Political Education in the Anthropocene (Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences) 3031400208, 9783031400209

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Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences

Nathanaël Wallenhorst Renaud Hétier Jean-Philippe Pierron Christoph Wulf  Editors

Political Education in the Anthropocene

Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences Series Editors Nathanaël Wallenhorst, Université Catholique de l’Ouest (UCO), Beaucouzé, France Christoph Wulf, Anthropologie und Erziehung, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

This series is the first collection to address the subject of education within the Anthropocene. The inspiration behind the series is a dialogue between Earth system science (ESS) and human and social sciences (which, when their object of study is the socio-political implications of our entering the Anthropocene are now officially called the environmental humanities). The series offers perspectives from a variety of disciplines. The raison d’être of this new collection is to draw together high quality studies dealing with the gravity of today’s environmental situation whilst also viewing the concept of the Anthropocene from a critical perspective by expanding on work engaged in in human and social sciences over recent years. The main objectives of this series are to: • bring together studies from Earth system science and the environmental humanities in the same collection, from an educational angle • engage with the question of the future and how to prepare for it in a time of uncertainty This series welcomes topics including, but not limited to: • • • • • • •

pedagogy didactics in the Anthropocene health education education for governance and democracy addressing the challenges of contemporary societies and ecological changes transforming agricultural production methods preparing for the future

The collection would make a valuable contribution to the academic world and research, which is currently seeking new editorial spaces for us to publish scientific works on the implications of entering into a new geological epoch. Works published in this series include monographs, edited volumes, and handbooks and textbooks. The series is intended for researcher working on the Anthropocene with all its socio-political implications and also students in different disciplines following courses on environmental issues. It may, however, also be of interest to all social stakeholders interested in environmental questions, who are becoming increasingly numerous including, but not limited to, policy makers, activists, entrepreneurs. We aim to make a first decision within 1 month of submission. In case of a positive first decision the work will be provisionally contracted: the final decision about publication will depend upon the result of the anonymous peer review of the complete manuscript. We aim to have the complete work peerreviewed within 3 months of submission. Proposals should include: • A short synopsis of the work or the introduction chapter • The proposed Table of Contents • CV of the lead author(s) • List of courses for possible course adoption The series discourages the submission of manuscripts that are below 75,000 words in length. For more information, please contact publishing editor, [email protected]

Nathanaël Wallenhorst • Renaud Hétier Jean-Philippe Pierron • Christoph Wulf Editors

Political Education in the Anthropocene

Editors Nathanaël Wallenhorst Faculty of Education Université Catholique de l’Ouest (UCO) Angers, France

Renaud Hétier Faculty of Education Université Catholique de l’Ouest (UCO) Angers, France

Jean-Philippe Pierron Faculty of Philosophie Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté Dijon, France

Christoph Wulf Faculty of Anthropology and Education Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany

ISSN 2731-6343 ISSN 2731-6351 (electronic) Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences ISBN 978-3-031-40020-9 ISBN 978-3-031-40021-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6 This work was supported by Chaire interculturalité de l’UHA © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgment

The editors would like to thank Liz Hamilton for the quality of her translation and her expertise. They would also like to thank the Springer-Nature editors, Christi Lue and Floor Oosting, for their trust and editorial support. They would like to thank the Catholic University of the West (UCO, France) for the grant to supervise the translation.

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Contents

Introduction: Political Education in the Anthropocene: A Metamorphosis to Sustain the Human Adventure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nathanaël Wallenhorst, Renaud Hétier, Jean-Philippe Pierron, and Christoph Wulf Part I

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Rethinking an Anthropology of Education in the Anthropocene

The Emergence of the Anthropocene, an Astonishing Revelation of the Human Condition? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nathanaël Wallenhorst, Jean-Yves Robin, and Jean-Pierre Boutinet Martians and Earthlings: What Anthropology for the Anthropocene? . . . Alexander Federau

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Who Is the Subject of the Anthropocene? The Use of Personal Pronouns to Express Degrees of Human Involvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yoann Moreau

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Towards the Anthropocene Via Philosophical Education: Being in the World, Inhabiting, Disappearing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emmanuel Nal

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Education for Responsibility in the Anthropocene in the Light of Paul Ricoeur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . François Prouteau

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Environmental Issues in the Mirror of the Anthropocene Event: Political Trend and Educational Heterotopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Melki Slimani, Angela Barthes, and Jean-Marc Lange

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Part II

Contents

Reforming Educational Culture and Institutions in the Anthropocene

From Critique to Action: Observations on a Strategy for Sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Christoph Wulf Understanding the Anthropocene as an Interpretative Framework for the Act of Educating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Jean-Philippe Pierron Educational Policies, Sustainable Development and the Anthropocene: Visions, Limits and Opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Daniel Curnier Will We Ever Be Indigenous? Permaculture and Depth Education . . . . 135 Christian Arnsperger Transformation in the Anthropocene: Mimesis, Rituals, Gestures . . . . . 145 Christoph Wulf What Does the Anthropocene Hold for Citizenship? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Nathanaël Wallenhorst To Educate Is to Begin to Do Something . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Renaud Hétier Part III

Some Educational Recommendations in the Anthropocene: Pedagogical Approaches, Experiments

Ecological Transformation and Education as an Odyssey . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 François Prouteau Educating for a Sense of Limits and Limitlessness in the Anthropocene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Jean-Marc Lamarre Learning to Live in the Anthropocene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Renaud Hétier Critique, Utopia and Resistance: Three Functions of a Pedagogy of ‘Resonance’ in the Anthropocene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Nathanaël Wallenhorst The Role of Science Education in the Anthropocene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Pierre Léna, David Wilgenbus, and Lydie Lescarmontier Ecology and Education: The Example of Ecotopias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Damien Delorme

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Promoting a Radical but Not Marginal Educational Innovation at the Campus de la Transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Cécile Renouard Conclusion: Education Awaits Us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 Jean-Philippe Pierron, Renaud Hétier, Nathanaël Wallenhorst, and Christoph Wulf

Introduction: Political Education in the Anthropocene: A Metamorphosis to Sustain the Human Adventure Nathanaël Wallenhorst, Renaud Hétier, Jean-Philippe Pierron, and Christoph Wulf

Abstract This introductory chapter consists of the following sections: (1) Is there still time to educate? The Anthropocene as a political challenge to education; (2) Change nothing or change everything?; (3) Moving beyond education for sustainable development; (4) Rethinking an educational anthropology in the Anthropocene; (5) Some educational recommendations in the Anthropocene. Keywords Political education · Anthropocene · Metamorphosis · Human adventure

1 Is there Still Time to Educate? The Anthropocene as a Political Challenge to Education “I want you to panic,” says Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who has decided to go on strike because of the irresponsibility of the world’s governments in destroying our planet, our only home.1

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This collective work consists of the translation of the contributions published in the collective work L’éducation en Anthropocène published by Editions du Bord de l’eau in 2019 (edited by Nathanaël Wallenhorst and Jean-Philippe Pierron) and in the translation of the articles published in issue 58 of the educational science journal Le Télémaque on the theme of political education in the Anthropocene coordinated by Renaud Hétier and Nathanaël Wallenhorst (2021).

N. Wallenhorst (✉) · R. Hétier UCO – Catholic University of the West, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] J.-P. Pierron University of Burgundy, Dijon, France e-mail: [email protected] C. Wulf Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_1

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Indeed, in 2009 Swedish environmentalist Johan Rockström and 28 of his colleagues report in Nature that we have crossed three of the nine planetary boundaries they identify as being important to respect if human life in society is to remain possible (Rockström et al., 2009a, b). These three boundaries are: climate change, the rate of biodiversity loss, and the alteration of biogeochemical cycles. In 2015, these same authors extended their work and published “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet” in the major international scientific journal Science (Steffen et al., 2015a). We note here that the two largest scientific journals ratify the existence of planetary boundaries. They reassess the indicators for monitoring the Earth system but also affirm and elaborate their model. In just a few years, the situation has deteriorated considerably: the boundary of bio-geochemical cycles has been crossed twice (the boundary of the phosphorus cycle has now been crossed in addition to that of nitrogen, which had already been crossed) and an additional boundary has been transgressed, that of land use change. In January 2022, an international team of 14 researchers, led by Linn Persson, a chemist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, reported that a fifth planetary boundary had been crossed, one that threatens to destabilize the Earth system: that of chemical pollution, known as the “introduction of new entities”, which includes plastics. In this article, entitled “Outside the Safe Operating Space of the Planetary Boundary for Novel Entities” (Persson et al., 2022), their observation is vivid: “Chemical production has increased 50-fold since 1950. It is expected to triple again by 2050. We recommend urgent action to reduce the damage associated with exceeding the limit by reducing production and releases of new entities, while noting that even so, the persistence of many new entities and/or their associated effects will continue to pose a threat.” In late April 2022 another Swedish research team, from the Stockholm Resilience Centre states that with so-called “green water” (precipitation, evaporation and soil moisture) a sixth planetary limit is being crossed as a result of human activities (Wang-Erlandsson et al., 2022). In 2011, the American biologist Anthony Barnosky and eleven of his colleagues, showed that we are en route for a sixth mass extinction of species – again undermining human life in society (insofar as coexistence with other living beings allows us to live) (Barnosky et al., 2011, then Barnosky et al., 2012 and Ceballos et al., 2017). In 2017 the French researcher Marion Bador carried out prospective studies and showed, together with six of her colleagues, that top temperatures in heatwaves may well reach 55 °C in Eastern France in 2100 (Bador et al., 2017). In 2018, the American chemist Will Steffen and sixteen of the most prestigious environmental scientists stated that the Earth is becoming a steam room in which several regions of the world will no longer be hospitable to human life in society (Steffen et al., 2018). According to these authors, the situation is serious: after +1.5 ° C to +2 °C of warming, the Earth system runs the risk of experiencing a set of runaway effects that could lead to +5 °C of warming (making human life in society impossible in many parts of the world). These few articles are only a small sample of the scientific studies that have been conducted and published.

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We have permanently altered the conditions of the Earth’s habitability for all living things. This anthropogenic alteration of the Earth system has a name: Anthropocene. The Anthropocene includes the chemical changes in the atmosphere and the oceans, ongoing global warming, the alteration of biodiversity and the collapse of ecosystems as well as our human responsibility for these changes and the adventure that lies ahead. This is a term that is currently being debated and we are dealing with a set of controversies. “When did the Anthropocene begin?” stratigraphers ask. Was it in the Stone Age with the discovery of fire, with agriculture, the meeting of the Old and New Worlds, the industrial revolution, the explosion of the first atomic bomb or the acceleration of consumption in the 1950s? “Who is this undifferentiated anthropos at the heart of the Anthropocene narrative?” ask philosophers and political scientists. Indeed, the least we can say is that human societies are characterized by their cultural and historical diversity and that each of them, in the case of civilizations, is still marked by great socio-economic differences, and we cannot pretend that it is a universal anthropos that is responsible for this. Thus, there is a lively debate among intellectuals, some of whom would prefer us to speak of the Capitalocene. The situation is serious and yet the policies implemented remain timid. As for education for the Anthropocene, which should be a priority if we consider that today’s children and adolescents will be the most exposed to the Anthropocene and to the changes in lifestyle that it will make necessary, it remains a dream. School curricula have long been slow to work on geoscientific knowledge in the classroom and are slowly adapting. For several decades it was a lie by omission, a real political scandal in the history of the human adventure. If we have only a decade left to prevent our planet from becoming a steamy place unfit for human life in society, what can we do? Can adults still dare to claim any kind of authority? Does education still have a meaning? Is it still possible to believe we can educate? The geoscientific data of the Anthropocene bring with them urgent political temporalities that call into question the very way education is organized – assuming we have a few decades ahead of us. Is it not preferable for young people to learn to live together on their own, free from the burden imposed upon them by previous generations whose legacy seems to consist only of debts? Or is it still possible to commit ourselves together, young and old, to an odyssey for a habitable Earth, as François Prouteau proposes here in this book? This is a lively question that the authors of this book have been working on for some years (Hétier, 2021, 2022; Hétier & Wallenhorst, 2022; Testot & Wallenhorst, 2023; Wallenhorst, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023; Wallenhorst & Wulf, 2022, 2023; Wulf, 2022a, b) in the presence of many others (Leinfelder, 2013; Curnier. 2017, 2021; Renouard et al., 2020, 2021; Priyadharshini, 2021; Tannock, 2021; Paulsen et al., 2022; Wallace et al., 2022; Jagodzinski, 2018). The political questions posed by the Anthropocene for education are very serious. This is not a new theme to address in education, but a new paradigm within which to address all educational issues now facing unprecedented difficulties. This is what the authors of this book have tried to address.

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2 Change Nothing or Change Everything? Our entry into the Anthropocene marks a decisive stage in our human adventure and throws up unprecedented existential questions. The relationship we have maintained with our environment for nearly two centuries may in turn compromise the continuation of the human adventure. The growing awareness of our entry into the Anthropocene defines a relationship to the future that is unprecedented in history. This marks a break with the relentless pursuit of progress that permitted a certain improvement in the material conditions of life. We have left the ascending linearity of Western modernity. The change that this entry into a new geological epoch of an anthropogenic nature would mean for humanity encourages us to think in new ways. First, the Anthropocene is related to humanity’s geological power. If we humans do not want to be destroyed by this power, then we must stop suffering through it and learn to manage it. Secondly, the Anthropocene reminds human beings of our profound dependence on the environment. It is this that makes our adventure possible, since it can only take place within it. Thirdly, with the Anthropocene the biosphere has left its cycle of climatic self-regulation. As well as doubts about whether the quality of life can improve in the future, it is the very existence of a possible future that is the subject of contemporary uncertainty. The Anthropocene thus signifies humanity’s power, but also the vulnerability of our dependency and the uncertainty of our continued adventure. The Anthropocene is characterized by a combination of certainties and uncertainties that relate to both geoscientific and political/social data. The reliable geoscientific data relate to what we identify as the long term (i.e. at least the next few millennia): the climate will be warmer, the atmosphere denser in CO2 and methane, the oceans more acidic and covering more surface area, reciprocally there will be less land, the ecumene (the space of human habitability of the Earth) will be reduced, biodiversity clearly diminished, the heat waves during which areas will be characterized by human non-habitability will be more frequent and stronger... The available data, which are still uncertain, concern a change in the global state of the biosphere and a break in its systemic organisation leading to a reorganisation of life forms, the possibility or impossibility of guaranteeing world food production, the extent of the destruction of biodiversity, or the level of stabilisation of the temperature at the Earth’s surface...2 In the political and social register and the organisation of human societies, we are also dealing with a combination of certainties and 2

This collective reflection focuses on the implications of the Anthropocene for education. Readers wishing to learn more about this new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, may wish to refer to a number of recently published books: Aux racines de l’Anthropocène – Une crise écologique reflet d’une crise de l’homme by Michel Magny (Le Bord de l’eau, 2019), L’Anthropocène décodé pour les humains by Nathanaël Wallenhorst (Le Pommier, 2019), Pour une philosophie de l’Anthropocène by Alexander Federau (PUF, 2017), the Dictionnaire de la pensée écologique by Dominique Bourg and Alain Papaux (PUF, 2015), or L’événement Anthropocène by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Seuil, 2013).

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uncertainties. We can say that we know that the dominant economic model of globalized postmodern societies will not be sustainable in a few decades and that some of the elements of collapse that were experienced at the beginning of the twenty-first Century with the subprime crisis and the collapse of the American bank Lehman Brothers are bound to increase in the decades to come. We also know that the twenty-first Century will be marked by a series of population migrations due to the impossibility of continuing to live in certain geographical areas. It is also a given that access to drinking water will be a problem for many human beings. What we have not yet fully identified is the extent of the political and social changes. Will 75% of the human population be exposed to life-threatening heat? (Im et al., 2017) Will global food security be jeopardized? Will we experience a widespread collapse of our economic system and a set of wars for survival on the surface of the globe? As we have just identified, the Anthropocene links the long history of the Earth with the short history of the human adventure. When, as educators3 we face these issues, both geoscientific and politico-social, we identify two major viewpoints. The first is that we should not change a great deal and carry on living. But we must distinguish between “business as usual”, the pursuit of a destructive economy and of education or training that prepares individuals to play an active role in it, and, on the other hand, maintaining a space of educational security. The possibility of a disaster of unprecedented proportions should not invalidate childhood and all that is playful, carefree and innocent. Nor should it mean renouncing education and preparing for the future. Even in the face of uncertainty, parents must continue to play with their children – whether it be handball, Mario Kart or Monopoly. Teachers must continue to teach little children to read. Academics, whether in psycho-sociology, fluid mechanics or medicine, must continue to teach their students. Adult educators must continue to accompany their trainees in their vocational search, enabling them to focus on others in the performance of their work. The role of the educator is to allow life to be lived in a human and dignified way. Thus we see that the Anthropocene does not alter the function of the educator – fortunately. There are things that must continue: playing with one’s parents; learning to become autonomous for one’s future journeys in the world, through reading, writing and arithmetic; developing skills and finding a place on Earth among humans; constructing meaning in one’s existence throughout one’s life. The second viewpoint is radical – but can be linked to the first. The Anthropocene is characterized by a break with the previous geological epoch, the Holocene, in terms of systemic elements that are perceptible in every corner of the globe (alteration of the bio-geochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen or phosphorus; alteration of the chemical constitution of the atmosphere; changes in the climate; an unprecedented increase in the rate of extinction of living species, etc.). Just as the Anthropocene is characterized by this systemic change, so education in the

In this book, the figure of the educator is considered in a broad way. It covers here the functions of teacher, specialised educator, adult trainer, parent, and, even more globally, it can sometimes refer to experiences of accompanying or supporting relationships. 3

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Anthropocene is characterized by radical changes in education, as it was constructed in the Holocene. These changes may be of the same magnitude as those that characterized the changes between the modes of conveying knowledge that were in effect during the Pleistocene (2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago) and those that developed during the Holocene (11,700 years ago to today) that were then characterized by the emergence of education with the formalization of teaching. What might be the characteristics of this education in the Anthropocene? It is to be imagined, created and implemented. Is it not necessarily radical or at the root of things? We must indeed continue to educate and train individuals, to make them both human and competent. But this does not mean that we should carry on as if nothing had happened, i.e. by continuing to blindly adapt to an economic system that is deleterious to the planet, on the one hand, and, on the other, one thing leading to another, by maintaining an attitude of ignorance, insensitivity and fatalism with regard to the destruction of the Earth. Most people are victims of the consequences of the Anthropocene, but they are also stakeholders. If the main purpose of education is to obtain the highest level of qualification for prestigious and highly paid jobs, this makes it difficult to be attentive to the Anthropocene at the same time. In concrete terms, the individuals who earn the most money are also those who pollute the most (big cars, swimming pools, etc.). Other educational goals are possible, without relinquishing the highest standards, but this time with the objective of self-fulfilment (which does not necessarily involve material goods) that can also be open to others and the world. An education in the Anthropocene must therefore make one fully aware of the consequences of one’s choices and actions, of one’s professional and existential orientation. There are obviously things to be avoided, such as overconsumption... as soon as we have the means. But there are also things to do, things that are possible, eco-citizen actions as much as political choices, as long as one has learned to be attentive and sensitive to them and as long as cowardice and enjoyment are not hidden behind a fatalism (“it’s too late”, “it wouldn’t make any difference if I took public transport”, etc.).

3 Moving Beyond Education for Sustainable Development Do education for sustainable development or environmental education respond to these challenges? They represent a significant contribution to education because they propose another way of thinking about it (Sigaut, 2010–2011, p. 66; Shaw & Oikawa, 2014; Shephard, 2015; Filho, Nesbit, 2016; Summers & Cutting, 2016; Barthes, 2018; Filho, 2019), which, in addition to the objective of ecological preservation, aims to enrich the meaning of life (Brière et al., 2010–2011, p. 251). This is in line with the goals we have identified above. Environmental education also has the advantage of having a political component (Sauvé, 2009) by helping to

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prepare citizens to participate in public affairs and to play a political role (Brière, Sauvé, Jickling, 2010-2011). Within the Dictionnaire de la pensée écologique (Dictionary of Ecological Thought) (Bourg and Papaux, 2015), for example, education is one of the themes of ecological thought in the two entries out of 350 that are devoted to it: “Environmental education” and “Education for sustainable development”. These see the issue of environmental education as “learning to ‘live here together’” (Sauvé, 2015, p. 376). These two entries make it possible to pose certain fundamental educational challenges, but they do not mention a paradigmatic revolution in education resulting from the entry into the Anthropocene. In 1987, the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Norway’s Gro Harlem Brundtland, published a report entitled Our Common Future, using the term “sustainable development” for the first time. It defined sustainable development as “a pattern of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. That was 35 years ago... Since then, the first future generations are now 30 years old – even if the future in question does not necessarily refer to generations whose contemporaries we will be one day. These future generations are questioning what we have been able to do for them in terms of education – following the example of the young Swedish woman Greta Thunberg who, at the age of 15-16, challenged all the adults responsible for the world. Since then, too, sustainable development has become an equivocal concept. It is suspected of being nothing more than a rhetorical strategy in its weak version, aiming to pass on to future generations the technical means to compensate for their environment, but without giving up the idea of growth, with the concept of “green growth”. In its strong version, it calls for thinking in terms of sustainability in order to accompany an ecological transition in society. However, sustainable development is gradually giving way to the idea of ecological transition, which is now being replaced by the idea of the Anthropocene. This semantic shift has a major significance: from the economic-ecological issue, we are moving on to considerations of a different scope and depth: an anthropological issue questioning “technological civilization” and its anthropic (having to do with the human adventure) if not entropic (unpredictable disorganisation) effect. The notion of the Anthropocene is not itself without discussion, as the concept of the anthropos embraces the whole of humanity in our responsibility and response to the ecological crisis, even though it is perhaps only an Ethnocene or a Capitalocene. We must therefore, when speaking of education and the Anthropocene, clarify the meaning and scope of this concept. In any case, this invites us to make a double shift, not to say to admit a double failure: that of the educational responsibility of generations that amputate the future of those who come after them; that of the concept of sustainable development that is not relevant enough to produce a satisfactory understanding of our historical situation. In this chapter, we do not want to simply be followers of fashion: first came education for the environment, then education for development, then education for sustainable development, and there should be education for the Anthropocene.

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Our aim will not be to think of an education for the Anthropocene but an education in the Anthropocene. The challenge is not to teach an additional subject but to think about education in a new way. This suggests that the Anthropocene would redefine a new framework of interpretation, a new symbolic framework within which to learn to understand the place of humans in their relations with themselves and others, including non-humans and nature. If so, what would it consist of? Does this not also suggest that such education should have several aims – those of shaping, informing and initiating? By analysing the relationship between education and the environment in a different way, we propose resolving the tensions that exist around education for sustainable development (integrating economic and sustainable development issues) and environmental education or education relating to the environment (integrating more educational and social issues). In fact, the Anthropocene makes it possible to question some of the founding paradigms of education in the West since the Enlightenment. This education in the Anthropocene integrates an education for the Anthropocene through engendering an awareness of the Anthropocene and its impacts (for example in terms of the understanding of the Enlightenment, or of modernity and all its dualisms). This education for the Anthropocene is political and requires a form of courage. Indeed, the strengthening of climate and environmental education is regularly questioned, as was noted in this article in Le Monde, written by Audrey Garric and Marine Miller on 23 March 2019 “Climate disruption is taught too little, from school to university”. Here, these two journalists mention that teachers and researchers are increasingly critical of the insufficient space given to climate change in various school curricula. This is also noted by the authors of the Manifesto for Climate Justice published in March 2019, directed at teachers. They propose marking a real break with education for sustainable development by no longer allowing students to believe that the situation is under control and being addressed by the world’s leaders and entrepreneurs. The situation is critical, and it is important for teachers to take a stand. Indeed, it is difficult, if not impossible, to be moderate when identifying the magnitude of contemporary environmental problems. When the knowledge of the Anthropocene has taken hold within teachers involved with it, it results in those teachers becoming serious and radical. These positions need to be expressed in the classroom, in line with the Manifesto for Climate Justice, even if this means that the classroom becomes a militant space. This is also what the 300 signatories, European scientists and academics, proposed when calling for a school climate strike. We can see here how much the Anthropocene touches the heart of education. Educational paradigms are being shaken up and need to be rebuilt: there needs to be a definition of what it means to educate in the Anthropocene. Since education is the political means par excellence for sustainable changes in the medium and long term, we need to think about the style of education needed for us to think, live and act together in the Anthropocene, which involves real and profound anthropological changes. This collective reflection is only a first stone in a vast edifice under construction.

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4 Rethinking an Educational Anthropology in the Anthropocene The contributions in the first part of this book aim at assessing the impact of the idea of the Anthropocene on the type of anthropology that underlies education. The concept of the Anthropocene is not simply a reminder of the importance of the environment for humanity. The Anthropocene, which constitutes a break in geological eras, also constitutes a break in the way humanity conceives of itself. It is therefore necessary to rethink the human condition; this is what this book begins with. It is a question of learning to think about humanity in a new way, breaking with the anthropology of the uprooting of humanity from nature that has long prevailed in the West. The geological power of the human being and the advent of the Anthropocene are impacting the definition we have of ourselves since Aristotle’s zoon politikon. Should humans, who since the Ancients have mostly conceived of themselves within the framework of an anthropology of their condition being removed from nature (separate and above), not become earthlings by assuming their belonging to the Earth (Bonneuil, 2015, p. 38)? Is it not now necessary to think of humanity within the framework of an anthropology of immersion in nature (Papaux & Frigerio, 2015), recognising that to know human beings means “first of all situating humans in the universe, and not cutting them off from it” (Morin)? The anthropology of humanity’s removal from nature underlying the ideal of progress is not sustainable in the long term. Humanity is not only defined intrinsically and statically, but also in terms of what it can and will become within the environment that hosts it. The first chapter, entitled “The emergence of the Anthropocene, an astonishing revelation of the human condition”, is written by the education researcher Nathanaël Wallenhorst and the psycho-sociologists Jean-Yves Robin and Jean-Pierre Boutinet. It questions the ambiguous and militant use of the term Anthropocene, its scientific originality and whether it is helpful in analysing the human condition. The dating of our entry into the Anthropocene is subject to lively debate within the geological community. Did we enter the Anthropocene in the Stone Age, with the development of agriculture, with the collision of the Old and New Worlds, with industrial modernity, with the great acceleration of consumption in the mid-twentieth century, or with the explosion of the first nuclear bombs? Or is it somewhere in the future? Whatever the geological community actually chooses, the various hypotheses for dating the entry into this new geological era function as a mirror of the human condition in the light of postmodernity. The authors show that our ways of thinking are struggling to understand this coming world, which we are entering with full force and within which it is important to give meaning to the human adventure. The philosopher and environmentalist Alexander Federau is the author of the second chapter, “Martians and earthlings: what anthropology for the Anthropocene?” Starting from the observation that nature is disappearing before our very eyes and that the catastrophes of the present time are irreversible, Alexander Federau’s contribution questions one of the fundamental issues of the Anthropocene.

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Thus, what is important is not “to save the Earth, which does not need it, nor life, which will find its way”, but rather “to preserve as much as possible the conditions that have allowed our societies to flourish and prosper”. It is our relationship to nature that must be rethought, thus bringing about a considerable broadening of our human identity: we are of the Earth before we are of a country or a family. Here the war of ideas and the political battle is open: are we going to continue this senseless race of industrial modernity and do everything possible to colonize the planet Mars? Are we destined to become Martians? Or, on the contrary, are we going to “mutate” and become the earthlings that we are potentially? This second option, which presupposes real changes in our lifestyles and our anthropological conceptions, appears to be the challenge of the present time. The reflection continues with the anthropologist Yoann Moreau in his chapter entitled “Who is the subject of the Anthropocene? The use of personal pronouns to express human involvement”. The Anthropocene opens up the possible end of the human adventure. What should we think about this? Here, one of the challenges of education in the Anthropocene is political: it is a question of enabling human subjects to position themselves within predatory human societies that are massively destroying their environment. Yoann Moreau proposes a reflection on language whose power can be educational and mobilizing. He works on three modalities of expression of the self within collectives: in French the personal pronoun nous, the indefinite pronoun on, or the “obsolete nominal form gent”. Through an analysis of how these forms of self-expression complement each other, we understand that, if the Anthropocene challenges us to think, it is only a means to an end concerning what we are going to do with what we know about ourselves. The fourth chapter, written by the philosopher Emmanuel Nal, poses the question of care and reciprocity from the outset, notably on the basis of care as defined by Tronto. The author uses Heidegger’s concept of being in the world. The idea of “being in the world” is interpreted as a calling: no being without the world, on the one hand, no being that is not dedicated to the world, “for” the world, on the other. We are, consequently, in a position to inhabit the Earth (and not only to be on it). The world takes care of us by sheltering us, and in return we are in a position to take care of it, that is to say, to “take care of the dwelling place that gives us back to ourselves”. Against the paradigm of domination (and exploitation), we must then think of a certain “withdrawal”, not in the sense of wishing the disappearance of a harmful humanity, but in the sense of “letting the otherness of the living express itself”. Responsibility appears here to be a determining factor and one of the political aims of education. It is in the light of Paul Ricoeur’s anthropology that the fifth chapter, written by the philosopher of education François Prouteau, questions education for responsibility in the Anthropocene. Ricoeur’s anthropology of vocation is based on freedom and responsibility, not in the domination of other living beings, whether human or non-human, but in order to live together safely with others. François Prouteau considers education in the Anthropocene against the background of an anthropology of the capable anthropos. Although humans have participated in the massive destruction of living things and so often fail to build a common world, they are still political subjects capable of being human, but also of

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becoming more alive (as part of the interdependent fabric of living things) and earthbound (belonging to the cosmic adventure of the Earth). This chapter sets out a humanism of the Anthropocene based on the notion of responsibility that yields “neither to the siren song of a naturalist ideology nor to the anthropocentric humanism of a human being who despoils nature.” He therefore proposes an education for democracy, but within the complexity of life. Then, in the sixth chapter, the contribution of Melki Slimani, Angela Barthes and Jean-Marc Lange aims to establish the principles of an education in politics that will meet the challenges of the Anthropocene. The authors first discuss the notion of event, based on Deleuze and Guattari, as intensity, excess, and potential. The Anthropocene is thus approached as a global event, both as a Plantationocene and a Capitalocene, and not only as a bio-geo-chemical fact. In fact, this new “geological” epoch is also strongly rooted in social life, with inequalities in responsibility, but also the inequalities that the degradation of the Earth’s habitability conditions will create. Thus, there is the need for political education (and not only scientific education). This is broken down into three learning processes: literacy, participation (for critical citizenship), and deliberation, these three processes being ultimately linked by lived experience, particularly that of collective action.

5 Refounding Educational Cultures and Institutions in the Anthropocene The contributions in the second section propose linking the notion of the Anthropocene with cultures and institutions. As a geophysical phenomenon with a strong social impact, the aim is to see how cultures, in their diversity and plurality, as well as institutions, receive, interpret and respond to the general mutation that is the essence of the Anthropocene. The chapters in this part include an ethical and political component. They allow us to “inculturate” the notion of the Anthropocene and to distance ourselves from its possibly ideological and totalizing component. It is a question of re-evaluating and going beyond “environmental education” and “education for sustainable development” and of working towards a form of “inculturation” of the notion of the Anthropocene. This makes it possible to develop a critical distance from the concepts of learning and competence in the predominantly developmental educational model. It is also a question of distancing ourselves from evolutionary psychology, which underpins instrumental rationality, from the critiques of care theories (Gilligan, 2003) and eco-feminism to the work of Gaston Pineau on eco-biography (Pineau & Legrand, 1993). The seventh chapter, “The Anthropocene. From Critique to Action: Observations on a Strategy for Sustainability”, by the educational anthropologist Christoph Wulf, who is particularly involved with UNESCO, takes as its starting point our dual heritage a heritage from both nature and culture, and seeks to turn critical reflection into action. To do this, it is important to accept new grand narratives, even if they are utopian.

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The eighth chapter, entitled “Understanding the Anthropocene as an interpretative framework for the act of educating”, is written by the philosopher Jean-Philippe Pierron. While Kant wondered what it would be like to educate in a century that was becoming aware of itself, Jean-Philippe Pierron asks what it would be like to educate in a new geological epoch. Education is urgent and what is particularly important is to think about it politically by taking a step back from the questions of methods and content that have dominated educational thought. Jean-Philippe Pierron understands education in the Anthropocene as a “total anthropological fact” and sees the Anthropocene having an impact on three aspects of education: on the knowledge of the world to be conveyed (information), on the ethics vis-à-vis future generations (training) and on the style of human being to be brought to life on earth (initiating). These three levels allow us to think of a new institution for children and to understand education in the Anthropocene as a new concrete utopia. This education is part of a necessary renewal of pedagogical thinking. Environmentalist and education researcher Daniel Curnier continues our educational theme in the ninth chapter entitled “Educational policies, sustainable development and the Anthropocene: visions, limitations and opportunities”. School is at the centre. Why has school failed so badly to adapt to the challenges of sustainability? How might it adapt to these challenges, on the one hand, but, above all, how might it play a central role in consolidating the sustainability of the human adventure? To do this, we must not be afraid to radically rethink the institution of school. In his analysis, Daniel Curnier shows that school is the product of the paradigm of modernity, and thus “inseparable from the process of industrialization of the Western nations” from which it is absolutely necessary for it to extricate itself. This means that it must leave behind the economism that organizes it the logics of which are hegemonic. The case is not won because the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, plays a central role in the organisation of educational policies. Indeed, it is this economic organization that pilots the PISA studies (on the skills acquired by pupils at the age of 15), whereby countries enter into competition with each other, all centred on the adaptation of pupils to the logic of the economic market, a world away from the issues of the sustainability of the human adventure revealed by the Anthropocene. But these limitations do not justify Daniel Curnier’s hope that the institution of school will undergo profound changes. Economist Christian Arnsperger is the author of the tenth chapter: “Will we ever be indigenous? Permaculture and education from the depths”. Is the most important purpose of education in the Anthropocene preparation for the future? No, replies Christian Arnsperger unambiguously: “Contemporary humanity has so lost itself in the clutches of its own confusion that it cannot ‘prepare’ anything without reproducing, once again, the profound errors of its past by projecting them into the future”. What is fundamentally important is to reconnect with our roots of indigeneity. Indeed, since our recent sedentarization, about 10,000 years ago, we no longer know how to be indigenous. The learning of education in the Anthropocene takes us beyond our Promethean mastery to its counterpart: our incorporation into ecosystems. The challenge here is that we succeed in accomplishing an anthropological mutation that will take us from a mode of being

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in the world that is that of the taker (who takes in his own hands) to that of the leaver (who deposits in the hands of the gods). This implies a set of concrete changes, starting with our modes of agricultural production, which can in turn be a fertile source of inspiration for thinking about the act of educating and “permaculture as education from the depths”. But how, in concrete terms, can this anthropological transformation, which the various contributors to this book call for, come about? It is through mimetic processes, rituals and gestures, says educational anthropologist Christoph Wulf, author of the eleventh chapter: “Transformation in the Anthropocene – Mimesis, rituals, gestures”. Thus, we have to invent new processes that are part of this great narrative of sustainability. Here the reflection is directly educational since it is new forms of mimetic, ritual and gestural learning that will allow us to incorporate sustainability in our collective actions. The gradual establishing of a new sustainable culture takes place through practices that are essentially mimetic. Moreover, rituals are important for the new foundation of an education because of their performative and social component. Finally, gestures materialize our presence in the world and the resistance of which we are capable. They embody a set of meanings and leave a lasting mark on the imagination. Nathanaël Wallenhorst’s contribution, in a twelfth chapter entitled “What does the Anthropocene hold for citizenship?”, introduces us to the Anthropocene, by contextualising the concept and dating its occurrences. Indeed, the urgency of the situation can impede thought. First, with Daniel Curnier, citizenship is approached as being more than individual gestures (eco-gestures, in particular), having to be marked by new ways of living, and of living together. Then, with Christian Arnsperger, the perspective becomes more that of an “existential citizenship”, which is a mobilizing force for individuals, towards getting out of capitalist development and entering into existential development. Finally, Andreas Weber suggests the possibility of going even further, by entering into a relationship with the “whole”, with other forms of life. In the end, the concept of citizenship is extended far beyond mere (individual) participation in institutional moments, beyond an individual role, into a commitment to and for life. The thirteenth chapter, “To educate is to begin to do something”, by the philosopher of education Renaud Hétier, starts from an observation of collapses. The collapse of life, in the Anthropocene, is well identified. Other collapses seem to precede it: spiritual and mental collapses. A spiritual link to the world allows us to be available, receptive. However, our materialism tends to fill all the gaps and prevent this availability. Our mental powers allow us to support and take care of ourselves. However, multiple compensations make us dependent and deprive us of our strength. It is then a question of thinking of an education that breaks with the current conditions of childhood, marked by educational overprotection, and an omnipresence of screens, which both separate us from the world and make life abstract. Such an education aims jointly at feeling, thinking and participating. It must first and foremost ensure that children are rooted in the world, in life (to feel the pleasure of being), so as to give them the strength needed to resist.

