Education at the End of Modernity
Education – in all its forms – has historically been concerned with both developing the capacities to secure human thriving and reproducing (or very slowly shifting) cultural norms and ideals. Higher education, in particular, has also served as a ladder for upward mobility. It has been a powerful propulsive force behind the steeply rising arrow of "progress," especially since the mid-20th century. Formal education promises, and sometimes delivers, ascension. At this same time, this unidirectional travel also swiftly moves people, their preferences, and their aspirations far from their histories, places, and relationships. The consequences of this are many. We’ve made some tangled, terrible systems that tear at the web of life, encourage extraction from the Earth, and push those alive today ever further from each other, from our ancestral ways of being and belonging, and from the possibility of survivable futures.
Alienation on the planet that allowed us to evolve and from everything we depend on for life causes feelings of desperation. This hollow, bottomless loneliness — especially when paired with the high levels of stress that come with economic precarity and time-scarcity — is surely behind much of the current so-called mental health crisis, which is really less a crisis of mental health than a set of crises that affect mental health. Dis-ease is endemic even among the well-educated and the fairly fortunate. Suffering is amplified for those who have, for generations, been stepped upon and trampled over in the mad dash of a great and unwise acceleration. Yet those who have endured oppression, apartheid and even attempts at extermination possess more than just pain. They also bear the blood-memory of survival, cherished remnants of old ways, and the ability to walk in more than one world.
The early climacteric – evidenced by an unrelenting cascade of crises – demands that educators make admissions against professional interest. Plainly, the twin mandate of formal education — supporting human thriving and reproducing culture — has become (and perhaps has long been) paradoxical. One imperative undermines the other. The widespread reproduction of dominant cultural ideals poses a critical threat to both human survival and the life-supporting capacities of Earth systems. Sound natural scientific research and upstream analysis demonstrate that the ways humans have organized and resourced themselves in recent centuries actually pose existential threats. Human activity, when moving to the beat of dominant ideologies, has caused transgression of six of the nine planetary boundaries. At the same time, the promises of "development" remain unrealized, with none of the 11 social foundations consistently and evenly accessible in any nation regardless of how allegedly advanced an economy it boasts. Simply put, economically and culturally imperial modernity – with its array of breaking ideologies and extractive practices – has delivered ecological overshoot and social shortfall. The result is a despairing present and an omnicidal, though unequally threatening, future. Without hospicing modernity and shifting into new-old ways, wellbeing will now and forever remain out of reach for most.
We know that we cannot expect to enjoy the stable and enabling features of the Holocene climate in and beyond the 21st century. Similarly, we cannot and should not presume the continuity of existing dominant socio-economic systems. Steeping current and rising generations of students in outdated stories and training them to operate effectively within breaking systems causes more harm and betrays our duties as educators and mentors. It is neither wise nor ethical to prepare young adults to do well for themselves (even in the very near term) within systems that undermine the conditions necessary for biophysical survival and stifle all hope of mutual flourishing.
In search of better ideas, those of us who fancy ourselves educators – and especially environmental educators who cherish the more-than-human world – should question the foundational premises and motivations of our vocation. After doing that for several years, EcoGather has reached a number of conclusions that guide our work. We share them in the hope that they may help other educators continue to evolve their own approaches.
Ethical education
Ethical education, especially environmental education, can no longer be centered on conservation or even the fast-dimming aim of sustainability, which has shown itself to be a mediocre midpoint between destructive and regenerative activities – one that slips ever lower as we continue to degrade ecosystems and extinguish species.
Of course, protecting and restoring remaining species, intact or rehabilitatable ecosystems, and natural complexity is essential work. But those efforts cannot yield their desired results while the aims of “sustainable development” rule the day. The arrangements we make to take us from today into tomorrow must not undermine continuance.
Because “the crisis we face is fundamentally one of relating,” environmental education needs to center relational ethics, re-storying, and culture building. Only then can we support learners in changing their relationships with the future.
Effective education
Effective education cannot lay the burden of reckoning and reimagining entirely at the feet of young adults inheriting a deeply wounded planet whose climate system copes by creating chaos.
Effective education of any kind ought to be intergenerational — with all involved swapping roles regularly. In light of our pressing human predicaments, it is essential to cultivate stamina in people of all ages. We are all facing traumatic disruptions to our cognitive, affective, relational, economic, and ecological environs. For people living in a time of these terrific transitions, education should build our capacities to be unsettled, to dance through the quaking. It should encourage us to dig deep. To salvage and to salve.
