony and therefore politics. There is an abundance of arguments in favor and against sustainable development, but what we want to make clear here is that there are evident symptoms of a misdevelopment (Amin, 1990; Slim, 1998; Tortosa, 2001) with a view of inducing social welfare with environmental protection. Between these opposing positions, sustained economic growth has become an orthodox fixation and continues to be the (impossible) goal to achieve in the policies promoted by international organizations, despite their proven colonialist and predatory features affecting both people and nature. One recent example can be found in article 8 of the UN 2030 Agenda, on “decent work and economic growth”. It states the need to maintain “economic growth per capita” and an increase in GDP of “at least 7% per year in less developed countries” (target 8.1). Recommendations that, if fulfilled, can turn unattainable other objectives of the same agenda, mainly those that refer to the preservation of the biophysical limits of the planet. Furthermore, we also observe the associated optimism in the possibilities of techno-scientific responses that conveniently redefine limits as limitations (CMMAD, 1987), responding to an economic rationality that goes beyond the vital options of people expressed in capacities, rights and freedoms. (Sen, 2009). In all, the planetary bio-capacity (external limits) has been exceeded and the serious signs of depletion and deterioration of key resources are evident; likewise, socio-economic disparities, in themselves unjust, have increased, exacerbating the precarious balance of social risk. All this 8 causes the emergence of new and more complex problems of a global nature, such as the one addressed hereafter regarding climate change, that will force us to learn to live within the planetary limits, although with each passing day that we procrastinate these limits become narrower. Climate change and environmental education Henderson, Long, Berger, Russell, and Drewes (2017) took stock of the annual meetings of the American Education Research Association (AERA) and the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) finding that they contain few sessions devoted to climate change. Moreover, a word search in the magazine’s corpus produced “only a small handful of mentions from an ever smaller handful of environmental education scholars” (2017, 2). The authors claim that this result is not an anomaly and that the subject is marginalized in the literature produced within the broad field of educational studies as a whole. It is an explainable silence when one does not want to disrupt the status quo, since it is more comfortable to maintain the research traditions of the disciplines unchanged; but this behavior turns us -as educational and social researchersinto passive accomplices of a specific state of affairs. Henderson et al. (2017) also point out that this issue has been addressed mainly by environmental (and science) educators, although in homeopathic doses. However, they maintain that these are articles with a largely apolitical cognitive approach, as well as a such a limited framework that it obstructs the full understanding of the scope of education on climate change. Our own searches confirm this grim diagnosis. We have found that the vast majority of educational articles on climate change are geared towards climate science literacy. This is a serious problem, because it reflects the fact that fifty years have not been enough to leave behind the ‘original sin’ of environmental education approved at the International Seminar on Environmental Education, held in Belgrade (1975). An 9 approach disseminated throughout the world through the editorial collection of the IEEP (1975-1995), which promoted literacy about the physical environment and its resources as a key to changing attitudes and behaviors. Do we still have the collective perception that the learning of concepts and processes about the terrestrial atmosphere and its thermodynamic models, the carbon cycle or the thermo-regulating role of the oceans, is enough to influence the lifestyle of people to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases and promote climate adaptation programs that will be essential in the short term? We recognize that the concept of scientific literacy has evolved and that many authors have ceased to refer only to the cognitive sphere and have incorporated, above all emotional aspects, but also ethical, cultural and political (Hempel, 2014). Even Dupigny-Giroux (2010, 2017) differentiates climate literacy from scientific literacy, noting that the former implies not only having a body of knowledge, but knowing how to use this knowledge to explain and act on the basis of better informed decisions in new situations. This implies – states the author – a deep appreciation of the complexity and interconnection of the climate system in space and time to act accordingly. Even so, there is widespread agreement on the fact that an appropriate education for climate change should not be limited only to climate literacy (Allen & Crowley, 2017; Kahan et al., 2012; Shepherd & Kay, 2012); a position that questions the information deficit theory, since there is no evidence that a greater mastery of the science of climate change may lead to changes in behavior and individual action (or even influence attitudes), and even less to a mobilization in collective action (Allen & Crowley, 2017). It is clear that education for climate change is not merely about climate literacy. Just as environmental