In 2019, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council put out a call for proposals related to the “future challenge” of “living within the earth’s carrying capacity”. This was part of an effort to align researchers across Canada with problems of critical importance to the country’s future. Specifically, the call was for “knowledge synthesis” in areas of scholarship with particular relevance to the chosen issue.
Among the 30 or so projects funded under this call was an exploration of “Educating for Living within the Earth’s Carrying Capacity” by CIRCE researchers Sean Blenkinsop and Mark Fettes. As they framed it, the goal was to provide scholars, activists, educators, and policy-makers with a wide-ranging review of the current state of education for eco-social-cultural change. They argued that, because modern educational traditions, processes and institutions have played a key role in fostering the attitudes, discourse and behaviour driving the current ecological crisis, learning to live within the Earth’s carrying capacity implies far-reaching, systemic educational transformation.
The project had three main components:
- A review of contemporary philosophical and theoretical work that critiques damaging or limiting assumptions and practices in mainstream education systems and points towards ways of being, thinking, valuing, acting, learning and teaching that are more consonant with the goal of living in harmony with the Earth;
- A review of generative and transformative educational practices, scattered throughout both formal and informal educational systems, with the goal of bringing these disparate practices into conversation with each other in the context of a shared project of eco-social-cultural change;
- A review of current work on systemic social change and generative resilience, with a particular focus on how large-scale change in systems of formal schooling could be brought about.
The final reports required by SSHRC were submitted in March-May 2021 (see below). We are currently working on further publications based on this research.