The ecology of sublimity: educational tensions between existence and the ungraspable

Sublime experiences are complex, poorly understood and articulated, but central to environmental education. They are also enabled, modified and threatened by scientific knowledge, ideas and practices, and in ways relevant for environmental education during the ecological crisis. A sublime experience is a felt encounter with something so vast that it cannot be fully encountered, such as endless mountains or the Milky Way, but also the multitude of planetary species - and their rate of decimation. Sublime experiences have many contingent aspects, brought about through relationships both within the experience itself and between it and its developing context. They can lead to multifaceted insights and emotions, such as generating humility and awe, but also fear, insecurity, and variously an increased or reduced sense of agency. Rather than having a specific effect leading to particular educational implications as it is sometimes treated, sublimity is better understood as a dynamic ecology of possibilities. Working educationally with sublimity’s promises and dangers is facilitated by familiarising with dynamic interplays that co-constitute its ecology in different contexts. After mapping some of this, I focus on the core educational issue of how the self’s existence can be deflated and/or re-instated through encountering sublimity, and the educational craft needed to engage with this educational tension.