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There have been terrorist attacks in Paris, Baghdad, Ouagadougou, Mogadishu, Brussels, Orlando, Nice, Berlin, Istanbul, and so many more. Painful tides of migrants try to reach the beaches of exile. Fiscal evasion has become a standard smart practice. Clowns climb onto the political stage. The “left” is dramatically weakened or pushed out in Latin America and elsewhere. Climate change is irredeemably going on, drying, burning, melting, flooding, devastating…while the “extreme” oil and shale gas industry tries to gain hold and the pipeline octopus finds and forces ways to spread its giant limbs. What next? The Arab Spring and other seasons of hope will not have bloomed?

Here, I could stop writing this text: there is no point, it is too late! But I will not. I received a good dose of hope through my deep immersive experience in social movements and my exploration of so many courageous, grounded ecosocial projects. If the global scale is—for here and now—out of reach, the sphere of local and regional action is largely open to concrete involvement, and there grows a whole rhizomatic world of meanings and skills patiently and courageously emerging, and transforming the landscape of our contemporary humanity.

Apathetic and resigned, the civil society? In reality, it has never been so lucid, so intelligent. It is discovering its collective strength, expresses an articulated critical thinking that brings the end of the neoliberal culture hegemony and proclaims its demands for real change. (Manier, 2012, p. 302)

Despite the unreasonably heavy tasks of resistance and of recreation of the world, despite the difficulties and setbacks, protests, marches, and other collective strategies still get organized at every crisis. Committed citizens claim the legitimacy of their democratic and active participation to governance, to the decisions that concern them. Transformative projects are also blooming creatively in the fields of energy, food, housing, and other dimensions of our individual and community lives. A collective intelligence—and even more, a citizen intelligence—is being built, with courage. Despite the present global failures (including all forms of social and ecological violence), the upsurge of a major cultural change is taking shape and getting stronger, as much from ethical and political perspectives as from strategic and economic ones, aiming to recover and celebrate the dignity of life.

This situation challenges the diverse sectors of education, but particularly school education. The current politics of formal education (from curriculum design to teacher education and classroom settings) maintain a huge gap between schooling and different social contexts where rooted, strategic, and meaningful learning can occur. Too often, school stands as an island—offshore—where youth remain waiting for “real life,” learning things that “will be useful later.” In order to really contribute to an “educational society” (Delors, 1996), and better still, to an emancipatory “learning society,” how could school derive inspiration from the informal leaning dynamics that are taking shape in the movements of resistance and ecosocial initiatives from whence societal transformation is slowly emerging? How could school support, value, complete, and transfer these learning processes? How can we foster gateways between school and the other different learning actors and contexts (community organizations, NGOs, museums, parks, media, etc.) so as to stimulate and sustain citizen competencies and ecosocial involvement? These are huge questions that certainly cannot be discussed in depth in this text. But it is important to acknowledge their relevance and contribute to reflection on this theme. We will examine here the contribution of the rich theoretical and pedagogical heritage of environmental education, as an ontological and political process towards ecocitizenship.

What Do We Learn Through Social Action?

I like to tell this story—similar to so many other situations where citizen commitment becomes the crucible of essential learning. In 2013, people from the Saint Lawrence estuary heard about the TransCanada Energy East pipeline project that planned to build a giant oil harbour at Cacouna, a small town along the river. Reacting to a strong feeling of territorial usurpation from a foreign private company, a citizen mobilization quickly emerged in the affected area, as well as through the whole watershed. Not only did the project jeopardize this Québec fluvial artery, but also the proposed harbour was situated right in the reproduction zone of the Beluga, an endangered marine mammal. On the protesters’ signs, one could read sentences as “Don’t touch my river!” “The river flows in our veins,” “I am Beluga!” A rooted and emerging collective consciousness of territorial identity thus appeared, as part of what Mitchell Thomashow (1996) calls an ecological identity, a sense of belonging to a life system.