Effective education should help integrate a person with the living world beyond their own being as early in their lifetime as possible. Kids need opportunities to be in their bodies and to explore the body of the Earth. Mud and puddles, trees and sticks, insects and flowers make excellent companions. Young people deserve to be guided away from old stories and toward new ones before the pernicious myths of modernity-coloniality set in and then have to be unlearned. (But even when this hasn’t happened as early as might be ideal, it should still be prioritized at the earliest possible points of intervention.)
At the same time, education is not only for the young. Learning is the labor of a lifetime. Effective environmental education should also engage mature people in positions of relative power, security, and influence to investigate and leverage their positions. It should encourage them to share from their deeper well of personal life experiences. It should allow them to humbly acknowledge the vast and transformative potential of what might lie beyond how they were taught to see and engage in the world. Even more aspirationally, education that meets this moment in human history must also inspire and encourage a restoration of elder-hood.
Importantly and practically, effective education absolutely must cover the skills needed to carry out the essential work of feeding, clothing, sheltering, and caring for each other in times of both calm and churn. While these skills were once commonplace and transmitted within families, neighborhoods, and communities, they have been critically eroded and need to be restored at once. Not everyone needs to know how to do everything, but we must restore the respect for and viability of landwork and carework.
Finally, effective education should cultivate the capacities for discernment, nuance, and not knowing. To avoid ending up where we are currently headed, people need to discern the difference between the laws of nature, which cannot be changed, and the laws of economics and of states, which certainly can. We need to rebuild our capacities for communicating with care, listening deeply, picking up on fine details, and identifying points of both alignment and divergence. We must always anchor our approach to learning in humility. And we should alight with awe for all that we do not and may never know. Together, these capacities can foster a greater level of comfort with uncertainty and with change— or at least a tolerance for the discomfort that uncertainty and change bring. They allow surrender to all that cannot be controlled, sacred regard for the mysteries of life, and wild delight at the prospect of survival.
Essential education
Essential education should be aimed at supporting learners in their pursuit of alivelihoods, not simply at developing workforce or career readiness. “Alivelihood” is such an inherently alluring and resonant term that it could almost be used and understood without any explication. But to narrow the space for misunderstanding, we (and others) define alivelihoods as meaningful and regenerative livelihoods that are oriented towards social, ecological, and personal wellbeing.
An alivelihood has the ability to:
make the person pursuing it feel alive, joyful, and content (personal wellbeing);
facilitate (cosmo)localisation, build local economies that aim to support well-being and solidarity; as well as create adaptive, resilient, social structures that distribute and share power (community wellbeing); and
regenerate the Earth’s biocapacity and resilience, repair harm, and narrow or eliminate global inequities (planetary wellbeing)
These are vocations that shift the pattern from extraction and consumption of resources to conservation and regeneration of resources, from profit to prosperity, and from scarcity to abundance.
Alivelihoods are typically contrasted with “deadlihoods” — types of labor that are “soul-sucking, violent, exploitative and separate from our spiritual life.” Deadlihoods tend toward hyper-individualism, and enable or maintain power and wealth accumulation. Careers that promote, finance, subsidize, incentivize, and protect (or even just tacitly tolerate) the extraction of natural resources, war, and waste are obvious deadilhoods. But so are many kinds of jobs that we might once have seen as “good work.” (Or at least adjacent to and enabling of others’ good works.) Roles that enable the transactional, market-based provision of care substitutes, that industrialize or technify education, and even those that prop up the non-profit industrial complex, if not deadly, are at a minimum deadening. These are jobs that undergird, disguise the harms of, or serve as the round-the-clock janitorial crew for the weitko economy. They tend to separate us from the land, from each other, from the living world. They include lots of jobs that wouldn’t exist in slack economies and are functions of taut, price-based markets, corporate capitalism, and intensive financialization. (If you are looking for examples, think: marketing, insurance, sales, optimization, endless administration, as a very short and entirely incomplete list.)