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6 Some Educational Recommendations in the Anthropocene – Pedagogical Approaches, Experiences The objective of the third section is to present proposals and recommendations for educational practices. How can young people and future generations become fully aware of the vulnerability of the biosphere to human action in order to rewrite it to ensure the continuation of our adventure? This section brings together pedagogical reflections and empirical contributions which discuss experiments on how to prepare for the future in the field of education. These chapters show a creativity and practical inventiveness through which we perceive that tomorrow is already being invented today. The fourteenth chapter, by the philosopher of education François Prouteau, “Ecological transition and education as an odyssey”, evokes an “odyssey”, in reference to the Homeric trajectory. One of the problems we face as humanity is that we do not always have the right words, the right concepts or the right narratives to think about and accept the far-reaching change that is needed. The author finds references that can support us in the Bible, and even more so, in the Odyssey. Thus, with Ulysses, it is a question of taming his hubris. It is a question of thinking about hospitality in a new way, and not limiting ourselves to the environmental dimension of the problem we are facing, which is also a problem of law and justice. The challenge is to aim for a transformation of ourselves in relation to the other and to the environment. The struggle of young people, in particular, which can be supported by the figure of Telemachus, is illustrated by the initiatives of the Student Manifesto for an Ecological Awakening and by the Transition Campus. The resilience of our common home also depends on their commitment. The fifteenth chapter, written by the philosopher Jean-Marc Lamarre, “Educating for a sense of limits and limitlessness in the Anthropocene”, first makes the link between the capitalist model (unlimited growth and production) and the Anthropocene, particularly in the era of globalized consumerism. The lesson to be drawn from such an observation is obviously to be able to return to a sense of limits, and, if these are not imposed by authority, to a capacity for self-limitation. But the difficulty lies in being able to create a positive (and not “punitive”) dynamic and at the same time not to interfere with the legitimate aspiration to fulfilment, to “selfrealisation”. The solution proposed in education is that of a link between selflimitation and the “anthropological potential for limitlessness”,4 through an investment in the resonances offered by the relationship with the other and a poetic relationship with the world. The sixteenth chapter, “Learning to live in the Anthropocene” is written by the philosopher of education Renaud Hétier. Here, education is a matter of limits. Living

C. Arnsperger, D. Bourg (2017), Ecologie intégrale – Pour une société permacirculaire, Paris, PUF.

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in the Anthropocene implies integrating a set of limits, starting with the planetary limits that we are constantly crossing in an ever-increasing proportion. How does the child learn to live? First of all, by supporting himself with limits, says Renaud Hétier, notably from his reading of Rousseau’s Emile. But, more fundamentally, it is by learning to make life happen that the child really learns to live. Indeed, living, which presupposes a pre-emption necessary for the maintenance of life, cannot be the sole purpose of an education in the Anthropocene. It is also a matter of learning to make life happen by being creative and working towards a re-enchantment of the relationship with the world. Paradoxically, this creativity called for by the fact of making life happen comes from the child’s “anthropological potential for limitlessness” (Arnsperger & Bourg, 2017). This is not experienced in transgression with a view to maximizing one’s own interests but in the context of a constructive sublimation that Renaud Hétier illustrates with three works of children’s literature. Nathanaël Wallenhorst continues this reflection in the seventeenth chapter entitled “Critique, utopia and resistance: three functions of a pedagogy of ‘resonance’ in the Anthropocene”. If resonance (Rosa, 2019) is the counterpart of contemporary acceleration (Rosa, 2013), might it not have something to tell us in this geological epoch of the Anthropocene, which is regularly referred to as “the great acceleration” (Steffen et al., 2004, 2015b). The pedagogy of resonance is organized around these three functions of the pedagogue that need to be reactivated and developed in view of the entry into the Anthropocene: a critical function, a utopian function and a function of resistance. Reference to the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa is linked here with that of another German, Andreas Weber, already cited by Christian Arnsperger. The thinking of the philosopher and biologist Andreas Weber reinforces the anchoring of a pedagogy of resonance in nature and allows us to give it a radical tone: it is a question of breaking with this paradigm of modernity of separation between a silent non-human world and a human world that is the only one capable of speech. Allowing the world to speak again then offers the possibility of the emergence of a post-capitalist and post-crusader world. The eighteenth chapter is by astrophysicist, Pierre Léna, specialist in climate education, David Wilgenbus and glaciologist, Lydie Lescarmontier: “The role of science education in the Anthropocene”. What is the function of science education in the Anthropocene, and especially climate change education, given the close relationship of education to temporalities (education that transmits a past in order to read the present and prepare for the future)? The complexity lies in the fact that it is necessary to distinguish between two components of science: research as such and “its sister, technology”. The former sheds light on global warming for human societies, while these may have a role to play in mitigating it after having largely caused it. Firstly, it is a question of understanding the functioning of the Earth system, which is incredibly complex and subtle (here there are many crossovers between traditional disciplines). Secondly, “the search for ‘understanding’ also involves the trust that it is possible and even necessary to place in what science proposes”. It is a question of restoring a relationship of trust that has been damaged by the problem of climate scepticism. Thirdly, it is collective action that is required for this education in science in the Anthropocene. For example, it is a matter of

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allowing the emergence of a decarbonized and sustainable society. Fourthly, this collective action generated by education on climate change must allow for a strengthening of solidarity links. The support of teachers is fundamental here and the authors present the mission of the Office for Climate Education (OCE) created in 2018 and which they know particularly well. After the Office for Climate Education, philosopher Damien Delorme offers an analysis of ecotopias in the nineteenth chapter: “Ecology and education: the example of ecotopias”. An ecotopia is understood as a place that is engaged in a cultural transition in response to systemic environmental problems; it is a place of creative resistance to contemporary growth-orientated capitalist hegemony. Pacifying our relationship with nature must be one of the founding principles of politics in the Anthropocene, and the relationship of interdependence with our living environment must be taken seriously, the Anthropocene tells us. This implies not only rethinking many of our institutions, “but also a subjective metamorphosis, which makes education a central issue for surviving or coping with the Anthropocene”. Damien Delorme analyses what an ecotopia is, the characteristics of an ecotopian education and how it can play a role in the Anthropocene. Two ecotopias are then presented and analysed. The first is O.U.R ecovillage, located on Vancouver Island in Canada and founded in 1999, which includes a farm, a school, living spaces and community sharing. It is a space of welcome and formation of our relationship to the Earth. The second is the Ecole Pratique de la Nature et des Savoirs (EPNS) located in the Drôme. Twenty people run this school, which aims to bring about an alliance with nature, from primary school to a range of training courses for adults with a practical or advisory purpose. Within these two ecotopias, education is seen as a true metamorphosis of the self. This collective exploration of renewed educational foundations in the Anthropocene concludes in the twentieth chapter with political philosopher Cécile Renouard: “Promoting a radical but not marginal educational innovation at the campus de la transition”. The Transition Campus was created in 2017 by teacherresearchers, students and professionals to offer high-level training whose purpose is the realization of an ecological and social transition that meets the challenges of the Anthropocene. The militant aim of this project is clear: “Can the Transition Campus contribute to generating a new way of relating to the world among those who feed unsustainable and deadly economic models and lifestyles?” The first objective is to strengthen both intellectual and existential awareness of the type of desirable common world we wish to bring about. The idea is to bring out a shared ethical horizon, the forms of which will then clearly be diverse. The second objective concerns the concrete means of implementing this shared horizon. Here it is a question of confronting the structural contradictions of the Paris climate agreements or the UN Sustainable Development Goals (for example, between the growth of GDP in all countries and clean energy for all). Cécile Renouard, who is directly involved in the Transition Campus, looks at this project from three angles: that of everyday life and the usual ways of doing things, that of the future we hope for, and that of the transitions to be made. This raises the question which is fundamental to

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the ecological and social transition: are the planned innovations part of a profound renewal of the world or is the action mainly conducted so that nothing changes? May the collective thoughts presented in this book be a small contribution to the vast task of making anthropological changes that will allow our “good” Earth to be as hospitable as possible for future generations.

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Nathanaël Wallenhorst is Professor at the Catholic University of the West (UCO) where he is Dean of the Faculty of Education. He is Doctor of Educational Sciences and Doktor der Philosophie (first international co-supervision PhD), and Doctor of Environmental Sciences and Doctor in Political Science (second international co-supervision PhD). He is the author of twenty books on politics, education, and anthropology in the Anthropocene. Books (selection): The Anthropocene decoded for humans (Le Pommier, 2019, in French). Education in the Anthropocene (ed. with Pierron, Le Bord de l’eau 2019, in French). The Truth about the Anthropocene (Le Pommier, 2020, in French). Mutation. The human adventure is just beginning (Le Pommier, 2021, in French). Who will save the planet? (Actes Sud, 2022, in French). Vortex. Facing the Anthropocene (with Testot, Payot, 2023, in French). Handbook of the Anthropocene (ed. with Wulf, Springer, 2023, in English). A critical theory for the Anthropocene (Springer, 2023, in English). Renaud Hétier is Professor at the Catholic University of the West (UCO). He is Doctor of Educational Sciences. He is the author of books on education, and anthropology in the Anthropocene. Books (selection): Freedom with impetuosity. Falling back to earth (Le Pommier, 2022, in French); Humanity versus Anthropocene (PUF, 2021, in French); Cultivating attention and care in education (PURH, 2020, in French); Create an educational space with the fairy tales (Chronique sociale, 2017, in French); Education between presence and mediation (L’Harmattan, 2017, in French). Jean-Philippe Pierron is Professor of philosophy at the University of Burgundy. Author of, among others, Taking care of nature and humans. Médecine, travail et écologie, Les Belles Lettres, 2019; Paul Ricoeur: Philosopher à son école (Vrin, 2016); La mort et le soin (with Elodie Lemoine, PUF, 2016); Parole tenue (with Jean-Pierre Charcosset, Mimésis, 2014); Où va la famille (Les liens qui libèrent, 2014); Les puissances de l’imagination (Cerf, 2012); Repenser la nature (with MarieHélène Parizeau, Presses Universitaires de Laval, 2012). Christoph Wulf is Professor of Anthropology and Education and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Historical Anthropology, the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB, 1999–2012) “Cultures of Performance”, the Cluster of Excellence (2007-2012) “Languages of Emotion”, and the Graduate School “InterArts” (2006-2015) at the Freie Universität Berlin. His books have been translated into 20 languages. For his research in anthropology and anthropology of education, he received the title professor honoris causa from the University of Bucharest. He is Vice-President of the German Commission for UNESCO. Major research areas: historical and cultural anthropology, educational anthropology, imagination, intercultural communication, mimesis, aesthetics, epistemology, Anthropocene. Research stays and invited professorships have included the following locations, among others: Stanford, Tokyo, Kyoto, Beijing, Shanghai, Mysore, Delhi, Paris, Lille, Modena, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Copenhagen, London, Vienna, Rome, Basel, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Sao Paulo.

Part I

Rethinking an Anthropology of Education in the Anthropocene

The Emergence of the Anthropocene, an Astonishing Revelation of the Human Condition? Nathanaël Wallenhorst, Jean-Yves Robin, and Jean-Pierre Boutinet

Abstract The concept of the Anthropocene appeared at the beginning of the twentyfirst Century and has quickly become a hot topic. It has even enjoyed growing media success throughout the last two decades, both in scientific circles and in popular works. It has provoked polemical reactions as well as much semantic debate. The use of the term Anthropocene remains ambiguous and we are faced with a concept that is still under construction, and which is worthy of further examination so that we might grasp its originality and also its usefulness for thinking about both education and politics in a new way. Keywords Anthropocene · Human condition · Political education · Political anthropology

1 A New Concept with Atypical Origins in Search of Legitimacy Although Anthropocene is a term from geological science, how it originated is quite unusual. Three observations demonstrate this. Firstly, although the Anthropocene is a concept from Earth System Sciences, the term was not coined by a geologist but an atmospheric chemist. Secondly, the term Anthropocene was not coined after several decades of soil studies, differentiated analysis of sedimentary strata and debates between geologists and stratigraphers. These debates sometimes lasted more than a century, as was the case with the dating of the beginning of the Triassic period (about 252 million years ago), the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period being proposed as the starting time in 1840 by the British geologist John Phillips and endorsed in 2001. The term Anthropocene was improvised, composed on the spot by someone taking

N. Wallenhorst (✉) · J.-Y. Robin · J.-P. Boutinet UCO – Catholic University of the West, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_2

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part in a symposium, following the intuition that we were no longer living in the Holocene.1 Finally, usually, when a neologism is proposed by a researcher, it takes several long years or decades for the new term to be used and accepted by the scientific community. Here, the instigator of the Anthropocene is not just anyone, but Paul Crutzen, who, as early as the 1980s, was able to get the media on side and alert public opinion about the possibility and consequences of a nuclear winter.2 The same Paul Crutzen won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his well-publicized work on the hole in the ozone layer. The conceptualization of this neologism Anthropocene has not got quietly lost in scientific publications read by a few experts unaware of political debates in the media. On the contrary, it has come under the media spotlight, in a back-and-forth between publications in the world’s most prestigious scientific journals (Science, Nature, Philosophical Transactions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, etc.) with a community of readers that goes far beyond scientific experts. Thus, the concept of the Anthropocene, in the interest it is currently generating, is becoming, in a short time, one of the dominant paradigms of the present time (Wallenhorst, 2023; Wallenhorst & Wulf, 2023).

2 The Semantic Scope of the Anthropocene The Anthropocene has therefore rapidly become a very broad, even sprawling, field of reference that can be identified by two very specific characteristics: it is an equivocal field, and it is also paradoxical.

2.1

An Equivocal Field

So what does this Anthropocene mean for us? Basically, in a few words, it demonstrates that the sustainability of the human adventure is compromised. Nothing more, nothing less. This is why the term Anthropocene is polysemous. Indeed, we are not dealing here with a scientific tool like any other: the human being cannot talk about the Anthropocene without being affected by it. The French biologist Pablo Servigne, who works on the biospheric and politico-social collapses of the Anthropocene, has no hesitation in saying at his conferences that a significant number of environmentalists experience depression caused by the anxiety-provoking component of the

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The Holocene is the current official geological epoch that began 11,700 years ago. A nuclear winter refers to a cooling of several degrees of the Earth’s surface temperature, which would jeopardize global food security in the event of a full-scale nuclear war.

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subject they are working on.3 This is highlighted by the environmentalist Alexander Federau (2017) who shows the connotations of this neologism for the scientific community who want to share their anxiety with the more global public. The Anthropocene is not simply a scientific concept, it is also a militant concept: we are dealing, among other things, with a term taken up by a whole variety of environmental activists driven by the desire to preserve, protect and regenerate the Earth. It is a question of seeking a harmonious relationship with living things, which implies radical changes in our lifestyles: we must break with consumerism as well as with this endless and exhausting search for growth, these convinced militants of the Anthropocene tell us. The Anthropocene is thus a strong argument of ‘post-growth’, post-capitalist, or post-neoliberal activists. In fact, the stratigraphic debate is more institutionalized than the debates within other scientific communities because its purpose is to produce the geological time scale that is disseminated worldwide by the International Union of Geological Sciences. The scientific debates are organized by the institutional policy of this Union. Moreover, over the last 10 years, the Anthropocene has gradually become a concept cultivated by the social sciences, taken up by political scientists, historians and sociologists, highlighting both the socio-historical divides concerning the responsibilities of humans in the entry into the Anthropocene and the societal reorganization necessary to guarantee the sustainability of the human adventure.

2.2

A Paradoxical Field

In addition to the equivocal character of the Anthropocene highlighted above, which is seen as a new geological epoch fraught with foreseeable planetary catastrophes (global warming being one of its variants), researchers in the Earth System Sciences and in the social sciences are developing a paradoxical approach. This approach curiously seeks to marry the Anthropocene with the modern idea of progress, often expressed in the expression ‘augmented reality’. These researchers believe that it is necessary to accompany our entry into the Anthropocene by continuing to liberalize our economy. The liberalism that brought us firmly into this new geological epoch is what will allow us to live in it, the eco-modernists seem to be saying (Manifeste écomoderniste, 2015). The neo-capitalist and neo-liberal British magazine The Economist, had the headline, as early as 2011 Welcome to the Anthropocene. The generation of paradoxes is complete when the Anthropocene even becomes the main argument of the opponents of the militants of an alternative system to the hegemony of economic growth, such as we mentioned above. Thus, the proponents of a neoliberal capitalist transhumanism do not fear our entry into this new geological

3 This is an element worked on with his two co-writers Raphaël Stevens and Gauthier Chapelle in Une autre fin du monde est possible (2018).

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era – here we could mention first and foremost Mark Zuckerberg (co-founder and CEO of Facebook), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google), Jeff Bezos (founder and CEO of Amazon), or Elon Musk (founder of a group of companies such as SpaceX, Tesla or Neuralink and whose objective is to put a human colony on the planet Mars). We can even say that our entry is held up as an example: we have in fact taken power (admittedly rather without our knowledge for the moment) over the Earth system; we must push this domination to the point of mastery over the functioning of this system in order to reorganize it as we wish. Let us take control of the “planetary machine” (Steffen et al., 2004, p. 9) or the “engine room of the Earth system” (Schellnhuber, 1999, p. 21). If nature, as something outside us, does not resist the techno-scientific genius of humans, how much more then will we be able to reorganize and reorient human nature to our liking: “If nature is unfair, let’s change nature!” (Cuboniks, 2016, p. 273).

3 The Anthropocene: Myth or Reality? So what should we think about the Anthropocene? How can we not be lost when faced with the blurring of the boundaries of such a highly permeable concept, which is both scientific and militant, but also contentious and at the same time attests to the current order? Thus, as we have just seen, the structural complexity of this neologism generates much confusion. After the past fictions that we have known, which have their place in history, such as those of progress, humanism or modernity, is the Anthropocene not, ultimately, one more fiction that is currently being suggested to us – i.e. a way of thinking that will help us to understand present society in a time when there is great uncertainty about the present and the future? A way of thinking which attempts to justify ways of acting that aim to make this future possible, through manipulating reality in various ways? In what way is this fabrication of reality a mirror of the human condition? Such a fiction is at work, through what follows, which relates the meanders of the current stratigraphic debate with different ways of dating the entry into the Anthropocene. These different hypothetical dates provide a good example of the vagaries that can run through any work, in this case conceptions of the Anthropocene, highlighting the way in which a variety of ways of thinking are currently struggling.

3.1

The Search for a GSSP or Global Stratotypic Point

Currently the Anthropocene does not yet appear in the geological time scale produced by the International Union of Geological Sciences. The Anthropocene, in order to acquire formal geological acceptance, requires the choice of a place and a date that attests to its beginning (its end needing to correspond to the beginning of a

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new geological epoch). The official process of studying the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch has been launched – this formal study is conducted by the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) within the framework of a Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) of the International Commission of Stratigraphy (ICS), a member of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS)!4 In the near future, the official Anthropocene Working Group will be able to complete the process of defining an entry date for this new geological epoch (Zalasiewicz et al., 2017). What will happen next? The outcome of this institutional work based on the current scientific debate will be the revision of the official geological time scale learned by all schoolchildren around the world who will also be taught the political, historical, cultural and social reasons for this change in geological epoch. When future generations learn in school what the Anthropocene is, this neologism will quickly gain a prominent place in the public arena. But what is still very uncertain is the narrative that will accompany the learning about this new geological epoch. Will the story told by teachers point to the responsibility of humanity as a whole or of a small handful of humans as being largely responsible for the contemporary environmental situation? How do geologists go about organizing the history of the Earth? They use different temporal categories based on changes in the Earth’s global state, traces of which can be seen in the sediments. They identify segments that are particularly recognizable in terms of climate, sea level and living species. Generally, geological boundaries are defined by the connection of a specific point on the Earth with a stratotype and a date. This is called GSSP: Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Points. It refers to rocks, sediments and glaciers that have developed during a given period. Geologists then plant a ‘golden spike’ at the location of the GSSP. A GSSP must be positioned in one place on the globe while having a demonstrable correlation to a new global context. It must also have continuous and clearly discernible sedimentation (Lewis & Maslin, 2015, p. 172). It is a simple question that structures stratigraphic research: “Have humans changed the Earth system to such an extent that recent geological deposits in formation that will remain in the geological record include a signature distinct from that of the Holocene and earlier times? If so, when will this stratigraphic signal (and not necessarily the first detectable anthropogenic change) become recognizable worldwide?” (Steffen et al., 2016, p. 11).

4 The ICS is the largest scientific body of the IUGS, consisting of representatives from 50 countries, and composed of an Executive Board and 16 sub-committees, each with about 20 voting members.

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Different Hypotheses for Dating the Entry into the Anthropocene

There are currently seven hypotheses being worked on by stratigraphers to date the entry into a new geological epoch following the impact of human activities.5 I. The Stone Age. The stratigraphic debate of recent years has worked on various possible dates for the entry into the Anthropocene. The earliest proposals for dates of entry into the Anthropocene go back to the Stone Age6 (Doughty, 2013). The frequent use of fire during the late Pleistocene geological epoch, about 400,000 years ago in Africa, is certainly the first landmark event of humans on their environment (Roebroeks & Villa, 2011). Furthermore another very significant event that the biosphere experienced was the extinction of the megafauna with the disappearance of half of the large mammals through homo sapiens (which took place between 50,000 years and 12,000 years before present) (Lewis & Maslin, 2015, p. 174). Among these extinctions of large mammals, we can note the extinction of other species of the genus homo with which homo sapiens could not cohabit and which he exterminated or which in fact disappeared. II. Agriculture. Some authors mark the entry into the Anthropocene as being the development of agriculture, perceptible through the modification of the chemical composition of the atmosphere (Balter, 2013; Kaplan et al., 2011; Ruddiman, 2003, 2013; Ruddiman et al., 2014). The stabilization of the climate at the beginning of the Holocene allowed for a development of agriculture in different parts of the globe. Agriculture began on three continents 10,000 years ago: in Southeast Asia, South America, and northern China (Lewis & Maslin, 2015, p. 174). Gradually agriculture consisted in the replacement of natural vegetation by another type of vegetation, i.e. cultivated, as well as in the disappearance of some species in favour of the development of others domesticated by humans. It is possible that the development of agriculture in different parts of the world is responsible for maintaining stable Holocene temperatures and not returning to an ice age because of the increase in CO2, 8000 years ago and the increase in methane 5000 years ago (MacFarling Meure et al., 2006). III. The meeting of the old and the new world. Two British researchers, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2015), propose an original dating of the entry into the Anthropocene – the collision between the old and the new world. This event is the beginning of a global organization of humanity on Earth with common food products. This generated a reorganization of animal and plant life. But the

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These different assumptions are developed in The Anthropocene Decoded for Humans (Wallenhorst, 2019). 6 The Stone Age begins with the creation of stone tools by the first hominids (2.4–3.2 million years ago).

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major fact noted by the two researchers is that of the arrival of Europeans in America in 1492, which was accompanied by a significant decline in the population of the continent from more than 50 million in 1492 (between 54 and 61 million) to 6 million 158 years later, in 1650. This decline in the population in America is due to wars, slavery, diseases brought by Europeans as well as famines. This population decline was followed by a decrease in agricultural land but an increase in forest area estimated at 50 million hectares. This increase resulted in a decrease of CO2 in the atmosphere by 7–10 ppm,7 which can be seen in the sediments of the Antarctic ice between 1570 and 1620. IV. The Industrial Revolution. From the earliest publications on the Anthropocene, it is the industrial revolution that is identified as the point of entry into this new geological era. In his early articles, Crutzen sees the entry into the Anthropocene as at the start of the industrial revolution and, if he had to date it precisely, he would choose the date of 1769 with the filing of the patent for the steam engine by the Scotsman James Watt. Indeed, for a number of authors, including Crutzen, industrial technology is the origin of the advent of the Anthropocene (Steffen et al., 2011; Zalasiewicz et al., 2011), with the industrial revolution supplanting agriculture in its global effects on the environment. V. The Great Acceleration. Among the social changes that have occurred since the middle of the twentieth Century, we can note a very significant increase in the world’s population and in particular in the urban population, with an increase from 730 million to 3.7 billion people living in cities between 1945 and 2014 (Zalasiewicz et al., 2014, p. 3). The curves of this great acceleration were proposed by Steffen et al. in 2004 without them yet being named Great Acceleration and then, with this name, in 2007 to illustrate how human activity on Earth evolved. Great Acceleration refers to an acceleration of humaninduced sediment production. It turns out that, for a range of authors, it can also serve as a relevant stratigraphic marker (Holtgrieve et al. 2011; Wolfe et al. 2013; Zalasiewicz et al. 2014; Waters et al., 2014). VI. Thermo-nuclear bomb explosions. Another hypothesis explored as a possible date of entry into the Anthropocene is the first explosion of a nuclear bomb on July 16, 1945 in Alamogordo, New Mexico, which generated a peak of radioactivity that occurred some 20 years later. Following this initial explosion, additional bombs were detonated at an average of one every 9.6 days, which subsequently changed the chemical makeup of the atmosphere (Zalasiewicz et al., 2014, p. 1). The peak of radioactivity is noticeable in 1964, just after the Partial Test Ban Treaty signed on 5 August 1963 in Moscow was put into practice.

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Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million (ppm). One part per million is the fraction corresponding to one millionth.

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VII. Somewhere in the future. For British climatologist Eric Wolff (2014), there is no doubt that human activity has altered elements of the Earth system, which he sees unambiguously in the ice cores of the ice caps, these polar glaciers being considered particularly important in climate stability.8 On the other hand, since the future of the Anthropocene in a few hundred or thousands of years’ time was not yet clear, it seemed to him to be geologically more prudent for future generations to decide on the date of entry, when it would be possible to have more hindsight.

4 The Anthropocene as a Mirror of the Human Condition What is important to us in the contemporary stratigraphic debate is not so much the formally accepted political choice of date and place, even if this choice is important because it will play a role in the structuring of the Anthropocene narrative. On the contrary, what seems essential to us is the recognition of the impact of human activities on their environment. The various hypotheses for dating the beginning of the Anthropocene are a mirror of the human condition that questions the status of modernity and the post-modernity that followed and its ways of thinking. The collected sediments put into question the whole concept of entering a new geological era, generated by man himself, and give us an insight into glimpse of the multifaceted complexity of the issues linked to these human activities. Whereas the research of stratigraphers identifies only one main factor that is responsible for the entry into this possible new geological epoch,9 as researchers in the human and social sciences, we are interested in the meanings that may be attributed to the sedimentary markers identified, since they function as mirrors of how human beings exist and live. Here we will focus on the social and cultural meanings to be attributed to the markers that are associated with the different hypotheses put forward by stratigraphers for the entry into the Anthropocene epoch. (a) In the Stone Age, the extinction of the Quaternary megafauna, such as the extinction of other species of the genus homo supplanted by homo sapiens, points to the difficulties of human cohabitation with certain other species.

8 Ice caps are large glaciers located at the poles. They are sometimes several kilometres high and extend over tens of square kilometres. These ice caps are an important part of the Earth system and can be seen from space. They have a high albedo (albedo is the reflective power of a surface) and thus contribute to global cooling. 9 It is possible that one or the other stratigraphic factor mentioned appears among the secondary factors correlated to the main factor responsible for the differentiation of the two sedimentary layers (but history will remember the predominance of one factor over the others).

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(b) At the time of the development of agriculture, the ability of humans to control ecosystems and to generate agricultural surpluses was apparent. Following this it was the management of these surpluses that led to the development of civilizations marked by the arts, sciences and technology. The mastery of ecosystems, which will gradually be accompanied by an externalising of nature, is the foundation of our civilizations. (c) With the meeting of the old and the new world, the collected sediments highlight the colonial history of humanity by pointing historically to the imperialist dynamics at the origin of world trade but also to the domination that arises in the relationship to the Other and the difficulties we encounter in living in a cosmopolitan way. These few elements show the fragility of humans who can quickly feel threatened by the Other, in a position of strength. (d) The geological traces left by the Industrial Revolution are considerable and show the formidable power of this newcomer, homo oeconomicus: everything seems to be able to be manufactured, bought and sold. This dating shows that the major characteristic of a part of humanity lies in the optimization and maximization of individual short-term interests.10 (e) The Great Acceleration that began after the Second World War celebrates the reign of globalized consumerist productivism characterized by its excessiveness and the cult of freedom. The preparation and the explosions of the thermonuclear bombs highlight the speed and power of the techno-scientific development of a part of the planet from the 1940s onwards, which becomes capable of destroying the planet in a few explosions. We perceive here the fragility of the political component of the human adventure when it is associated with technoscientific power in an enterprise of mass destruction, as we experienced with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. At the same time we are also aware of the impact of politics when it provides itself with the means to avoid this destruction, as was the case in August 1963 with the signing in Moscow of the treaty for the partial prohibition of nuclear tests. From the above, it is essential to clarify the following: – How do the identified sedimentary markers, which record the traces of human action in a permanent way, question the ways in which humanity lives in the world by examining democratic life together, progress, humanism and the idea of what happiness could be? – How do these markers question the imminence of possible major collapses? Is the democratic way of life still strong enough to resolve the challenges we face? What can we say about the totalitarian models that threaten us and what avoidance measures can we take against them? – How can we rethink the tragic dimension of the human condition for today and tomorrow so that it is able to respond to such challenges?

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This component is further developed by Nathanaël Wallenhorst (2019).

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5 Thought Patterns Struggling to Understand the New World Before Us The image of the human condition that we find reflected in the mirror of the Anthropocene shows us that the thought patterns that emerged during modernity are now struggling. Modernity at its best was characterized by an attempt to connect technical and social progress: what we call Les Trente Glorieuses in France, a term coined by Jean Fourastié can be seen as as an example of this, where strong economic growth was allied with improved living conditions. It is this alliance that has broken down in recent decades, which have been marked by a turning away from the Trente Glorieuses to characterize what is called the entry into postmodernity. We are now engaged in a period marked by a dissociation between the two forms of progress, with technical progress now accepting social regression. Our entry into what we are beginning to hypothetically call the Anthropocene is complex: faced with this technical progress/social progress divide, we paradoxically find a number of views that were clashing throughout modernity now coming together. The Anthropocene forms the background for us to analyse these ways of thinking that modernity had deliberately placed in opposition, or even in conflict: this is true of the nature/culture, innate/acquired, time/space, masculine/feminine and also life/death pairings. At the very least, these five pairings, which the modernity of the Enlightenment and then of industry had all too often treated as divides or even as mutually exclusive, now seem to us to have become complementary, interchangeable or even fused. In postmodernity, culture has ceased to take its revenge on the nature from which it sprang, a nature that we are now ecologically required to respect as existing in its own right. The skills assessments that workers carry out are as much a matter of acquired skills as of innate ones. As for the masculine/feminine, against a backdrop of complete differentiation, there are now numerous instances where there is no differentiation, as transgenderism can testify. Life and death, opposites in modernity, as shown by the existentialist revolts, making death a taboo to be removed from life, are now learning to intertwine, under the gaze of Transhumanism to bring out augmented man who, going beyond questions of life and death, attempts to merge in the same bodily entity the living man and the deadly machine. Thus, these five oppositional pairings, which in modern times placed value on one to the detriment of the other, have become partly fused in postmodern times. Through the way they have metamorphised we can consider them as characteristic, of the current cultural changes that frame the advent of the Anthropocene. We have thus entered a new historical regime, characterised by digital culture, marked by an avoidance of caesuras or breaks and by a denial of castration. It is also illustrated by the paradigm of globalization, which is one of the components of this culture. If it is now accepted that this era that appears to be coming, the Anthropocene, threatens to radically transform the spaces as well as the ways of life of humanity in

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every corner of the world, then should we not ask ourselves if the perils that threaten us announce the end of a history, that of the human adventure? The transition we are witnessing reveals challenges that humans will have to face if they simply want to preserve themselves or survive, but will they be able to? In other words, the mirror of the Anthropocene reflects a set of questions that allow us to better identify some of the components of the human condition. First of all, we must remember what makes this condition tragic. Death remains objectively the horizon of our lives. There is therefore a time to live and a time to die. Consequently life and death are inseparably linked, like positive or negative emotions. We cannot escape the paradox of our existence. Thus, the scientific adventure has made us powerful, in its association with technology that brought about industrialization, itself made possible by capitalism but with obsolescence programmed in. This scientific and technical adventure has been able to generate so many feats that risk contributing to our downfall, or at least indicate the ineluctable fragility of our human condition. Is it possible to escape the risk of collapse of the world around us, as well as our own fragility? Some avenues can be explored to ward off the inescapable and turn this risk and fragility into possible salvation (Servigne et al., 2018). What affects our scientific-technical adventure is indeed this obsession with more and more, in other words growth in its current form: a predatory growth that has difficulty cohabiting with what tomorrow’s transitions could bring, whether they are ecological, economic, industrial or simply existential. It is not a matter of decelerating but of entering into better resonance with this nature, this environment in which we are immersed (Rosa, 2019). Finally, through our excesses of predation and domination and the disruptions they generate, nature, by contrast, paradoxically comes to control us, whereas we had the demiurgic claim to dominate it and shape the world to our likin. Now the fabric of history as we had imagined it is slipping away from under our feet. This is how humanity discovers that we are first and foremost beings immersed in nature, and new research in genetics in particular has shown how much the social environment, and also the air we breathe, shapes epigenesis, this experiential component which, in addition to our genetic material, constitutes us. This experience of the world that we live in at the beginning of the twenty-first Century is, at least for a minority of us, currently marked by the worrying image of the Anthropocene, but such an experience says nothing about our relationship to this world. Some of us are well aware of what is at stake, others are aware of the facts without taking them on board, and others again are indifferent, or even dubious about the changes that surround them. Some of these even deny this process of degradation and acceleration, going so far as to spread fake news about the heuristic happiness that transhumanists promise to ‘augmented man’, no doubt with the aim of sowing doubt and uncertainty. This denial of reality says a lot about our relationship to truth: after all Hannah Arendt wrote that one of the characteristics of totalitarianism lies in the impossibility of agreeing on the facts. Everything has become

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falsifiable, modifiable, nothing holds and nothing resists: reality dissolves, and relativism comes to serve a mode of operation that could be called perverse.