Through such dynamics as resistance, citizens learned—once again—that in the context of the current “governance,” centred on political and economic alliances and backed by a complacent or incoherent legislative system, it is up to civil society to assume the difficult and very demanding role of becoming a critical vigil, of fighting against or for projects, programmes, or policies that affect their lives, places, and territories. The ecological argument, the one for the preservation of the integrity of the ecosystems, as well as the argument of the common goods (health, security, auto-determination, etc.) seems to have no importance for policymakers, except when they are upheld by popular discontent, requests, and claims and they become embarrassing for the elected politicians. So with regard to issues like the Cacouna harbour project, in an emergency context, mobilized citizens have to very quickly get informed, understand, build up an argument, communicate, debate, plan strategically, protest, act, and propose. They have to learn how to work together, share knowledge, experience, expertise, and resources. Collaboration is challenging, but this is how citizen intelligence can be developed, as a global comprehension and a collective capacity to act over a very political situation. And these elements of learning and empowerment turn out to be transferable to other socio-ecological struggles.

The social mobilization against the oil project not only has allowed the Beluga habitat to be to preserved, but also—like so many other resistance movements against invasive projects of this kind—it has contributed to the creation of social links and the formation of a vigilant ecocitizenship, now more aware of the necessity of “free, prerequisite, and enlightened consent” of populations facing “development” initiatives in their territory. Through this courageous debate, the desire for a renewed democracy based on transparency, deliberation, collaboration, cooperation, participation, and direct action was expressed.

From such experiences, we have understood that denouncing and resisting is not enough; one has also to create. Resisting is creating (Aubenas & Benasayag, 2002), thus opening up huge and meaningful working for ecosocial initiatives, innovations, and practices. This is why we need to hear more and more about the inspiring stories of community gardens, workshops to share tools and skills, networks of solidarity between farmers and “eaters,” eco-villages, and so many others, where resistance to capitalism “becomes an act of creation, able to produce through itself other values” (p. 114).

Formal Education and Ecosocial Transformation

But how can formal education get inspired from the extraordinary learning processes that mobilized citizens’ experience together through the dynamics of resistance and collective projects? How can schools invite, prepare, and accompany youth to take part in the current ecosocial transformation movement? How can education value young peoples’ creative force and respond to their quest for meaning and desire for action?

The idea is not to shape “future citizens,” but to consider and accompany youth as fully fledged players in our world. In her book Children, Citizenship and Environment, Bronwyn Hayward (2012) insists on the role of children as social actors in their community. It is not a matter of teaching political science, she writes, but to offer children the possibility of taking consciousness of their place and role in the collective life, and to experiment with active democratic processes. Children need to recognize that “ecological” problems are closely linked to problems of violence, poverty, injustice, and inequity. Our role as educators is to invite them to talk about their daily living, to clarify their reality, and to experiment and understand how ordinary people (like their parents, their teachers, their neighbours, and themselves…) can “act together in free collaboration to achieve extraordinary change” (p. 2). Since the environment is a “common good,” one must learn to live with commitment and democracy in order to contribute to the transformations of socio-ecological realities, starting with those that concern us the most, right here, in our living places. “We need to support young citizens as they discover the art, craft and passion of active ecological citizenship” (p. 16).

This critical requirement for democracy, cooperative learning, and collective construction of meaning and action projects echoes John Dewey’s pedagogy. It also echoes Noam Chomsky’s hope that human beings, because of their “instinct of liberty,” are able, if their development is not completely impeded, to raise up victoriously against whatever oppresses them (Baillargeon, 2010, p. 10).

Edgar Morin (2014) also wishes to transform education towards autonomy and liberty of choice through different opinions, theories, and philosophies. He insists on the importance of learning “how to know,” recognizing that knowledge is always translation and reconstruction. This metacognitive posture helps us recognize the risk of mistakes and illusions, of partial or biased knowledge. As he says, “To live implies the need, in order to act, to access relevant knowledge that is not mutilated, nor mutilating, that replaces all objects or events in their context and that apprehends them in their complexity,” while recognizing zones of uncertainty (p. 20).

