Book review: Education and Learning for Sustainable Futures: 50 years of learning for environment and change, by Thomas Macintyre, Daniella Tilbury and Arjen Wals

Book review: Education and Learning for Sustainable Futures: 50 years of learning for environment and change, by Thomas Macintyre, Daniella Tilbury and Arjen Wals

Routledge, 2024, 134pp., ISBNs: 978-1-032-72791-2 (hbk), ISBN: 978-1-032-73963-2 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1-003-46700-7 (ebk)

Education and Learning for Sustainable Futures: 50 years of learning for environment and change, by Thomas Macintyre, Daniella Tilbury and Arjen Wals, provides a clear and reflective narrative of policy and research in education and learning for the environment and sustainability since 1972.

In 1972, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm. The emerging Declaration’s ‘principle 19 … identified education as an environmental strategy, laying the foundation for the Environmental Education movement’ (p. 3). This provides the authors’ main starting point and sets the tone for the book, which draws significantly on the UN (described as ‘Western’ on p. 14) and its agencies’ policy texts. The book is structured with an introduction and a final chapter bookending six other chapters which set out key issues in each decade from the 1970s to the 2020s. I appreciated that it considers education more broadly than as just what happens in schools.

The authors are all highly respected and have provided a rigorous account of the decades since 1972. It feels appropriate that they are much cited throughout the book as they have been central to these debates and policy texts (since the 2010s, 1990s and 1980s, respectively). They have worked together in such a way that the authorial voice feels consistent throughout the decade chapters. Whenever a section raised queries for me, I found responses in the next, and I attributed this range of perspectives to the dialogue among the three authors and their wider networks.

I was initially sceptical of the tidy, decade-based structure. Yet, as someone born in 1972, the story they tell resonates with my own experience as a student and educator and with narratives of the period with which I am familiar (maybe as my own lens is also ‘mainly a Western or Northern one’ (p. xvi)). They describe the decades heuristic as an ‘impressionistic painting’ (p. 102) and I found that their brushstrokes worked well in practice:

1970s … Inform and Experience ….

1980s … Investigate and Solve …

1990s … Rethink and Engage …

2000s … Connect and Change …

2010s … Reframe and Transform Futures …

2020s … Regenerate and Transition. (pp. 8–10)

Providing a chronological narrative can often imply a story of straightforward progress. The book skilfully avoids this while pulling out key debates, policies and practices from each decade and showing how certain tensions, such as that between instrumental and emancipatory approaches to education, recur in different guises. Each chapter ends with the image of a tree and leaf, summarising what the authors have said about education and the environment in that decade.

The authors provide a valuable big-picture narrative of the changing field as they show how different understandings of the relationship between education and societal change manifest in each decade. For example, they discuss the shift from ‘nature’-based education in the 1970s to a science-education focus in the 1980s; later, they discuss how approaches to behavioural changes became less dominant in the 2000s (although these may be returning again). I am currently at a career crossroads and found the opportunity the book gave me to look back and reflect on my past experiences among these metaphorical trees very helpful for thinking about the future. I kept thinking, however, about what I see as the bigger forest (or what I might call the ‘plantation’ to draw attention to its destructive nature) within which the trees of education and learning about the environment and sustainability are struggling for light.

While it is clear that education and learning has a fundamental role to play in establishing a more just relationship with ourselves, other species, and the planet as a whole, 50 years of policy, diplomacy, and governance have not changed much in our schools, universities and non- and informal systems of education and learning (Wals et al., 2022). In this book, we ask the question what needs to be done for education’s role to materialise in an effective way. (p. 6)

I would suggest that many of the answers to this question are to be found outside the specific policy and research discussed in the book, which is tightly focused on education and learning about the environment and sustainability. The book mentions symptoms of the disease (of late neoliberalism and its comorbidities) of the forest/plantation that work against transformation:

the emphasis on testing and measurement, the cognition bias, the increasing gap between the poor and the rich, the continued anthropocentric way of thinking, the disciplinary silos that still determine much of what goes on in schools and universities, the erosion of deep democracy, the mantra of continuous economic growth, and there is more. (p. 114)

The book needed to, and does, keep its focus clear. My message here is to readers: this book must be complemented by reading about the forest/plantation and understanding the power relations operating against the environment and sustainability and against education. Given the focus of the book, power is discussed as central to critical pedagogy for educators and learners. Readers also need to understand its implications for policy and research. In this vein, I want to emphasise this plea from the book’s conclusion: ‘transformative change underpinned with agency, courage, and active hope needs to be accompanied with critical examination of power dynamics within education and within society in general’ (p. 113).

The authors cite UNESCO’s (2021) statement that ‘to shape peaceful, just, and sustainable futures, education itself must be transformed’ (cited on p. 85). This is key. Yet the more education and learning about the environment and sustainability is ostensibly mainstreamed, the greater the danger it will be co-opted and compromised (Young, 2024). For example, they refer to critiques of Education for ‘Sustainable Development’ (p. 67) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and further note that some scholars point to how the SDGs ‘are instrumentalised and deepen marketisation in the present world economy (Bonn, 2021)’ (p. 93).

In their conclusion, I may have hoped for a deeper analysis of the tricky tensions and problems emerging from the preceding chapters, but perhaps I was looking for ways through impossible quandaries (Young, 2024). The final chapter attempts to look forward. In a darker reading, the authors’ reflections on the future feel like they represent the same level of change as described in the preceding decades, where limited transformational change has occurred. Yet, since I am also in this particular 2020s goldfish bowl, their arguments reflect themes I greatly value and have been exploring too: ‘A Living and Connected Sustainability’; ‘Valuing the Role of Teachers and Teaching’; ‘The Interplay between Climate Change, Gender, and Education’; ‘Intergenerational Justice and Equity’; ‘The Posthuman and New Materialist Turn’; ‘Societal Polarisation in an Age of Misinformation, Artificial Intelligence, and Fake News’ and ‘Reviving a Pedagogy of Hope’ (pp. 105–13).

This book review is based on the hardback edition. An open-access pdf is also available, and I hope this book will be widely read. I would recommend it to all educators, researchers and policymakers. Looking back is critical for looking forward, as is looking at the bigger picture of power relations. A lot has happened in this fragile world, even since the book was published, making the transformation of education more necessary than ever.