6 But, Through the Anthropocene, What Meaning Can We Give to What We Are Experiencing? Faced with such challenges, faced with great societal fragility, politics and democracy are put in the front line. Politics has lost its grip on the meaning of history. It has taken refuge on the island of governance, abandoning the government of societies and people. Indeed, what institutions still exist today: the UN, whose decisions are constantly challenged and scorned? The Security Council, whose members are constantly waging trench warfare by using and abusing their right of veto? It is the deregulation of flows, exchanges, debates and economies that seems to prevail over any other consideration. Thus the invisible hand of the market becomes the key to all regulation, as libertarians claim. So, we French can condemn the Saudi offensive in Yemen and at the same time point out that our Western and particularly French military equipment performs very well in a hostile desert environment: business takes precedence over all other considerations. We see that idealism and cynicism coexist without difficulty. And the same is true of the financial and banking economy. According to the ‘dismayed economists, nothing has finally changed since the previous crisis of 2008. (Les économistes atterrés, 2015). The impunity enjoyed by UBS and Goldman Sachs can attest to this. We therefore have the impression that we are witnessing the decline of institutions, in all their forms (Dubet, 2002). This raises the question of the meaning of history. Is its destiny a game of chance, controlled by the opportunities and financial economic interests held by a minority of individuals? Since January 2019, supported by the annual report of the NGO Oxfam, we know that the 26 richest people on the planet have as much money as 50% of humanity (Public Good or Private Wealth? Oxfam, 2019). With such inequality in the distribution of goods, what sense does it make for it to be imaginable and long lasting? Also, in view of these data, it has become imperative to collectively question the meaning that could be given to political action. Unfortunately, if everyone today sees a meaning in what is happening to us, no one really knows what meaning is right. Any interpretation remains precarious, provisional, all the more so because it is often partial and consequently biased. What resonates today at the heart of our anxious and frightened postmodernity is the multifaceted nature and equivocality of our present human condition, questioning the problematic future it has prepared for itself. Will the emergence of this new geological epoch and its recognition as the Anthropocene be able to set guiding benchmarks for this future and if so, what educational consequences should we draw from it?

The Emergence of the Anthropocene, an Astonishing Revelation of the Human. . .

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References Balter, M. (2013). Archaeologists say the ‘Anthropocene’ is here – But it began long ago. Science, 340, 261–262. Cuboniks, L. (2016). Accélérer le féminisme. In L. de Sutter (Ed.), Accélération! (pp. 253–273). Paris. Doughty, C. E. (2013). Preindustrial human impacts on global and regional environment. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 38, 503–527. Dubet, F. (2002). Le déclin de l’institution. Seuil. Federau, A. (2017). Pour une philosophie de l’Anthropocène. PUF. Holtgrieve, G. W., et al. (2011). A coherent signature of anthropogenic nitrogen deposition to remote watersheds of the Northern Hemisphere. Science, 334, 1545–1548. Kaplan, J. O., et al. (2011). Holocene carbon emissions as a result of anthropogenic land-cover change. The Holocene, 21(5), 775–791. Les économistes atterrés. (2015). Nouveau manifeste des économistes atterrés. Les liens qui libèrent. Lewis, S. L., & Maslin, M. A. (2015). Defining the Anthropocene. Nature, 519, 171–180. Mac Farling Meure, C., et al. (2006). Law Dome CO2, CH4 and N2O ice core records extended to 2000 years BP. Geophysical Research Letters, 33, 1–4. Oxfam. (2019). Public good or private wealth. https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/public-good-orprivate-wealth Roebroeks, W., & Villa, P. (2011). On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, 108(13), 5209–5214. Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance. A sociology of our relationship to the world (J. C.Wagner, Trans.). Polity Press. Ruddiman, W. F. (2003). The anthropogenic greenhouse era began thousands of years ago. Climatic Change, 61, 261–293. Ruddiman, W. F. (2013). The Anthropocene. The Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 41, 45–68. Ruddiman, W. F., et al. (2014). Does pre-industrial warming double the anthropogenic total? The Anthropocene Review, 1, 1–7. Schellnhuber, H. J. (1999). ‘Earth system’ analysis and the second Copernican revolution. Nature, 402, Ch.19-23. Servigne, P., Stevens, R., & Chapelle, G. (2018). Une autre fin du monde est possible. Seuil. Steffen, W., et al. (2004). Global change and the earth system. A planet under pressure (The IGBP book series). Springer. Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P., & McNeill, J. (2011). The Anthropocene: Conceptual and historical perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 369, 842–867. Steffen, W., et al. (2016). Stratigraphic and Earth system approaches to defining the Anthropocene. Earth’s Future, 4, 1–22. Wallenhorst, N. (2019). L’Anthropocène décodé pour les humains. Le Pommier. Wallenhorst, N. (2023). A critical theory for the anthropocene. Springer. Wallenhorst, N., & Wulf, Chr. (Eds.) (2023). Handbook of the anthropocene. Humans between heritage and future. Springer. Waters, C. N., et al. (2014). Evidence for a stratigraphic basis for the Anthropocene. In R. Rocha, J. Pais, J. Kullberg, & S. Finney (Eds.), STRATI 2013 (pp. 989–993). Springer Geology. Wolfe, A. P., et al. (2013). Stratigraphic expressions of the Holocene-Anthropocene transition revealed in sediments from remote lakes. Earth-Science Reviews, 116, 17–34.

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Zalasiewicz, J., et al. (2011). The Anthropocene: A new epoch of geological time? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 369, 835–841. Zalasiewicz, J., et al. (2014). When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal. Quaternary International, 30, 1–8. Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C., & Head, M. J. (2017). Anthropocene: Its stratigraphic basis. Nature, 541, 289–289.

Nathanaël Wallenhorst is Professor at the Catholic University of the West (UCO) where he is Dean of the Faculty of Education. He is Doctor of Educational Sciences and Doktor der Philosophie (first international co-supervision PhD), and Doctor of Environmental Sciences and Doctor in Political Science (second international co-supervision PhD). He is the author of 20 books on politics, education, and anthropology in the Anthropocene. Books (selection): The Anthropocene decoded for humans (Le Pommier, 2019, in French). Education in the Anthropocene (ed. with Pierron, Le Bord de l’eau 2019, in French). The Truth about the Anthropocene (Le Pommier, 2020, in French). Mutation. The human adventure is just beginning (Le Pommier, 2021, in French). Who will save the planet? (Actes Sud, 2022, in French). Vortex. Facing the Anthropocene (with Testot, Payot, 2023, in French). Handbook of the Anthropocene (ed. with Wulf, Springer, 2023, in English). A critical theory for the Anthropocene (Springer, 2023, in English). Jean-Yves Robin. Professor in Education Sciences at the UCO. Author of Penser l’accompagnement des adultes (with Jean-Pierre Boutinet, PUF, 2007), La vie scolaire (Chronique sociale, 2013); Petite fabrique de l’innovation à l’université (with Brigitte Albero and Linard, L’Harmattan, 2009). Jean-Pierre Boutinet. Professor emeritus of the UCO. Author of numerous works, including Anthropologie du projet (PUF, col. Quadrige, 1990), Vers une société des agendas (PUF, 2004), Grammaire des conduites à projet (PUF, 2009).

Martians and Earthlings: What Anthropology for the Anthropocene? Alexander Federau

Abstract Every day over 100 million tons of CO2 are added to the atmosphere. This amounts to 40 gigatons over a year (Le Quéré et al., Earth Syst Sci Data 10(4): 2141–2194. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-2141-2018, 2018) and increases the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2–3 ppm. Combined with past greenhouse gas emissions, these gigatons of carbon are the source of climate change that threatens the health, prosperity and stability of human communities (Allen et al., Nature 458(7242):1163–1166. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08019, 2009; Matthews et al., Nature 459(7248):829–832. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08047, 2009; Wei et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci 109(32):12911–12915. https://doi.org/10.1073/ pnas.1203282109, 2012). Every day, more than 80,000 hectares of forest are lost to human interests. The equivalent of a football field is lost as natural habitat every second. (Carrington et al., One football pitch of forest lost every second in 2017, data reveals. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ng-interactive/2018/jun/27/one-football-pitch-of-forest-lost-every-second-in-2017data-reveals, 2018). That same day, many animals disappear without being replaced. In 40 years, the planet has lost more than half of its animals (Ceballos et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci 201704949. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1704949114, 2017). The current rate is so fast that biologists speak of sterilization, biological annihilation, or a mass extinction, only the sixth in the history of the Earth (Barnosky et al., Nature 471(7336):51–57, 2011; Dirzo et al., Science 345(6195):401–406. https://doi.org/ 10.1126/science.1251817, 2014). Nature is leaving its place to humans alone. By tomorrow, 380,000 more babies will populate the Earth. The increase is rapid: from a world population of 2.5 billion in 1950, to some 8 billion in 2022 (United Nations, World population prospects: the 2015 revision. United Nations, 2015). Human domination is overwhelming. According to Vaclav Smil (Popul Dev Rev:613–636,

A. Federau (✉) University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_3

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2011, p. 619) wild terrestrial wildlife now accounts for only 3% of the biomass of terrestrial mammals. Humans account for more than 30% of this total. The remaining two-thirds are domestic animals. Keywords Political anthropology · Anthropology for the Anthropocene · Earth

1 Nature Is Disappearing Before Our Eyes The days follow one another and look the same. They confirm the same observation: nature is disappearing before our eyes. Events are accelerating: only 10 years ago, the world emitted a quarter less CO2. Tonight, the world will be a little warmer than yesterday. It will be a little more polluted and the oceans will be more acidic. There will be fewer animals, and fewer trees. The pressure that human activities exert on nature is without historical equivalent. It is so powerful that it has already permanently disrupted the planet’s major biogeochemical balances. The consequence is a lasting alteration of the very conditions of life on Earth. The push has already been strong enough to take us out of the conditions we have known since the dawn of civilization. Geologists call it the Holocene, an interglacial episode that lasted for 12,000 years, the main characteristic of which was great climatic stability and a temperate climate. This climatic clemency allowed the simultaneous blossoming of agriculture and then of civilizations in many parts of the world. The Holocene is now a thing of the past. Environmental cursors have varied sufficiently due to anthropogenic alterations that the scientific consensus is that the Earth will not return to Holocene conditions for a long time. In the early 2000s two scientists, chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer, proposed (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000) the concept of the Anthropocene to describe the new planetary characteristics in which we now live (Crutzen, 2002; Steffen et al., 2007). The Anthropocene is characterized by the emergence of an unprecedented geological force, human activities. The Earth has been experiencing this force for at least two centuries. Compared to 1750, the average temperature of the planet has already increased by more than one degree Celsius, and there is every reason to believe that we will have gained another 3 or 4 °C by the end of the twenty-first Century. Describing the current situation in terms of a new geological epoch is controversial in the scientific community. How long have we been in the Anthropocene? What are its precise characteristics? Should we just accept this notion? Should we choose another term? Geologists and stratigraphers have been debating these questions for years, but what does it matter? The concept has proved sufficiently fruitful that scientists from a wide variety of disciplines have adopted it and used it to characterize their own observations. A similar conclusion has been reached in biology, stratigraphy, hydrology and climatology: human impact has proven powerful enough to have consequences over thousands of years. Not only has the human

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species initiated a new geological epoch, but it is up to our contemporaries to take responsibility for it and the first real consequences. The figures are dizzying: while the human species has only existed for an instant on the geological time scale, the consequences of its actions are no longer on this scale. The world of the Anthropocene into which we have entered is partly unknown. What we do know is that it is different from the past, that it is getting hotter and hotter, that extreme weather events are increasing. We know that the world that is coming to us is less hospitable, less fertile, less temperate. But to what extent? The scenarios diverge, because of the different political and social options that will be taken during this century. The IPCC, which is often overly cautious, has calculated a range of between 1.5 and 4 °C, depending on how drastic are the choices made by societies regarding greenhouse gas emissions.

2 At the Risk of Irreversible Disasters Over the past decade or so, new concerns have emerged. As the functioning of the Earth System has become better understood, it has become clear that there are threshold effects, leading to catastrophic snowball effects (Barnosky et al., 2012). If, for example, the warming proved to be sufficient to thaw the permafrost, the permafrost would in turn release astronomical amounts of methane, further accelerating the warming process beyond our control (Schellnhuber et al., 2016). Such catastrophic shifts have occurred in the past, sometimes leading to mass extinction events. The fact that crossing one of these thresholds is now a real possibility has motivated teams of scientists to study and catalogue them. The concept of planetary boundaries has emerged (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015). The nine global limits listed show the extent to which the current ecological challenge is protean. It is not enough to replace the combustion engine with an electric one, or to close down all the coal-fired plants, to be out of the woods. This will not eliminate the holes in the ozone layer, nor compensate for the loss of biodiversity, nor reduce the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. It will not bring back the bees. The ecological challenge is not to “save the Earth”, which does not need it, nor life, which will find its way. The challenge is to preserve as much as possible the conditions that have allowed our societies to flourish and prosper. The clarification of our conditions of existence requires us to rethink our relationship with nature. By intertwining natural and social destinies, the Anthropocene forces us to a new understanding of, where nature and natural cycles have a place, and by extension a new understanding of who we are (Chakrabarty, 2009). As individuals, our historical identity is no longer limited to being the heirs of a nation, or perhaps the descendants of victims of colonialism or slavery. We are also co-responsible for the disappearance of glaciers and the Northern White Rhino.

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3 A Growing Polarization of Interpretations There is no consensus on the story describing the entry into the Anthropocene. There are several contradictory narratives, varying according to who writes it, who is named as being responsible for the current situation, and what solutions are put forward. The historian Christophe Bonneuil has listed four distinct narratives of the entry into the Anthropocene (Bonneuil, 2014), leading to four political readings. From these narratives emerge two distinct and opposed positions in relation to the Anthropocene, which we call the Martian and Earth positions. This new ideological polarity has been perceived and theorized by several authors (Latour, 2015; Federau, 2017). It is part of the traditional left-right divide as well as the conflict between liberal globalists and supporters of an identitarian and authoritarian withdrawal.

3.1

The Headlong Rush as the Only Remedy of Modern Thinking

For the Martians, despite the entry into the Anthropocene, the Western project must be continued. They defend a certain liberalism and have as their goal human emancipation. To achieve this, they display their faith in progress, which is historically in the past and passes through forms of domination: over women, over non-Western peoples, over nature. Progress means expansion and growth, and the Martian imagination is filled with conquests and transcendence. Conquest of the West, of space, of the planet Mars, battle for jobs. Historically, the Martian ideology has claimed to be based on science, and has relied on engineering. Progress through science, trains, antibiotics, fertilizers. Thus, the solutions to the ecological challenges of Martians are almost always technical: the transition to renewable energy, the transition to electric vehicles, progress in energy efficiency, methods of carbon capture, or even proposals for geoengineering, that is, deliberate intervention in the climate on a planetary scale, using sulphur aerosols, seeding the oceans, or whatever. This confidence in technology is accompanied by an anthropological pessimism, since the sole purpose of these techniques is the continuation and indefinite expansion of the current consumerist lifestyle. Unfortunately, the defence of this way of life is also done with less laudable weapons. The role of lobbies in crippling environmental solutions has been repeatedly documented and denounced (Klein, 2015). Environmental whistle-blowers regularly bear the brunt of smear campaigns, from biologist Rachel Carson, when she denounced the effects of DDT, to climate scientist Michael E. Mann, when he defended his famous hockey stick graph of CO2 emissions (Mann, 2014). These often unfounded attacks shatter careers, sully reputations, and propagate untruths. It sometimes takes a bloody turn, as every 2 days an environmental activist is murdered because he or she stands up to a government or a company that destroys natural resources (Watts, 2018).

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This casualness in resorting to lies and slander partly explains why Martians who have historically relied on science and reason are increasingly abandoning this to place themselves exclusively on the terrain of ideology, while at the same time scientific discourse is increasingly critical of them. They then abandon any claim to truth and plausibility, and assert unflinchingly that ecological issues are matters of personal belief. For example, it is enough for a US president to say he does not believe in climate change to get out of the Paris agreement. This is not an isolated case, as shown by the climate-sceptic statements of politicians in power in Australia, Brazil or Russia. At this level of irrationality, it is no longer surprising to see Orwellian oxymorons such as clean coal flourish. Coal becomes clean simply by invoking its purity! This Martian flight indicates an internal contradiction, as their actions are not a reflection of their beliefs but of their interests. Such a contradiction can be found in the American industrialist Elon Musk. A massive investor in renewable energy, and famous for running the Tesla company, which produces electric cars, Mr. Musk nevertheless sees no salvation. For him, life on Earth already seems doomed, since he only sees humanity’s salvation as an “interplanetary species”. His plan is to send 100,000 people on a one-way trip to Mars. While his engineers are working on the rockets for this venture, he never explains how his colonists will be able to thrive on Mars, which has no life, no liquid water, no oxygen in the atmosphere, no protective magnetic field and an average surface temperature of -63 °C! He does not hide it, since he promises them death (Kaitlyn, 2018)! Faced with the Martian headlong rush, a second ideological pole, that of the terrestrials (Latour, 2017) or earthlings, has emerged. The latter do not dream of leaving the planet, but seek on the contrary to preserve it. The earthlings consider it to be the only planet known to harbour life, and therefore our only possible habitat. For them, it is futile to try to emancipate ourselves from nature, since we cannot survive without it. It nourishes us, literally and figuratively, a source of beauty and awe. Earthlings are seeking to establish a gentler relationship with nature. This requires the development of true ecological thinking (Bourg & Papaux, 2015) which is not just a science, but which emphasizes our interdependent relationships with other beings. In this way of thinking, the Anthropocene becomes a lever for thinking about our societies and way of life from a critical point of view.

3.2

The New Horizon of Ecological Thinking

While Martians deny the problems, or at best advocate sustainable development, the central idea of which is to continue the current model, but in a “sustainable” way, Earthlings put forward the need to make an “ecological transition”. This transition is not just an energy transition, but begins with a personal transition (Bourg et al., 2018; Egger, 2015). This personal path does not lead to quietism, but to local action.

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The term “ecological transition” was coined in 2005 in the small town of Totnes in southern England. A group of citizens around Rob Hopkins, anxious about the end of oil and climate change, proposed to their community that should prepare an energy descent plan, with a view to drastically reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and preparing for the post-oil world (Hopkins, 2013). The movement is apolitical and non-militant. It takes place on a voluntary basis and conducts educational work whose goal is to move towards sustainable lifestyles. The ecological transition is thus a participative and local approach by citizens. The Totnes experiment has been replicated in several other towns, linked by the Transition Towns movement. Earthlings refuse the consumer society as the ultimate horizon, and promote more frugal lifestyles, with the use of simpler, but more easily mastered technologies. Permaculture and biodynamics are earth-based approaches that break away from productivist agriculture. It is based on individual and collective change. For an earthling, the most ecological plastic is the one that is not produced, not the one that is best recycled. Similarly, the best CO2 is the one that is not emitted, as the LINGO (Leave fossil fuel in the ground) campaign demands (McKibben, 2015). Sometimes people form real communities, in the form of ecovillages like Findhorn in Scotland. These villages exist because their inhabitants do not believe that contemporary society allows them to match lifestyles with their values, for example by actively reducing their carbon footprint and reconnecting with nature. Earthlings often voluntarily live on the fringes of society. They propose a multitude of initiatives, and are a real motivating force. For example, recently, the young Swedish student, Greta Thunberg, started a strike at her school for the climate, which was emulated across the world. Through her actions, Ms. Thunberg is directly challenging the education system. Should the education system distance itself from an ideological conflict such as the one between earthlings and Martians? Can it choose to ignore the major issues facing our societies? Is its role not to prepare the young generation, to equip it as well as possible for what awaits it? If so, how should it do this? Should educators raise awareness of environmental factors with the help of a body of knowledge that deciphers the issues? Or should we rather encourage sensory experience, through direct contact with nature? Does the teaching of values such as respect for animals and ecosystems take precedence over that of knowledge? Indeed, and this is a source of constant perplexity, when it comes to ecological issues, knowledge does not necessarily lead to action. Scientific knowledge about climate change has been well understood and supported for over 30 years. We have known about the greenhouse effect for over a century. The composition of the atmosphere has been recorded on a daily basis for more than 60 years, and thanks to ice cores, it has been known for hundreds of thousands of years. This knowledge enjoys a broad scientific consensus and is taught in schools around the world. Yet greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise every year: at the time of writing, annual emissions are at their highest in history, exceeding levels of the previous decade, which were themselves higher than previous years. We do not act on what we know.

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There is something more serious, and more disturbing for those who believe in the virtues of education. Those responsible for the current ecological situation were not and are not illiterate. We can accuse today’s climate sceptics of being ignorant, but we must admit that if we are where we are today, it is the result of the most advanced education offered by our civilizations. It took a sophisticated collective intelligence to produce the combustion engine, CFCs, nuclear power and DDT for example. None of these devastating technologies would have been possible without an efficient education system to train engineers, scientists and economists. Each of these innovations was presented at the beginning as great progress. Why did we not see then that these techniques would have disastrous consequences for the environment? One answer is silo thinking. We study physics, then biology, then French separately. This suggests that each discipline is not only teachable on its own, but is autonomous in itself. This segmentation leads to silo thinking, where each discipline, and by extension each profession, exists only for itself. An example of silo thinking is the recent development of cryptocurrencies. Touted as “revolutionary”, the goal of these electronic currencies is to dispense with a centralized institution using distributed algorithms. The latter require “proof of work” to establish the authenticity of transactions. However, the only way to present this proof is to consume astronomical amounts of energy, making forgery too costly. The net result is that these currencies require staggering levels of energy to operate, in a world that is struggling to reduce its energy consumption in order to combat global warming. Silo thinking is the enemy of the environment. Architects need to know the carbon cost of concrete, consumer products, and these need to be designed for a circular economy. Economists must learn that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. Educators did not sit idly by in the face of environmental issues but sought to integrate them in one form or another into educational systems very early on. As soon as the ecological crises of the 1970s began, a new field of education was defined: environmental education. The need for environmental education was first discussed during the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. This was followed 5 years later by the Intergovernmental Conference on Environmental Education in Tbilisi. At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 was devoted to environmental education. In December 2002, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring that education is an indispensable tool for achieving sustainable development. Environmental education is now taught in several countries. But the results are still far from adequate for the challenge. Perhaps this is because the current form of environmental education fails to understand the nature of ecological issues. It is just another Martian tool, when an Earth-based approach is required. Indeed, environmental education is futile if it is just another silo. It concerns all disciplines and must be taught in each of them as both positive and normative knowledge. This is the price to pay for a true eco-pedagogy.

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Schellnhuber, H. J., Rahmstorf, S., & Winkelmann, R. (2016). Why the right climate target was agreed in Paris. Nature Climate Change, 6(7), 649–653. Smil, V. (2011). Harvesting the biosphere: The human impact. Population and Development Review, 613–636. Steffen, W., Crutzen, P. J., & McNeill, J. R. (2007). The Anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature? AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, 36(8), 614–621. https://doi.org/10.1579/0044-7447(2007)36[614:TAAHNO]2.0.CO;2 Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockstrom, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E. M., Sorlin, S., et al. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223). United Nations. (2015). World population prospects: The 2015 revision. United Nations. Watts, J. (2018, February 2). Almost four environmental defenders a week killed in 2017. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/02/almostfour-environmental-defenders-a-week-killed-in-2017 Wei, T., Yang, S., Moore, J. C., Shi, P., Cui, X., Duan, Q., Dong, W., et al. (2012). Developed and developing world responsibilities for historical climate change and CO2 mitigation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(32), 12911–12915. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas. 1203282109 Alexander Federau A philosopher and physicist, his field of expertise is environmental philosophy. Author of une philosophie de l’Anthropocène published by PUF, he has been active for several years in the field of ecological transition. He is currently project manager at Mobilidée.

Who Is the Subject of the Anthropocene? The Use of Personal Pronouns to Express Degrees of Human Involvement Yoann Moreau

Abstract In this article, I describe the specific uses in French of three ways of expressing the self within a collective. First, by means of the personal pronoun nous, then the indefinite pronoun on and, finally, the obsolete noun gent (plural: gens). I then examine the pros and cons of each when it comes to expressing the living forces of geology on all living things, human and non-human. Next, I propose a way to bring these three voices of the plural together through the notions of friction (Tsing, Friction: an ethnography of global connection. Princeton University Press, 2005), rumination (Stengers, Civiliser la modernité? Whitehead et les ruminations du sens commun. Les presses du réel, 2017) and milieu (Berque, Poétique de la Terre. Histoire naturelle et histoire humaine: essai de mésologie. Belin, 2014). This combination of first-person plurals allows a sensation to emerge, a sensation of being part of a milieu populated by diverse and different people. Keywords Political education · Anthropocene · Philosophical approach of the Anthropocene Prologue In his 1978–1979 lecture at the Collège de France, a year after his mother’s death and 2 years before his own death, Roland Barthes devoted several sessions to a discussion of Dante’s opening line of The Inferno. Barthes describes the feeling of being “midway upon the journey of our life” as being part of the recognition we come to at the moment when, having reached a certain age, we begin to realise that “our days are numbered” the moment when it becomes necessary to look at how we make use of the time left to us before we die and when one discovers death as real and not as a theme for poetry or discussions (Barthes, 2015: 19). These questions that Barthes addresses on the level of the individual confronted with his or her own

Y. Moreau (✉) Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan Laboratory of Critical Interdisciplinary Anthropology (EHESS), Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_4

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end, also arise on a collective level: At what point does the feeling of being “midway upon the journey of our life” emerge? At what point do we become aware that our days are numbered and does it become necessary to look at how we make use of our time before the end comes? At what point do we discover that the Anthropocene is real, and not just a subject for poetry or colloquiums? Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Dante, The Inferno

1 Introduction The word Anthropocene was formed to reflect the advent of a geological epoch characterized by the massive influence of the overall behaviour of humans on the conditions of life on Earth. The previous epoch, called the Holocene, began 10,000 years ago and is characterized by the emergence of a specific anthropic mode of existence based on the domestication of animals, plants, minerals and elements; on the mastery and dissemination of techniques; on the development of systems of signs; on the rise and amplification of economic and political devices. The globalization and intensification of this particular way of life now generate anthropic risks on a global scale. This is mainly due to the systematization of (1) a unique model of exchange based on the market economy and liberalism, (2) an industrialized mode of production and extraction, (3) a quasi-hegemonic cultural framework that organizes the manufacture of knowledge and imagination according to the standards of technical rationality, the will to control and dominate, (4) a rhythm and logic of action that engenders generalized acceleration, disruption (Stiegler, 2016), and a dualistic “Great Divide” (5) possessive individualism (Macpherson, 1971), post-colonial structural naturalism (Descola, 2005), and the modern ontological topos (Berque, 1996). Modernity, which is omni-predatory and energy-intensive, is inextricably linked to the threats to all forms of life today for which it is considered responsible (Bonneuil, 2015). The transformation of the Earth by humanity’s overall behaviour, the geological force it is deploying constitutes a proven threat of upsetting the ecological balance as we know it (Federau, 2016; Waters et al., 2016). As such, humanity gradually tends to be perceived as a negative species, a threat to the Earth and its inhabitants, or even a “plague” that should be eradicated as in the time of the Flood (Afeissa, 2014). This negative perspective profoundly affects our existence, both on a personal and a collective level. On the one hand, the feeling of being responsible, as an earthling, or even guilty grows within each of us; on the other hand, the feeling of being powerless to change the trajectory of a world that is fast advancing towards its doom increases. One of the problems with this all-encompassing view is that it lumps everyone together, rich and poor, industrialists and hunter-gatherers, political

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leaders and street people, adults and children. But not all individuals are equal in the face of changes to the Earth (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016: 65–95). In order to deal with the increase of threats related to the globalization of monoculture and human alienation in the Anthropocene, it is crucial to look carefully at individual action and collective action (Toussaint, 2019) as well as the how what goes on in the domestic sphere is linked to the climate. I propose to address this complex issue by looking at the use in the French language of the first person singular (“moi”) and the first person plural (“nous”, we humans). This simple question of vocabulary and grammar, which everyone is confronted with in their daily lives, will be studied in order to address the issue of the dislocation caused by the Anthropocene and the possibilities of remedying it. I present here a study on our use of everyday language as a vehicle for education, action and mobilization in the Anthropocene era. To do this, I will first present the uses of three ways of expressing the self within a collective, by means of the personal pronoun nous (we), the indefinite pronoun on (one), and the obsolete noun gent (race or species). I will then attempt to clarify the qualities and shortcomings of each in expressing the living forces of geology, human and non-human. Finally, I will propose a way to bring these three voices together through the notions of friction (Tsing, 2005), rumination (Stengers, 2017), and milieu (Berque, 2014) or, more precisely, through the sensation of being part of a milieu populated by diverse and different people.1

1.1

We (Nous)

The first person plural in French is usually the word nous, for example in the expression “La Terre, l’histoire et nous” (Earth, history and us). To say we states a collective that pre-exists the utterance. For example, “We, moderns”, “We French”, “We humans”, “We Earthlings”, etc. There is a shared identity in the word we. It ties individuals together through shared characteristics, and pre-existing categories, including the broad classes of belonging - species, race, gender, age, social category, religion, sexuality (Garcia, 2016). One way to adapt this pronoun to the specific constraints of the Anthropocene era is to specify categories or invent new ones. The word we that was initially used to indicate the group responsible for the Anthropocene explicitly referred to humanity (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). This implicitly meant that all humans were considered equally responsible for global change, which is not in fact true. This vision of a humanity responsible as a whole contributed to minorities continuing to be ignored and to the crushing of territories and cultures on the margins of modernity (Moreau & Kaufmann, 2018). Moreover, the idea that “we’ll all die together” is always more likely to provoke “ontological indolence” (Anders, 2007: 43) or a process of stupefaction through “slow violence” 1

Here the word gens is the plural of gent, which explains the agreement in the feminine.

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(Danowski & Viveiros de Castro, 2014: 223) than a genuine collective mobilization. There is therefore no point in ignoring the diversity that makes up humanity through the use of a we understood as “we humans”. On the contrary. It must be possible to attribute responsibility according to lifestyles. This is precisely what inspired the neologisms Occidentalocene, Consumercene, Technocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chtulucene (Haraway, 2015, 2016). These proposals for reframing the collectives designated by the we associated with global change make it possible, above all, to clarify the geological and political forces which determine the fate of the planet. In fact, the personal pronoun we, because it conveys dimensions of identity, tends to reduce the notion of the Anthropocene to questions of claims, of organization into parties (political or otherwise). The sociologist Bruno Latour, for example, has proposed that humanity is divided into two camps, the Moderns versus the Earthlings, an option of which he says that either we deny the existence of the problem, or we seek to land (Latour, 2017: 15). There are many advantages to this stance, not least of which is that it allows us to reposition ourselves without continuing to be encumbered by a right-left political spectrum and terminology inherited from modernity, for example the word “Global [which] grasps all things from afar, as if they were external to the social world and utterly indifferent to human concerns” (Latour, 2017: 87). One drawback of this approach is precisely its identity-based tropism. Saying “We Earthlings” can lead to seeing others not just as contradictory figures, opponents or adversaries, but as actual enemies that need to be fought. The explicitly confrontational, even warlike, semantics of some of Latour’s writings (Latour, 2015), is significant here. However, this type of approach makes a contribution to challenging the threat to the climate. It allows for the clarification of identity-based, i.e. political, forces, and also contributes to the acceptance of new ones that were previously excluded. We note that identity-based postures are not necessarily conflictual and warlike, insofar as there are still (mental) dispositions and (social) devices that allow opposition and contradiction, such as courts of justice, palaver trees in the African tradition, senates, assemblies and other platforms. This need to maintain a capacity for interaction with antagonists and antagonistic forces is precisely what democratic and scientific ideals are supposed to advocate, and they need to be revived and supported more than ever.

1.2

One (On/We)

First we must point out that on (implying we) is used far more widely in French than the word ‘one’ in English, which is not used in this way. Saying one does something is not saying we do it. The first difference is grammatical: one requires a singular verb whereas we is a plural. Saying one means that it is the collective entity that acts, not each individual.