And beyond these epistemological aspects, education for social transformation finds its major roots in Paulo Freire’s politico-pedagogical proposal for freedom, hope, and love:

Love is the basis of an education that seeks justice, equality, and genius. If critical pedagogy is not injected with a healthy dose of what Freire called “radical love,” then it will operate only as a shadow of what it could be. […] Critical pedagogy uses it to increase our capacity to love, to bring the power of love to our everyday lives and social institutions, and to rethink reason in a humane and interconnected manner. […] A critical knowledge seeks to connect with the corporeal and emotional in a way that understands at multiple levels and seeks to assuage human suffering. (Kincheloe, 2005, p. 3)

These educational preoccupations of epistemological, ethical, affective, strategic, and political order expressed by the different authors mentioned above—as examples of this type of discourse—converge towards the necessity of engaging a major shift of our education systems. Indeed, the integration of cross-curricular or transversal dimensions that have characterized curricular reforms throughout the past decade has tried to answer some of these preoccupations (including critical thinking, problem solving, democracy, etc.). But the integration of such transversality through traditional disciplines has been really too timid, remaining hampered by a techno-rational and competitive culture in education. Yet, the importance of valuing the role of school as a social actor in order to realize the transforming potential of learning is increasingly recognized (Mezirow, 2009).

Environmental Education: An Ontological Requirement

Facing this necessity to transform (not only reform) our educational systems, Edgar Morin (2014, p. 11) brings attention to the “anthropological role of education” and insists on its ontological dimension. In this perspective of constructing our being-in-the-world, the ecological dimension of our human identity appears fundamental. Here, environmental education has a major role to play. Its rich theoretical and pedagogical legacy can greatly contribute to the conception and enactment of contemporary education as a process of life, and not awaiting for “real life.”

Environmental education—or environment-related education as in French terminology, éducation relative à l’environnement—is a core dimension of basic education, which is more specifically centred on one of the three interaction spheres at the basis of personal and social development. Closely related with the sphere of relationship with ourself (learning to learn and to connect with the world, while constructing the multiple aspects of our identity), and with the sphere of relationship with other humans (developing human alterity through democracy, interculturality, peace, justice, cooperation, etc.), environmental education concerns more specifically our relationship with oikos, our common home, this living environment where our humanity is connected with the more-than-human world. This third interaction sphere calls for an ecological education: to recognize that we are embodied beings, that our lives are situated and contextualized; to define our human ecological niche in relation with all the niches composing the local and global ecosystem we belong to; to learn how to fulfil this “function” adequately, in a responsible way. It also calls upon an economic education: to learn how to collectively use and share our common home and its resources, with care and solidarity. Ecosophic education is also involved in a transversal way, in order to clarify one’s own cosmology (a personal and cultural vision of the world, including our most immediate reality), and to build a coherent ethics, which implies, among other things, rethinking the contextual significance of “responsibility,” “justice,” “equity,” “solidarity,” and other socio-ecological values:

The environment forms, deforms and transforms us, at least as much as we form, deform and transform it. […] In the space between us and the other (whether person, animal, object, or place…), each takes on the vital challenge of being in the world. […] And the crux of human dynamics is in relationship, in ecodependence and in the question of the meaning that each one gives to his existence. (Cottereau, 1999, pp. 11–12)

The environment is neither an object to study or a theme to consider amongst many others, nor is it only an imposed constraint for a “sustainable development.” The environment is the web of life itself, at the junction of nature and culture. If education cares for achieving our human being in the world, it has to fully include the sphere of interaction with oikos, our environment.

The philosophical and pedagogical field of environmental education has greatly unfolded through the decades and has produced a rich diversity of theoretical and practical currents (Sauvé, 2005). But basically, it aims to forge our ecological identity—our way of being-in-the-world with integrity and integrality—and to stimulate and accompany individual and collective socio-ecological commitment—in the diverse forms it can adopt, often interlinked: philosophical, aesthetic, creative, territorial, political, and others. Commitment is an act of identity: it involves defining ourselves—initially—and to keep on building and clarifying our individual and collective identity. Here, we shall look more specifically at commitment of a political nature, because the environment—as education—is a socially shared object of care, thus of eminently political nature.