education does not consist only of ecological education and conservation. If we have not understood this in 16 severity, beyond feeling sorry for ourselves as spectators and participating with donations in some campaigns. To these difficulties we may add our tendency to overestimate extreme weather events, given that the media coverage of their effects tends to shock us emotionally, but we disregard the subtle but relevant changes that occur around us (for example: the increment in average temperatures by decimal points, alterations of coastlines or changes in phenological rhythms). Even more complicated issues to understand are the irreversibility, inertia and ubiquity of climate change, as well as the differences in regional effects that may be contrary to global warnings. For all these reasons, climate change can seem an abstract and timeless problem, as well as a counter-intuitive phenomenon whose causes are not easy to discern and whose consequences are projected in distant spaces and at temporary scales remote from the immediate horizon of current life (Uzzell, 2000; Spence, Poortinga, & Pidgeon, 2012). Being a phenomenon of recent appearance in our lives, the information disclosed about climate change and taking into account that there is no unanimous scientific agreement about it – which responds to the levels of epistemic uncertainty characteristic of all scientific knowledge – contributes to our confusion, hinders our awareness of the seriousness of the problem, and inhibits the urge to act. The emphasis on indeterminacy, knowledge gaps or variance margins in prediction models discourages preventive measures by fueling doubts about the problem, its causes and possible consequences, weakening the relevance it deserves as a real threat. It is paradoxical that the high levels of belief in climate change in countries such as Spain – 9 out of 10 people think it is a real phenomenon – are accompanied by the perception that the scientific community still has doubts about it – 5 out of 10 people perceive discrepancies in the scientific community on this issue (Meira et al., 2013). 17 Second, the obstacles that stem from the sociopolitical context and its ethical expressions are related, as we have stated, to the fact that climate change results from an economic system that is in a crisis brought on by its own success as a way of organizing material production, creating a relatively safe environment, and generating meanings and lifestyles shared by a significant portion of humanity. Therefore, the solutions, whichever they may be, have to generate a great international consensus, since they must be globally assumed and applied to be effective, which has not happened until now. Climate change confronts humanity for the first time with of the possibility of a global collapse that, therefore, requires a global response. Similarly, the complexity that surrounds this threat is also expressed in the ethical field. The ethical and political responsibility in the causes of climate change is unequally distributed, globally and within each country. Most of the greenhouse gas emissions, both historical and current, have been and continue to be generated by the most developed countries and by the elites of the developing countries. Although we are only a little more than one fifth of the world population, we accumulate the highest per capita rates of hydrocarbon consumption and emissions. Such a paradox, that the presumably better educated population of history should cause the greatest damage to the planet and the rest of humanity! In the scenario of a delocalized market, a large part of the emissions in the developing world are produced to satisfy the needs and desires of first world inhabitants. In addition, poor countries are the most vulnerable to climate change. Much of their production relies on extractive activities that move large volumes of unprocessed materials and on the primary sector. Furthermore, these countries have fewer resources to prevent impacts, mitigate emissions and adapt to change by strengthening their social resilience; they are the ones that are most at risk from indirect effects derived from the degradation of ecosystems, from economic turbulence, from new threats to health or from the deterioration and 18 depletion of vital resources such as land and water. By exacerbating inequities, climate change poses difficult moral dilemmas in the context of a persistent economic crisis and an increasingly rarefied international geopolitical scenario. The urgency to take personal action often seems incongruent with public policies and with the over-optimism of the messages projected through advertising, marketing and other ways of modeling the consumerist lifestyle. This contradiction also weakens our perception of the threat and discourages the adoption of alternative behaviors, sometimes difficult to put into practice in the absence of adequate facilities (i.e., the use of public transport, the consumption of energy from alternative sources, economic precariousness, etc.). We tend to perceive the slowness in the implementation of policies to respond to climate change as an indicator that the threat is not imminent, that it is not as urgent as it seems, and that there is still an ample margin of time to act (Meira, 2008). The limited and selective memory of the past, as well as the linear vision of history that situates modern civilization at the zenith of human evolution, fuel a cult of progress rooted in the myth that the future will always, necessarily, be better than