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One always refers to a set of persons, conceived not as the total of distinct personalities, but as an uncountable mass: the verb is in the singular [...]. In fact, one functions as a collective noun. (Leeman, 1991: 108)

Thus, in the expression “On va à la plage” (we’re going to the beach), on conjugates the verb in the singular, meaning that the real subject of the action is the collective. It is precisely through the very action of going to the beach that the collective emerges, not by the fact of gathering individuals but by the linking of the protaganists. Indeed, the word on is “a grammatical oddity of the French language, [an] indefinite personal pronoun” (Gjesdal, 2008: 29). The use of on contains something indeterminate and unclear, something that is nevertheless resolved and concretized in the realization of collective action. The use of nous is different in this respect. Saying “nous allons à la plage” suggests a pre-existing common referent, even if it has just been formed, for example as opposed to “you, who are staying to watch the game”. Whatever the scale, the nous is part of a certain conception of the political and social field. It makes us think in a certain way; in particular, about identity principles (Laplantine, 2015). In contrast, the on tends to be situational. In sum, on is pro-noun (the emphasis being on the pro, or that which promotes, makes happen, impels to action) while the nous is a pro-noun (which assumes the function of a pre-existing noun). Unlike nous, the use of the word on does not require that individuals have anything in common beforehand, but it does require a common context. An expression such as “on est en train de changer le climat” (we are changing the climate) “ is to consider the Anthropocene as a shared situation. “On va à la plage” is addressed to those of us who would like to join in with swimming, sunbathing, play beach volleyball or any other beach activity. Unlike nous, the collectives brought together by the personal pronoun on are not bound by things inscribed in time (categories, social functions, physical characteristics, political affinities, etc.) but by what is at stake in a situation. The word on is eminently pragmatic, situated and voluntary, it promotes the passage to action, the fulfilment of desires, whereas nous tends rather to consolidate or establish positions. The nous is more strategic, it fits into what is familiar; the on dares to act without having all the elements, it launches into the adventure without a pre-established plan, without a clearly formulated programme or project, without the group it is part of having a name, a slogan, a logo and other ‘badges’ marking a common belonging. The on responds above all to a desire, to a feeling that arises in a situation. It is a response to a certain set up, to a certain situation. Firmly dependent on a situation, it is the expression of a collective action in a situation of accepted uncertainty, which does not respond to the unprecedented by bending it to fit patterns of thought and logical schemes. Saying “On a gagné!” (we won!) expresses joy, surprise and spontaneity. It is quite different from saying “Nous avons gagné”, which stresses the we rather than others, and expresses the result of a collective effort, the outcome of a project that was carried out together.

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Unlike the nous, the on does not bring people together within a party, but with the sound of a ‘leaving?’ It expresses a reaction that unites through what Souriau calls a “questioning” situation (Souriau, 1945). If the on encourages people to take action, it is because it brings people together around what, in the primary sense, sets them in motion: emotions. The on brings people together around shared sensations, feelings and impressions, around sources of stress and frustration or excitement and joy, in short, around ruminations (in the sense of Stengers, op. cit.). In a way, the on promotes a sense of adventure (Whitehead, 1968) and is an important vector of resistance to indolence, irresoluteness, apathy, frigidity and depressive inertia. Because it brings together ‘feelings’ (Peirce, 1931), the word on is capable of mobilizing individuals regardless of their social class, political affiliations, age, gender, nationality, hair colour or any other similarity. It does not unite on the basis of pre-established things, things that have a name and convey a certain taxonomic order (political, ontological, symbolic or other). No. The on mobilizes on the basis of those far more volatile ‘things’, which are not necessarily more ephemeral (Corbin et al., 2016), which are emotions. Whether it is the emotions that arouse the desire to go to the beach, to celebrate a football World Cup final, to show support for victims of attacks, to demonstrate to change political options, emotions bring collectives into being, in response to events and in reaction to situations. In moving crowds, large numbers of people jointly experiencing the same emotion, the on expresses a power of collective change that is more unpredictable and spontaneous than the nous. It forms a mass and releases a force of social division, but this too is not without risks, notably its splitting up into a multitude of ‘closed masses’ (Canetti, 1984). There is no miracle solution to guard against the possibility of this social energy being exploited by institutional or radicalized powers. However, to guard against this, it may be useful to stress one of the essential characteristics of the on: it does not base its action on a logical and rational conclusion, but on feeling and emotion. When things get too complicated, too muddy or too absurd, the on can unite people who have nothing in common except... a feeling. It can be a feeling of confinement that makes you want to go to the beach, or a feeling of being completely fed up that makes you want to demonstrate and change the world. It is in this sense that the relevance of the exercise of rumination is revealed, which consists in “refusing (mutely perhaps, without necessarily deploying a contradictory discourse) to lose confidence in the value of an experience, even if it is difficult to put into words or is challenged by a theory that disqualifies it” (Stengers, 2017: 15). To ruminate is to continue to allow oneself to be affected, to agree to let the feelings build up and, in a way, not to remove the stone from the shoe just yet, but simply “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016). From this perspective, it is less a question of refining our analytical tools and our capacity to intellectualise than of identifying the root and springs of our emotions. We need to relearn how to let ourselves be moved (Stengers, 2017: 29) and how to see the importance of this (Debaise, 2015) in order to be able to reconfigure what we value and what we care about. It is about revisiting and consolidating emotional force fields, valuing feelings, resisting the objectification of feelings, the rationalization of

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intuitions, the abstraction of emotions, and of shutting out anything that cannot be quantified. We should, therefore, ruminate. Resist the decalcification of our sensitivity that is systematically advocated by the modern mechanical approach. It is a way of reducing the risk that the living forces of the on will be split, it is also a way of reassessing a map of tenderness, of reconsidering and feeding what makes us tender (in the double sense of the term).

1.3

Nous Versus On

Before continuing, let us bring together what is different and what is similar in the use of the word nous and the word on. (1) On the political front, the nous makes it possible to deploy new identities, to reorganize forces of identity and to include human and non-human agents previously excluded from public debate. This creates new areas of controversy, but at the risk of creating new areas of violence and conflict that can degenerate into war and other forms of radicalization. On is a catalyst for new things, i.e. the emergence of experiences that that break out of the routine and change the course of a day, history or an era. However, the mass of heterogeneous people that it initially sets in motion often ends up splintered into a multitude of single units disconnected from the original feeling that united and motivated them. (2) On the level of emotions, the on is the expression of a community of sensations and desires, whether spontaneous or frustrated, experienced in the moment or contained and recalled after a long time. It arises after a time of rumination, after having considered and weighed up what moves us and what matters. On this level, the nous is more divisive, conveying polarities that already exist, attractions and inclinations already named, qualified, situated, instituted, publicized and dramatized. It tends to consider the field of emotions as a simple set of levers for (selling, enlisting, subjugating, convincing, etc.) and not as places where futures and the future are decided and put into play. (3) In terms of temporality, the nous is on the side of social and historical temporalities, in connection with the groups and structures inherited from the past. The on, on the other hand, is part of an in situ and in vivo regime, anchored in experience and in the present, rooted in the earth and in the people present. It expresses a fragmented and sometimes confused awareness of the future, without a predefined plan, a clearly established programme or a detailed budget, because the movement it initiates is based on feelings. (4) In terms of grammar, nous conjugates verbs in the plural, while on conjugates them in the singular, ‘as one man or one woman’. The nous brings together forces of polarity (political, technical, symbolic), while the on brings forces together through collective action, based on a common feeling, for example the feeling that everyone is in the same boat and that we must manoeuvre together to avoid the shipwreck forecast by the Anthropocene. Faced with this threat, on reacts on an emotional level, while nous takes action. Two words may help to further clarify what unites and distinguishes the use of these personal pronouns expressing plural subjects. The nous and the on generate

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consensus, but nous is a consensus on the basis of shared meanings, while on has the basis of shared feelings, what Stengers calls “feeling together”. Both the nous and the on run the risks of radicalization, those engendered by intensifications and tensions of identity in the case of the nous, those of the risks of identification (between facts and values, intuitions and convictions) generated by the renewed attention and importance awarded to feelings which remain “completely veiled to introspection” (Peirce, 1931: 1).There is a risk of political radicalization for the former, and a threat of becoming rooted in subjective feelings for the latter.

1.4

‘Gent’

When Pasteur succeeded in cultivating pathogenic strains, and isolating and identifying microbes, he brought new players into the field of medicine. In so doing, he not only discovered a technique of care, pasteurization, but also changed the way we think about disease, cleanliness and the presence of life in the environment. The impact on behaviour and sanitary norms has been worldwide and long-lasting. What is at stake in the proposals that the word Gaia designates today is homologous with that -it assumes the hypothesis of an organic Earth capable of taking revenge (Lovelock, 2000; Stengers, 2009; Latour, 2015; Merchant, 2016), of being moved, of being an agent of history, and even of being a political body (Latour, 2014). Here it is a question of provoking a splitting of geo-human history towards a relationship of mutual care (care). This is also the challenge of judicial proposals that undertake to bring geographical aspects into the courtroom, by conferring a legal identity on rivers, mountains, and forests (Stone, 2010), by reconfiguring a notion of property freed from the ideology of a human being as “master and possessor of nature” (Vanuxem, 2018), or by creating a new form of crime – ecocide (Neyret, 2014). However, these proposals come up against a major difficulty: how can we know what entities that do not speak, that we do not hear or whose language we do not know how to translate want and claim? Is it a question of feelings? This field is difficult to approach from a scientific point of view, not so much because it involves emotions, but because it brings into play questions of faith and practices whose modes of action cannot be pinned down by science (prayer and shamanism for example). The agencies summoned in these modes of action (God, gods, spirits, ghosts, forests, rivers, Gaia, souls, etc.) are not ordinary from the point of view of the dominant cultural scheme of modernity. Taking them into consideration ontologically, as entities, has posed serious philosophical difficulties for over 2000 years. However, it seems possible to include them in another form of expression of the collective that exists in the French language. The obsolete French noun gent is used to express belonging to a group united around a common mode of existence. This community is not necessarily based on biological considerations (the human race, the cat species, etc.) or gender (the male gender, the female gender), but also on ‘style’ considerations, as in “la gent trotte menu” (La Fontaine, 1817), (describing the scuttling style of mice, rats, etc.).

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Of course, according to the dictionary, the word “gent” refers primarily to ‘nation, people, lineage, race’ (Le Robert, 1993) but this word can be applied to all forms of life. To say “la gent trotte menu” is to consider rodents not only as living beings characterized by their way of moving, but as individuals that are part of organized groups bearing a history, and not the mere products of evolution (Ingold, 2013: 74–76). Jean de La Fontaine is perfectly capable of writing about the modes of existence of animal species by using metaphors with qualities homologous to those generally imputed to the human species alone. In other words, the use of the word gent immediately places the speaker in a multinaturalist perspective (Viveiros de Castro, 2009), i.e., one in which the ability to organize into societies and cultivate behaviours would not be the sole preserve of humans. This is one of the major issues at stake in the notions of Umwelt, exteriorization, milieu, mediation, collective, residential perspective, affordance, rumination, friction (see respectively, Uexküll & Kriznat, 1956; Leroi-Gourhan, 1964; Berque, 1996; Descola, 2005; Latour, 1991; Ingold, 2013; Gibson, 1979; Stengers, 2017; Tsing, 2005). This general movement in contemporary anthropology forms part of the progressive dismantling of the Great Divide between human and animal, innate and acquired, constructivism and realism, body and mind, reality and fiction, sensations and feelings. In this context, the word gent is an alternative to the nous and the on. The word gent opens up of the view of a coexistence that is material and organic, and also technical and cultural, of beings and things, humans and non-humans, of the material world and imaginaries. In particular, it makes it possible to say “the earthling” without the restrictions of “we (nous) earthlings” of the political field (with the risk of identity conflicts), or in a “we (on) will strive to become earthly” in the field of specific action (at the risk of relying on ‘veiled’ intuitions and emotions). Let us note that if the word gent has deeper affinities with the word on, it is because the origin of on is specific. From the Latin homo, (man), on is also a way of speaking collectively a humanity that is always developing and always threatened by inhumanity. Its use in the form l’on recalls this that it was originally a noun and not a pronoun, which emphasizes the ‘indeterminate’ nature of the characteristics that are said to be particular to the human species (Leeman, 1991). Like the word on, the word gent unites not through identity, but through a style of existence, a relationship to the world, a way of acting, thinking, living and feeling. However, unlike on, it does not restrict the collectivity of this relationship to the human sphere. In general, “on va à la plage” does not include pets or maybe ghosts and passing spirits who might want to join the excursion. The notion of gent does not make this exclusion. In fact, it shifts the focus of the action, freeing it from its anthropocentricity. To say “la gent ballade-plage” (the beach-going species) includes all those who might be walking on a beach, including cats, dogs, birds, wind, hats, rain, sand, ghosts and crabs. How do you know who is part of a species? It is enough that they are part of the story. The word gent includes those whom the speaker describes in the story. In this sense, the word gent does not describe a situation or respond to it; it invites us to describe what is important to us and what moves us, to state what we understand and what we don’t know, to take an interest, to observe, to go out into the field and get as close as possible to the people who live

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in and make up the worlds. To say “la gent terrestre” (the earthly species) is to engage in a narrative that remains to be told, said, written, mimed, staged, in body and in music, and that remains largely to be invented.

2 Conclusion I have described three ways of expressing belonging to a collective subject. The first is somewhat political and is concerned with identity, in response to devices instituted over time; the second has emotional connotations and brings out collective responses that are situational and pragmatic, in response to situations of “rumination”; the third is more narrative, focusing on describing, observing, notifying (Tsing, 2005), investigating (Latour, 2017: 120) styles and qualities of existence. None of these exclude the others, as human action always contains both an active, emotional and narrative dimension. These words that enable the expression of collective action are in a relationship of opposition and complementarity, just as the hands that transform materials, the gestures that express emotions, and the words that narrate how one thing is passed to the next. This movement between things, the way they touch and affect us, and what we say and do about them in practice, describes precisely what geographer Augustin Berque calls mediation (Berque, 2015). Mediation describes a process whereby objectification (of what is collectively perceived), subjectivation (of what is felt) and passages from one to the other (what is expressed, fabricated, interpreted, narrated) are alternated. In terms of language, at the collective level, it is appropriate to intermingle the different pronouns (with a minimum of friction and rumination), and to speak alternately in the name of the nous, the on and the gent. With this in mind, it would be appropriate to revisit education related to the way the self is expressed in the plural in the French language. In the Anthropocene era, why continue to disqualify the word on, which is considered too vague and associated with a low level of language? Why not rescue the word gent from oblivion? Why cut ourselves off from the expression of the living forces that emerge from the common feelings and narratives that link humans and non-humans in a single gesture? Epilogue Two millennia have passed since Diogenes walked through Athens in broad daylight with a lantern in his hand. To those who ask him what he is doing, Diogenes invariably replies, “I am looking for a human being.” He uses the word anthrôpos (ἄνθρωπoς), which rather indicates the concept of human, i.e., the denominator that would be common to all members of this species. But, in fact, no anthrôpos lives in Athens. There are only anèr (ἀνήρ), i.e., quite ordinary, flesh-and-blood individuals. The world of Platonic ideas has no place in the world, any more than in the street where Diogenes has taken up residence to combat the growing abstraction propagated by the philosophers of the Academy.

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The question is being asked anew in the Anthropocene era: we (on) are looking for humanity, but there is only us (nous), the people (gens).

References Afeissa, H.-S. (2014). La fin du monde et de l’humanité. Essai de généalogie du discours écologique. Presses Universitaires de France. Anders, G. (2007). Le temps de la fin. l’Herne. Barthes, R. (2015). La préparation du roman. Course at the Collège de France 1978–79 and 1979–80. Seuil. Berque, A. (1996). Être humains sur la terre. Principes d’éthique de l’écoumène. Gallimard. Berque, A. (2014). Poétique de la Terre. Histoire naturelle et histoire humaine: essai de mésologie. Belin. Bonneuil, C. (2015). Anthropocène. In D. Bourg & A. Papaux (Eds.), Dictionnaire de la pensée écologique (pp. 35–40). PUF. Bonneuil, C., & Fressoz, J.-B. (2016). The shock of the Anthropocene: The earth, history and us. Verso. Canetti, E. (1984). Crowds and power. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Corbin, A., Courtine, J.-J., & Vigarello, G. (2016). Histoire des émotions: De l’Antiquité aux Lumières (Vol. 1). Le Seuil. Crutzen, P. J., & Stoermer, E. F. (2000). The “Anthropocene” International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP). Danowski, D., & Viveiros de Castro, E. (2014). L’arrêt de Monde. In E. Hache (Ed.), De l’univers clos au monde infini (pp. 221–339). Éditions Dehors. Debaise, D. (2015). L’appât des possibles. Reworking Whitehead. Presses du réel. Descola, P. (2005). Par-delà nature et culture. Gallimard. Federau, A. (2016). Philosophie de l’Anthropocène : interprétations et épistémologie. PhD thesis, UNIL. Garcia, T. (2016). Nous. Grasset. Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Psychology Press. Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 159–165. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Ingold, T. (2013). Marcher avec les dragons. Zones Sensibles. La Fontaine, J. d. (1817). Fables of La Fontaine. Didot l’ainé. Laplantine, F. (2015). Je, nous, et les autrs. Humensis. Latour, B. (1991). Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique. La Découverte. Latour, B. (2014). Agency at the time of the Anthropocene. New Literary History, 45(1), 1–18. Latour, B. (2015). Face à Gaïa: huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique. La découverte. Latour, B. (2017). Où atterrir? La Découverte. Leeman, D. (1991). On Thème. ingvisticae Investigationes, 15(1), 101–113. Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1964). Le geste et la parole (Vol. 1). Albin Michel. Lovelock, J. (2000). Gaia: A new look at life on earth. Oxford University Press. Macpherson, C. (1971). The political theory of possessive individualism. From Hobbes to Locke. Gallimard. Merchant, C. (2016). Exploiter le ventre de la Terre. In É. Hache (Ed.), Reclaim. Recueil de textes écoféministes (pp. 131–134). Cambourakis.

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Moreau, Y., & Kaufmann, A. (2018). Habiter terrestre, hospitalité terrienne. Faire mondes avec les fictions, les non-humains et les non-modernes In M. Augendre, J.-P. Llored, & Y. Nussaume (Eds.), La mésologie, un autre paradigme pour l’Anthropocène?? Hermann. Müller Gjesdal, A. (2008). A semantic study of the pronoun ON in a textual and contextual perspective. Thesis in Linguistics, University of Bergen. Neyret, L. (2014). For the recognition of the crime of ecocide. Environmental Law Review, 39(01), 177–193. Peirce, C. S. (1931). Collected papers, Volume I. Principles of philosophy & II. Elements of logic. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Souriau, É. (1945). Les différents modes d’existence. PUF. Stengers, I. (2009). Au temps des catastrophes. Résister à la barbarie qui vient. La Découverte. Stengers, I. (2017). Civiliser la modernité? Whitehead et les ruminations du sens commun. Les presses du réel. Stiegler, B. (2016). Dans la disruption. Comment ne pas devenir fou? Les liens qui libèrent. Stone, C. (2010). Should trees have standing? Law, morality, and the environment? Oxford University Press. Toussaint, M. (2019). Construire un nouveau ‘nous’. Terrestres. Journal of Books, Ideas and Ecologies. Online: https://www.terrestres.org/2019/01/16/construire-un-nouveau-nous/. Accessed 12 Jan 2019. Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton University Press. Uexküll, J. V., & Kriznat, G. (1956). Animal and human worlds. Gonthier. Vanuxem, S. (2018). La propriété de la terre. Wildproject. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2009). Métaphysiques cannibales. PUF. Waters, C. N., Zalasiewicz, J., Summerhayes, C., et al. (2016). The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene. Science, 351(6269). Whitehead, A. N. (1968). Modes of thought. Macmillan.

Yoann Moreau. Anthropologist at the Centre de recherche sur les risques et les crises (Écoles des Mines). His work focuses on disasters, engineering in extreme situations, unsustainable ways of living and processes of environmental destruction. He is notably the author of Vivre avec les catastrophes (PUF, 2017).

Towards the Anthropocene Via Philosophical Education: Being in the World, Inhabiting, Disappearing Emmanuel Nal

Abstract Although the world has entered the Anthropocene, humanity does not yet seem to fully perceive the paradigm shifts that it is becoming urgent to consider. In order to become familiar with the stakes of an eco-citizenship that will have to invent itself and inaugurate new practices, this article proposes a philosophical journey around three issues, to show the problem of man in the world, and how “inhabiting” the world is envisaged by means of an ethic that encourages a creative imagination. It also examines the idea of the certainties of our world disappearing if history is to continue, and proposes a pedagogical approach to the Anthropocene, based on classical references in philosophical teaching, brought up to date by these new issues. Keywords Philosophical education · World · Anthropocene · Inhabiting · Disappearing The discussion of the Anthropocene as a scientific debate that now goes beyond the traditional divide between the sciences and the humanities, is probably not just a manifestation of transdisciplinarity. Rather we see it as the result of the globalization of an anthropological concern about how to apprehend life and its oἶκoς – its domain, its heritage, its home. In a century already exposed to climatic variations declared to be lasting, the worst of which are still to come, the Anthropocene manifests both the alteration of the familiar – this oἶκoς/domus which we have become used to – and the fragility of a relationship with this familiar world that has long been regarded as unalterable. This is why the resulting concern reflects both the anxiety in the face of a change which has uncontrolled ramifications and also a transformation of the way humans looks at themselves, whereby the recognise themselves less and less as sovereign beings at the centre of the living kingdom, and more as an actors within a system to which they are obliged, to which they owe something. In 1991, Fischer and Tronto envisaged extending the concept of care to E. Nal (✉) University of Upper Alsace, Mulhouse, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_5

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consider it “as a generic activity that includes everything we do to maintain, perpetuate and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible”. They continue, “This world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to link together in a complex, life-supporting network” (Fischer & Tronto, 1991, p. 40). Even if we consider a world that is “not identical to the Earth or to nature” (Arendt, 1993, p. 92), and is rather understood as the between” that “extends between men” (Arendt, 1974, p. 12), it would still inspire concern for the preservation of this world, because it is through it that a third entity arises, which allows people to distinguish themselves from one another, that is to say to exist. Does the Anthropocene then mark a concrete concern for the world (Granger, 1992)? If we believe on the one hand that fundamentally, the Anthropocene questions what we make of ourselves and of the Other, and what connects us and, on the other, that the world is precisely both what makes possible “these open links between us” (Wallenhorst, 2019) and the ongoing result of these woven links, we can then attempt to see the emergence of the Anthropocene as being part of a philosophical path, the weft of which would be our relationship to the ‘world’. Our path will take us through three stages: how can thinking about the world, an important part of the philosophical tradition, make it possible to envisage this new relationship to the ‘planet’ as a moral entity? How does the Anthropocene introduce the idea of a philosophy of ‘inhabiting’ against the background of a long tradition of thought marked by the division between man and nature? How is the problem of disappearance seen through the lens of the Anthropocene? Our intention here is to be didactic and educational. Didactic, because it is a question of understanding how certain classic themes of philosophical teaching can be brought into a discourse on ecology for the young generations. Educational, because it is a question of using this understanding to benefit something new, “the aim of education [being] no longer only to teach something to the interlocutor, but to seek with him the means of transforming the world in which [all] live” (Freire, 1974, p. 9).

1 Being in the World 1.1

The “Age of Man”? The Problem of Being and Existing as an Introduction to the Anthropocene

Etymology allows for many word games. When anthropos, ‘the human’, rubs shoulders with kainos, ‘new, unprecedented, unheard of’, a whole field of interpretation opens up; is it the ‘new man’ whose unity emerges from the ‘disparate nature of things’ (Saint-Exupéry, 1999, pp. 363–364)? Is it the ‘newcomer’ (Arendt, 1954)? Is it the human being of a ‘new logos’ (Nietzsche, 1896, p. 323 ff)? Strictly speaking, the Anthropocene does not refer to any of them although it may well evoke them all. Literally, it is the age of the human. The paradox of this name is that it designates a recent state of affairs, when we might spontaneously consider that the Anthropocene

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coincides with the appearance of human beings, as a cause without specifically mentioning what is affected. The Anthropocene signals the entry of the ‘Earth system’ (Wallenhorst, 2020) into an era in which humans have come to determine this system, what it is and what it will become, or not. The idea of a system does indeed take into account a set of interactions developed by interdependent elements where one determines the other; however, currently the first philosophical problem for us concerns the nature of these interactions – or rather, what underlies them. Even before speaking of a system, there is the otherness in which we live, that we have already evoked under the Greek term o κoς, the familiar space, which surrounds us and allows our anchoring in space and time, which is fundamental to our relationship to reality. However, the term that will probably come most easily to mind will not be the o κoς, but the world. A simple concept, and yet so philosophically fruitful? One may dream of going around the world, want to discover it, set out to confront it, desire to leave it... But what is the world? What is being in the world? By recognizing a link between human modes of existence and the transformation of the space-time in which everything happens, the Anthropocene gives new relevance and perhaps a new context for these two fundamental philosophical questions, which are often not easy to address. Our hypothesis is that the analysis of Dasein in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) allows us to understand the significance of these questions, and is a useful way to begin reflecting upon the Anthropocene. The first dimension of the problem is that the human being is and seeks to exist. But we must qualify this concept of being, which is not as homogeneous as one might think. There is the ‘ontic’ mode of being, an essential part of what Heidegger calls ‘beings’, which designates the complete and sensitive, perceived and concrete beings. Man is thus a ‘being’ who evolves among other beings, but he evolves through a need for being that is a desire to exist, in other words a desire to manifest himself as being, we might almost say to come out into the sun. This need to project oneself, to create, fuelled by the awareness of an end, i.e. of death, confers on the human being another, complementary nature. This is called ‘ontological’ because it is focused on a quest for the root of being through the mediation of existence, hence through the mediation of deeds. This perception of the human condition is expressed by the term ‘Dasein’. This helps us to understand why humans are inclined to want to make their mark on their time and everything around them; they share the material conditions of a physical universe, which is therefore also their own, while at the same time being driven by a quest to touch something of what it is to be by going beyond the being that confines them to mortal limits. This interpretation sheds light on the certain human propensity to want to exist at the expense of other beings and to seek to go beyond. It is what Heidegger ek-sistence- to get out, to extract oneself from just being in order to be. By considering the problem of a human nature that always finds itself caught between being and the aspiration to be, we can understand that progress can also be too ambitious and try and go too far, perhaps refusing the very idea of there being any limitations. Nowadays, we could try to link this philosophical perspective with the ever-changing idea of development: giving full scope to something, allowing it to unfold ‘as far as’ it can go, without being able to qualify this ‘as far as’ in advance.

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What Does ‘World’ Mean and What Is the Idea of ‘Being-In’?

Let us therefore situate ek-sistence (Heidegger) as this movement of affirmation of a being in search of an ontological amplitude which it cannot envisage. Is it not precisely this movement that education wants to tame? In each person, the desire to ‘be’ seeks to know what this means and learns more about itself as it encounters other people, things and knowledge, while not knowing ‘how far’ it can go. Let us go further and extend this ek-sistence to the human race; it can degenerate into a societal and economic model based on infinite deployment of resources, as we see in Truman’s speech of January 20, 1949: ‘“Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge”‘(Sachs, 2007, p. 275). The prospect of development with techno-scientific roots, giving rise to a ‘new imperialism’ (Harvey, 2003), is very much like an apology for the Anthropocene, i.e. a world resolutely shaped by man and for man. The intention claims to be moral, since the discourse pronounces that no one should be excluded from this prosperity. One thing is exclude, however, but we have difficulty knowing how to regard it: the world itself. But what do we mean by this word? If the question of the ‘world’ is asked, what world are we thinking of when we ask it? It is obvious that it has multiple meanings”, warns Heidegger (1927). He distinguishes four complementary meanings. The world can be understood in the ontic sense as ‘the whole of being’, the whole of all concrete beings in their diversity, or in the ontological sense, as the soul of being, i.e. the essence common to all that lives and has feelings. But the world can also be understood as a ‘container’ (the environment conducive to life), understood as bios, and the ‘home’ that recalls the o κoς. The world can still be understood as worldliness: a totality of meaning that is more than the sum of its parts, a general texture of meaning, a meaning that flows through things. This is what leads Heidegger to question, in an astonishingly contemporary formulation of this problem, the enigmatic character of our relationship to the world, which cannot be reduced to a form of possession. He believes that the statement that ‘man has his surrounding world’ is ontologically meaningless as long as this ‘having’ remains indeterminate (Heidegger, 1927). The decisive insight in Being and Time is another factor in the human relationship with the world, which breaks with the idea of mere possession and situation: being-in (‘in-sein’). This concept of ‘Being-in-the-world’ allows us to learn that the world is not only that from which we cannot extract ourselves, but that it is also that which becomes familiar to us and that we can learn to love. Determining how we think about what we do, for example we use materials found in nature to make our tools, we anticipate certain seismic and meteorological events in constructing a building, the world is recognized as being ‘existential’ for Heidegger: we owe to it the inevitable way of being us in the face of things, and yet we have not finished elucidating what to make of it.

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From the ‘World’ to the ‘Planet’, How to Adapt a Pedagogical Discourse Based on Conceptual Distinctions?

We believe that a phenomenological approach is an interesting way of introducing the Anthropocene into philosophical education. “Everything changes”, explains MerleauPonty, “when a phenomenological or existential philosophy sets itself the task, not of explaining the world or discovering its ‘conditions of possibility’, but of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world that precedes any thought about the world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1996, p. 36). In this case, from a didactic point of view, Being and Time shows that one can start with looking for the meaning of being, a fundamental philosophical problem, by situating it in a network of problems where the concept of ‘world’ it is revealed as something other than a simple staging post for humanity: they maintain a relationship of a complex reciprocity, shaping and being shaped, which links their destiny from the beginning. It is necessary to grasp this in order to understand how in the concept of ‘world’ there can be some continuity with the much more recent concept of ‘planet’ or ‘Earth system’. Heidegger also touches on this. In Holzwege (Off the beaten track) he deplores the fact that with modernity, the reign of technology has broken with the mystery and poetic meaning of an earth that needs to be rethought, because it “is not just a green expanse, a meadow where animals go to graze; it is, beyond the worldly evidence of the meanings that objectify or ustentize it”, Zabalza explains. He adds that “the earth is first seen in the Greek phusis, it then appears at the heart of the earth-world conflict, it is then revealed in the materiality of works of art, and finally, it can be defined as the native soil” (Zabalza, 2002, pp. 386–387). By moving from the world to the earth, in Was heiβt Denken? (What is called thinking?) Heidegger pre-empts the question of the Anthropocene, seeing that the devastation of the earth can go hand in hand with by the highest attainments of human life as well as by creating a state of happiness for all (Heidegger, 1959, pp. 35–36). ‘Being-in’ contextualizes a need for human existence carrying the risk of degrading into ‘devastation of the earth’, but it also confirms the relevance of questioning of what it means to inhabit the earth, and allows us to slide from the ontological question to the axiological one: why should we care about our ‘home’? And it outlines the challenge of reconciliation: how can we continue to develop our being on an earth that we must also learn to safeguard?

2 Inhabiting 2.1

Finding a Dwelling Place

For I have discovered a great truth. Namely that people live somewhere, and that the meaning of things changes for them according to the meaning of the house. [...]. And the rites are in time what the house is in space [...]. I have imposed my law which is like the shape of the walls and the arrangement of my dwelling. (Saint-Exupéry, 1999, pp. 375–376)

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Young people demonstrating for the environment and safeguarding the planet seems to show awareness, if not of the Anthropocene as such. For the term is not always easy to understand, at least to what it designates, i.e. the changes brought about by the effects of human action on the biosphere. The philosophical journey proposed here begins with the situation of man in the world because it is important to grasp that the impetus that has accompanied human action since its appearance on Earth is just as ontological as it is vital. Unless we presuppose that humanity is fundamentally evil, i.e., destroying for the sake of it, we cannot accuse ourselves of wanting to annihilate that from which we derive our subsistence and which shapes our existence. Yet we may well succeed in doing just that even though we do not wish to, because of what we are doing, the extent of which has reached a stage of alteration of the living world itself. As Zalasiewicz points out, ‘“The Anthropocene does not represent the detectable incoming of human influence (which in any case is clearly diachronous [...]) but major change to the Earth system that happens to be currently driven by human forcing” (Zalasiewicz et al., 2014, p. 40). The use of the expression ‘human forcing’’ refers to anthropic forcing, describing a force exerted on a dynamic system and likely to disrupt its equilibrium, and further underlines a paradox that plunges us into the pain experienced by the person who unwittingly did something evil (Augustine, 1957). At this point in our philosophical journey, we must work to get out of this paradox and investigate what makes it difficult to coexist with nature. This poses the problem of what it means to inhabit, and the learning that this implies in terms of determining the place we can occupy. From a pedagogical point of view, tackling the question of inhabiting makes us aware of the very idea of reconciling the quest for existence as it is understood for our being-in-the-world and the perspective of maintaining a habitable planet, which is a ‘requirement of hospitality’ (Wallenhorst, 2020). From a didactic point of view of philosophy,1 in order to analyse the human condition consider what it means to inhabit, it may be relevant to look at another text of Heidegger, the lecture delivered in 1951, entitled Bauen Wohnen Denken (Building, Dwelling, Thinking). One excerpt draws our attention in particular, where he asks in what the being of the dwelling consists. The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian mean to dwell, to stay, just like the old word bauen. But the Gothic wunian expresses more clearly what experience we have of this. Wunian means to be content, to be put at peace, to dwell in peace. The word peace (Friede) means that which is free (das Freie, das Frye) and free ( fry) means preserved from The didactic approach is concerned with “methods and techniques specific to the teaching of a discipline” (F. Danvers, 500 mots-clefs pour l’éducation et la formation tout au long de la vie, p. 160). As announced in the introduction, our reflection is intended to be pedagogical on the one hand, as it attempts to reach out to young people in their concern for the environment, in order to guide them towards a questioning of conciliation (what place is there for humans within nature and with it?) rather than an exclusive opposition which radically opposes the one to the other and ends up leading to the idea, to which we will return, that the one can only survive at the expense of the other. It is also intended to be didactic, from the point of view of the teaching of philosophy, in order to understand how the new issues surrounding the Anthropocene can be based on the classical concepts of the teaching of philosophy – which is why we evoke the philosophy textbooks of the final class in school. 1

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damage and threats, preserved from, i.e. spared. Freien actually means to save, to conserve. This conserving itself does not mean simply doing nothing to what we are conserving. Real conservation is something positive, it takes place when we leave something in its being from the beginning, when we bring something back to its being and make it safe there, when we surround it with protection – this is implied by the word freien. To dwell, to be made safe, means: to remain enclosed (eingefriedet) in that which is related to us (in das Frye), that is, in that which is free (in das Freie) and which conserves everything in its being. The fundamental feature of dwelling is this conservation (Heidegger, 2022). This would undoubtedly elicit some reactions from a high school or student audience. Dwelling is conceived here according to mutual caring, because dwelling peacefully proceeds from a freedom preserved insofar as we remain in what ‘is related’ to us, in what is free and which ‘conserves everything in its being’. What is inhabited is indeed existential, in other words something that works to make us ourselves, all the more so as it is not altered; to put it another way, to inhabit is to care for the dwelling that makes us what we are. But why? Why does it seem that reality is so far removed from this description? Doesn’t the entry into the Anthropocene indicate that human behaviour is ignoring of the aspect of taking care to let the planet remain in its being? “Letting what is inhabited remain in its being” can be understood as not interfering with its evolution; this is why the idea of ‘care’ is all the more valuable in that it allows us to rediscover the meaning of care evoked by Fischer and Tronto and which is very topical. However, inhabiting also exposes us to forms of struggle, and Lefebvre recognizes it as “the site of a conflict, often acute, between the constraining powers and the forces of appropriation”, a conflict that “always exists, whatever the elements present” (Lefebvre, 1977, pp. 222–223). These two facets of inhabiting, which are not very compatible, nevertheless demonstrate its complexity, raising the paradox: can they be reconciled, and how? How can one take care of the host environment in one’s being and engage in an inevitable appropriation of an environment that is not immediately welcoming?