Equitable education
Equitable education must center conversations about planetary boundaries, dominant socio-economic systems and the incompatibility between the two. It must offer a clear and unflinching, if also dark and unflattering, portrait of systemic violence and dispossessions, both historical and ongoing. It must support all participants in reckoning with and reducing our own complicity in harmful systems. It should hold space for grief and for the slow processes of repair. Because it is not enough to gawk at exploitation or gasp at horrors, equitable education should build change competence and provide a strong basis for belief in the potential for transformation. To do so, it is also necessary for education to interrogate power, its legitimate uses, its arrangements, and its abuses. In other words, ethical education should be oriented unabashedly toward collective liberation from systems of oppression, extraction, and alienation.
Equitable education — especially when focused on preparing people for alivelihoods — cannot ignore the ongoing impacts of enclosures and extractions begun centuries ago. It must reckon with the fact that a new wave of enclosures and extractions is again occurring with particular ferocity in the present.
The growth-dependent global economy tilts ever-more precariously away from valuing the essential work that makes life possible, from valuing alivelihoods. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened and bifurcated into two chasms: one between the super-rich and wage slaves and the wage-slaves and the destitute. The true hoarders — the intergenerationally or extraordinarily wealthy — centralize luxury in elite urban fortresses and paradisiacal retreats. They undermine working landscapes and vital rural communities by re-colonizing rural places and requisitioning them for recreation and their own personal climate- and crisis-refuges. All this dims the prospects for earning a decent living in essential forms of land, care, and social reproduction labor – let alone weathering the increasing volatility in weather and markets. But without skilled, sovereign practitioners of “alivelihoods” feeding, clothing, sheltering, healing, and tending, everything else becomes impossible and all other pursuits are quickly rendered irrelevant.
Equitable education (again, especially environmental education) must avoid enticing students back to the land – especially those who have experienced racialization and marginalization – without also facilitating ways to access and remain on it. Educational institutions should also ensure that those they train will have a fair chance of meaningfully participating in the social and political life of the places where they live and labor. Enlarging the ambit of “equitable education” in this way multiplies both the difficulty of equity work and its prospects for real success. This will require looking beyond familiar modes of institutional organization and governance, private enterprise, individually or family operated farms, nuclear family structures, and single-family housing. It is time for more of us to get curious about collective endeavors, cooperative business models, and re-commoning.
Fortunately, healthy ecosystems and the survival strategies of more-than-human beings provide alluring alternatives and models. So do our deeper human histories, which run many-times-longer than modernity. The diverse lifeways and cultures of pre-industrial, pre-colonial ancestors who lived as mostly benevolent parts of the living world offer lessons and inspiration.
Educators ought to remember that every single person alive today descends from people who lived in intimate, reciprocal relationship with land and who understood themselves to be kin with a wide and wild array of beings. Equitable educators recognize and revere the myriad ways of knowing and ways of being that have carried generations through millennia. They draw from a wide array of cultures, perspectives, cosmologies, ontologies, disciplines, eras, materials, languages, and sources. They encourage us to root into what we might not be able to remember and reach for what we might not be able to imagine.
Situating and Re-introducing EcoGather
In this context, we’d like to reintroduce EcoGather. What started as an experiment in collaborative, digitally enabled place-based education that grew out of and around Sterling College’s Surviving the Future program has matured into an international cosmolocal learning network, one that has allowed us to connect with and support kindreds in the space between stories. There, together, we challenged ourselves to begin building education that makes sense in a world that does not. In co-equal partnerships with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)-led grassroots and community organizations in India, Bhutan, Puerto Rico, and Colorado who are already living into alternatives, we created over 300 modules of digital teaching and learning assets spanning subjects that enhance the vitality of agro-ecosystems, the change-competence of communities, the transition to well-being economies, and the pursuit of collective liberation. We also applied this knowledge to a subject that we know especially well, agriculture and food systems, and published the first collapse-responsive book in that space: Feeding Each Other: Shaping Change in Food Systems Through Relationship.
Over the past several years, EcoGather’s staff and partners recognized that we were really experimenting with education for the end of the world as we know it. To be clear and emphatic, EcoGather does not predict or prepare folks for the end of the world, full stop, or the extinction of our species. Rather, we enthusiastically embrace the the end of widespread ways of being and relating to each other and the Earth that are inherently unethical and unsustainable, premised on the destructive and outmoded ideologies behind enlightenment dualism, ecological extraction, racialized and gendered forms of exploitation and dispossession, and the fallacy of limitless economic growth.
