Can Sustainability Become a Burning River? An Ecopedagogic Agenda for the Discipline

Sustainability is everywhere. Spearheaded by the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals, it is woven into supranational policies and embedded in national strategies. It is used by activists, researchers and businesses. In this essay, I suggest that such ever-growing ubiquity has weakened its transformational impact in overt and covert ways. I propose a way forward through education. I connect with scholarship on ecopedagogy as a socially inclusive and eco-centric approach to teaching and learning about sustainability. I suggest that ecopedagogy offers a way of moving beyond the neoliberal logic of sustainability education as a vehicle for labour market skill acquisition and towards social-environmental consciousness. I conclude by urging fellow educators to adopt ecopedagogy in their practice and turn sustainability into a ‘burning river’ of change.