2.2

Genealogy of a Power Relationship

It is necessary to go back to the philosophy textbooks of the Terminale (highest class in French school). There is much to be found there, in the history of ideas that they trace, the choice of extracts and, basically, the genealogy of a thought that has accompanied generations of students. Among the texts in the chapter “Nature and Culture” there are recurrent classical references that say much about the perception of nature. For example, this excerpt from the myth of Protagoras, in which Epimetheus, Nature, and his mission to distribute qualities among living beings are mentioned. In the year 321 BC, the Greek text relates a decisive fact accompanied by a no less important comment: “Ἅτε δὴ oὖν oὐ πάνυ τι σoφὸς ὢν ὁ Ἐπιμηθεὺς ἔλαθεν αὑτὸν καταναλω  σας τὰς δυνάμεις εἰς τὰ ἄλoγα-(Plato, 1998, 321b–c)”: Epimetheus the Dazed realized, but too late, that there was nothing left for

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him to distribute to man, the ‘forgotten one’ of Nature. The comment is very important: “Ἅτε δὴ oὖν oὐ πάνυ τι σoφὸς ὢν ὁ Ἐπιμηθεὺς” (emphasis added), “As obviously Epimetheus was not very skilled in the manual arts or wise”, breaking with the idea of a perfection of nature, whose order is not a perfect harmony. This conception is fundamental because it accentuates the conception of an original break with nature (also found in the myth of Genesis, for example), which gradually opens up the perspective of humanity in struggle against that same nature. Another classic text in this chapter comes from the Sixth Part of the Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method), where Descartes envisages the development of a practical philosophy that would be able to make us “like masters and possessors of nature”, not by changing its principles, but by putting them at the service of a more comfortable life, where we could “enjoy the fruits and comforts of the earth” (Descartes, 1987, p. 62) and hope to maintain our health. We can observe that this struggle will be coupled with a form of competition with nature, as gradual technical and political advances are made. Hegel argued that after the creation of nature, man appears and opposes the natural world. Marx, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, sees work as an act that takes place between man and nature, where man himself takes on the role of a natural power vis-à-vis nature (Marx, 1867). Rupture, struggle, competition: such a relationship can be liberating but it reflects an imbalance that is always unfavourable to humans, whose vulnerabilities it ends up mirroring in contrast to a nature that is never presented as threatened. From this philosophical framework, one comes away with the impression that this opposition is similar to that of Jacob wrestling with the angel; man measures himself (ennobles himself?) by measuring himself against something greater than he is in a opposition that is hopeless because it is asymmetrical, in the face of ‘invincible nature’ as Rousseau calls it. This is why Heideggerian developments around being-in-the-world, inhabiting, and the devastation of the earth in the name of technical mastery appear to be particularly fruitful for understanding the process whereby we arrive at a form of the opposite today. Now we have an amplified perception of the vulnerability of nature and the ambivalence of human power, which is capable of both destroying and saving this environment. Although she uses a different concept and speaks of ‘the world’ in a broader sense, Arendt offers an interesting –angle on this relationship. In The Crisis in Education, she presents it instead in a surprisingly symmetrical way, both as a mutual threat and as a shared vulnerability, asserting that this world needs protecting to prevent it from being devastated and destroyed by the wave of newcomers which sweeps over it in each new generation (Arendt, 1954).

2.3

Find Something Else! The Data of an Ethical Problem

We find in a few classical works the description of a relationship between man and nature long apprehended according to a form of πóλεμoς (which generally refers to war and confrontation). It was necessary to oppose nature in order to establish equality, it was necessary to modify it to make it favourable to ourselves, to exert

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force to transform it; this was necessary for survival. For a long time perceived as unbalanced, this struggle therefore was the embodiment of the effort to overcome an environment deemed rather unfavourable, even hostile, to humans. Knowledge of this prerequisite, especially for younger generations, who are now made aware of the need to protect nature at a very early age, seems all the more relevant if we wish to consider where we have come from and the axiological reversal that the Anthropocene represents, when it is a matter of abandoning “a simple marker between exploitation and conservation” in order to find out how we should “inhabit the Anthropocene together” (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2013). Everything is then in place for the Anthropocene to force its way into the history of ideas in philosophy to give rise to a new form of ethical reflection. This is never easy; as Wittgenstein reminds us, it is nothing less than a matter of determining what is valuable or what really matters and also determining the meaning of life, what makes life worth living, and the right way to live (Wittgenstein, 1966). Through it, it is a matter of defining the best possible action to be taken in order to attain the highest possible freedom for oneself and others, that is to say, to return to one’s own being and to spare oneself in the effort to exist. With the entry into the Anthropocene, this approach takes a rather new turn, with one of the moral actors concerned being new, another not yet there. The new actor is the planet, with what Haar calls “the rediscovery of the Earth [...] as a possible home and re-rooting for Man” (Haar, 1987, p. 41). In this triangulation between actors, both in space and in time, it is the planet that comes between us, which will be our common and yet different world; the ethical challenge of the Anthropocene thus concerns the preservation of what connects us, as a way for other living beings to be able to affirm this inevitable mode of being that ultimately makes them free of an ecosystemic balance. “We must save our planet”, we hear, often in the sense of preventing the changes that are happening that could lead to its destruction. This moral concern is ambivalent, however -who do we wish to preserve the Earth for? In The Metaphysics of Morals, we read the Kantian doubt about the very possibility of a purely disinterested act (Kant, 2017). There is no longer an ethical problem if it is a question of preserving the Earth in order to continue to exploit it for our own benefit; in this case, it is only a way of wanting to save ourselves by using a world that is hardly more than a means. Yet, Ricoeur insists, ethical intention is intrinsically liberating; I engage in this process to ‘release’ all actors, never to subordinate one to the other (Ricoeur, 1990). With regard to the Earth, Heidegger agrees, again in his 1951 lecture: “To save (retten) is not only to snatch away a danger, it is properly to liberate a thing, to let it return to its proper being” (Heidegger, 2022). There is a risk of perversion in the will to save: the risk that we feel we possess what we have saved, under the pretext that its salvation is thanks to us; but Heidegger adds that the person who saves the earth does not make himself its master, he does not make it his subject: for there would be only one more step to total exploitation (Ibid.). However, what can be done to educate people in this ethical approach brought about by the Anthropocene? Perhaps through responsibility and invention. Taking a famous example from Balzac and Chateaubriand, Alain writes rather darkly, “Everyone, every minute, kills the mandarin; and society is a marvellous

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machine which allows good people to be cruel without knowing it” (Alain, 1944, p. 101). Alluding to a dilemma known as the ‘Mandarin’s Button’, if the death of a very distant and unknown Chinese mandarin brought us fortune, and it was up to us to decide, what would we do? Can the mere prospect of wealth, regardless of where it comes from, be enough to satisfy me? Since 1970, the NGO Global Footprint Network has published the date of the Earth Overshoot Day, which marks the exhaustion of the resources that nature is capable of renewing in 1 year, and in contrast, supermarket shelves are always overflowing with food. The problem of the ‘Mandarin Button’ allows us to question responsibility by encouraging us to go beyond the immediate and visible, without however wanting to make us feel guilty, because this choice remains open and is constantly updated, by addressing each person in the light of what he or she is able to do. The second pedagogical stool is to stimulate invention. In referring to the conflict inherent in ‘living’, Lefebvre stresses that “this conflict [...] is generally resolved for those concerned on another level, that of the imagination and the imaginary” (Lefebvre, 1977, p. 223). We need to think of something new, to think of cultivating without destroying, consuming differently, more wisely, by relying on renewable resources... Ricoeur insists precisely on this aspect of ethics: forbidding something does not stop it: “The prohibition: ‘thou shalt not kill’ leaves me free to invent the positive actions that are opened up by the prohibition itself: what should I do in order not to kill?” (Ricoeur, 1990, p. 65) In the Anthropocene, there is a moral problem that can be solved by resolving to invent another model – the prohibition, just like the impossibility of perpetuating a model, also tells me “Find something else!”

3 Disappearing 3.1

Disappearance as Humanity’s Wish for Itself: The Nihilism of a Humanity Disenchanted with Itself

“Is it true that the planet would be better off if we were no longer here?” It is often children who ask this question in this way, but it comes up increasingly in the media, on social networks, where articles and videos circulate – what would the planet look like if humans disappeared? How long would it take for nature to regain its rights? At the end of June 2020, the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution relayed an ongoing investigation into the effects of the ‘great human pause’ on wildlife. By highlighting the effects of human activity on the evolution of the natural environment, the Anthropocene logically favours these kind of questions and counterfactual approaches, which allow us “ “to re-examine the fundamental questions of causal imputation, truth, determinism, and history/fiction relations” (Deluermoz & Singaravélou, 2011, p. 561). In this case, this what if is forward looking. From an educational point of view, we think it is important to be attentive to the drifts of selfdisaffection that can go with it, especially for the child who perceives very well that

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they are a member of the human community, and is also aware of the cause and effect relationship between human activities and some of the consequences of these on the fauna and flora. However, to feel concerned and to become aware of the Anthropocene is one thing, to internalize a bad conscience is another, involving the risk of self-punishment which would require, in its extreme form, us to disappear as the only alternative – “for the planet to live, we must no longer be here”. In other words, our disappearance would be a requirement for its survival. A philosophical path for an education that integrates the Anthropocene must take care to avoid this deadly alternative; humanity modifies nature to the point of having altered it, of course. But we are not outside of nature: we part of it, he manifests something of it; we must not deny humanity a place in it, but reflect on the place we may have since entering the Anthropocene. Humanity is part of the problem, and undoubtedly also part of the answer. Thus between the illusion of omnipotence and the disenchantment of the self, an important space for the philosophy of education is emerging.

3.2

Disappearance as a Historical Marker

If envisaging the ‘physical’ disappearance of human beings can fuel a debate on the end of history, the Anthropocene is rather the beginning of another event, which is much more the crossing of a threshold than the reaching of an end. The end of a world is not the end of the world, even if the disappearance of living species heralds the disappearance of a certain number of reference points and models. The entry into this new era, Chakrabarty argues, begins by making less of a distinction between human and natural history: Anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history and end by [...] the question [...]: How does the crisis of climate change appeal to our sense of human universals while challenging at the same time our capacity for historical understanding? (2009, p. 201)

The abolition of this boundary now makes it possible “to learn to work with the so-called hard sciences, without becoming the simple chroniclers of a natural history of the interactions of the human species with the Earth system” (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2013, p. 12). This break with history (the advent of the Anthropocene being often associated with the end of the Holocene) undoubtedly also marks the disappearance of a certain idea of humanity and their place in the world. In Buber’s words, in contrast to other times when he felt ‘at home’ in the world (Epochen der Behaustheit), he may now be asking himself whether he is not arriving at a time when he is likely to find himself deprived of a home (Epochen der Hauslosigkeit) (Buber, 1952, p. 22). The Anthropocene teaches us that a threshold has been crossed, from which concepts that are radically incompatible have become salient. Models of development through exponential growth and consumerism have had their day, even if they may still last a little longer, because they compromise the sustainability of an o κoς that is slipping away. Yet it seems that the choice is not yet unanimous, and

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that the answer to the question ‘what is worth preserving?’ is not settled, at any rate in what is done. This is perhaps a ‘conflict of disappearances’, where if we do not know how to give up one thing, we risk being deprived of everything.

3.3

Disappearance as the Art of Withdrawal

In a philosophy textbook published in 1980 we find an extract from L’homme sauvage, by Alain Hervé. Today, when nature has ceased to frighten us, he writes, “we would like to begin again with delicacy, with love, with care, not to abuse our strength, not to begin by ‘bending’ the world, not to try to make it like ourselves [...] We are also obliged to do so, since otherwise we will destroy [nature] definitively and our survival depends on hers” (Hervé, 1979, p. 165). It would therefore be absurd to save the world without wanting to save humanity itself, and a philosophical way of thinking about disappearance cannot be conceived here as a negation of the human. “The Chinese way of saying disappearance does not mean annihilation”, Zufferey notes, “it is that of eclipse, oblivion, displacement, possibly reduction or transformation” (2012, p. 219). The three axes addressed in this article and inspired by the Anthropocene seem indeed to converge on the same idea, perhaps the same necessity, that of forging new imaginaries, in order to solve a strange equation: how to work on a reasoned withdrawal from the world? For there is an art of withdrawal, which is neither abandonment nor disengagement, and which involves a new normativity and a new empire that humans must conquer, this time over themselves. The break is significant, since after centuries of envisaging survival by overcoming nature, we must now envisage a more systemic survival, that is to say, one that is more united. In this quest, is the starting point not philosophical, since it is a question of knowing how to withdraw in order to leave a space for being to all that exists? We know how much education loves the metaphor of the tree: in order to help the other person to develop as far as they are able, it is necessary to provide them with what they need to nourish themselves and to give them the necessary space to develop and then leave them be. Will there be an Anthropocene man? In common with the educator this person could be concerned with this art of withdrawal, which we will only outline here, working on a form of symbolic disappearance, by which we efface ourselves just enough to give each person their own self. How should we present a ‘wisdom of withdrawal’ inspired by the Anthropocene, especially to the younger generations? The task is not easy, because in order to include this perspective of withdrawal, we must begin by accepting that we have limits. In Emile, Rousseau warns that “childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking and feeling” (1969, p. 319), which do not like being ‘braked’. Among these traits highlighted by an anthropology of childhood is a sense of justice and fairness as well as a capacity for revolt. “Young people around the world seem to have a predilection for distributive justice...to respond positively to folk tales in which the problem arises and to react to adult failure to realize it”, notes Carpenter (2010, p. 49), adding that child culture is also marked by revolutionary potential and

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desire for greater social justice, as evidenced in several historical examples. Taking seriously this anthropological portrait of childhood, educators know that they should not address withdrawal from nature simply through a ‘non-action’ approach. Since kindergarten, children are made aware of nature conservation through various activities, e.g. litter picking in the yard or in the countryside, and teenagers are inspired to get involved and ‘do something’ for the environmental cause, as their climate protests and strikes in early 2019 showed. It is therefore not a matter of curbing youth’s propensity to act, which would be largely counterproductive, but of inciting them to discover how to ek-sist with a concern for letting the otherness of the living express itself. The art of withdrawal is therefore a form of ethical experiment as to the right place to occupy. Far from being passive, it renews the power to act: finding other resources, distinguishing between what is essential and what is not, inventing another modus vivendi with the world. One name, a thousand faces. The challenges of the Anthropocene are undoubtedly as numerous as its ramifications, all the more so in our globalized societal models, where everything is connected; crossing the threshold of a new era outlines a new citizenship, which must be tamed with a certain urgency. “On a sinking ship,” Guerne remarks, “the panic comes from the fact that all the people, and especially the sailors, obstinately speak only the language of navigation; and no one speaks the language of shipwrecks. One returns to one’s long habit, to the illusory security of the chains of the past to avoid the unforeseeable, to turn away for a moment from the real danger. The other language, the only current one: that of the one who dares to see, must be invented as we go along” (Guerne, 2005, p. 13). Speaking the language of shipwrecks is not synonymous with catastrophism, it is first and foremost the pledge of a double refusal, that of fatalism and contingency, and it is here that the philosophical journey that we have attempted to present takes place. In the face of the current challenge of “inventing the unknown” we must remember all the difficulties in which we have built a relationship with the world. It is now time to write a new page.

References Alain. (1944). Propos sur le bonheur. Gallimard. Arendt, H. (1954). The crisis in education. http://www.digitalcounterrevolution.co.uk/2016/ hannah-arendt-the-crisis-in-education-full-text/ Arendt, H. (1974). Vies politiques (p. 12). Gallimard. Arendt, H. (1993). La condition de l’homme moderne (p. 92). Pocket. Augustine. (1957). Against Julian. Catholic University of America Press. Bonneuil, C., & Fressoz, J.-B. (2013). L’événement Anthropocène: La Terre, l’histoire et nous. Seuil. Buber, M. (1952). Das Problem des Menschen. Verlag Lambert Schneider. Carpenter, C. (2010). Les universaux de la culture enfantine. In A. Arléo & J. Delalande (Eds.), Cultures enfantines, universalité et diversité (pp. 45–57). PUR. Chakrabarty, D. (2009). The climate of history: Four theses. Critical Inquiry, 35(2), 197–222.

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Danvers, F. (2003). 500 mots-clefs pour l’éducation et la formation tout au long de la vie. Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Deluermoz, Q., & Pierre Singaravélou, P. (2011). What If...? Apports, limites et enjeux de la démarche contrefactuelle en histoire. Annuaire de l’EHESS, 561–562. Descartes, R. (1987). Discours de la méthode. Vrin. Fisher, B., & Tronto, J. C. (1991). Toward a feminist theory of care. In E. Abel & M. Nelson (Eds.), Circles of care: Work and identity in women’s lives. University of New York Press. Freire, P. (1974). Pédagogie des opprimés followed by Conscientisation et révolution. Maspéro. Granger, G.-G. (1992). La vérification. Odile Jacob. Guerne, A. (2005). Réponse à une enquête. Les cahiers du moulin, 4(7), 13. Haar, M. (1987). Le chant de la terre. Eds de L’Herne. Harvey, D. (2003). The new imperialism. Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1927). Sein und Zeit. Niemeyer. Heidegger, M. (1950). Holzwege. Frankfurt. Heidegger, M. (1954). Was heiβt Denken? Niemeyer. Heidegger, M. (1959). Qu’appelle-t-on penser? (pp. 35–36). PUF. Heidegger, M. (2022). Bauen, Wohnen, Denken. Klett-Cotta. Hervé, A. (1979). L’homme sauvage. Stock. Kant, I. (2017). The metaphysics of morals (M. Gregor, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1977). Du rural à l’urbain. Anthropos. Marx, K. (1867). Das Kapital. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1996). Sens et non-sens. Gallimard. Nietzsche, F. (1896). Also sprach Zarathustra. Macmillan. Plato. Protagoras. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1591 Ricoeur, P. (1990). Avant la loi morale, l’éthique (Paris, Encyclopaedia Universalis. Supplement I: Issues, 1990) (pp. 62–66). Rousseau, J.-J. (1969). Émile ou de l’éducation. Gallimard. Sachs, W. (Ed.). (2007). Development dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power. Witwatersrand University Press. Saint-Exupéry (de), A. (1999). Citadelle. In Œuvres complètes (pp. 363–843). Gallimard. Wallenhorst, N. (2019). L’Anthropocène décodé pour les humains. Le Pommier. Wallenhorst, N. (2020). La vérité sur l’Anthropocène. Le Pommier. Wittgenstein, L. (1966). Lessons and conversations on aesthetics, psychology, and religious belief (C. Barrett, Ed.). Blackwell. Zabalza, A. (2002). Recherche sur le sens métaphysique et sur la portée métajuridique de la formule husserlienne: la terre ne se meut pas. Archives de Philosophie du Droit, 46, 379–406. Zalasiewicz, J. A., Williams, M., & Waters, C. N. (2014). Can an Anthropocene series be defined and recognized? In Waters et al. (Eds.), A Stratigraphical basis for the Anthropocene (pp. 39–53). Geological Society. Zufferey, N. (2012). Aspects philosophiques de la disparition: un détour par la Chine ancienne. Intermedialities, 10, 219–224.

Emmanuel Nal. Philosopher and lecturer at the University of Mulhouse. Researcher at LISEC (UR2310), Norms and Values team (NeV), associate researcher at the MAPP laboratory (EA2626) in Poitiers, he also carries out studies and expertise at CESA (Ecole Militaire, Paris). At the University of Haute-Alsace, he is in charge of the Mediation mission for the Faculty of Letters, Languages and Human Sciences.

Education for Responsibility in the Anthropocene in the Light of Paul Ricoeur François Prouteau

Abstract To what extent does an education in responsibility based on Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology provide an answer to the challenges of the Anthropocene? Throughout his research career, the philosopher confronted the great questions faced by his contemporaries. For him, philosophical anthropology is a counterpart to the human sciences, which it does not replace, but with which it is in dialogue, without reductionism. What he criticizes most is “not so much the idea of the death of man as its counterpart: that man is recent” (Ricoeur [1988], Philosophie, éthique et politique. Seuil, 2017). I suggest here that such a philosophical anthropology helps us to think of the Anthropocene as the time of human responsibility and accordingly makes political education essential. This Anthropocene period would seem to tell us, in effect, that human beings are called upon to strive for freedom and responsibility, not in domination of other living beings, whether human or non-human, but to live safely together. In other words, we have above all a responsibility to educate and cultivate as in a garden. . . in a model of permaculture of course! Keywords Paul Ricoeur · Anthropocene · Political education · Responsibility

1 Fragility of the Living and Revolution in the Concept of Responsibility In a highly significant and unparalleled way, the Anthropocene highlights the intrinsic link between responsibility and what is fragile (Ricoeur [1992], 2019). Moreover, it can be argued that this relationship is the raison d’être of education.

F. Prouteau (✉) UCO – Catholic University of the West, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_6

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This link is highlighted by Hans Jonas1 with regard to the fragile balance of the planet. Hannah Arendt also emphasized the perishable nature of the will to live together when the will to live together breaks down and we are faced with defeat, in times of war of course, but also in any type of battle. Can we drop the fight against global warming and the other battles to be fought in the Anthropocene? (Schellnhuber in Journal Ecologist, 3/01/2019). According to Ricoeur, if Hans Jonas’s view provokes a “revolution in the concept of responsibility”, it is first of all because the object of responsibility is in fact perishable. To be responsible is not to suppress what is perishable, but rather to consider that the living, which is intrinsically vulnerable, is in our care. At the same time, there is in each of us the presence of a desire for power and a dream of omnipotence. The analysis of such responsibility in Soi-même comme un autre (Oneself as Another) follows the reflection on wisdom on both a political and a moral level, both of which are affected by conflicts. Ricoeur points out that in Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, what is human is called “the marvel”, but also “the terrible” as seen in the “evil infinity” of the power of technoscience. In other words, we must not give in to the “technical imperative”, since the capacity to do is not the only measure of ethics. Let us take care to make a distinction between science and technology, even if at times they can be confused in the term technoscience. Doesn’t science have its own purpose in the need for knowledge, for the search for truth, for knowledge independent of technical applications? At the same time, it would be a delusion to think that there is an innocence of science because “it is one of the quite positive contributions of Habermas and the Frankfurt School to have shown that knowledge is linked to power” (Ricoeur [1981], 2017). The role of the educator, according to Ricoeur, is therefore, in the first place, to reintroduce conflict and to exercise a critical spirit towards both technicism and positivism. The revolutionary ideas of Jonas also elevate responsibility to the rank of a new principle: “Act in such a way . . .”. Whether the imperative becomes part ofthe reciprocity of an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ or in the conscience of the subject (one’s relationship to the self), responsibility here is a promise and a commitment. As a political educator, Ricoeur does not want to fall into “the deadly illusion of a disengaged, disincarnated conception of the intellectual” (Ricoeur [1965], 1991). The imperative is extended to nature and life as a whole, and not only to human beings, for all living things are fragile and perishable. Faced with this awareness, today we can see thousands of young people in the forefront of the media, such as the young Swedish high school student, Greta Thunberg, an icon of this fight since her speech at the COP24. They are calling for faster action and more radical measures, brandishing slogans such as “Save our earth” or “Be part of the solution”, thus demonstrating a

Ricoeur puts it this way in Soi-même comme un autre (Ricoeur, 1990): “act in such a way” that “a future humanity still exists after us, in the environment of a habitable earth”, “taking into account the long-range consequences of the decisions of public authorities and also of citizens in the age of technology”.

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new form of citizenship towards the planet. Among the tasks of the educator is the need to “prepare people for this responsibility of collective decision” (Ricoeur, ibid.), which takes on a wider significance in the face of the challenges of the Anthropocene. The key to Jonas’s thought is actually contained in nature: life evaluates itself as good. This is expressed in a will to live or a will to survive that is found in all realms of life, through competition and also cooperation. On this last point, recent discoveries concerning biodiversity within organisms have profoundly affected our biological knowledge, including that of human beings (Sélosse, 2017). Thus, from biology emerges a scientific paradigm based on the absolute unity of the living in which the human being is one of the elements of the ecosystem. Such a paradigm invites us to rethink everything, economy, politics, etc. but also fundamentally education where the experience and fostering of a living-together-with-nature would be good for human beings and the learning that they need. Ricoeur foresees the generation of “long-term and far-reaching nuisances, in space and time, and also of an exponential destructive degree” (Ricoeur [1993], 2017), which has two major effects. First, not only does human responsibility extend to the heavens and all the earth to keep it habitable but it is also called upon to createnew institutions at the international level. Second, an essential relationship between responsibility and temporality unfolds in three directions: firstly in the direction of the past which we accept as ours, with the idea of debt or inheritance; then it is angled towards the future, towards accepting the consequence of one’s acts in the legal and moral sense, and Hans Jonas gives this meaning a breadth hitherto never explored since the scope of the action extends to infinity; and then it is a relationship of the present because it is here and now that what is possible or impossible, what is permitted or forbidden, our guilt or our innocence is played out. Whereas geologists usually deal with phenomena that last millions or even billions of years, the Anthropocene requires them to think about this era on the scale of a few centuries or even less, given the urgency and pressure of climate change. Another inherently contradictory phenomenon of our late modernity is the logic of growth and acceleration that breaks up our relationship to the world (Rosa, 2019) and empties the ‘here and now’ of its substance. While the dazzling technological advances give us the impression of being free of time, we keep running after it. What happens to the space and time of education in the Anthropocene? The work of Edgar Morin shows very well the stakes of an increasingly complex society (Ricœur [1991], 2017) and the need to teach the complexity of the human condition which is “a black hole in our educational systems” (Morin, World Congress for Complex Thinking at Unesco, 2016). From there, is it possible to explorer-examine the question asked by Erle C. Ellis (2018), “Who is responsible for the Anthropocene?” What is at stake in this question, according to the professor of geography and environmental systems, is much more than a new period of geological time. Indeed, law professor Jedehiah Purdy (After Nature: A politics for the Anthropocene, 2015) judges that people will only be able to take responsibility when this era is appropriately named. Carbocene (age of fossil fuels)? Capitolocene? Anglocene (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2013) in

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reference to British and then American domination (Arendt suggests ‘Yankism’ in her analysis of modernity)? Chthulucene, a term introduced by the philosopher of science Donna Haraway who wants to invent new ‘deanthropocentric’ narratives and invite us to meet other forms of life (plants, fungi, bacteria...), so many ‘comrade’ species of the human being who is seen in terms of the biological concept of sympoiesis, ‘doing-with’. If the term Anthropocene is chosen to name this geological epoch, for Bruno Latour the prefix anthropos can only refer to a critical and renewed approach to what the human being is, because who is “the anthropos of the Anthropocene? It is Babel after the fall of the giant Tower”. The fall of Babel in the Anthropocene would represent the failure of “Moderns who have little chance of surviving the Anthropocene any more than a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle” (In Hache, 2014). Under these conditions,, for Latour a new vision of science must take place on the basis of what climatology terms an ‘epistemic culture’ and ‘structure of knowledge’. In all this, the anthropos becomes an element that is hypersensitive to any signal or influence received from its receptors in sufficient numbers to feel the interactions and act in a thousand and one diverse ways that are constantly being rewoven with all the other actors “in space and on this Earth”, (ibid.). “I am waiting for the Renaissance” states Ricoeur ([1988], 2017). For all that, he sees nothing outdated in the philosophy of the past remaining open to unexpected rebirths from the new objects that science still has to explore and the phenomena that puzzle the researcher. The political educator sees “islands of rationality” but no longer has “the means to situate them in a great archipelago of unique and all-embracing meanings” (ibid.), which protects him or her from rebuilding a Tower of Babel. Language is not primarily a tool for communication or knowledge, but a fantastic revelation of the hidden side of things and the buried aspects of our deep experience. Poetic language makes us see aspects of a habitable world that seem to be obscured by the everyday world or the handiness of things (Ricoeur [1994], 2017). The revolution in the concept of responsibility is not, therefore, limited to repositioning the human being as one of the pieces among others of a complex ecosystem in nature: it is rather that it questions the special nature of the human being. At the very least, awareness of the Anthropocene strengthens our understanding of the phenomenon of anthropologisation. The challenge is to understand the anthropos and “the most difficult problem of philosophical anthropology: what characterizes man in nature?” (Ricoeur [1981], 2017).

2 From the Responsible Subject to the Political Subject: An Anthropology of the Capable ‘Anthropos’ Is the ‘Anthropos’ capable of learning and assuming responsibility for the challenges posed by the present situation of humanity’s future on the planet? For Ricoeur, a phenomenology of the capable subject begins with a question such as “what does it

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mean to be alive in the world, acting, suffering, speaking?” (Ricoeur [1988], 2017). In the preface he wrote for the French version, of Arendt’s The Human Condition: La Condition de l’homme moderne (1961a), he began by analysing the change of register that Hannah Arendt operates in relation to her previous masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism. For her, totalitarianism is based on the central assumption that everything is possible; this assumption led to the systematic fabrication of corpses that was the Shoah. The idea of progress promised by “the Enlightenment” has fallen apart, leaving us living in the ruins of hope: evil is like a sting in the flesh for a philosophy of freedom and hope. When evoking the survivors of the horror, Ricoeur (2007) in his last unfinished work, remembers the words of Malraux in the frontispiece of the book L’Écriture ou la Vie by Jorge Semprun: “I am looking for the crucial region of the soul where absolute Evil is opposed to brotherhood”. Fragile and at the same time strong from his own experiences, in The Human Condition Ricoeur sees a work of resistance and reconstruction of political space. The original meaning of the active life is that of a life devoted to public-political affairs (Aristotle’s bios politikos), in other words, of a civic life and a habitable world confronted with their ephemeral nature. However, working life has become exclusively a monotonous alternation of work, production and consumption, of which the individual has become a slave. In The Human Condition what Arendt condemns about individualism resonates with what Camus, whom she held in high esteem as an intellectual, wrote about Malraux’s Human Condition, a few years earlier: “a proud world, I mean of Europeans. Its men are intoxicated with the Western poison of belief in the individual”.2 It remains to be seen to what extent The Human Condition is a critique of modernity or of what modernity is Hannah Arendt’s work a critique? In any case, Ricoeur chooses to “avoid the most polemical controversies that they would not fail to arouse if one were to look for a description of modernity”. The debate would be worth engaging in, especially since it resurfaces in a way when the Anthropocene is seen as a clearly detectable benchmark for escaping the notions of the ‘Modern’ and ‘modernity’ (Latour, in Hache, 2014). It is therefore from an anthropological philosophy that Ricoeur understands the temporal features of the active life which are, for human beings, different ways of fighting against the ephemeral nature of their existence: working (the animal laborans) to satisfy their biological needs for as long as their life lasts; working (the homo faber) and receiving the dignity of creating a work, of inventing artefacts which will have permanence in time; acting in a plural world where “who” is revealed through the narrative of action: “the revelation of the agent in speech and in action [...]. All these terms are interwoven: public domain, space of appearance, web of human relations, revelation of the ‘who’. Taken together, they constitute political life” (Ricoeur, in Arendt, 1961a). Every project of being-in-the-world contains a constantly present and always imminent limit, that of death. “One ends up dying one day, but for the moment we

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Albert Camus in his Correspondence with André Malraux quoted by Guy Samama in Présence d’Albert Camus, Revue published by the Société des Études Camusiennes, n°10 – 2018.

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remain safe”. Nevertheless the fact that we die unequivocally reveals that our being is moving towards death, Heidegger underlines. However, without denying this, Arendt develops a philosophy of birth, stating that each newcomer possesses the faculty of undertaking something new, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and thus of new birth, is inherent in all human activities. (Arendt, 1961a, b). The power to ‘save the world’ alongside others is contained in a promise of newness and action addressed to each human being, a humanized world in which he or she is born and dies. But life is full of events which in the end can be told in a narrative.This combines the sense of history in weaving together the spaces between their coming (what happened in the fragility of human affairs) and the time of their passage in days and nights (ibid.). Mutual recognition of the great variety of actors and their personal capacities is therefore the key to a space for living together for which political education prepares us. This is the anthropological and ethical perspective we find in Soi-même comme un autre (1990). This identifies four verbs in addition to the verb pouvoir (to be able to) which are intertwined in the political subject: to speak, to act, to recount, to be responsible. In the words of Ricoeur “Who speaks? Who acts? Who recounts? Who is responsible? Who is the political subject? This is how I got the idea that only those who can ask the question ‘who’ in all the other fields can be subject-citizens” (Ricoeur, 1995), whatever the good or bad aspects of history may be. Ricoeur notes that if the act of ‘recounting’ is so close to the heart of experience, it is undoubtedly because by recounting ourselves, we give ourselves an identity and structure time to make it a work of permanent creation. Human beings have the capacity to create and recreate, from beginning to beginning, but without losing the thread of meaning in the alliance of activity and speech. Being able to give an account of one’s successes and failures is a constituent element of the responsible subject who is exposed to debt or blame as much as to reward or merit in the eyes of the law. In this intention of educating the faculties of the subject, an awakening to practical wisdom is the art of reconciling the search for the good life while observing norms and the law, in complex situations of uncertainty, conflict or risk “mixed with an indefinite number of interventions that make sense at the level of institutional systems, such as ecological, bureaucratic, financial, etc.” (Ricoeur, 1995). However, there is not only fragility in human affairs, but there are also weaknesses inherent in the remedies themselves, weaknesses that “can be summed up in two words: irreversibility and unpredictability [...] The only answer to irreversibility is the power to forgive, to unpredictability, the power to promise” (Ricoeur in Arendt, 1961a). For Hannah Arendt, accepting to forgive and to be forgiven, to make promises and to keep them, fundamentally nourishes politics, in other words the will to live together in the plurality of speech and action. Ricoeur recognizes in Hannah Arendt the capacity she had to cite forgiveness as being a political concept. Both philosophers have shown that forgiveness is constitutive of the life of the city, in ancient Rome for example, but also, on the fringes of the political and the poetic, because after the time for the unforgivable, there is a time for forgiveness (Willy Brandt in Auschwitz, Anwar Sadat, etc.) which requires patience and which only

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love can offer. These stories must be taught. The capacity of a responsible subject in the Anthropocene also lies, through forgiveness, in the capacity to exchange national or ethnic memories wounded by Promethean modernity. It is a question of exercising the will not to forget while freeing memory from its burden of guilt. How can school learn to exercise such capacities? “The importance of the Anthropocene lies in its role as a new lens through which age-old philosophical narratives and questions are revisited and rewritten” (Ellis, 2018). It turns out that human societies have always used stories to explain their origins and relationships to the world, using a wide variety of actors, from animals and plants to the most divine beings and spirits. This narrative process is ubiquitous, from Greek mythology or biblical creation stories to the most recent controversies around the Anthropocene. To what extent is the new pro-climate generation that is rising up around the world also that of a youth lulled by the stories of Harry Potter, Divergent or Hunger Games? “In post- or pre-apocalyptic universes, where adults have failed or are corrupt and vile, only children have the necessary solutions, keys and courage” (Quentin Girard, Libération 11/04/2019). For Günter Pauli3, an industrialist who writes fables written in Chinese, English or French, on mineral paper, the complexity of systems thinking must grow, over time, in the child’s long-term memory and must be combined with an emotional richness in learning, which is achieved through the magic and charm of stories. To what extent can the philosophical anthropology of the human being capable of becoming truly human enlighten the vision that we can have of the desire of the learner and the mission of the educator? With Ricoeur, we perceive subjects who can deploy their potentialities and become increasingly aware of the plural capacities that make the human truly human, a being capable, acting but also suffering: he thus underlines the fragility of the human condition. In other words, education has to do with the capacity to make us “examine how magnificent it is to be human” (Ricoeur, 2000) in the weaving of action and word in the learning relationship. The starting point is perhaps to be found in the expression of a capacity for initiative on the part of the subject who, in the face of the other, as in all births, in a mysterious and committed way, replies ‘Here I am’! Ricoeur acknowledges his debt to Levinas, who also analyses such a response on the basis of his philosophy of responsibility. But in Levinas, it is always the Other, not just any interlocutor but the teacher, the master of justice or any paradigmatic figure who calls me as from Sinai to say ‘Thou shalt not kill’, who takes the initiative ‘in the accusative’ and enjoins the ‘me’ being absolutely passive “to respond again in

3 Günter Pauli, Günter’s Fables, blu editions, 2015. blu editions uses exclusively mineral paper in an effort to respect the environment and promote the principles of the Blue Economy. Mineral paper is made from construction waste and does not use trees, fibres or bleaching agents in the production process. It is an ecological and reusable paper. Several innovations and initiatives of industrialists combining technological and ecological progress are emerging for quality education, such as the partnership in Africa between Fondacio and the company Armor for the distribution of solar kits based on organic and flexible photovoltaic film for the school work of children in non-electrified areas (particularly in the lake city of Benin).