Ecopolitical Education: Towards Ecocitizenship

Ecocitizenship corresponds to the political dimension of our relationship with the environment. Politics relates (should relate) to our collective involvement in setting the best conditions for living well together, in our common home. The root of the word politics is from the ancient Greek polis, which means “city,” this democratic place (which should be inclusive) where free and autonomous humans take decisions together about things that affect them all. Polis is the “city,” the school, the workshop, the neighbourhood, the village, the town, the country, the international community. The idea of politics is then intimately linked to the idea of citizenship: we have to learn to live together in the “city.”

Ecocitizenship gives a specific meaning to the “city,” that of our oïkos, our living place shared with us all humans, and also with all other life forms. In the ecological city, our humanity is intertwined within the fundamental web of life itself: we are part of life systems, we share the same thread of life that links all living beings. The city is not restricted to our human community; it includes the whole community of life.

Since the idea of citizenship is closely linked to the one of democracy, ecocitizenship means enriching democracy with an ecological dimension. Dominique Bourg and Kerry Whiteside (2010) have developed the concept of ecological democracy: “Protecting the biosphere involves rethinking democracy itself” (p. 10). Here, nature is no longer considered secondary, like an element of public affairs to be looked at if there is time and resources to do so. The environment is more than “a place, an historical site, a source of raw materials, a tradable commodity. […] Nature is an integral part of deliberations within the organization of the city” (pp. 101–102).

Issues regarding hunger, thirst, health, or energy, for example, remind us that human/social realities are closely linked to ecological realities. Murray Bookchin (2005) insists that violence between humans, between societies, and violence against nature have the same roots: they come from the same desire for power and domination, from the same contempt. The notions of socio-ecological equity, ecological justice and more recently, of climatic justice put into light the political dimension of these issues.

Exercising such a democracy requires the development of ecocitizen competencies: mainly critical, ethical, political, and creative competencies (Sauvé, 2015). And the most efficient way to develop these competencies is to immerse oneself reflexively in community projects, social debates, and citizen movements.

Critical competency is based on the capacity to ask questions (what? how? by and for whom?) and demand adequate answers. Paulo Freire (in Freire & Faundez, 1992) associates “learning to question” with a pedagogy of liberation. Ethical competency seeks to answer “why?” What values, what value system, support decisions? What are the values that I/we wish to promote? Here, our relationship with the environment is understood from an in-depth perspective, including its connexions with issues of peace, human rights, solidarity, equity, and other social realities. Political competency develops within the exercise of democratic debate—that must be endlessly claimed as a right. One must learn to occupy the participative and active spaces of democracy efficiently, and contribute to broaden them. Michelangelo Pistoletto (in Morin & Pistoletto, 2015) proposes the word demopraxis, which invites us to live a reflexive democracy. Finally, as argued above, if we must learn to denounce and resist, we also have to propose. This is where a creative competency comes into play to imagine solutions, alternative projects. It is focused on divergent thinking and a proactive attitude. It stimulates ecosocial innovation, designing ways of doing things, acting, and being together that contribute to the transformation of our relationship with others and the environment.

The context in which these multiple competencies can be jointly developed is through citizen action and moreover, through ecocitizen action. They feed on commitment and, in return, make it more efficient. Unfortunately, they are rarely taken into account in formal education. Yet, youth can be involved and committed, not as future citizens, but as fully fledged citizens of the ecological city that needs their critical stance, their impetus, their energy, their desire to contribute right now to “real life.”

How to Promote an Education Grounded in Life?

Education for life (ecosocial life), education as a process of life, needs to be supported by sound institutional policies and strategies, as well informal education systems as in non-formal organizations and initiatives—where financial support is dramatically melting away in the neoliberal and conservative societal wave.

Despite the goodwill of last decade educational reforms, the current formal systems still do not promote and support education as life, do not include school in the “city,” in the oïkos. Teaching–learning situations are trapped in the “right-wing” disciplinary didactic culture imposed by national and international evaluation and competition systems. Of course, in the daily and intimate life of classrooms, courageous, innovative, and socially involved teachers achieve miracles—going against the grain—in order to open up the school to the realities of its environment and to create bridges with other actors of the educational community. It is important to support these initiatives and promote them, particularly through the development of structuring strategies.