the present. This myth is based on the belief that our species has been able to overcome other critical moments in the past, despite the fact that human history is full of cases of civilizations which have collapsed or suffered notable declines and setbacks (Diamond, 2005, Berman, 2007). Many of them due to deep ecological alterations, although they had achieved extremely sophisticated advances in their specific time and space. This myth is also reinforced by the confidence that science and technology, as instruments within the reach of advanced societies, will eventually find solutions that do not require substantial changes in the established model. Third, the following types of obstacles in the path of a full understanding of the problem are related to the cognitive and psychosocial processes that mediate scientific information, reinterpret it and integrate it into the 19 population’s environmental culture. It is necessary to take them into account for at least two reasons: a) so that we do not insist on the before-mentioned political and pedagogical ingenuity of thinking that it is enough to transfer scientific information about climate change to society – conventional scientific literacy – so that this problem can be understood and assumed without further ado; and b) to help guide programs and educational, communication and participation initiatives aimed at raising awareness and mobilizing the population against the climatic threat and thus obtaining a greater collective efficacy. Below, we synthetically present some of the most widespread beliefs, conceptions and prejudices according to our own research experience (González Gaudiano, 2007; González and Maldonado, 2013; Meira, 2008; Meira et al., 2013) and the experience systematized by other authors (Bord, Fisher, & ÓConnor, 1998; Moser & Dilling, 2004; Weber, 2010): a) Our difficulty in perceiving the implications of climate change can contribute to the idea that a moderate increase in temperature is trivial, given that it manifests in increments of “only” tenths of a degree per decade. In addition, temperate climates tend to value such increases as positive within the contemporary culture of leisure and well-being. In colder latitudes with communities that perform activities limited by the thermal variable, the expectation of an increase in temperature could be a desirable change (i.e.: for the productivity and oenological quality of certain vine varieties in central and northern Europe; for the increase of the production of cereals in the American Midwest – the corn belt –, or for fomenting the sun and beach tourism in the European Atlantic coastline). b) Our sensory apparatus can capture the evolution of weather patterns and adapt to the daily and seasonal thermal variations. But it is unable to record the subtle variations of the average global temperature, 20 quantified in tenths of a degree per decade on a scale of long periods of time. They are basically imperceptible. Accepting that climate change is underway literally becomes a “question of faith” in science. Due to this, weather phenomena that are part of natural fluctuations can be interpreted as evidence for or against climate change, given the need we have to give meaning to reality and to objectify a new event. Thus, a wave of Siberian cold in an area especially sensitive to climate change such as southern Europe can be interpreted as evidence refuting that the climate is becoming warmer, just as a heat wave in the same region can be assumed as evidence of an opposite process, although they could be normal meteorological episodes in said latitudes. c) If our senses show little sensitivity to capture the physical signs of climate change, our ability to process information is also limited and operates according to principles of economy and simplification in everyday life. These cognitive limitations, added to the uncertainty, complexity and scale of climate change, constitute an important difficulty for us to perceive and represent them appropriately. d) As we have pointed out, when transferred to the common culture, scientific information is processed based on epistemological patterns that are different from those that govern the scientific field. Specialized literature identifies some of the socio-cognitive patterns that, from this perspective, distort the representation of climate change and our assessment of its threat potential (Grothmann & Patt, 2005; Dietz & Stern, 2002; Jaspal, Nerlich, & Cinnirella, 2014): ✓ Our tendency to perceive the atmosphere as an immense and empty space, capable of absorbing everything, that has remained unaltered and unalterable throughout the natural history of the planet. This common belief is opposed to the scientific observation that it is rather a fragile system, consisting of multiple layers whose total thickness is proportionally very small compared to the volume of the Earth and that has been changing in composition and dynamics over time. 21 ✓ Our confusion between weather and climate. If we experience daily temperature changes of several degrees between minimums and maximums, to which we respond without substantially altering our lives, how could the increase by a decimal point in the average temperature of the planet over a much longer period of time be considered a significant threat? Our frequent confusion between weather and climate hinders a more precise representation of climate change. ✓ Our tendency to think that warming is a linear process and to trust that the changes that take place will follow a gradual