In this closing chapter, we provide a summary of the previous ten chapters. Each chapter has addressed different perspectives of human relationships with the natural environment and with the more-than-human world, which are shown to be relevant to Education for Sustainable Development. In this anthology, we have encountered contexts from South Africa, Canada, Sweden, and Australia and even contexts of imagined places and documented art projects. Not least, we have encountered the context of our contemporary situation itself, with reference to the ongoing climate emergency and mass extinction. The authors have brought our attention to sustainability issues, implicitly and explicitly, some in more well-known ways and others by using more surprising approaches. We have encountered approaches that include the art of being and sensing, inquiry-based teaching and learning with children and young people with regards to their place-based opportunities and challenges, and also an approach that includes the position of facing an uncertain future ecology whilst creating hope. In retrospect, this anthology instantiates a collaborative effort that spans across nations and scientific disciplines. As editors, we are most grateful for this international and interdisciplinary collaboration. This anthology deals with the problematic situation we have positioned ourselves in by over-exploiting the planet’s resources. Regarding this fateful situation, intertwined themes are made visible in the chapters, with reference to belonging and sensing, critical thinking and acting. Furthermore, the authors acknowledge the despair and anguish the current condition creates and, yet, they also offer us hope. These intertwined themes connect despair with hope, anxiety with possible ways of action, true wonderment with criticality, ecology with art, theory with practice, education with society, and, as alarming as it might sound, human existence with the collapse of humanity. Reading and engaging with the chapters included in this anthology moves us to a point where dichotomies can no longer be accepted. Instead, it is made clear that we (as educators, researchers, and citizens) have to embrace the complexity, the sharp edges, the fuzziness, and the contradictions that our shared situation is constituted of. In this way, each chapter presents a narrative that argues that we must become cognizant of the broad picture of our current place in human history. In other words, we are doomed to encounter life and life’s premises with open eyes, not as a matter of surrendering to the whims of fate, but instead with an attitude of approaching life and life’s premises with dignity. The philosopher Martin Hägglund (2019) suggests that human beings are “reconciled with being alive, but for that very reason, we are not reconciled to live unworthy lives” (p. 369). Drawing on Hägglund, we need to hold our gaze steady when we observe the reality of disrupted ecosystems, frightening climate change, and the extinction of species. “We are what we do and we can do things differently”, writes Hägglund (2019, p. 20). In this light, the task of a democratic society that takes the challenges of climate change, mass extinction, and socio-ecological action seriously remains to be completed.
Cham: Springer Nature, 2022. Vol. , s. 171-182, p. 171-182