In this regard, what about the institutional impulse of UNESCO now referred to in national education policies? Supplanting the previous environmental education international programme (1975–1995), but promoting the same “progressive pedagogy” (interdisciplinarity, critical thinking, project learning, and others) and same institutionalization strategies, the UN Education for Sustainable Development Decade (DESD)—despite its huge politico-economic support—did not succeed in transforming education as suggested by Faure (1972) many years ago, and as observed more recently by Delors (2013). Using virtuous arguments and aiming for the resolution of worldwide problems, the programme imposed (and still does) an economistic worldview—a narrow and distorted cosmovision where economy (seen as growth to be sustained) stands outside society, imposing its rules over the relationship between the environment (as a set of resources not to be exhausted) and the society (as a collection of producers and consumers) (Berryman & Sauvé, 2016; Jickling, 2016). If the principles of sustainable development are supposed to offer some initial ethical framework for business administration and some aspects of public affairs management—arguing that social and ecological issues have to be taken into account so as to better sustain economic growth—there is certainly a huge confusion in considering it as a societal project, and even more as a universally appropriate and holistic education programme.

As well, if the value and language of sustainability is often adopted to avoid the hard injunction of sustainable development, it would be important to recognize its minimalist and vague character. Why could (should) sustainability be the core value of our societies, considering the existing spectrum of ecocentric ethics, including those inspired by indigenous cosmovisions, or considering the value of harmony, adopted in the community-centred politics of “Vivir bien”?

In its recent proposal Rethinking Education: Towards a global common good?, UNESCO (2015) presents a revisited analysis and vision of contemporary education, putting in evidence important concerns. But still, education as a “common good” is presented as “a key resource for the global integrated framework of sustainable development goals” (p. 3). One must recognize that behind the humanitarian discourse of the United Nations Development Project (2015) presenting 17 Sustainable Development Goals as a response to problems of poverty, gender inequity, environmental degradation, etc., the global solution proposed remains the promotion of sustained economic growth—thus putting aside the analysis and recognition of the fundamental structural causes of present societal and environmental problems, which are closely connected.

Global Citizenship Education (2014–2021), the international education programme launched by UNESCO in 2014, is also presented as a contribution for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Unfortunately, no ecological concerns can be found; there is no place for the development of the ecological dimension of our identity, nor ecojustice in relation with social justice. There is only a timid call for “empathy” for the other humans and the environment—amongst the many objectives.

The texts, declarations, and objectives of UNESCO should be considered as global propositions from which certain elements can be inspiring, but they must not become confining, convergent-thinking moulds, ready-made recipes, or neo-colonization strategies. We must keep examining these top-down guidelines, in the light of various reflective educational fields and taking into account the diversity of territorial, social, and cultural contexts.

For this task, the fields of ecopedagogy, of critical environmental education, of ecocitizenship education, of community education in the context of “Vivir bien” or “Ubuntu,” and of other “alter-native” educational theoretical and practical fields, offer important contrasting visions of the world, other diagnosis of contemporary problems, other conceptions of the role of education in societies, and of the identity of educators. They are important because they call for immersion in life, for participation, their conception of “politics” as a collective democratic affair, their ethical reflection that goes beyond anthropocentrism, their recognition of the ontological dimension of education, and their striving for emancipation from any oppression. These pedagogical fields should inspire and nourish educational choices as well at the classroom and community levels as the one of public policies.

And again, in the process of collectively and reflexively weaving education into the fabric of life itself, in this process of living education as a journey of personal and social emancipation, beyond the limits of any exogenous prescription (would it be from prestigious international institutions), let us recognize the “treasure” (in the words of Delors, 2013) to be found in the rich experience of the different actors of our educational society, in the learning dynamics of the people and the groups involved in addressing collective issues in our “city,” our oïkos. Learning through collective action, reacting against projects or public decisions that are invasive or unjust, or developing ecosocial initiatives that contribute to the transformation or improvement of our way of living here together, is a precious outcome of citizen commitment that should inspire pedagogical practices in school and academic settings.