progression that will allow us to adopt strategies of response and adaptation with opportunity. ✓ As mentioned before, we tend to highlight the importance of extreme environmental phenomena, but we have great difficulty in capturing gradual and progressive changes (Weber, 2010; Bellamy & Hulme, 2011; Spence et al., 2012). ✓ Our belief that individual action is irrelevant compared with the magnitude of the problem. Feeling overwhelmed or over-determined constitutes one of the main psychosocial barriers that hinder the shift from awareness of climate change to responsible action. Even when we perceive the problem, we can consider that individual response is inconsequential and useless given its epic scale. ✓ The social representation of climate change is being built by reusing ideas, beliefs and environmental representations in general and other environmental problems in particular. The difficulty experienced by most of the population, who take a layman’s view to science, in order to understand climate change is compensated by the activation of sociocognitive processes that allow us to recycle ideas and shared representations on other related issues. The most prominent example is the widespread belief that there is a causal relationship between the depletion of the ozone layer and climate change (Reynolds, Bostrom, Read, & Morgan, 2010; Ungar, 2000). This belief is so widespread that 22 we can speak of a “cultural universal” in advanced societies. It is also a paradigmatic example of how we integrate and reinterpret in the sphere of common culture images, information and concepts generated in the scientific field. The way in which we apply socially established knowledge, be it scientifically valid or not, to make climate change intelligible can be a major obstacle, since it is easier to create a new representation than to modify an already established one (Adams, 2001; Smith & Joffe, 2013). e) The fact that climate change is a problem closely linked to the lifestyles that we enjoy or desire makes the subjective cost of adopting significant changes be perceived as very high in terms of renouncing the well-being we have already achieved. When subject to the tension generated by the contradiction between the awareness of the problem and individual inaction, people tend to derive responsibility for the generation of the problem towards other agents and, therefore, also the search for solutions and alternatives: towards industries, governments, pressure groups, international organizations, politicians, etc. (Lenzen, 2001). Thus, our individual responsibility is diluted in collective responsibility and also suffers the paradoxes of the “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin, 1968): when personal action involves sacrificing certain levels of individual well-being – objective or subjective – for the benefit of others, our procrastination is justified and legitimated either by the inaction of those others or by the perceived inefficiency in institutional responses. Given these dilemmas, the mechanisms to avoid cognitive dissonance appease the perception of the contradictions between what is desirable and what is real. f) Climate change appears in a scenario in which there are many problems that are projected onto each one of us as global or local threats, from global terrorism and immigration to the financial crisis, passing through North-South inequalities, the threat of collapse of the “welfare state”, unemployment or citizen insecurity. So many simultaneous crises turn our perplexity into normality, which generates hesitations about which threat requires priority attention. Climate change does not figure 23 in the top of the hierarchy of concerns of most of us, which logically tends to include the most pressing problems in the day-to-day present. This scale of priorities favors the tendency to reject and postpone those that are perceived as more abstract, mediate and distant (Meira, 2008, Meira et al., 2013). On the possibility of collapse This article is based on the assumption that our civilization faces the possibility of a collapse derived mainly from breaking the boundaries of the biosphere. A collapse that, far from being projected onto a more or less distant future horizon, may already be under way. Human history shows how previous civilizations suffered collapses preceded by periods of decay of variable duration and intensity and, what is more relevant to understand the present, without being aware of the signs of their decline or without the ability to respond and to avoid it (Tainter, 2003; Diamond, 2005; Taibo, 2016). However, there is a fundamental difference between past collapses and the one that may be in progress at present: now we are facing a global collapse, whereas the previous ones were at a local or regional scale. This implies that no human society can avoid its consequences, although the levels of human suffering generated may vary according to each region of the planet and throughout time. A realistic reading of the IPCC series of reports points, at least, to a situation of exceeding limits, in which the trajectory we follow as a civilization will result, unless significantly altering our course in the next decade, in an end of the century that can be described in many ways, but that can be synthetically expressed as the chronicle of an announced climate collapse, with catastrophic ecological, social and economic consequences for humanity. Since the publication of the Limits to Growth report (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens, 