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This blog post advocates for engaging pluriversal environmental literacies (ELs) for a critical, radical practice of sustainability education. Arturo Escobar’s (2018) concept of the Pluriverse advocates for a ‘world where many worlds fit’ – a reality that is understood in plural ways as opposed to universal(ised) (neo)colonial, Euro-Western perspectives. The term ‘pluriversal environmental literacies’ draws from this concept to refer to diverse ontological and epistemological knowledge of and perspectives on life, reality and human relationships with the natural world.

Something vital is missing from the teaching and learning of/for sustainability as it is practised across mainstream educational spaces, within higher education, schools, colleges  and community learning. Through ongoing legacies of (neo)colonialism, both across the global majority and global minority (Campbell-Stephens, 2021), mainstream (sustainability) education is seldom evidenced to engage with pluriversal (environmental) literacies. These literacies include indigenous and place-based environmental literacies (ELs) (Kahn, 2010). Indigenous refers to longstanding Indigenous traditions and place-based to faith, spiritual and cultural literacies from a particular place, as these have developed over time. Literacies refers to more than simply reading and writing to encompass diverse ways of knowing and being including somatic, sensory, semiotic and experiential ways of meaning-making. , therefore, are knowledges and competencies through which we understand reality and life on earth, which includes literacies about human relationships with nature, or environmental literacies.

Pluriversal ELs can include literacies of land, water and air, more-than-material understandings of human and non-human life and life forms, ancestral wisdom and experiential knowledge, all deriving from diverse/plural knowledge systems and traditions. However, through (neo)colonialism, these literacies have been systematically marginalised or erased for reductive understandings of reality, characterised by scientism and Enlightenment-era Cartesian duality (Smith, 2012). This (neo)colonial legacy continues to inform human perception of and engagement with nature, where nature becomes an opportunity for domination, extraction and manipulation at worst (see Norviel, 2022), and at best a physical resource to be conserved because our lives depend on it.

Many forms of sustainability education practised within modern education systems, including environmental education (EE), the commercialised misnomer of education for sustainable development (ESD), land education, forest education, and so forth are often either dominated or at the very least impacted by underlying frameworks of Cartesian duality and scientism, that have ironically been critiqued for driving ecological destruction (Stein et al., 2023). Cartesian duality isolates the conscious mind from the physical body and non-human world, while scientism reduces nature to strictly physical/biological mechanisms. Together, these perspectives deprive human–nature relationships of intrinsic meaning, replacing human–nature interconnectedness with anthropocentric mastery and domination.

‘Indigenous and place-based environmental literacies conceptualise nature as sacred and animate, humans to be intertwined with nature, and promote symbiotic regenerative interaction.’

In contrast to Cartesian duality and scientism, Indigenous and place-based ELs conceptualise nature as sacred and animate, humans to be intertwined with nature, and promote symbiotic regenerative interaction (Nasr, 1997; Kimmerer, 2013). Through this lens, sustainability education deepens human–nature relationality and critically engages with the economic, political and social dimensions of the environmental crisis. There is increasing evidence of engagement with these literacies, particularly through non-formal community learning, to reconnect learners with ELs from their lands, traditions and cultures and revive human–nature interconnectedness (Nesterova, 2020). However, this practice remains the exception to mainstream sustainability education, not the rule. Consequently, there remains a striking gap between the rhetoric of modern sustainability education and its actual epistemic breadth in practice.

An integration of Indigenous and placed-based ELs into sustainability education could be the first important step towards closing this gap. This integration can look like facilitating learners of all ages to reflect on and begin cultivating ethical, reciprocal relationships with non-human life and life forms, informed by pluriversal ELs, originating from both local traditions and across geographies. A sustainability education informed by pluriversal ELs acknowledges the limitations of a universalised worldview and recognises that our connected global crises require the widest possible range of knowledge and literacies – literacies that offer a wealth of resources that we, as educators, cannot afford to miss out on. This makes it imperative for us to realise that pluriversal ELs are not a supplement to sustainability education but foundational to it.

References

Campbell-Stephens, R. M. (2021). Educational leadership and the global majority. Palgrave Macmillan.

Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.

Kahn, R. V. (2010). Critical pedagogy, ecoliteracy, & planetary crisis: The ecopedagogy movement. Peter Lang.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.

Nasr, S. H. (1997). Man and nature: The spiritual crisis in modern man. ABC International Group

Nesterova, Y. (2020). Rethinking environmental education with the help of Indigenous ways of knowing and traditional ecological knowledge. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54(4), 1047–1052.

Norviel, J. (2022). Review of the book Fresh banana leaves: Healing Indigenous landscapes through Indigenous science, by Jessica Hernandez. Diálogo, 25(2), 150–152.

Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books.

Stein, S., Andreotti, V., Suša, R., Ahenakew, C., & Čajková T. (2023). From ‘education for sustainable development’ to ‘education for the end of the world as we know it’. In Education for sustainable development in the ‘capitalocene’. Routledge.