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the accusative: ‘This is me’! (Ricœur, 1990) Ricoeur, however, perceives the capacity to speak and to act as being latent in subjectivity and, at the call of the other, the awakening of a responsible response (where the accusative and the nominative are both present ‘Here I position myself’) based on a capacity to welcome, to discriminate and to recognise the voice of the Other. A responsible response is born of a dialogue between persons who take on the roles of ‘I’ and ‘you’ (ibid.). It is part of the ethical aim of seeking the good life, with and for others, in just institutions. For Ricoeur, this is a key to happiness that is not incompatible with suffering. “By happiness, I mean the ability to find meaning, satisfaction in self-fulfilment”, knowing that “we always need someone to contribute to the realization of our capacities” (Ricoeur [1994], 2017), in the prime of life as well as in situations of the most extreme deprivation and right up to the doors of death. Behind the phenomenology of the capable man, there is a free subject capable, even in great fragility, of giving himself up to the possibility of not being able to do anything more. Thus in the extreme, the stripping away of all capacity returns the question ‘who am I?’ to its ‘nakedness’ (Ricoeur [1988], 2013). The ‘I’ is unable to stand alone without the other, the other who counts on me and returns me to my responsibility, to existence itself. It can be said here that education for responsibility in the Anthropocene in the light of Paul Ricoeur draws fundamentally on the new humanism that he never ceased to bring to light, a humanism later recognised as his life’s work by the Kluge Prize of the United States Library of Congress. From one of his earliest writings at the end of World War 2 when he addressed the Federation of Christian Student Associations in 1946, to one of his last texts “Personal Capabilities and Mutual Recognition”, he dedicates himself to “examining the foundations of humanism” (Ricoeur [2004], 2013). But how is humanist thinking that puts human interests first compatible with ecological thinking that humanism seems to have forgotten for so long? For the philosopher, the human being is an agent in the sense of an anthropology of the capable subject: he or she is therefore not just any agent within the Earth system. From this point of view, we can affirm, in the light of Paul Ricoeur, that there is a humanism of the Anthropocene to be invented: to be responsible for it is to give in neither to the siren song of a naturalist ideology nor to that of an anthropocentric humanism of a human being who despoils nature. How can we understand and maintain this balance between the human being’s belonging to nature and the exceptional nature of the human being in relation to it? Regarding the humanist project, Ricoeur sees Heidegger’s greatness in his philosophical anthropology (Ricoeur [Nov.1988], 2017) and his critique of humanism when man “takes himself as the centre of a great spectacle he organizes, and also of an inert site of things to be manipulated” (Ricoeur [1993], 2017). On the other hand, Ricoeur criticizes Heidegger for cutting himself off from human sciences and thus his philosophy is no longer in the world, a world from which he borrowed concepts from Heidegger: “What is a world? It is something that can be inhabited; that can be hospitable, strange, hostile...” (Ricoeur, 1995).

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Moreover, Ricoeur condemns the amalgam of science and technology as we saw in the previous analysis of technoscience, “as if it were technology that devoured science” (Ricoeur [1994], 2017). Of course, modern technology, by using the exact sciences, represents a danger if we start to think that we can master it as an instrument that reveals the whole truth and nothing but the truth, that technology delivers to us, in a way, the original truth in the measures of ‘committing’. Heidegger understands science to be the theory of reality. Then technology and science, by their very essence, work with each other, questioning each other, for questioning being the ‘piety of thought’. Such a philosophy can be echoed here with what constitutes for Ricoeur a fundamental fact of humanism from a pedagogical angle4: the capacity to question, and along with that, to know and to think. To question is our privilege and our misfortune, as we have seen previously with Sophocles’ Ode on Man, and ‘also in the Bible, in Ecclesiastes’ (Ricoeur [1993], 2017). Time, too, is posed as a question, because the human being is the only one who thinks and thinks what is eternal, but it is as a mortal that he thinks it. (Ricoeur in Arendt 1961a). Certainly, anthropos belongs to nature and must be put back into the ecosystem, and at the same time, anthropos is just one part of nature, unique in its kind. In Ricœurian philosophy, human beings explores their own sacredness in resonance with that of the world5 but, with regard to nature, there is no personification, nor rendering the Earth divine as a goddess such as Gaia, which caused Michel Serres to take offence at not being invited to the COP 15 summit in Copenhagen in 2009. Ricoeur’s humanist line thus extends to nature, but for him, the exceptionality of anthropos means that the notion of rights cannot be extended outside the human sphere (Ricoeur [1993], 2017). From then on, the ecological question is a fundamental issue of politics, undoubtedly a priority, but it does not embrace the entire political field. For Ricoeur, living together in harmony with nature is an ecological issue, but it is even more of a political one, as is highlighted in several of these articles, notably the one on the ‘tasks of the political educator’ (Ricoeur [1965], 1991).

4

In his Letter on Humanism (1946), Heidegger recalls the link between pedagogy and humanism, which “consists in this: to reflect on and ensure that man is human and not in-human, ‘barbaric’, i.e., outside his essence. Now, in what does the humanitý of man consist? It lies in his essence”; “it is in Rome that humanism first appeared. Homo humanus is “the Roman who elevates and ennobles the Roman virtus by the ‘incorporation’ of what the Greeks had undertaken under the name of ‘παιδεία’ [paideia]. The Greeks here are those of late Hellenism whose culture is taught in the philosophical schools. [...] The “παιδεία” thus understood is translated as “humanitas”. 5 “I express myself by expressing the world; I explore my own sacrednesś by deciphering that of the world” (Ricoeur, Philosophie de la volonté: Finitude et culpabilité, 2009) cited by Pope Francis (2015), Laudato Si′ - Encyclical Letter on Safeguarding the Common Home, Chap. IV “The Message of Every Creature in the Harmony of All Creation”.

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3 Educating for Democracy in the Complexity of Life Philosophical anthropology has made it possible to think of the political subject on the basis of a typology of basic powers – to say, to act, to recount, to be accountable and to promise. The emphasis shifts to a moral pole based on the ethics of esteem – self-esteem, esteem for the other, esteem for each other with the help of just institutions. It then extends to politics as a power edifice that allows for the life, duration and stability of a just space which recognises abilities (the anthropological dimension) and esteem (the moral dimension). Power in relation to all these human capacities results from this will-to-live-together and it “exists only as long as the latter is effective, as is proved in a negative way by the terrifying experiences of defeat, where the bonds unravel (Ricoeur, 2019). Before Hannah Arendt, power was often studied from a political point of view only as a relationship of domination and force exerted by the Promethean being over his fellow human beings or over nature. In fact, the myth of Prometheus plays a key role in the narratives that tell the origin of the Anthropocene (Ellis, 2018). In reading Plato’s Protagoras, Arendt sees that humans endowed by Prometheus with the knowledge and skills necessary for life use, instead, their powers for the destruction of the living, through the excess of production and consumption. Prometheus had intervened to provide humans with the tools necessary for their lives, but faced with the difficulties they have in living together, Zeus sends Hermes to ensure that everyone has their share of justice and that principles of order and bonds of friendship can unite the cities. Such a virtue is the fruit of a teaching, a unique whole, of the order of a science that includes different parts – justice, wisdom, conformity to the divine law and also courage, which involves knowledge of dangers. Unlike Plato in The Republic, where a philosopher-king, by nature, would ensure the government of the city and be obeyed, Protagoras wants to teach everyone the art of making decisions in private and public affairs: this is the political art of which everyone is capable, and that is why Protagoras is committed to forming good citizens. It is in this line that Hannah Arendt conceives of power as arising from living together, for which the citizen must be educated. It is a fragile power that can quickly be structured by a relationship of domination that can, at any moment, cover it up again if we are not careful (Ricoeur [Oct. 1988], 2017), especially in a democracy. The essence of the democratic question is played out in the right combination between the vertical institutional relationship that supports duty or mandate (the relationship of government) and the horizontal relationship of conviviality and reciprocity. Borrowing from Eric Weil the definition of the state as “a historical community that is capable of making decisions”, Ricoeur also repeatedly reflects on the paradox of politics “in the conflict between form and force in the establishment of political power” (Ricoeur, 2019). The rational side of force gives the state the features of a state of law with “above all, education of all in the freedom of public discussion (ibid.). On the other hand, the potentially irrational side of force as a decision of a person or a few people who, as the repository of the people’s

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sovereignty, can exercise power in an arbitrary manner or with ‘legitimate violence’ (Max Weber). But politics never exists only through its institutions, even if they are necessary, but through the will of the citizens who are all responsible and guardians of a living together, exercising their sovereignty. This presupposes that they act in such a way that power remains under their supervision, while remaining aware of the fact that it is not exercised in an illegitimate manner over their heads, or even against them. For this, Montesquieu’s liberal thinking (Ricoeur [1991], 2017) is useful to teach because “it is an eternal experience that every man who has power is inclined to abuse it; it continues until it finds limits”, it is necessary that things are organised in such a way that”“ power stops power”.6 Other views favour the role of cooperation, as indicated by Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens and Gauthier Chapelle (2018). For them, the solutions to the Anthropocene crisis will not come from governments or multinationals who cannot radically change things, radical in the sense of taking the problem at its roots. Will they come more easily from schools? For Hannah Arendt, power precedes domination. Power is found in the roots of living together, and “it is a matter of recovering the layer of power that is buried, as it were forgotten, which we only catch up with through a mythologization of events” (Ricoeur [1988], 2017). Whether we reject this heritage or not, the human being is always an heir: the educator is a passer-by. Paul Ricoeur likes to speak of us being the heirs of the past: living as heirs and builders is worth teaching. It is upon his “what comes from the past, can expect to last”, that the authority of all teaching is based, on condition that it does not lock up knowledge as knowledge for its own sake, but on the contrary opens up the freedom to do something, to create. This is what an important insight for education today in the Anthropocene, where the challenges posed to humans are such that they seem to demand of them something totally new in our living together with nature. By being at the interface between society and state, schools should prepare pupils to take part in wider discussions, by teaching them to grasp and process information and by initiating discussion, because “democracy is the political regime that is based on a public discussion in which the greatest possible number of citizens participate” (Ricoeur, [1991], 2017). The pluralism of democracies, especially Western democracies which are based on the interweaving of several heterogeneous heritages such as Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, humanis from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, is “an interweaving of conflicting or consensual ethical behaviours” (Ricoeur [1995], 2017). Learning ethics of responsibility also requires a good understanding of the tension between the morality of conviction (the construction and reason of meaning) and the morality of responsibility (efficiency and reason of means), the conflicting dimensions of which can be seen in ecological changes on a national as well as cosmopolitical level. The art of compromise is an art that requires practice and education: it is fundamental because it prevents society from falling apart under the blows of rivalries between different commercial goods andt also non-commercial goods because not everything can be bought (education, citizenship, a habitable

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Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, XI, 4.

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earth, etc.). We therefore need to invent a civilization of compromise, because we live in an increasingly complex world, where plurality and the Other are to be found in every sphere (Ricoeur [1991], 2017). Finally, there is the risk not only of the philosopher-king but also of the technician-king. In the preface to the Condition de l’homme moderne, the connection between fragility and politics as “the supreme expression of free action”, highlighted by the revolution in the concept of responsibility, allows us “to condemn all attempts to dilute politics into an engineering activity” (Ricoeur in Arendt, 1961a). No one has a single answer, and this is all the more true in the choices of global issues where “experts know no more than any of us” (Ricoeur [1991], 2017). For Ricoeur, the task of a political educator is “to constantly bring back into public discussion what is now, in an abusive of power, the monopoly of specialists” (ibid.). Experts should not be primarily advisors to princes, but rather to the public. All forms of expertise, including, of course, that available to the teacher, must be made available in the open discussion to help and teach people to think for themselves. Arendt asserts that thinking, in its non-cognitive, non-specialized sense, as a natural need of human life, is not the prerogative of the few but a faculty present in everyone. The inability to think is not the prerogative of the unintelligent, but something that threatens everyone - scientists, academics and those who specialise in the psyche. It prevents the principle of agreement with oneself, the importance of which was discovered by Socrates (Arendt, 1961a, b). As Ricoeur, in close agreement with the ideas of Hannah Arendt, points out, democracy appears in the reestablishment of the forum. It is currently being expressed in a variety of ways, notably through the Forum Mondial Convergences organised in different capitals around the world. This French forum, initiated in France, aims to facilitate alliances between different actors (companies, NGOs, states) to aim for “zero exclusion, zero carbon, zero poverty”, based on the UN’s sustainable development goals. This forum focuses on the training of thousands of professionals to help them understand the social and environmental challenges of each country. It also encourages young people to take action by supporting groups such as Youth We Can. The systemic and integral nature of thinking about the future of the planet also influences the way environmental governance is thought about on a global platform such as Future Earth where scientists, policy makers and business leaders work together (Ellis, 2018). Responsibility and fragility go hand in hand, as Ricoeur said, in the face of the very nature and novelty of unprecedented situations. In the present time of the Anthropocene, the future of humanity is at stake because it is confronted with great dangers. Arendt stated that if we measure all objects in terms of their usefulness to humanity, the world relationship with humanity is utilitarian, rather than speaking, acting and thinking human beings. This makes it possible to argue the merits of a philosophical anthropology, the very central idea of human being who acts and suffers, a being capable of speech, action and promises, a subject that discerns the capacity of human beings to be themselves and living-together as the environment in which human capacities can be fully realised. These are the components of human responsibility that can inspire an educational project in the Anthropocene.

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In fact, Ricoeur’s contribution can be extended in the direction of a philosophy of education, with ethical and political stakes in a world open to multiple forms of life that are in their different ways respectful of the human being and of nature, but are always interconnected. The philosopher’s thinking is always evolving, in action, notably as a teacher with their students, and words occupy a central place. To the question “What do I do when I teach?”, Professor Ricoeur answers very simply: “I speak” (“La parole est mon Royaume” in Esprit, 1955), words being understood in three practices - rhetoric, hermeneutics, poetics (Fabre in Kerlan & Simard, 2011). In other words, learning to argue, to interpret but also, like the poet, to “compose a creative imitation of action taken in all its political dimension” (Ricœur in Arendt, 1961a).

References Works of Paul Ricoeur Bonneuil, C., & Fressoz, J.-B. (2013). L’ événement Anthropocène. Seuil. Ricœur, P. (1990). Soi-même comme un autre. Seuil. Ricœur, P. (1991). Lectures, t.1 – Autour du politique. Seuil. Ricœur, P. (1995). La critique et la conviction. Hachette. Ricœur, P. (2000). La Mémoire, l’Histoire, l’Oubli. Seuil. Ricœur, P. (2007). Vivant jusqu’à la mort. Seuil. Ricoeur, P. (2013). Anthropologie philosophique. Seuil. Ricœur, P. (2017). Philosophie, éthique et politique. Seuil. Ricœur, P. (2019). Politique, économie et société. Seuil. Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance. A sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Polity press.

Other Works Arendt, H. (preface by P. Ricoeur). (1961a). La Condition de l’homme moderne. Calmann-Lévy. Arendt, H. (1961b). Between past and future. Viking Press. Ellis, E. C. (2018). Anthropocene – A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Hache, E. (Ed.). (2014). De l’univers clos au monde infini. Éditions Dehors. Heidegger, M. (1927). Sein und Zeit. Niemeyer. Kerlan, A., & Simard, D. (Eds.). (2011). Paul Ricœur et la question éducative. Presses de l’Université de Laval. Sélosse, M.-A. (2017). Jamais seul. Ces microbes qui construisent les plantes, les animaux et les civilisations. Actes Sud. Servigne, P., Stevens, R., & Chapelle, G. (2018). Une autre fin du monde est possible. Seuil.

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François Prouteau holds a postgraduate degree in engineering awarded by the French Grandes Ecoles Institut Mines-Télécom Atlantique. He is Doctor of Educational Sciences. He is teacher and associated researcher at the Catholic University of the West (UCO). He is the author of scientific articles and books on education, and anthropology in the Anthropocene. Books (selection): Former...oui, mais dans quel sens? (Harmattan, 2006, in French); Éduquer l’homme augmenté Vers un avenir postprométhéen (with Nathanaël Wallenhorst and Dominique Coatanéa, 2018, in French); Odyssée pour une Terre habitable (Le Pommier/Humensis, 2021, in French). Developing an educational philosophy in the Anthropocene – Courage at the Crossroads (Springer, 2023, in English).

Environmental Issues in the Mirror of the Anthropocene Event: Political Trend and Educational Heterotopia Melki Slimani, Angela Barthes, and Jean-Marc Lange

Abstract We use the Philosophy of the Event to conceptualize the political element in the virtual/real dialectic of the event of the Anthropocene. With reference to bio-geo-chemical, cultural and scientific fields, we bring the Anthropocene event into the educational domain in the form of political learning. These become the pedagogical and didactic anchor of an educational heterotopia: political education in the Anthropocene, the content of which is being constantly updated by scientific education and ‘education for’. Keywords Anthropocene · Environmental issues · Political trend · Educational heterotopia

1 Introduction: The Philosophical Approach to ‘the Event’ The notion of event is conceptualized in the English speaking philosophical tradition of critical realism and the French poststructuralist tradition. Critical realism, as a meta-theory, assumes that behind any natural or social event there are always generating mechanisms associated with powers. The latter operate in the different strata of reality: physical and material, psychological and social (Danermark et al., 2005). Event-generating mechanisms, according to critical realism, form a kind of potential that can be activated or not. Main contributors to the Philosophy of the Event in the French-speaking tradition are M. Foucault, G. Deleuze and F. Guattari (Dosse, 2007). Foucault proposes the M. Slimani (✉) ISEAH of Sbeïtla, University of Kairouan, Sbeïtla, Tunisia e-mail: [email protected] A. Barthes University of Aix Marseille, Aix, France e-mail: [email protected] J.-M. Lange Faculty of Education, University of Montpellier, Montpellier, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_7

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term ‘évènementialisation’ (‘eventisation’) as “a being aware of the breaks of evidence induced by certain facts” (Revel, 2002). This marks a contrast between his philosophical work on the event and that of historians. S. Gallo points out a second contribution of Foucault in the way he conceptualises the space of the event, the heterotopia, which he differentiates from a utopia which in spatial terms is an unreal location. A heterotopia is a real space that is not actually here. Foucault uses the metaphor of the mirror to elucidate “The mirror functions as a heterotopia in that it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the mirror both absolutely real, in connection with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived, it has to pass through that virtual point that is over there” (quoted in Gallo, 2015, 93). Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy conceives the event as an intensity, an excess or a potential (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991). The event is defined as a point of inflection, a node or a focus where the two dimensions of time coexist: the past and the future. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1980), an event has two temporal modes. First, there is its actual execution or actualization. But there is also a part that cannot be executed that spills into indefinite time (Zourabichvili, 1998) because “In historical phenomena [...] there is always a part of event, irreducible to social determinism, to causal connections” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972) in such a way that “the future continues to anticipate itself in the present” (Zourabichvili, 1998). The spatio-temporal execution of an event (Zourabichvili, 2003), does not exhaust virtual elements - an event is therefore a reality composed of actual and virtual elements according to the ontology of Deleuze. In a reading of Foucault’s philosophy, Deleuze takes up the concept of heterotopia and its mirror analogy in terms of a dialectic between the Outside and the Inside, in which “an Outside, more distant than any exterior, ‘twists’, ‘bends’, ‘splits’, from an Inside, deeper than any interior, and alone makes possible the relationship between the inside and the outside” (Deleuze, 2004, 12). These philosophical traditions provide us with conceptual tools of potential, ‘eventisation’, virtuality, actualization and heterotopia for a reinterpretation of the Event of the Anthropocene integrating the question of a political education via environmental issues.

2 The Anthropocene: Beyond the Bio-geo-chemical Environmental Event The term Anthropocene was initially proposed by P. Crutzen and E. Stoermer in the light of a new variable, that of human activity, in determining the long-term functional pathway of Earth systems (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). Thus, in the context of the geosciences, the term Anthropocene refers to a human event, having the magnitude of a major geological force, on biogeochemical cycles. As an example, human climate forcing is dependent on a generative mechanism in the form

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of a positive feedback loop (Federau, 2016) of global warming resulting from anthropogenic releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This positive feedback loop can enhance or amplify global warming by altering carbon fluxes between its different biological and geological reservoirs. This feedback activates several mechanisms that generate greenhouse gas emissions and can cause the current functioning of the climate system to shift to unstable states in the form of extreme weather events, or even climatic events, and then to new states of equilibrium. For example, they can activate the degassing mechanism of methane hydrates (which have a very high greenhouse effect), in permafrost and in the seabed. The rapid thawing of permafrost also leads to the formation of eroding soils, which, together with the resumption of decomposition of stored organic matter, contributes to the emission of carbon dioxide (van Huissteden, 2020). We believe that the reception of research in Earth Systems Science and their recontextualization in social life is an ‘eventisation’, on the impact of human activity brought about by bio-geo-chemical factors. This is why the Anthropocene is a theoretical basis for awareness campaigns that aim to change human activity in various economic sectors. Thus, in tourism, the paradigm shift gives rise to eco-tourism, which we consider to be an example of the reality of the Anthropocene event. This paradigm shift also gives rise to the need for changes in the training of professionals in this sector.

3 Plantationocene and Capitalocene: The Politico-Cultural in the Mirror of the Anthropocene Event There have been various suggestions that serve as a critical mirror of the bio-geochemical event of the Anthropocene, notably in the political and social sciences (Beau & Larrère, 2018). They have led to the development and emergence of new concepts such as Plantationocene and Capitalocene. Suggested at Aarhus University in 2014, the Plantationocene refers to the devastating transformation of various types of farms, pastures and forests that have been managed by humans and turned into extractive and closed plantations, based on slavery and other forms of exploited and alienated labour (Haraway, 2015). The Capitalocene, proposed by J.W. Moore (2016, 2017, 2018), identifies capitalism with a global ecology of power, capital and nature. We begin by looking at those approaches that identify the causes of the event as the anthropic forcing of bio-geochemical cycles, and more specifically the carbon cycle. According to G. Quenet, for the concept of the Capitalocene there are three hypotheses that form a triple critique of the Anthropocene. The first is that it is impossible to hide or escape the fundamental relationship between the global environmental approach and the nature of capitalism. The second is that fossil fuel consumption is only one of many steps in the acquisition of cheap natural resources. The third is that statistics on carbon dioxide emissions at the level of individual

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countries mask a Euro-centric approach. The concept of the Plantationocene, related to its critical component, assumes that the political downgrading of environmental changes to carbon dioxide emissions makes humanity, in its generic sense, a major actor, thus neglecting the role of other species and ignoring the local diversity of peoples and their cultures (Quenet, 2017). A re-examination of what generates anthropogenic forcing helps to clarify both of these views. The first important thing is to see the Anthropocene as being a result of political relationships and human behaviour. The second is to situate these causes in the cultural sphere. Thus, through the concept of the Capitalocene, the causes of environmental change establish a link between the history of fossil fuels and the power relations between social classes. The Plantationocene, on the other hand, points to more distant causalities in which changes begin with the cultural systems that transform plants, animals and humans into exploitable resources. The Capitalocene and the Plantationocene are mirror images of the bio-geochemical event of the Anthropocene. The latter appears to us as a heterotopia in which political relations, which are a priori outside the bio-geo-chemical stratum, are included. ‘The political’ in sociological terms is an event through which “the society that symbolically represents itself as a unity, is also divided by struggle” (Caillé & Vandenberghe, 2016). It is also defined by N. Wallenhorst “as that which allows for the accommodation of human plurality by integrating responsibility for the world and for the preparation of the future” (Wallenhorst, 2017). With regard to the Capitalocene, ‘the political’ can take the form of a struggle to revisit inequalities between countries in terms of material and energy flows, while the Plantationocene suggests a struggle against an “ecological and historical alienation” of the living and “the expression of their suffering” (Quenet, 2017). However, taking up the ‘eventiality’ of the Anthropocene (Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology of an intensity, an excess or a potential), it is indeed the integration of the political into environmental questions that makes the Anthropocene event intelligible. This integration opens it up to the space of a heterotopia of the political, which the concepts Capitalocene and Plantationocene, among others, seek to designate. D. Bourg has already noted that it is becoming impossible to raise environmental and ecological issues independently of the question of justice or even that of social inequalities (Bourg, 2020). Bourg reminds us that the issue of social justice necessarily intersects with environmental and ecological issues. He points out that this connection emerged as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the scientific, political, legal and economic world, and then through the currents of ecological thought from the end of the Second World War (Fressoz, 2012). Here we would say along with Wallenhorst, that environmental issues, studied in the various epistemological and methodological currents of environmental humanities, represent “a renewal of political theory” (Wallenhorst, 2016) that should not ignore the material and ecological conditions of democracy in the Anthropocene age.

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4 The political as a New Epistemic Dimension of Environmental Issues in the Age of the Anthropocene Environmental issues, defined through those of environmental policies, environmental ethics, agri-food production, sustainable development, environmental technologies and management, and the more general issue of transitions, are thus intrinsically political (Slimani et al., 2017). Environmental policies are affected by the issue of environmental justice because environmental changes contribute to inequalities. Therefore, the issue of climate change allows us to broaden the scope of environmental justice. Environmental justice is not limited to access to resources or to the problem of the unequal distribution of environmental costs. It involves a recognition of “plural modes of being in the environment” (Centemeri et al., 2016). Applied environmental ethics are based on the democratic foundation of “value pluralism” (Larrère, 2010). To solve an environmental moral problem there must be a hierarchy of values resulting from deliberation and public debate which will justify environmental action. This ethical orientation makes it possible to overcome the limitations of the anthropocentric approach (or instrumental value ethics), those of the biocentric approach (or ethics of intrinsic value) which condemns anthropocentrism, and is in principle de-ontological, and those of the ecocentric approach, which has an integrative approach towards the human and is consequentialist in principle, for which the value of the action is measured by its effects on the biotic community (Beau, 2019). The issues of agri-food production are not immune to the constantly dynamic economic and social forces in human societies. They can be conceived as a matter of food literacy through which one can “read the world by eating” (Wever, 2015). This literacy forms the basis for a political literacy that enables people to exercise the power to impregnate and reshape the existing food system. According to such an approach, a food appears more than “a compilation of vitamins and nutrients: it becomes a physical and social, personal and political, and inanimate but animating entity” (Freedman, 2011). Sustainable development corresponds to a heterogeneous set of trends (social ecology, eco-feminism, eco-socialism...). However, they all share the same point of view, which assumes the interconnection of environmental and social crises and the risk of collapse of social and environmental systems in the absence of radical change (Hopwood et al., 2005). Technology and management share the characteristic of including a broad sociopolitical agenda, which is that of sustainability. Justice appears as a meta-narrative framework for the analysis of organisations. This framework raises fundamental questions in organisational studies about the types of governance and control in contemporary organisations, as well as their moral and political foundations. They insist upon the centrality of questions relating to the distribution of political, economic and cultural power in these technological issues (Reed, 1996).

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Transitions are “processes of fundamental social change in response to societal challenges that reflect a particular diagnosis of social problems whose persistence is attributed to a dependence on dominant practices and structures [...]. Thus, transitions involve politics in the broadest sense of the word” (Avelino et al., 2016). The socio-institutional approach to transitions identifies institutionalized cultures, structures and practices as regimes in which transitional changes take place (Loorbach et al., 2017). Seen in the mirror of the Anthropocene, therefore, environmental issues generate political potential, and therefore a potential for political learning. This would lead us to a political education in politics as an educational heterotopia in the age of the Anthropocene. We can envisage opportunities to consider what is problematic, involving games to enable us to overcome the difficulty of saying what is true (heterotopia of statements), in a space other than the formal space of the classroom (heterotopia of environments). Therefore this perspective offers a favourable framework within which the world of education might participate in the changes that are happening with a view to enabling people, in their cultural and geopolitical diversity, to reflect upon and meet the current challenges that face our present world, due to our entry into the Anthropocene (Lange & Kebaïli, 2019).

5 Science Education and “Educations for”: actualizing Political Education in the Age of the Anthropocene Education, conceived as a process of critical emancipation, is at the heart of the political process of democratization (Dewey, 1916). It can thus be considered with regard to its formal, non-formal, and informal components (Gasse, 2017). Political education through environmental issues is therefore a possibility for emancipation, including that of ecological activism that has marked a turning point in the political life of contemporary human societies: that of the Anthropocene event. Indeed, political communities also emerge through popular movements of environmental struggles within which an informal learning of politics takes place. J. Kluttz and P. Walter (2018) comment on this learning in such events: in conversations, in situations where strategies are planned and in protests. Formal education, for its part, is an area where the ecological activism emerging in the age of the Anthropocene can be institutionalised, by targeting political learning through its contents (Slimani, 2021a, b). This learning, which is envisaged as being part of scientific education or environmental education, runs the risk of being reduced to: – ecological literacy conceived as a technology in terms of the relevance of the natural sciences for addressing societal issues, – adaptive citizenship conceived in terms of good manners, – normative deliberation conceived in terms of specified a priori viewpoints or collective action but in a minimalist regime that accepts that a juxtaposition of interventions is sufficient (Slimani, 2019).

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This is what A. Barthes (2017) calls normative drifts that oppose the aim of political citizenship. Such drifts are a result of a watering down of the political potential of environmental issues generated by the Anthropocene event. We will now take up J. Sloam’s (2010) idea of linking the three processes of learning about politics (literacy, participation and deliberation) through the learners’ lived experience. This lived experience constitutes a fourth process of learning about politics through environmental issues, integrating the three previous ones. These learning processes take place in educational areas which involve environmental issues, notably science education and especially ‘education for’. This includes education for eco-citizenship, education for uncertainty and education for sustainable development. We will also examine the conceptual links between the political potential of environmental issues and the way political learning can take place through these issues (Slimani, 2021a, b).

5.1

Critical Eco-literacy Learning

Science education has long included environmental issues in its curriculum. Issues such as biodiversity management or climate change have been the subject of learning in life sciences and earth sciences. This learning has also been the subject of research analysis in science education and more specifically in the theoretical framework of this field. The analytical work of C. Orange and D. Orange Ravachol (2017) shows for its part how the theme of climate and how it is evolving can be studied as part of the science curriculum, which itself enables learners to access scientific literacy. The aim of the research is that of building a reasoned and critical education on climate change or what M. Fabre calls emancipation through knowledge which creates a ‘habitus’ that can help to form a critical spirit in the future citizen (Charbonnier, 2017). For R. Levinson, there is a connection between democratic participation and science education. It helps learners deconstruct discourses steeped in hegemonies so that they become able to understand social conflicts which disagree over the interpretation of freedom and equality (Levinson, 2010). In fact, environmental issues have significant political potential. Literacy in environmental science involves problem-solving skills that are needed in the evaluation of environmental actions, as well as the skills required to constantly examine and re-examine cultural values. Environmental issues thus promote critical eco-literacy learning. Critical eco-literacy learning is explicitly political in nature, suggests Huckle. It enables learners to reflect and act on the dominant type of political economy, i.e. its modes of production, consumption and reproduction (Huckle, 2013). More generally, this idea of critical eco-literacy is similar to that of critical literacy, which refers to a pedagogy that aims at learning processes that embrace the socio-cultural realities of the learners and then use what has been learned to challenge these social processes. These are pedagogical tools for the

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development of “learners who have been oppressed, excluded or disadvantaged because of their gender, ethnicity or socio-economic status”1 .

5.2

Learning About Critical Democratic Citizenship

Eco-citizenship refers to the idea of a political community of eco-citizens emerging through an ecological space created by the metabolic and material relations of individuals with their environments (MacGregor, 2014). It includes environmental issues of ecological transitions based on the problem “of our living in a limited ecological space which requires the reduction of our ecological footprint” (Machin, 2012). According to Machin, it is the implicit assumption of rational consensus supporting the idea of a community of eco-citizens, which thus allows the emergence of another conception of eco-citizenship that is radically democratic. This new conception suggests that environmental issues play an important role in disagreement or dissent by offering a plurality of perspectives. These perspectives are the consequences of each human being embodied in a unique environmental situation. The ontological starting point is described by Gabrielson and Parady who envisage “bodies as porous yet resilient, plural, connected, and inescapably embedded in social and natural contexts” (cited in Machin, 2012, p. 861). Moreover, the ontological embodiment of differences is politically radicalized further by the inclusion of aesthetic experiences of poetization of the environmental question of transition, such as that proposed by D. Delorme. These experiences of environmental creativity that allow us to “pluralise the world, to be open to other perspectives, ways of feeling, thinking and acting to experience the plurality of worlds that are present within the web of the living” (Delorme, 2019, p. 545), put “the imagination in control in both ecotopian narratives and concrete ecotopias, in order to invent alternatives to the system that has already dragged us into the heart of the catastrophe” (Ibid). In this way, these ecotopias fulfil a critical function of “contesting or fighting against mortifying normative models” (Ibid). From an educational point of view, this conception of eco-citizenship, which is ontologically and aesthetically radical offers a significant potential for learning about political matters by targeting the development in learners of an attitude of critical questioning and courage, and the creativity needed to open up new avenues of reflection on social conventions and the power structures that support them (Johnson & Morris, 2010). It unlocks diverse perspectives of grounded, educational projects that allow the development of these attitudes.