At the same time, EcoGather's core team recognizes that they did not always see things this way. In fact, their formal education mostly obscured the view. For that reason, EcoGather began hosting heterodox spaces for transformative learning that do not feel like school. Our gatherings and courses are not assignment-assembled, deadline-driven, or assessment-oriented. Instead, they meet adults – young, old, and anywhere in-between – in the middle of their busy and often unfulfilling or under-examined lives. We help them eek out some space for encountering new ideas, grappling, and reflecting alongside others. EcoGatherings have become a haven for those who suspect that their diplomas or degrees don't actually signify that they've learned all they need to know, as well as for those who didn't start or finish formal post-secondary education. In this way, EcoGather enables and enlivens a dynamic balance between learning, work, and active engagement in communities of praxis.
Because we believe that learning is the work of a lifetime, we make it possible for teachers and learners to constantly swap roles, for communities to both share their knowledge and glean new insights from others. Each EcoGather participant brings their lived experience and insights to our network. From that well of co-created knowledge, each can draw on wise, time-tested, appropriately innovative practices from around the world in service of the common good.
As we share our courses and books and build relationships with additional organizations and coalitions, the EcoGather staff is finding that there is presently a real appetite for collapse-responsive education in non-traditional learning spaces. In our own homeplace (known as N’dakina by its indigenous inhabitants and Vermont by the settlers), the back-to-back disruptions of a viral pandemic and devastating flooding have shifted sensibilities. We are finding – and connecting – more and more organizations who light up when we introduce them to David Fleming's system-scale rule:
Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions;
they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.
EcoGather is, among other things, a cosmolocal lifelong learning and action network that offers refuge and renewable resources for people (mostly adults) who desire a different relationship to the future.
The Work Ahead of Us
In the year ahead, EcoGather will re-position its educational repository and in ways that counter separation and enclosure and invite even more people into courageous co-exploration. We’re beginning to:
transplant our existing course materials into a vibrant, diverse digital garden, which we will tend as a learning commons;
plant seeds for and cultivate new multimedia learning assets, in the form of original audio storytelling, interviews, videos, and visual art that reflect and uplift many ways of knowing and being;
offer guided explorations and journeys in the space between modernity & what comes next;
host courageous-yet-cozy web spaces for radical imagination, cosmolocal exchange, and restoration of relational capacity; and
replenish ourselves (the digital guides) by engaging with our own homeplaces and hosting a few in-person events.
We are also embarking on a process of articulating our digital ethos and more critically considering how we can continue to divest from or take a very limited, considered relationship to platform capitalism, algorithmic social media, and so-called “generative artificial intelligence.” We are exploring ways to make greater use of open-source technologies and federated platforms that do not seek to turn people and their attention into products for further profit extraction. We appreciate that “the devil is on the default” — especially in the digital world. So we’re taking another look at all the digital tools and infrastructure we use and are trying to strike a better balance between ease of use and affordability and data security and user privacy. We are eager to engage our community in this work.
The Questions We Carry
As we move forward, our team together and its members, individually, will continue to ask ourselves, inspired by many of the people we’ve learned from and with:
How might we be complicit in sustaining the dominant institutions and ways of knowing that continue to perpetuate harm?
Are we willing to work harder, move slower, and sacrifice our comfort and ego in service to a different way of being?
What are we doing to hospice dominant and destructive hegemonies and compost their components? As we engage in these activities, are we learning from peoples and cultures that have already endured and learned from their own apocalypses?
Are we allowing sorrow and joy, grief and celebration, to remain fiercely connected to each other? Are we tending to each so that trauma does not define us?
Are we balancing the thinking, feeling, and doing? Are we taking breaks for restoration as we "swim against the tides of denial"?
Are we behaving as "architects of abundance"?
What early signs of bridging and reclaiming belonging within the web of life do we observe?
Do the ways we work align with our answers to the ancestor question: What kind of ancestor do you want to be?
As we live and work "outside the box," are we attentive to remaining "inside the circle"?
How can we be ever more radical, loving, relational, creative, and joyful in our learning, teaching and convening, even in the face of collapse?
In addition to all of the linked sources and inspirations and our collaborators, we express or gratitude to Marie Vea, Nakas i Fortune, Ross Gay, Lyla June Johnston, Rowen White, Bayo Akomolafe, john a. powell, Mama D. Ujuaje, Audre Lorde, John Hausdoerffer, Vanessa Andreotti, Sharon Stein,and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, among others,
for moving us toward this awareness and ongoing inquiry.