1972), warnings about a collapse due to exceeding the biophysical limits of the biosphere have not stopped coming (Corell et al., 2009; Rockström et al., 2009; Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 2013; Turner, 2014; Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney, & Ludwig, 2015). Taibo (2016) speculates on three possible collapse 24 scenarios whose causes he identifies in the climate crisis, in the expansive and antihuman logic of global capitalism, and in the increasing scarcity of key resources – minerals, food and oil – to sustain the exponential rhythms of demographic and material growth of present-day humanity: 1. A slow collapse. In this scenario, the exhaustion of resources, environmental deterioration and socio-economic erosion occur gradually, allowing the implementation of mitigation and adaptation options. This situation could go on for many years, with increasing traumatic disturbances; over time, the decline will be increasingly evident. 2. A collapse with global-local peaks. This scenario is similar to the previous one but is marked by periodic and sudden environmental or social crises at local and global scales, increasingly intense and frequent. The process will not be linear, neither at the biophysical level nor at the social level. 3. An abrupt collapse. The impacts of the energy decline and the consequences of climate change are so severe that the social fabric and the global economy degrade rapidly, causing violent competition for scarce resources, mainly food, water and energy. It is not easy to incorporate this panorama into the field of environmental education. It is so because of the optimistic and idealistic nature of pedagogical thinking and of the educational practices to which it gives rise. A pedagogical praxis anchored, since the Enlightenment, in a conception of progress that is part of the ethos of Modernity and that understands history as an expansive, constant and endless improvement of the human species thanks to its cognitive and social capacities, amplified by the spectacular technological, scientific and economic development experienced since the middle of the 20th century. But faced with this credulous optimism of Modernity, Jonas (1995, 356) proposes the reform of a critical perspective based on responsibility: 25 “to the principle of hope, we oppose not the principle of fear, but the principle of responsibility. But fear is certainly part of responsibility as much as hope; and since the face of fear is less attractive and even, in some circles, is the object of moral and psychological contempt, we must once again give it the floor, because today it is more necessary than in other times in which, given the existing confidence in the smooth running of human affairs, it could be dismissed as a weakness of pusillanimous and fearful individuals (…). To avoid fear where it fear is due would be anguish”. (Free translation). In the field of environmental education, even in the most critical and emancipatory visions, pedagogical optimism is often transformed into voluntarism, if not into pure ingenuity, by seeing in education the key or one of the keys to overcome the socio-economic crisis for its alleged power to modify behavior or to incorporate the principle of sustainability, but without questioning the foundations of modernity or the predatory nature of global capitalism. Educating for collapse? Considering the difficulty to politically design a roadmap that may increase the chances of mitigating the climate change by the end of the century, it may be time to start thinking about an environmental education aware of the likelihood of a collapse of civilization whose consequences can be – or already are – dramatic in terms of human suffering. When the project of environmental education began in the ‘60 s and ‘70 s of the 20th century, the expectation was to contribute from the educational field to the regeneration of a civilization model that had begun to show evident signs of imbalance with the bio-physical limits of the biosphere. Precursors such as Stapp (1969) understood the relevance of conceiving educational processes aimed at raising awareness among the population and triggering civic responses to the socio-environmental crisis. In its 50 years’ run, this regenerative pedagogical project has run into the inertia of the establishment, victim of its internal weaknesses, of 32 the political role of citizens (Filho, Pace, & Manolas, 2010; Herman, 2015) to strengthen the sense of responsibility and agency. In short, there are many changes to be made. Although in the end, our task, as we see it today in this urgent crossroads of our civilization, is to recover a critical perspective that may allow us to question in pedagogical terms, the alleged benefits of perpetual growth and comfort offered by the establishment, which are radically unsustainable. It is a matter of rethinking that the limits are real, that they have already been exceeded in various aspects and that the only way to stop the destructive impulse in which we are engaged is by modifying substantively the inertial trend in which the world navigates under the illusory siren song of the global consumerist society. In short, education for climate change must be oriented towards the degrowing and recovery of a horizon of meaning in our lives, apart from the vain mirage of the material world. We do not know what the future might bring, but we do know what possible futures we do not want. References Adams, S. (2001). 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