1 See Unesco’s “Education for All Global Monitoring Report”, p. 160, available online at https:// unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000145595

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Deliberative Learning

With the Anthropocene event, as J-P. Pierron notes, environmental action is “confronted by the irreversible and unpredictable effects of anthropization” (Pierron, 2018). We believe that this confrontation provides what we can call a “political charge” for all questions of environmental ethics. In fact, these issues form a political potential by incorporating “the anticipation of unknown risks into ethical and political choice” (Ibid). Decision-making in situations of uncertainty, such as the management of ecological transitions, for example, calls upon the philosophy of foresight, which projects societies into their future. This philosophy, by virtue of its potential for learning about politics, forms an important part of education for uncertainty (Favre, 2016) through environmental issues. It helps with the forming of attitudes in favour of social change, democratically discussed, in situations where socio-epistemic uncertainties are discussed. Democratic discussion “can liberate individuals from narrow conceptions through intersubjective dialogues” (Machin, 2014, p. 63). Deliberative learning in the school environment is promoted especially by teaching methods that include debates, epistemological clashes or case studies, or even practical forwardlooking initiatives (Lange, 2012; Julien et al., 2014; Barthes et al., 2019). M. Håkansson, L. Östman and K. Van Poeck identified a way of teaching awareness of environmental issues, which they called conflict-oriented awareness. According to these authors, this method is characterized by its “openness to defending opposing views which are the subject of contention” (Håkansson et al., 2018). It aims to build up learners’ subjectivity in situations, giving particular importance to “strong emotional experiences” (Ibid). These situations are considered to lead to a sense of self that allows learners to be prepared for social and political life through the acquiring the ability to debate.

5.4

Learning Through Collective Action

Environmental collective action can either be formally organised or can take on a more latent form where the collective identity is weak or non-existent, i.e. not linked to something specific, such as actions for recycling household waste or saving water (Duit, 2010). Thus, in its different forms, collective environmental action seems to us to have a very important political potential that can be exploited pedagogically for political learning through environmental issues. Here, we can give an example from the work of J-M. Lange who examines the sociology of organizations to identify forms of collective environmental action at the school level. Thus, political learning can take the form of a community of learners as a method of learning about politics. In fact, it “cannot take place without the initial willingness to accept the other as a partner in the discussion and decision, but also to learn from them, whoever they are: child, adult, layman, expert, scholar, ignorant” (Lange, 2011). It can also take the

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form of a “community of practice involving a mutual commitment of all members, collective actions and the constitution of a shared repertoire of resources” (Ibid.).

6 Conclusion: The Possibility of Political Education Throughout this chapter, we have sought to reconstruct the potential of a political education through environmental issues as a heterotopia of the Anthropocene. We include the Capitalocene and the Plantationocene within the Anthropocene event, showing the integration of the political in environmental issues. Thus, potentially, the Anthropocene can generate political education. It provides a condition for political learning that can be anchored in the learning about critical eco-literacy, critical democratic ecological citizenship, environmental deliberation or environmental collective action. This learning forms the content of a political education. The critical dimension, as a framework for this learning, is important because it promotes a political education through environmental issues, which are conceived as an educational heterotopia in the Anthropocene age. N. Wallenhorst defines, on a broader scale, three objects of such an education for political thinking: the world, relating to the learning of human plurality, the biosphere, relating to the learning of anthropological finitude, and nature, relating to the learning of the integration of the natural condition (Wallenhorst, 2016). The realisation of this heterotopia has already been described by R. Levinson as science education involving environmental issues promoting democratic participation and by J. Öhman (2008) as pluralist environmental education. For J. Öhman, environmental problems themselves emerge as conflicts of interest between people or groups of people with different views on the development of society, based on different value systems. Thus, thanks to the conceptual tools of the philosophy of the event, we believe that the anchoring of political learning in the Anthropocene event via the political potential of environmental issues allows us to open up the field of a political education that preserves the anticipatory dimension of politics as an emancipating educational heterotopia. We assume that this anticipatory dimension forms the very essence of the educational process by joining the ambition launched by J.P. Pierron and N. Wallenhorst of an education, in the age of the Anthropocene, liberated “from the heaviness of management, the heaviness of engineering, the dryness of ambient cognitivism...” (Pierron & Wallenhorst, 2019, p.194).

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Slimani, M., Lange, J.-M., & Azzouna, A. (2017). Questions environnementales et de développement et transitions vers la durabilité: quels contenus éducatifs pour le développement d’une littératie politique? In D. Bédouret et al. (Eds.), Changements et transitions: enjeux pour les éducations à l’environnement et au développement durable (Conference proceedings, Toulouse, 7–9 November 2017) (pp. 183–194). Laboratoire GEODE-UMR5602CNRSUniversité de Toulouse Jean Jaurès. Slimani, M. (2021a). The political dimension in environmental education curricula: Towards an integrative conceptual and analytical framework. Environmental Education Research, 27 (3):354–365. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2021.1879023 Slimani, M. (2021b) Towards a political education through environmental issues. Wiley. Sloam, J. (2010). Youth, citizenship, and political science education: Questions for the discipline. Journal of Political Science Education, 6, 325–335. van Huissteden, J. (2020). Thawing permafrost: Permafrost carbon in a warming arctic. Springer. Wallenhorst, N. (2016). Politique et éducation en Anthropocène. Raisons politiques, 62, 151–160. Wallenhorst, N. (2017). Learning existential citizenship together. Anthropological and political issues in the Anthropocene. Bildungsforschung, 1(2017), 1–10. Wever. (2015). Cultiving critical learning: Critical food pedagogy in foodshare school program. York University. https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/items/fb85c6af-f523-40c9-96ca-b81a1 f89f3fa Zourabichvili, F. (1998). Deleuze et le possible (de l’involontarisme en politique). In E. Alliez (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze. Une vie philosophique. Le Plessis-Robinson. Zourabichvili, F. (2003). Le vocabulaire de Deleuze. Ellipses.

Melki Slimani holds a PhD in Education Sciences from the University of Montpellier and the Institut Supérieur de l’Éducation et de la Formation Continue de Tunis. His thesis research focused on a possible curriculum for political education through environmental issues. He is currently teaching curriculum didactics and educational sciences at the ISEAH of Sbeïtla, University of Kairouan, Tunisia. Angela Barthes is a university professor in educational sciences at Aix-Marseille University, France. Her research focuses on formal and non-formal education, knowledge, transitions and development of territories, and education for (sustainable development, transitions, heritage, politics, citizenship, environment, rural territories). Jean-Marc Lange is a university professor of education and training at the Faculty of Education of the University of Montpellier, France. His research focuses on the contributions of life sciences to the societal challenges of the contemporary world, the so-called Anthropocene, through “education for” and interculturality. He is a specialist in curricular issues.

Part II

Reforming Educational Culture and Institutions in the Anthropocene

From Critique to Action: Observations on a Strategy for Sustainability Christoph Wulf

Abstract Gradually, and in increasing numbers of countries, the concept of the Anthropocene has been the subject of debate in the natural sciences, as well as the social sciences and humanities. This serves to show, in most cases, the radical change that has taken place in our understanding of the relationship between nature and culture and between humans and nature. Culture has long been understood as a heritage that is passed on and developed from one generation to the next. To describe this process, the metaphor has often been used that each new generation behaves towards the past like a dwarf perched on the shoulders of a giant. This has emphasized not only continuity but also the autonomy of cultural development and freedom from nature. In ancient Greece, man was understood as part of the physis, and in the Middle Ages as part of a divine creation that encompassed everything. With modernity and industrialization, man was taken out of the divine creation. His world was no longer a world-within-a-world but a world that man had to deal with. Nature and man were separated from each other. The world became an image and an object. It is the Anthropocene that shows how problematic this separation has become. Keywords Reflection and critique · Sustainability · Utopia · Robotics · Genetics · Artificial intelligence Nature and Culture as Heritage In a way that was hitherto inconceivable, nature is so marked by man that there is hardly any nature left that he has not influenced. Nature and culture, and the reciprocal influence of the one on the other, constitute the common heritage of mankind. All heritage has its origin in the past, but it is distinguished from it above all by the significance it has for the present and the future (Resina & Wulf, 2019). Each generation must creatively shape both its natural and cultural heritage; it must understand its heritage and make it fruitful for future generations. The C. Wulf (✉) Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_8

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multitude of forms, diversity and otherness are a basic condition for the common heritage of our world. It is an educational mission to make present and future generations aware of this. We need to understand how important it is to share the heritage of this common world and how easy it is to endanger or even destroy it. The term heritage is an all-encompassing term that embraces all tangible and intangible assets handed down from the past and valued by individuals, communities or humanity as a whole. This leads to a new understanding of nature and man as well as a fundamental change in anthropology, education and training (Wulf, 2010, 2013, 2022a, b).

1 The Anthropocene as a New Worldview When we speak of the Anthropocene it is not enough to consider only the many negative effects of industrialization on the environment, including climate change, the destruction of biodiversity and biochemical cycles, ocean acidification, pollution and the destruction of non-renewable resources. To these should be added other developments that combine with the dynamic effects of the Anthropocene, for example: (1) machine worlds, (2) digital transformation including artificial intelligence and robotics, (3) genetics and biotechnology. These examples show that we need to broaden the concept of the Anthropocene and not see it merely in terms of ecological contexts. The concept of the “Anthropocene” characterizes a new global view of humans and the world that intertwines with all social and cultural domains (Wulf, 2022b; Wallenhorst, 2022; Federau, 2017). Let us try to clarify this very significant expansion of the concept. Machine Worlds Since industrialization, the Anthropocene has been determined by the discovery and diffusion of machines in all areas of life. This development has led to an unforeseen increase in the efficiency of human actions and behaviour. The relationship between humans and machines is complex. At the centre is the manmachine relationship. In this relationship, machines have long since ceased to be mere objects for humans. Rather, machines become actors in the relationship. As such, they are not only determined by human action, but they also determine human action and behaviour. With the development of robots and artificial intelligence, an intensification of the human-machine relationship has been created (2020). Digital Transformation In many cases, computers and smartphones have already crossed the line into learning machines and “weak” artificial intelligence. However, the concept of artificial intelligence is still controversial. Does it make sense to call machine learning through feedback loops intelligent, or would it be better to call it machine learning? The fact remains that this form of artificial intelligence already supports human action in many social areas. Over the next two decades, learning machines will fundamentally transform social life, the economy and the world of work. Systems based on computer data are already part of a cross-section of technology that can be used in many areas, so that it is reasonable to speak of a

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digital transformation in the Anthropocene era. There are hardly any social areas in which digital transformation and artificial intelligence have not yet had an impact. Among the most important areas at present are: verbal interaction between man and machine, sales machines, robotic lawyers, health systems, rescue operations. Genetics and Biotechnology A further characteristic of the age of man is that differentiations such as the distinction between the biosphere and the noosphere are becoming blurred, leading to hybrid mixtures. The field of genetics or genetic research is an example that shows the growing power of man over the biosphere. In this development, four markers can be identified that illustrate how incredibly fast the development is taking place here: the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953; the cloning of the first mammal, “Dolly” the sheep, in 1996; the human genome project and the deciphering of the gene pool and the discovery of CRISPR in 2015, a technique for manipulating or redirecting genes which was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2020 (Doudna & Sternberg, 2019).

2 From Reflection and Criticism to Action From these considerations, two conclusions emerge. First, the concept of the Anthropocene should not be reduced to a critique of the negative ecological effects of industrialization, which is often the case. It is necessary to extend this critique to all social and cultural areas of the Anthropocene that relate to the idea of continuous “progress” and constant human development. Secondly, reflection on the Anthropocene should not stop at critical reflection. In this case, critical reflection on the Anthropocene could share the fate of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory: we owe it important insights into what capitalist society is, but to the insights did not go beyond reflection and criticism, so the Frankfurt School led to few transformations of society (Wiggershaus, 1986; Wulf, 2003). Examples of this are Critical Theory’s insights into “critical and traditional theory”. “the dialectic of reason”, “negative dialectics”, “one-dimensional man”, “knowledge and interest”, “the connection between theory and practice”, “emancipation”, “commodification”, “society”, “criticism” and so on. This knowledge, which is very important for understanding the Anthropocene, has contributed not enough to a constructive transformation of society. This is why it is important from the outset to link the reflection and criticism of the Anthropocene with feasible proposals for transformation (Wallenhors & Wulf, 2022, 2023). The concept of sustainability or goals for sustainable development is the way to achieve these goals. The international community of states decided in 2015 at the UN General Assembly in New York on 17 goals for sustainable development. They constitute the programme aimed at a correction of the negative developments of the Anthropocene and, therefore, it should be considered from the outset as a component of the Anthropocene, the age of man. The 2030 action programme aims to save the vital foundations of human life. This agenda can be divided into five areas: people (poverty and hunger, life in

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dignity, equality, a healthy environment), planet (protection of ecosystems), peace (inclusion, peace, justice), welfare (welfare of all people through economic and technical development), and cooperation. The realization of these tasks should be based on the principles of universality, indivisibility, inclusion, accountability and partnership. Education for Sustainable Development The fourth goal of sustainable development is in the area of education. This task concerns inclusive, egalitarian, quality and lifelong education and training. It serves as a frame of reference for education in the global society. Equal access to education and equal treatment are necessary consequences. Particularly for girls and women, there is still much to be done in many parts of the world. In order to promote the knowledge and creativity of children and young people, it is necessary to improve the quality of education and training, for example by better training of teachers. Finally, it is important not to limit the requirements of education and training to schools. Vocational training and lifelong learning must be developed, and informal and non-formal education should be further promoted. Four to Six per cent of gross domestic product or 15–20 per cent of public expenditure should be devoted to education. This direction needs to be complemented by Global Citizenship Education.

3 The Sustainability Strategy 21 In order to promote the transformation of society towards the goals of sustainable development, the German government is developing the Sustainability Strategy 21 under the leadership of the Chancellery (Bundesregierung, 2020). This strategy seeks to implement a decade of action at all levels. In contrast to all previous efforts, this strategy is a comprehensive, multi-dimensional strategy that includes many of the results already achieved. Sustainable development is understood as a central task of German politics and must be fulfilled within the framework of the European Union and the community of states as a whole. To this end, the first chapter presents the following areas of transformation: • • • • • •

The energy revolution and climate protection The circular economy Sustainable construction and a turnaround in transportation Sustainable agricultural and food systems A pollution-free environment Human welfare and human capabilities, social justice.

To be effective in this regard, efforts should continue to be made at several levels: overcoming sectoral thinking, including social actors, channelling the flow of finances, promoting research, innovation and digitalisation as well as accountability and international cooperation.

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This sustainability strategy is further elaborated in the second chapter. The following are named: central institutions, structures and competencies, the basis for “sustainability governance” including sustainability principles and indicators and monitoring procedures, the programme of measures for sustainability, cooperation between the federal states and the federal government, cooperation at the municipal level and the inclusion of social actors. The aim is to create common action and interest in sustainability. The third chapter presents the German contribution to achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The German Sustainability Strategy 2021 specifies the measures Germany has to take with reference to the national action plan that was already decided in 2017 by the National Platform for Education for Sustainable Development. More than 300 representatives of the federal, state and local governments, civil society and the scientific community have jointly developed the plan, which is to be implemented in the short, medium and long term and contains 130 objectives.

4 Sustainability as a “Grand Narrative” As important as these efforts to ameliorate the threatening situation of the Anthropocene through systematic strategic action are, it is questionable whether we will actually achieve the transformations necessary to do so. Is the vision of sustainable development and education to achieve it not a “grand narrative” in the sense described by Jean-François Lyotard, a narrative whose function is to prevent us from seeing that the necessary transformations cannot be achieved (Lyotard, 1986)? Such a vision already offers a certain degree of “satisfaction”. It suggests that with the 2030 Agenda and the 2021 Sustainability Strategy, things will already have improved insofar as we now know what needs to be done and are already starting to do it. It may be that this awareness already exempts many people from acting in a truly sustainable way. It is true that the sustainability strategy is already trying to transform the “grand narrative” into a societal change and to evaluate its realization. Nevertheless, the question remains open as to how far this plan can be realized in view of the considerable social resistance it raises.

5 Sustainable Development as Utopia In order to assess the possibility of achieving the goals of sustainable development and the formation of human beings that it involves, an analysis of the great utopias of European history could perhaps enlighten us: among others Plato’s Republic (1997), Campanella’s City of the Sun (2009) and Thomas More’s Utopia (1967). In the utopias cited here, we find the focus is on the portrayal of an ideal community. They show what it would be possible to do if people were not what they are and if the

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utopia could be realized. All utopias tend to limit the diversity and contradiction inherent in human life and to favour a social order that is considered preferable. Certainly, the utopia that aims at sustainable development is more multidimensional than all historical utopias. But, one may still ask, would its realization not also lead to questionable restrictions of fundamental democratic rights? Even if such restrictions can be justified in terms of the destructive conditions of the Anthropocene that threaten the future of humanity, the question remains as to how far such restrictions are compatible with human rights? Do these attempts at reform not run the danger, as Horkheimer and Adorno discerned in their “Dialectic of Reason”, of producing the opposite of what they intend to do (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972).

References Bundesregierung. (2020). Die Deutsche Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie. Bundesregierung. Campanella, T. (2009). The city of the sun. Wilder Publications. Federau, A. (2017). Pour une philosophie de l’Anthropocène. PUF. Doudna, J. A., & Sternberg, S. H. (2019). Eingriffe in die Evolution. Die Macht der CRISPRTechnologie und die Frage, wie wir sie nutzen wollen. Springer. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (1972). The dialectic of enlightenment. Seabury Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1986). The postmodern condition. A report on knowledge. Manchester University Press. Plato. (1997). The Republic (2nd ed., D. Lee, Trans.). Penguin. Resina, J. R., & Wulf, C. (Eds.). (2019). Repetition, recurrence, returns. How cultural renewal works. Lexington Books/Roman & Littlefield. Wallenhorst, N. (2022). Qui sauvera la planète? Arles. Wallenhorst, N., & Wulf, C. (2022). Humains. Un dictionnaire d’anthropologie prospective. Vrin. Wallenhorst, N., & Wulf, C. (2023). Handbook of the Anthropocene. Springer. Wiggershaus, R. (1986). Die Frankfurter Schule. Geschichte, Theoretische Entwicklung, Politische Bedeutung. Hanser. Wulf, C. (2003). Educational science. Hermeneutics, empirical research, critical theory. Waxmann. Wulf, C. (Ed.) (2010). Der Mensch und seine Kultur. Menschliches Leben in Gegenwart, Vergangenheit und Zukunft. Köln: Anaconda (First edition: Vom Menschen: Handbuch Historische Anthropologie. Beltz 1997). Wulf, C. (2013). Anthropology. A continental perspective. University of Chicago Press. Wulf, C. (Ed.). (2016). Exploring alterity in a globalized world. Routledge. Wulf, C. (2020). Den Menschen neu denken im Anthropozän. In C. Wulf et. Zirfas, (Eds.), Den Menschen neu denken. Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, 29/2020/1, 13–35. Wulf, C. (2022a). Human beings and their images. Imagination, mimesis, performativity. Bloomsbury. Wulf, C. (2022b). Education as human knowledge in the Anthropocene. An anthropological perspective. Routledge.

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Christoph Wulf is Professor of Anthropology and Education and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Historical Anthropology, the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB, 1999–2012) “Cultures of Performance,” the Cluster of Excellence (2007–2012) “Languages of Emotion,” and the Graduate School “InterArts” (2006–2015) at the Freie Universität Berlin. He was founding secretary of the “Education Commission” of the International Peace Research Association, president of international network “Educational Science Amsterdam”, initiator and chairman of the commission of “Pedagogical Anthropology” of the German Society of Educational Science. His books have been translated into 20 languages. For his research in anthropology and anthropology of education, he received the title “professor honoris causa” from the University of Bucharest. The German Society of Educational Science awarded him honorary membership. He is Vice-President of the German Commission for UNESCO. Major research areas: historical and cultural anthropology, educational anthropology, imagination, intercultural communication, mimesis, aesthetics, epistemology, Anthropocene. Research stays and invited professorships have included the following locations, among others: Stanford, Tokyo, Kyoto, Beijing, Shanghai, Mysore, Delhi, Paris, Lille, Modena, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Copenhagen, London, Vienna, Rome, Basel, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Sao Paulo.

Understanding the Anthropocene as an Interpretative Framework for the Act of Educating Jean-Philippe Pierron

Abstract The urgent need to educate: is it an oxymoron? For a long time, if we think of Rousseau, Kant, Durkheim or Dewey, the question of education has been an integral part of political philosophy projects. It would seem that it has now become marginal, if not marginalized. In fact, the educational sciences in the twentieth century gradually took on the question of an epistemology of the human psyche and learning, of the methods and content to be conveyed. This was sometimes done in the context of a quarrel between the old and the new, opposing teaching and learning, and neglecting the question of an education that would enable children to understand themselves as human beings capable of self-esteem in the light of their situation. However, the philosophical, ethical and political question remains, or even comes back indirectly, when we become aware of the situation of the “Anthropocene”. Kant asked what education was in a century that was becoming aware of itself by calling itself the Age of Enlightenment (Aufklärung)? In the modern day, what will education be when we call, not our century, but our era the Anthropocene? And there is a great difference in scale between century and era. What are the influences of the educational system and the anthropology that underlies it, of learning methods, of the long and slow passage of an educational system, mainly state and school-based, on the way children learn to understand themselves as human beings with others in their relations with non-humans and with a nature whose vulnerability they discover? Does the Anthropocene not provide an opportunity to rethink the relationship between education, democracy and ecology? Keywords Anthropocene · Educational philosophy · Relationship

J.-P. Pierron (✉) University of Burgundy, Dijon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_9

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1 Overgrown Children or the Last Men A century ago, Max Weber pessimistically saw the deployment of instrumental rationality in all dimensions of existence, and with it the arrival of those he called the “last men”. He refers to heartless specialists and pleasure seekers. (Weber, 1958) These last men will soon be caught in the steel cage of a form of organization of the world where the mechanical caging of existences by increasing bureaucratization will prevent them from developing their capacities for thinking, imagining and initiative. The cage in question will encourage an abstract relationship to oneself, to others and to nature, leading to the emergence of humans who are uprooted from the earth, as is already being said today, for agriculture and animal husbandry. Could it be that the humans of the Anthropocene era have become the last men?1 Would it be absurd to think that our children will be the first of this generation of last men, or can we envisage that they will escape by inventing a new way of understanding themselves as living with other living humans and non-humans in nature? Is there a way out, in the face of the deployment of this new confinement that alienates us (as was said in the nineteenth century), dominates us (as was said in the twentieth century), and wears us down or burns us out, as is said in the twenty-first century? Where, politically, having naturalized the laws of the economy, we never stop saying that there is no alternative; and where, individually, the self is under siege (Lasch, 2008), living the experience of a feeling of being confined by routines, norms and the neo-liberal paradigm of management (of becoming the entrepreneurs of ourselves), to the point of asphyxiation, is there a way out, and if so, would it be through education? The success of Sean Penn’s film Into the Wild (2007), which features a young man who flees a conformist university education system that promises him bureaucratic and psychological confinement, for nature (wilderness),2 could lead one to believe this. The tragic end of the film, however, implicitly suggests that it would be folly to dream of it, since we die from it: nature is not a good, generous and educating mother. To which we can add that the wilderness itself has lost its status as a beautiful escape since all nature, in the Anthropocene, is anthropized, the wild itself being regulated and controlled via parks and protection zones. So, would mobilizing educational urgency in the face of these forces be derisory? Or are there still good reasons to mobilize education, even an educational utopia? If so, is it because we can oppose enclosing ourselves in a caged space by opening up a time of surprise? In response to this cage of the inertia of the past world, can we find, through childhood

1 In 2008, the Jerôme Kerviel affair, the trader who caused his bank to lose 5 billion euros in stock market speculation, raised the question: how and with what training does one become a trader? 2 Note the erroneous invocation of Henry-David Thoreau’s in wildness is the preservation of the world, theorist of civil disobedience. It confuses wilderness and wildness. Where the former reiterates the anthropocentric opposition between the wild and the artificial, nature and culture; the latter thinks, without dichotomy, of successful forms of understanding between humans and nature.

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and the support given to psychic creativity and imagination, an opening up to the unforeseeable, making education a “breach between past and future” (Arendt, 1961), and making the child the “miracle that saves the world” in the famous words of Hannah Arendt (Arendt, 1958)?

2 Education in the Anthropocene: A Total Anthropological Fact By asking the question as abruptly as we have just done, we are reminding ourselves that education involves a major anthropological issue: what kind of human do we want to bring into being? What kind of human being do our educational system and our educational projects seek to promote, if we admit at least that all education is directed towards a high level of subjectivity and self-understanding? To what extent does the Anthropocene give urgency to these questions, reconfiguring the idea of education? These questions may seem abstract. To some extent, they are. Curricula, rhythms, methods and the organisation of the education system would, however constitute four major areas for thinking about education in the Anthropocene, as we shall see below. However, if we begin with anthropological considerations, it is not because we do not see the urgency of educating, or at least take the measure of what education should be in the times we live in, but on the contrary to measure the full extent of it. The Anthropocene invites us to fundamentally rethink the act of educating. The act of educating requires identifying what content should be conveyed, and how, in order to develop an informed intelligence of the state of the world (to inform); an ethic redefining the normative conception of the human being (to form; and an anthropology that digs deeper and deeper into the question of “what it means to be human on Earth” (to initiate), because of the vulnerability of humans and nature. The impact of the Anthropocene on education must take place on these three levels. All education has an epistemological dimension in its choice of learning methods and the psychological references that underlie them. They are far from neutral in the models of the human psyche that they encourage (developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, cognitive or behavioural psychology) and in their preparation for adaptation to future changes. On this point, there is a worrying congruence between the approaches of behavioural and cognitive psychology at a time when governance by numbers and indicators is being introduced into the management of quantitative evaluation in the educational field. Indeed, one might think that it is this “statistical” and quantifying approach which overlooks relational qualities that is also the origin of the ecological crisis! On the other hand, what if we dared to take a different path, as Carol Gilligan would say, in the sensitive, creative and relational formulation of the educational questions conveyed by the idea of environmental care? Care theorists, for example, question the extent to which the favouring of a genetic type of

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developmental psychology (of the Piagetian type) encourages a way of thinking and structuring the moral reasoning of the child as being universal, rational and abstract. They see it as abandoning other paths that place more value on the emotions and imagination, inviting us to consider vulnerable beings (human beings, animals and environments) - in a different way. All education has a central ethical-political dimension in terms of awareness of our historical situation, the practical guidelines to be promoted and the values to be upheld. Especially at the present time when, having renounced the idea of progress in the manner of the Enlightenment, without having yet given in to the idea of collapse, we are aware of the precariousness of the time to come. If the struggle for emancipation has marked our thinking on education for the last three centuries, it is now also a question of envisaging a form of education in relationships, including our relationship with nature. The Anthropocene invites us to think not of an autonomy that has become alienated but of relationships that are opened up. What should ethics of the future and politics for the long term be and what education should serve them? But all education is also an anthropological fact, because educating is a “total social fact” whose challenge is to bring about a human being with a good relationship with oneself, others and nature. This is what is suggested by the idea of the Anthropocene, which shares its etymology with the root anthropos common to that of anthropology.

3 The Anthropocene: An Interpretative Framework for the Act of Educating? Our hypothesis is that the Anthropocene constitutes a renewed framework for understanding a hermeneutic of the self and a hermeneutic of cultures. This framework redefines a way of elucidating what it means to understand oneself as human, in one’s relations with others, non-humans included, and an Earth whose vulnerability we measure? In this sense, the Anthropocene is seen as the interpretative, practical and symbolic framework within which to educate. This includes both children and adults, since all education is never-ending because we are never finished with the task of being human. We borrow this concept of an interpretive framework from the philosopher Charles Taylor (Taylor, 1989). He understands a culture in a dynamic way as that which keeps alive questions that count concerning the true, the beautiful, the good, the just, the healthy, and the meaningful, and with regard to which everyone can confront themselves in order to work towards answering the question “Who am I?” The classroom, an educational device can thus, in miniature, be seen as playing an important role in the institutional constitution of such an interpretative framework, serving to clarify this understanding of oneself. As the elaboration of a new conceptual framework where the geosciences and the humanities meet, the Anthropocene thus contributes to us breaking out of the industrial paradigm (Callicott). This means coordinating a series of proposals from different fields so that we can have a plan of action, including education. These would include

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scientific statements concerning the climate or biodiversity; philosophical proposals concerning the meaning of our ecosystemic trajectory and our ecumenical place; a redeployment of what the arts, sciences, ethics and religions are for us; all of which would redefine what a child is for us, what we should pass on to him or her and how we should pass it on. However, the latter requires some clarification in order to avoid ambiguity. Why should we keep the notion of Anthropocene? The concept of “Anthropocene” seems to us the best way to describe the situation of our time within which education is taking place. It is better than ideologically problematic sustainable development, or ecological transition, or collapse or collapsology, or degrowth, which is too specialized in the economic field, We are aware that the word “Anthropocene”, a neologism constructed on the model of the temporal categories of the geosciences, does not enjoy unanimous support among researchers in the various natural sciences. Conceptually, the Anthropocene is also a concept that needs to be taught, since it is not yet part of “normal science” and is currently being tested in university teaching. It also questions the possible linkage between the human sciences (including the educational sciences) and the natural sciences, around the environmental humanities, the status of which is also debated. One of the objectives of this book, is to work on the acclimatization, at the heart of the humanities, of this concept at the point where nature and history meet. It can allow us to rethink human beings as living beings among the living, helping us to understand ourselves and to live as such. Although, strictly speaking, we are still living geologically in the Holocene3 (Pyne, 1982), the metaphorical and heuristic success of the Anthropocene concept lies in the fact that it helps to make sense of and link diverse realities (from climatology to agriculture, from geology to education). It develops a new grand narrative of the time humans have lived through in history in relation to nature. But it is not a grand totalizing narrative expressing the absolute sense of becoming. Rather, we see it as an attempt to network the irreducible multiplicity of human cultural heritages, in which, human beings try to decipher themselves in the understanding they have of their earthly anchorage. We therefore conceive of the Anthropocene as a concept that opens up a potential space for us to play with reality. It inaugurates a transitional space, as Winnicott would say, within which to vary possibilities and to imagine different ways in which human beings can develop in their relational, and not only functional, links with nature. The Anthropocene understood in this way promotes a different image of society. Breaking with governance by numbers and its managerial control, the Anthropocene is the ultimate name for an exposure to the risk of history. The Anthropocene makes us think of humanity as a geological force of nature. Its physical forces of anthropisation, through technology having grown 3

We should add here how ethnocentric the concept of the Anthropocene is, not only geographically, but historically, as it obscures the impact of the expansion of the homo sapiens population as the main cause of the extinction of the American megafauna by the pre-Columbian culture in the Pleistocene. This invites us to resist the simplifications that encourage a romantic reading of the good savage, the myth of virgin nature, while obscuring other cultures.

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disproportionately large, it is important to learn practical and pedagogical lessons from it. This is not to make people feel guilty or to frighten them, two powerful emotional forces in education, but to make them responsible and to allow them to exercise their freedoms fully. In this sense, the Anthropocene makes it possible to reconnect, not from above with the metaphysical background of a sense of history, but from below, starting from physical constraints, with questions concerning the ethical significance of an education of humanity in the vast process of its hominization. “Humanity is a species only insofar as it has a history”, Paul Ricoeur liked to say, in a Kantian vein. The educational question, when it intersects with that of history and the Anthropocene, forces us to ask the educational question not only on an individual level but also on the level of the species. At the junction of natural time and human time, it does not ask whether nature is the educator of humanity in the Anthropocene, but how humanity can make its relationship to nature the object of an education that has undergone rethinking. This notable inversion is developed against a tragic background, since education in the Anthropocene unfolds with the awareness that an authentically human life on Earth may 1 day no longer be possible (cf. Hans Jonas). In his idea of a universal history, Kant noted that the reading of the history of humanity and its progress poses a major moral problem: that of the sacrifice of past generations for the benefit of the progress enjoyed by present generations. But the moral problem is reversed with the idea of a sacrifice of present generations in terms of lifestyle, etc. for the sake of future generations (the ethical problem of non-reciprocity). Today, the Anthropocene is criticized for embroiling the whole of human history in the unifying character of the word “Anthropocene”, whereas it would be more accurate to speak of an Ethnocene whose origins are to be found in Western Europe and in Western countries, or even more precisely, to speak of the Capitalocene. Unquestionably, we cannot speak of the Anthropocene without mentioning a critique of the “demented capitalist project” that mobilizes in the service of its tendentious nihilism all the “physical, biological, psychological, social, cultural data” that its increased techno-scientific development provides (Guibal, 2018, p. 24). Most of this critique focuses on the idea that with the Anthropocene humanity is really constituted as a universal species agent that “suddenly emerges within the danger that is climate change”. But the argument does not hold. It blatantly ignores the realities of differentiated vulnerability on all levels of human society. “If climate change represents a form of apocalypse, it is not universal but uneven and combined” (Malm, 2017). This criticism calls for caution. This differentiation or unevenness applies to different levels between the individual, the social, the cultural and the translocal. It also applies to different anthropologies and cultures. A philosophical anthropology draws lessons from vulnerability by developing an anthropology of the vulnerable person. But to the word ‘Anthropocene’, we need to add grammars of the Anthropocene, if we do not want to make it a catch-all word. In order to avoid confusion, a distinction must be made between a philosophical anthropological consideration that questions the vulnerability of humans and the Earth and an

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anthropological anthropology that refers to specific human experiences, to the field, as is the case, for example, in the work of Philippe Descola in his Par-delà nature et culture. The Anthropocene can be seen as an opportunity for a profound questioning of the naturalist anthropological background that makes nature something other or outside of us, considering it as a quarry to be exploited. One can imagine all the educational, family or school implications that this invitation to understand oneself as essentially other than and apart from non-humans or ecological environments could have for a child. We need only to think, for example, of our science of nature which, from childhood, teaches us to distrust our sensitive and carnal experience as a source of illusion – “No the sun does not rise!” The Anthropocene is a concept derived from a naturalistic ontology. It is designed to enter into a critical debate with the latter and to initiate new hybrid practical schemes, preparing other ways of thinking and living, subverting from within the logics that may have justified its coming into being. This concept radicalizes what environmental ethics denounced in the 1970s as “human chauvinism” (Routley, 1973), so that the Anthropocene becomes the pathological expression of this chauvinism, distorting our relationship with nature. It radicalizes it because, where environmental ethics aimed to make environmental obligations and human obligations compatible, the Anthropocene presents the idea of a profound entanglement of the environment and the human. The criticism of the Anthropocene as a European concept is a necessary ethnological reflection. But thinking about education in the Anthropocene cannot stop there. It is also a question of asking what resources other anthropologies, which are foreign to the origin of the Anthropocene, use in order to respond and adapt to it. Thinking about animist, totemic or analogist education in the Anthropocene presents us with a gigantic task!

