Educating for the Anthropocene

The work of environmental educators and activists in India and South Africa offers new models for schooling and environmental activism.

Education has never played as critical a role in determining humanity’s future as it does in the Anthropocene, an era marked by humankind’s unprecedented control over the natural environment. Drawing on a multisited ethnographic project among schools and activist groups in India and South Africa, Peter Sutoris explores education practices in the context of impoverished, marginal communities where environmental crises intersect with colonial and racist histories and unsustainable practices. He exposes the depoliticizing effects of schooling and examines cross-generational knowledge transfer within and beyond formal education. Finally, he calls for the bridging of schooling and environmental activism, to find answers to the global environmental crisis.

The onset of the Anthropocene challenges the very definition of education and its fundamental goals, says Sutoris. Researchers must look outside conventional models and practices of education for inspiration if education is to live up to its responsibilities at this critical time. For decades, environmental activist movements in some countries have wrestled with questions of responsibility and action in the face of environmental destruction; they inhabited the mental world of the Anthropocene before much of the rest of the world. Sutoris highlights an innovative research methodology of participatory observational filmmaking, describing how films made by children in the Indian and South African communities provide a window into the ways that young people make sense of the future of the Anthropocene. It is through their capacity to imagine the world differently, Sutoris argues, that education can reinvent itself.Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xiii
Part I Learning to Live in the Anthropocene
Dilemma 1 The Shock of Recognition: (De)Politicizing Education 3
1 Introduction: Education's Task in the Anthropocene 7
2 A Bittersweet Landscape 39
Part II Schooling on the High Anthropocene's Frontier
Dilemma 2 Representing Liminality: Total Institution or Tough Love? 61
3 The Origins of Depoliticization 67
4 Reading the Cultural Landscapes of Schooling: Depoliticization and Hope 99
Part III What is the Alternative? 
Dilemma 3 The Myth of Impartiality, or How I (Almost) Became an Activist 147
5 Environmental Activism: An Answer to Educating for the Anthropocene 151
6 Toward a Different Anthropocene Politics 195
Notes 211
References 241
Index 271“This remarkable book shows schoolchildren and environmental activists working together to craft education as imaginative discovery while opening a conversation for tackling the global environmental crisis. A major accomplishment that speaks with passion and purpose.”
—K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University
 
“A riveting account of grassroots environmental activism, providing inspiration, wisdom, and practical ideas for teaching and community action. This is a groundbreaking book that will be useful for educators, anthropologists, community organizers, and environmental justice advocates.”
—Mitchell Thomashow, author of To Know the World: A New Vision for Environmental LearningPeter Sutoris is an environmental anthropologist, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Education at the University of York, and Honorary Senior Research Associate at University College London.