Editor's Notes

One needs only to read the headlines to know that the climate crisis is upon us. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres suggests that we have passed from a warming phase into an “era of global boiling” (Reuters 2023). Climate scientists argue that the climate tipping point is likely closer than we suspect, noting that the Atlantic Ocean's circulation system, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, will likely experience an abrupt and irreversible change due to warming as early as the middle part of this century, which will have widespread consequences (Ditlevson and Ditlevson 2023). We are now consistently experiencing the hottest months in history, and under an almost constant threat of volatile weather. Climate refugees are no longer a possibility, but a reality. The climate crisis may be the greatest threat colleges and universities face in this already volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous century. Global warming threatens to squeeze, injure, and destroy institutions and the many purposes we invest in them. Yet at the same time as academia faces this challenge, we also have the opportunity to improve humanity's ability to understand, mitigate, and adapt to the emergency (p. 225). This call to action is amplified by climate writers and activists such as Joanna Macy, Katharine Hayhoe, and Bill McKibben, and the responsibility and ability of colleges and universities to respond to social and ecological crises is evident in pedagogy studies and philosophy of education, such as Kevin Gannon's Radical Hope, Paul Handstedt's Creating Wicked Students, David Orr's Earth in Mind, Alexander's Universities on Fire, and bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress. This special issue explores higher education's ability to respond to the climate crisis through sustainability pedagogies in teaching and learning, program design, and cross-institutional collaborations. The first chapter explores many levels of teaching and learning through the lens of the Climate Alliance's “Just Transition Framework.” Applied to higher education, this framework issues a call for educational developers to work with faculty on course design aimed at justice and sustainability, supporting practices that are restorative and regenerative, rather than extractive. In chapter two, a group of educational developers and faculty at Barnard College share their both challenging and successful experience in facilitating co-taught, interdisciplinary courses on climate. They explain how they surmounted institutional and disciplinary barriers and what kind of programming was effective in creating partnerships across disciplines. Chapter three details the history and structure of one of the country's first online sustainability and resilience graduate programs. Developed at Green Mountain College and sustained by Prescott College, this program is centered on place-based pedagogies, even though it is primarily asynchronous and remote. Chapter four chronicles a sustainability pedagogy cross-institutional dialogue between educational developers and faculty at several universities in Canada. This program has yielded expected results, such as participants learning from the challenges and successes of other institutions, but it has also led to other benefits, such as research collaborations and a feeling of community. Chapter five showcases the interaction between a statewide initiative in Alaska and a particular class in the arts, emphasizing how project-based learning can lead to justice and sustainability-focused outcomes. This, in addition to the preceding chapters, is aimed at offering examples for and guidance on various high impact practices that will enhance our universities’ capabilities to contribute positively to social and environmental sustainability and resilience. Finally, the issue concludes with an opinion piece on artificial intelligence. The author reminds us of the significant environmental footprint of AI tools and asks us to consider taking a pause in what seems to be a frantic race to keep up with and leverage this technology. These suggestions come not only from environmental concerns, but the author argues that our pedagogies may be stronger and more resilient if we are more thoughtful in our adoption of AI. This is not an argument for ignorance but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival—the issues now looming so large before us in the twenty-first century. It is not education but education of a certain kind that will save us (p. 238).