Review of Education, the Environment and Sustainability, edited by Kai Horsthemke

In Education, The Environment and Sustainability, we learn that the main limitation to environmental conversations and consciousness is ourselves.This book, a collection of essays published in volume 16, issue 2 of Ethics and Education, serves as an apt microcosm of the current state of environmental discourse.Despite our best efforts, sometimes we talk past each other, even when striving after the same pedagogical and environmental goals.The editor's short introduction, which spends most of its time situating the essays in the context of COVID-19, also gives very brief summaries of the chapters which follow.The introduction concludes with an appeal to objective and universal truth as an antidote to climate change denial (Horsthemke 2024, 6); however, Horsthemke's 'nave realism' is directly challenged by the final essay in the collection, Daniel P. Gibboney's "Spiritual exercises in times of climate change."In that essay, Gibboney challenges the common epistemological simplification that "you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts" (Horsthemke 2024, 140).He calls contemporary American science's defense of itself "mediocre" because it relies on the positivistic assumption that "facts are indisputably true" (Horsthemke 2024, 144).Such positivist epistemologies have been challenged at least as far back as Friedrich Nietzsche's famous pronouncement that there are no facts, only interpretations (1967, 301).The contrast between the editor's and the final contributor's writings highlight both the "problem" of wide-ranging interdisciplinary approaches, as well as the opportunities afforded by such multiplicity.Rather than espousing any single ideology or approach to pedagogy and sustainability, readers are implicitly encouraged to explore potential solutions non-linearly, which is the sort of creativity we need in both pedagogical and environmental spheres.Perhaps the best of the chapters included in this collection was the first, written by Vanessa De Oliveira Andreotti.Largely a thought experiment about the ramifications of a very-real-albeithypothetical climate crisis, it provides a great jumping-off point for the rest of the collection.Not only is the actual hypothetical situation itself interesting, but at a metacognitive level it helps us to interrogate the various starting assumptions everyone concerned with the environment brings to the table.Using our uniquely human capability to imagine potential futures, both good and bad, we're able to assess our own stress responses and potentially intercept problems before they arrive.Dubbed "Education 2048," Andreotti developed this thought experiment alongside an international collective called "Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures" (GTDF).The experiment asks the reader to inventory their reactions to a series of imagined news headlines of the future.Their goal is not to predict the details of the future, but rather to lay bare the gut reactions that often remain unspoken and thus unevaluated.Andreotti's experiment makes an important point: no matter our particular political or ideological biases, the only way we can solve climate and other crises is to "hold space for difficultissues and conversations, away from desires to be