4 Towards a New Institution for Children As an interpretative framework, the concept of the Anthropocene contributes to criticizing the imaginary of our globalized societies that supports our educational practices. But, on the other hand, it also helps to promote the emergence of new subjectivities that are free and exposed to the risk of history, serving what Montaigne would have called another “institution of children”. Briefly, the Anthropocene can be recognized in the following features: (a) an awareness of the vulnerability of the biosphere that dangerously undermines confidence that time is an open book, which promises the future of childhoods to come, (b) excessive industrialisation and an excess of the management tools that encourage “the unlimited expansion of a pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery” (Castoriadis, 1996) over all forms of human or non-human life, reducing the lives of children to the calculations of what the curriculum teaches them, (c) the awareness of the possibility that there will be no more authentically human life on Earth tomorrow, fed by the abyss and dizzying threats of all the hazards upstream of us and by the anxiety of what might happen, - would it be better if there were no more children tomorrow? (d) a one-dimensionalization of the world that reduces everything that has value to a

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price, which generates the response of the need to value and take care of the territories of childhood (imagination, creativity, attention, thought, daydreaming), (e) the need for a renewed understanding of education, and promoting autonomy in vulnerability, through a pedagogy resolutely lived within a shared state of the human being with other living beings and the environment (cf. e.g. scouting, the leading youth movement in France today), that is not seen as a prison but as a place of fulfilment, (f) the need, within the framework of a redefined cosmopolitanism, to move from a de facto solidarity through shared problems to a solidarity of project, by encouraging young people to live and experience this planetary solidarity (from development education to Erasmus mundus for all), (g) the need to reinstate democratic issues (ecological democracy), in recognition of the fact they are long term to accompany the ecological transition. In this spirit, speaking of the “urgency of educating” (the long term inherent in the succession of generations in the face of the short term nature of politics) with a view to a new ethos, is not an oxymoron but an opportunity to consider future humanity.

5 Education in the Anthropocene: A Concrete Utopia Over the last 30 years or so, we have seen the gradual development of environmental education in school curricula,4 which has become education for the environment and sustainable development. But with education in and not about the Anthropocene, there is not only a change in degree but also in nature. The challenge is no longer simply to instruct, but to educate. It is no longer just to prevent but to prepare. It is no longer a matter of preserving but of initiating and arousing the creativity of actors with a view to changes, including catastrophic ones, of which we know nothing, through education seen as a concrete utopia. Indeed, can we not say that the imagination itself – through its utopian function – has a constitutive role in helping us to rethink the nature of our social life? (Ricoeur, 1986, p. 36). Several perspectives are open to those who want to rethink the nature of our social life in the Anthropocene. They are a concrete utopia. They focus on what the content of education should be with a view to social and environmental sustainability at a time when there are fierce debates on the delimitation of school and educational programmes, bringing together divergent scientific, economic, educational and political interests. They become clearer as the question of educational and school rhythms, long justified by the seasonality of agricultural work in rural societies and today by that of the leisure industry and because of parental reconfigurations, clashes with the biorhythms envisaged as an alternative to the hyper-synchronisation of the pace of industry and commerce. They propose pedagogical methods or reflections on games that are likely to encourage forms of cooperation rather than competition, and

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There are significant variations, which should be studied, between national education on the one hand and agricultural education on the other, due to two different ministerial supervisory bodies.

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are likely to promote awareness of what binds us together on a global scale in a spirit of solidarity in projects for a new cosmopolitanism. They are necessary in order to be able to re-discuss the organisation of a very segmented and analytically designed educational and school system. The latter envisages education in the mode of a curriculum vitae, obliterating the hidden curriculum dimension5 (Rosa, 2013, p. 272 ff.) that underlies it, i.e. all that is learned tacitly at school, and which has its part in the production of a subjectivity anaesthetized in its awareness of what binds it to the environment. But we need to resonate by constructing syntheses, if not great narratives, that will allow children to feel more at one with each other and to realise their capabilities within the spiritual situation of uncertain times. By distinguishing between informing, training and initiating (Larrère, 2002), we are not inviting people to choose but to combine different educational perspectives responding to the Anthropocene. They are different from each other but they are complementary, even in what they are opposed to as well as in their hybridisations. The informed or scientific attitude imparts reason, knowledge and experimentation; the trained attitude focusses on the ethical dimension of experiences; and finally, the attitude of initiation facilitates experiential or eco-phenomenological knowledge, also addressing the part of eco-psychology that focusses on the psychic impact, empowering but also anxiety-provoking, of the lived awareness of our living environment becoming increasingly fragile. Education as Information Humanity did not wait for the environmental crisis to happen before knowing. However, it is our knowledge that also caused this crisis. How could so much accumulated knowledge, the source of so many technical innovations, come to erode the natural foundation without which these innovations could not themselves endure? What would our knowledge have to be to avoid such a disaster? At the level of scientific information, the Anthropocene is about knowledge. This knowledge works to re-articulate nature and history, an articulation that modern analytical rationality has worked to dismantle by encouraging fragmented, siloed thinking. Cognitively, responding to this segmented thinking, which encourages watertight knowledge, requires cultivating a linking of knowledge and the knowledge of interdependencies. The scientific education project “La main à la pâte”, encouraged by the Nobel Prize winner Georges Charpak for primary classes, supervised personalised transdisciplinary subjects in high school, the creation of an interdisciplinary scientific community such as the IPCC or environmental humanities (Blanc et al., 2017), which are still in their emergence, are today the results of such a project, decompartmentalising different practical disciplines. Knowledge helps to clarify the complexity of our situation. The role of this knowledge is to describe in detail the situation of our relations with the environment, making visible

5

This concept of the Hidden Curriculum, developed by Hartmut Rosa, does not reduce education to instruction. But he observes that it is mainly at school, in our societies, that our basic existential problematic is formed, because of the number of dense interaction processes (to the body, to others in terms of explicit or implicit recognition; to nature) that it gives rise to, in addition to or under the official program.

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what we did not see, making us sensitive to what we were insensitive to (care for the environment, ecological services), since our situation of being in ecological transition has the peculiarity of being counter-intuitive. Climate change, for example, is invisible, spatially trans-local and temporally irreversible, and is thought of less in terms of stock than of flow; four characteristics that require a series of institutional reforms and at least four educational responses (Bourban, 2018, pp. 188–191). This knowledge also makes it clear, by explaining cause and effect relationships, that it is possible to develop ways of practising new ways of being and doing (eco-gestures, updating the planetary ethos of the Anthropocene). To learn is also to be learned. Positive exploration of our sciences does not only discover mechanical assemblages but also interactive reciprocities, dynamic polarities that invite us to be touched by their creativity. From science to action, this new systemic knowledge breaks with the systematic approaches that schools and the education system as a whole continue to convey. They value, alongside laboratory experimentation, the need for territorial experiences. But the difficulty lies in the fact that the Anthropocene is linked to the existence of techno-sciences. This creates a considerable gap between science in the making (which is not the science of school textbooks), and a science whose discoveries continue to be applied via techniques which have considerable impact and are extremely inert. Our technical systems, and the infrastructures (roads, hydraulics, energy, etc.) that make them possible, were developed on the basis of natural scientific knowledge developed several centuries ago. Because of the inertia inherent in them, these systems continue, technically, to make us live in a state of separation between nature and history, whereas we know today that they are interdependent. It is not a question of confusing the distinction between is and ought in a new naturalism, but of discovering that our knowledge (eco-systemic, climatological, etc.) pedagogically enriches the understanding of our duty. Education as Forming or Shaping When we French speak of ‘forming’ (French formation = education), we do not mean it in the critical sense that Bernard Lahire in the educational sciences denounces in what he calls ‘la forme scolaire’. Formal schooling, with its norms and standards of learning, valuing writing and objectifying distancing, justifies the ideal of forming in the child a disciplined, immobile and silent “school body” (Millet, 2007). A relational anthropology in the Anthropocene, attentive to the links between humans and non-humans, criticizes these three traits, because they encourage in children an anaesthetized response in their relationship with nature, each one being an isolated individual (the hidden curriculum of the school system) and a set interpretation of the world based on knowledge and methods that do not place much value on attentiveness, on cooperation and sensitive sharing with the surrounding world. Training aims not only at individualization but at individuation. It must allow each person to take the measure of his or her capacities for initiative. While our knowledge favours and encourages analytical rationality and a form of anaesthetic abstraction for engineers, salesmen and financiers, the challenge is to redefine the role of the humanities in engineering sciences and business schools. The role of ethical training cuts across all fields of learning...

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Ethical training requires students to be put in a situation that helps them see reality through different glasses and in other frameworks than those to which they are accustomed (Renouard, 2012, p. 127). The role of the ethical formation of the psyche, irreducible to mere obedience to the regulations in force, is decisive on this point. Where an acosmic economism, pervading even scientific research through its modes of financing, obscures and curbs the originality of a deliberative, critical, lucid subjectivity that is open to new things, it is up to ethics to arouse these powers of creation. These powers allow each person to become aware of their capacity for initiative and self-esteem through internalising the aim of leading a good life that underpins their project. Reflective thinking through ethical questioning dismantles siloed thinking, creating bridges between distinct disciplinary fields. We can see this today, in the evaluation of biotechnologies, with the convergence of bioethical reflection between medical ethics, animal ethics and environmental ethics.6 To Initiate Finally, in speaking of initiating, we insist on the dimension of this experiential knowledge through and in which subjects learns to understand themselves, to live themselves and to feel themselves as being part of nature. A major educational challenge in this respect is to fight against the anaesthesia encouraged by a certain ambient cognitivism, which views education as being merely a sharing of representations between rational beings. Where our a-cosmic civilization encourages a scopic impulse that stares at nature by distancing it as an object, a poly-sensory education envisages an initiation into all that makes a world singular for us. It encourages children, through experiences of immersion in a natural environment, to be able to answer the question “Who am I, living in such and such an environment, where there is such and such an understanding between nature and history? The project consists in allowing the free and sensitive deployment, for each and every child, of an eco-biography. In this way, life stories are constructed, supported by a poetic of environments and nature, stimulating what Bachelard called the material imagination in working with the elements (water, earth, fire, air). It allows us to deepen and give a sensitive, sensorimotor consistency to our being in the world in the lived natural environment and a spatial ambiance. Cultivating this poetic imagination cultivates a subjectivity in the feeling of its belonging (the lived image of a spring, a valley, a tree, etc. in an intimate cosmicity as Bachelard likes to say), and empowers it in its capacities. In the face of the dematerialization implicitly encouraged by technological conceptuality and, if we are not careful, by the digital, there is a fundamental anthropological dimension involved in an education which values touch. The initiation to touch has become suspect for hygiene reasons or for fear of a dubious educational eroticism. However, the world that we inhabit does not only represent itself, it presents itself sensitively. The strength of touch, in the ambivalence of a world that fundamentally welcomes us, until we cuddle up to it, or that

6 https://www.ccne-ethique.fr/fr/publications/contribution-du-comite-consultatif-national-dethiqueccne-la-reflexion-dans-le-contexte-de-la-21eme-conférence-sur-les-changements-climatiques(COP 21), from 6/11/2015. See also: https://www.ccne-ethique.fr/fr/publications/biodiversite-etsante-nouvelles-relations-entre-lhumanite-et-le-vivant

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resists our efforts, is to initiate multiple ways of entering into a body to body relationship with matter and nature up to the point of us internalizing it. Gardening, walking, working manually are initiations into a way of inhabiting a place and integrating into it. It is clear that education in the Anthropocene does not invite the addition of another discipline to be taught. It reconfigures the anthropology that underlies our conception of education, encouraging relational thinking.

References Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1961). Between past and future. Viking Press. Blanc, G., Demeulenaere, E., & Feuerhahn, W. (Eds.). (2017). Humanités environnementales. Enquêtes et contre-enquêtes. Editions de la Sorbonne. Bourban, M. (2018). Penser une justice climatique, Devoirs et politiques. PUF. Castoriadis, C. (1996). Les carrefours du labyrinthe. La montée de l’insignifiance. Seuil. Guibal, F. (2018). Veilleurs aux frontières, Penseurs pour aujourd’hui. Editions Lessius. Larrère, R. (2002). Nature, campagne et paysage: des différents regards et de leur légitimité. In J. P. Sylvestre (Ed.), Agriculteurs, ruraux et citadins. Les mutations des campagnes françaises. Educagri. Lasch, C. (2008). Le moi assiégé, Essai sur l’érosion de la personnalité. Climats. Malm, A. (2017). The progress of this storm. Nature and society in a warming world. Verso. Millet, M., & Thin, D. (2007). Le classement par corps. Les écarts au corps scolaire comme indice de ‘déviance’ scolaire, Sociétés et jeunesses en difficulté [En ligne], n°3 | Spring 2007, online 03 May 2007. Accessed 26 Dec 2018. http://journals.openedition.org/sejed/373 Pyne, S. J. (1982). Fire in America. A cultural history of wildland and rural fire. Princeton University Press. Renouard, C. (2012). Proposition 6: Pour une formation initiale et continue, à l’éthique. In G. Giraud & C. Renouard (Eds.), Vingt propositions pour réformer le capitalisme (p. 2009). Champs/Flammarion. Ricoeur, P. (1986). Lectures on ideology and utopia. Columbia University Press. Rosa, H. (2013). Leading a life – Five keys elements in the hidden curriculum of our schools. Nordic Studies in Education, 2, 97–111. Routley, R. S. (1973). Is there a need for a new, an environmental, ethic? In Proceedings of the XVth World Congress of philosophy 17th to 22nd September, 1973, Varna, Bulgaria. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self. The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press. Weber, M. (1958). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Scribner.

Jean-Philippe Pierron. Professor of philosophy at the University of Lyon 3. Author of, among other works, Taking care of nature and humans. Médecine, travail et écologie, Les Belles Lettres, 2019; Paul Ricoeur: Philosopher à son école (Vrin, 2016); La mort et le soin (with Elodie Lemoine, PUF, 2016); Parole tenue (with Jean-Pierre Charcosset, Mimésis, 2014); Où va la famille (Les liens qui libèrent, 2014); Les puissances de l’imagination (Cerf, 2012); Repenser la nature (with MarieHélène Parizeau, Presses Universitaires de Laval, 2012).

Educational Policies, Sustainable Development and the Anthropocene: Visions, Limits and Opportunities Daniel Curnier

Abstract The Anthropocene is considered as the current geological epoch, featuring the disturbance of the global ecological system by human activities. These profound and rapid changes in global biogeochemical conditions impose the transformation of modern societies towards a new model of political organisation and economical structures. A transformation of such magnitude requires moving out of the paradigm of Modernity, hence away from the Western way of relating humanity with the environment, developed during the previous centuries. Schools are involved in the construction of this specific worldview and can therefore contribute to the transformation of society, provided that significant curriculum changes are made. After describing the historical dependance of formal education to the paradigm of Modernity, this chapter suggests a curriculum model engaging schools on the path of an ecological transition, based on the principles of strong sustainability. Keywords Anthropocene · Educational policies · Sustainable development · Limits Entering the Anthropocene renders the proposal of sustainable development obsolete, due to the change of scale on which transformations are taking place, as well as the interaction of ecological, social and political time frames (Theys, 2016). A cultural metamorphosis (Morin, 2014) is therefore less an ideological choice than a necessity, if we are to adapt to ecological changes all the while minimizing their range, for a fair share of human beings to continue living on Earth. Yet, more than half a century after the topic of ecological limits was first addressed (Boulding, 1966; Meadows et al., 1972/1973), the destructive trajectory of a growing portion of humanity continues. This persistence has its roots in the paradigm of Modernity, the context in which educational institutions have developed (Morin,

D. Curnier (✉) University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_10

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2014). Therefore, schools are both a product and a driving force of its reproduction. For more than three decades, attempts have been made to adapt schools to the challenges of sustainability. However, the promises made regarding Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) have not managed to train eco-citizens capable of leading an ecological transition. In a similar way as sustainable development for society as a whole, ESD has not set schools on a course that deals with the most pressing challenges of the twenty-first century. The aim of this chapter is to explain the reasons for this failure, before suggesting ways of redesigning the school system.1 The first part sets out the theoretical framework for assessing current educational policies. The second part deals with the evolution of these policies from the birth of modern schools to the present day, emphasizing the tension between economy oriented and human oriented educational programmes (Varcher, 2012). The third part describes how ESD has been reduced to just another political injunction. The fourth part explores the cultural roots of school and shows how the paradigm of Modernity is both the origin and the product of formal education. Finally, the fifth part proposes to envisage an educational project that seeks to overcome this restriction.

1 Three Levels of Institutional Change Educational policies aim to influence the knowledge, skills and attitudes expected of pupils at the end of their time within an institution that combines instruction, training and education. These often confused, multi-faceted terms are clarified in this section based on Develay’s distinction (2000) between amending, innovating and re-modelling, depending on the depth of the change envisaged. Regarding the link between education and sustainability, Sterling (2010–2011) makes a slightly different distinction, differentiating between ‘conformative’, ‘reformative’ and ‘transformative’ social change, the latter being a complete paradigm shift. Schematically, the deeper the change, the more school functions will be concerned. 1. Amending (‘conformative’ change – doing things better) takes place through superficially modifying teaching content. The main focus is on instruction, i.e. the transmission of knowledge in the narrow sense. Amending takes the form of updating the knowledge selected to be taught in the curriculum (Tavignot, 2015).

1

This text draws heavily on Curnier, D. (2017). Quel rôle pour l’école dans la transition écologique? Esquisse d’une sociologie politique, environnementale et prospective du curriculum prescrit (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lausanne), available online on the SERVAL university server. It contains a more detailed argumentation and additional references. While the dissertation focused on the case of the French-speaking part of Switzerland, this chapter aims to generalize some of the findings and apply them to other education systems, although the trends described do not necessarily apply to all particular cases.

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The way teaching and school are structured, on the other hand, remains unchanged. 2. Innovating (‘reformative’ change – doing better things) focuses, in addition to the acquisition of knowledge, on the acquisition of know-hows, i.e. cognitive and manual processes. This can be done, for example, by adding a subject such as computer science to the curriculum, or by adding cross-curricular skills such as oral communication or creativity. If school macrostructures are inflexible here, the curriculum and teaching must be reorganized in order to meet new demands (Audigier et al., 2011b). 3. Re-modelling (‘transformative’ change – seeing things differently) fundamentally restructures the educational institution on the basis of changed political foundations and aims. It involves knowledge, know-hows and competences and therefore instruction, training (‘formation’) and education. ‘Education’ relates to the socialization process of future citizens and encompasses behaviours, attitudes and values (Raynal & Rieunier, 1997/2012, p. 189). Whether or not they are named explicitly in the curriculum, these elements are often assimilated in an unconscious way. Re-modelling therefore involves the entire school system, which is itself part of a changing social system. Indeed, only societal crisis and a transformation in our societal goals are capable of justifying the upheaval of an institution as a whole (Tavignot, 2015, p. 484). If we consider the Anthropocene as the symptom of a society in crisis and a paradigm shift as a necessity to avoid the worst, it is only such a re-modelling that would be commensurate with what is at stake. This assumption is the starting point for the assessment of educational policies, in order to test their relevance to the challenges of the twenty-first century. The following sections will thus review structural (Sect. 2), conceptual and political (Sect. 3) and cultural (Sect. 4) factors.

2 Structural Obstacles to Institutional Re-modelling Despite initial intentions to re-model schools, ESD has not succeeded in establishing itself in the educational policies of the turn of the century. To understand the structural reasons for this failure, we must go back to the roots of modern schooling. The birth of modern schools in the first half of the nineteenth century went hand in hand with the process of industrialization of Western nations. The spread of primary and then secondary schooling was in fact greatly motivated by the need for manpower in a rapidly expanding capitalist economy. The purpose of schooling was thus geared towards the production of ‘human resources’ to satisfy the growth of the wage labour market (Robinson, 2001/2011), at least for the masses who joined the compulsory schooling system. However, utilitarian aims based on economic concepts were not hegemonic. The humanist view valuing citizen and individual emancipation also influenced the

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curriculum, under pressure from nineteenth century liberals, and then from ‘alternative’ educational theories and environmental and anti-globalization movements in the twentieth century (Varcher, 2012). Yet economic considerations have come to dominate educational policies and the development of institutional structures up until today. In particular, productivist logic has shaped the school form, i.e. “all the material and intellectual means put in place by and in school institutions” (Audigier, 2015, p. 160, in Hertig, 2012). The division of pupils into age groups, sitting in straight rows facing a board at the front, the division of school time into periods of identical length, the organization of content into disciplines, the completion of tasks with predefined results or the learning of respect for authority are all elements that lead some people to compare school activities to production lines and schools to factories producing docile workers (Petrella, 2000; Robinson, 2001/2011). Two factors explain why learning that is directly transferable to professional practice, such as reading, writing, mathematics and foreign languages, still dominates school time and criteria for success. Firstly, school values are firmly established in society. Secondly, political power relations ensure the continuing importance of economic goals. Indeed, neo-liberal ideology that has come to dominate over the last three decades has only reinforced the pre-existing structures (Varcher, 2012), particularly through the increasing use of New Public Management methods to evaluate the economic performance of school systems (de Gaulejac, 2005/2014). Standardized tests such as those of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are thus used to compare countries and make them compete. However, these tests only measure knowledge in reading, writing, mathematics, natural sciences and, recently, ‘financial skills’. In order to avoid being left behind, countries reinforce the teaching of contents which are tested, i.e. those that target instrumental learning, that is directly transferable to the labour market. The prevalence of economic concerns focuses attention, right from primary school, on professionally oriented goals, to the detriment of citizenship education. However, for several decades now, schools have also been subject to numerous “new social demands” (Audigier, 2015), i.e. pressure to address societal issues traditionally confined to the private sphere (such as food) or newly emerging issues (such as digital data management). These social demands are translated into ‘education for/to...’, politically motivated with the aim of changing social norms (Lebeaume, 2012): health education, media education, intercultural education, sex education, business education, etc. Formulated in terms of knowledge, but also know-hows and competences, these demands require innovation on an institutional level. As a matter of fact, they challenge traditional disciplines and practices, since they often advocate the teaching of cross-curricular skills or require changes to the timetable (Audigier et al., 2011b; Lange & Victor, 2006). In some cases, such as ESD, the initial intention goes as far as to advocate a re-modelling of schooling itself.

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3 Conceptual and Political Barriers to Education for Sustainable Development ESD can be defined as the reorganisation of the educational aims, curriculum and school form in order to develop the necessary competences for future citizens to act in the face of the many challenges of sustainability (Audigier et al., 2011a). The methods by which this reorganization should take place are widely debated (Varcher, 2011), but there is a certain consensus among researchers to prioritise emancipatory education, a socio-constructivist approach to learning (Vygotski, 1934/1997) and tasks oriented towards decision making and action (Audigier et al., 2011a). Bringing together the humanist programmes of environmental education and global citizenship education of the 1970s, ESD gained particular prominence from 1992 onwards with the adoption of the political agenda of sustainable development. The assignment of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to lead the Decade of ESD 2005–2014 then gave it sufficient impetus to become part of most state curricula. For UNESCO, as well as for most researchers and practitioners, there was a clear ambition to re-model educational institutions. However, although ESD has highlighted fundamental educational issues, its implementation generally goes no further than amending the curriculum (Varcher, 2013), usually making alterations to the teaching content of biology and geography. The gap between the initial project and how it is actually implemented can be explained by factors linked to its conception on the one hand, and its integration into educational policies and management tools on the other. On the conceptual level, ESD suffers firstly from a freedom of interpretation that is both comparable and dependent on its affiliation with sustainable development. The conceptual vagueness surrounding this notion has allowed it to be reclaimed by neo-liberal ideology and marginalized in favour of productivism. Views on the changes needed in schools vary greatly according to views of those needed in society as a whole, in order to meet the challenges of sustainability. These differences in interpretation generate a broad array of educational consequences, ranging from teaching specific contents to contributing to a single social project with a predefined trajectory, to developing critical thinking and discussing what the aims of development and the conditions for its sustainability are. While environmental education and global citizenship education sought to challenge the dominant economic model, this soft approach aimed at gaining broad support implicitly allowed the dominant interpretation of sustainable development, based on weak sustainability, to influence the scope of ESD. In practice, ESD is often no more than the objective study of issues from the perspective of the three ‘spheres’ – environment, society and economy – and the inculcation of “eco-habits” (Barthes & Alpe, 2013).

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The second conceptual gap in ESD is that multiple forms of education for have been brought together under the same banner for political or economic reasons.2 This ‘patchwork’ has distanced ESD from the main challenges of economic development, namely respecting planetary limits and reducing inequalities. It has led to a confusion of priorities and a lack of clarity and coherence in the discourses and competency models proposed. Moreover, these competency models often combine undifferentiated and unclear goals, cross-curricular skills and knowledge in a narrow sense, which leads to a blurring of the political foundations of ESD. In addition to the conceptual shortcomings of ESD, there are also political factors that water it down when it becomes part of the curriculum (Varcher, 2013). Despite international commitments and declarations of intent, policy makers who guide and administer school systems at the national level are influenced by conflicting interests. Business organizations, universities, and parent associations exert pressure that is often at odds with that of UNESCO or ESD researchers. Moreover, decision-makers, who are themselves former students and sometimes parents of students, often have different views of education. The development of public policies is therefore the result of a delicate compromise between traditionalist/progressive, individualist/ collectivist, economic/humanist visions. Among the actors who carry great weight in educational policies, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) plays a role that is often underestimated or even misunderstood. The OECD, which brings together the 35 richest countries in the world, is a forum for exchange and coordination of public policies, strongly influenced by neo-liberal ideology. It is this body that pilots the PISA tests and publishes recommendations favouring new public management that will promote economic competitiveness (Lauwerier, 2017). Giving more weight to instrumental disciplines, increasing the number of standardized tests and drafting study plans in the form of competences that are useful to the private sector are all factors that prevent ESD from becoming part of the key missions of schools and re-modelling curricula (Varcher, 2013) and school management tools such as timetables or success criteria. Conceptual gaps, the dominance of neo-liberal ideology, lack of political will and the rigidity of traditional school structures all combine to prevent an ESD-inspired rethinking of educational institutions and to maintain a status quo that meets the needs of the private economy. But there are also deeper cultural elements that explain this inability to change. For an institution is always both a reflection and a driving force of the society that created it (Farley, 2014), and thus of the paradigm that produced it and that it reproduces.

In Switzerland, éducation21 is the national competence centre mandated and financed by the Confederation to coordinate the integration of ESD into public education. Born from the merger of environmental and global citizenship education, it later integrated health, economic, gender, intercultural and citizenship education (education21, 2016).

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4 Cultural Barriers to Education in the Anthropocene Over and above the institutional considerations that are holding back a re-modelling of the school system, its affiliation to a civilization that is experiencing a major cultural crisis is a fundamental obstacle. The paradigm of Modernity is the system of representations and relationships to the world that originated in Europe five centuries ago. Still relevant today, it is based on rational thought, technology and natureculture dualism (Descola, 2011; Hess, 2013; Kuhn, 1962/2008; Papaux, 2015). Schools have been dependent on this paradigm since their creation. Rational thinking is thus at the centre of learning: the world is apprehended by the intellect, rather than by affect or first-hand experience; instrumental and scientific disciplines largely dominate those based on physical and artistic expression; verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical forms of intelligence prevail (Gardner, 1983/1997); disciplinary knowledge is not interwoven; the world is segmented into distinct elements, corresponding to disciplines or ‘subjects’, which are in reality objects of study, distanced from the pupil and reduced to their material, observable and measurable dimension. These examples illustrate that, in reality, the entire foundation, purpose, curriculum and form of schooling is permeated not only by the historical and cultural context of industrialization, but also by the modern system of thought. In return, the school acts as a force for the reproduction of the paradigm in which it is embedded. By training successive generations of adults and thus parents, teachers and policy makers, the school consolidates the paradigm of Modernity, whose system of representations and values it implicitly transmits (Curnier, 2016). Anthropocentrism is reinforced by the study of nature presented as external to students, as an object to be observed from a distance, described and understood, and on which they can act (Sigaut, 2009). On the other hand, schooling participates in the “disenchantment of the world” (Weber, 1958) by excluding the possibility of metaphysical and symbolic explanations. In the specific case of ESD, the dominant conception in research, in the field or at the political level is also part of the paradigm of Modernity, notably because of its humanist heritage. The term Education for Sustainable Development, for example, reflects a clear objectivism and there are few approaches that break away from this anthropocentric position to reinvent a way of being in the world. Occasionally, reference is made to this issue, as is the case in Switzerland with the sub-competency ‘Developing a sense of belonging to the world’ proposed in the competency model of the éducation21 Foundation. But despite the mention of associated objectives such as “perceiving oneself and the social and natural environment in a holistic manner and in a global context” and “perceiving oneself as part of this environment and showing respect and responsibility towards it” (éducation21, 2016), this proposal is buried in a list of 22 sub-competencies of varying levels and orientations, some of which are contradictory. ESD, like all past and present educational policies, therefore remains dependent on the cultural straightjacket of Modernity. Few proposals are explicitly anchored in

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a biocentric or ecocentric anthropology.3 The following section, which imagines what the foundations, aims, curriculum and school form of an educational model of the Anthropocene might look like, is intended to be an extension and updating of these previous pieces of work.

5 Proposals for Change If we postulate that the entry into the Anthropocene requires a paradigm shift in order to guarantee the conditions of terrestrial habitability for most human beings, several types of cultural transformations must be undertaken: 1. a philosophical shift from humanism to ecohumanism (Farber, 2003; Tapp, 2002), a concept that is still not very stable, but is particularly important in the context of the conflict between economic and humanist conceptions of education, in which ESD is embedded; 2. an ethical shift from an anthropocentric moral position to a biocentric or ecocentric position, which attributes intrinsic value to all living beings, if not to all earthly ecological systems (Hess, 2013); 3. an ontological shift from an anthropology of withdrawal from nature to an anthropology of immersion in the milieu (Berque, 2000; Papaux, 2015). What these three movements have in common is the departure from the natureculture dualism, a transformation of the way we look at the environment and a redefinition of the human beings’ position within the living world. Among the key elements of this repositioning is the overcoming of the subject-object relationship in favour of a system of interdependent relationships between one’s interiority, one’s body, human and non-human otherness, and the cosmos. These principles can be mobilized to re-model an educational institution whose general purpose would be to contribute to a transformative change in social organization within the framework of planetary limits. Schooling should therefore fall within the new paradigm and contribute to its definition and realization.4 The specific goals of an education of the Anthropocene would be set on the basis of collectively identified basic learning needs. The skills expected of future citizens could be determined by developing a positive and realistic vision of the future and by defining the steps to be taken to achieve it. It is only on the basis of this renewed societal project that the knowledge, know-hows and competences to be acquired could be determined, as well as the associated school form, without totally sweeping aside traditional learning and ESD proposals.

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Among the exceptions, see for example Cornell, 1979 and Morin, 2014. This proposal synthesizes the “Educational Model for the Anthropocene” proposed in Curnier, 2017, pp. 185–233.

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1. On the level of knowledge (savoirs), if a pragmatic approach consisted, for example, in systematizing the study of various sectoral themes based on the social and ecological consequences of human activities, a more ambitious approach would aim to question, through an interdisciplinary approach, elements such as the choices of civilization, the idea of environment, the notion of development and scientific production, based on central concepts such as the Anthropocene, the Biosphere and socio-ecological systems. 2. With regard to know-hows (savoir-faire), they could combine tools and procedures already present in education with more abstract skills, as recently proposed by UNESCO (2017): critical thinking, systems thinking, anticipatory thinking, normative thinking, integrated problem-solving, strategic thinking, reflective thinking and collaboration. The ‘retrieval’ of this broadly disseminated ESD model would be subordinated to the aims of a schooling that contributes to a transformation in society. 3. As for the competences (savoir-être), they could be classified into three categories induced by the horizon of paradigm shift, namely the transformation of our relationship to knowledge (relationship to materiality), in our relationship to the human being (relationship to interiority, to the body and to human otherness) and in our relationship to the world (relationship to non-human otherness and the metaphysical). An interdisciplinary curriculum would describe the organization and progression of knowledge, know-hows and competences learning, involving epistemological distancing in order to question and connect disciplines and avoid the “risk of error and illusion” (Morin, 2014). By going beyond the slicing of reality characteristic of Cartesian thinking and traditional school knowledge, interdisciplinary approaches in fact make it possible to grasp socio-ecological issues that are by definition a-disciplinary, in a holistic manner, by bringing together disciplinary and crossdisciplinary knowledge. To be complete, an education based on an anthropology of immersion and relationship should also promote dialogue between intellect, feelings and first-hand experience. The consequences of this approach for the schools are still partly to be defined. Among the most obvious elements, the obstacles to interdisciplinarity posed by strict divisions between disciplines or timetables should be removed, and learning should take place in activities and places that encourage reflection, emotions and first-hand experience. This could, for example, be achieved through field projects aimed at solving a local problem in groups, contributing (modestly) to the resolution of a global socio-ecological challenge. This type of project, if it involves occasions of individual and collective reflection, could contribute to anthropological change, developing the power of action of future citizens through the direct control of students over their activities and the outcomes of these.

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6 Conclusions It is more than 150 years since modern schooling was created, primarily to meet the growing labour needs of Western industrialisation. Although it is an institution that is essentially future-oriented, paradoxically, little has changed since then. The aims, learning content and school form are similar to what they were in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, entering the Anthropocene invites us to think about the changes that could enable schools to contribute to the emergence of a new paradigm. The ESD project supported by UNESCO proposed an interesting rethinking of the school institution, but the rigidity of traditional school structures, the influence of neo-liberal ideology on public policies and the weight of the paradigm of Modernity have reduced it to a simple amendment of contents. Nevertheless, the beginnings of a transformation of school structures anchored in a new paradigm exist both in theory and in the field. The failure of ESD is therefore primarily the result of a lack of political will. Some countries, such as Great Britain, leave enough room for experimentation for projects such as Schools in Transition to emerge, which explicitly set as their goal the contribution of schooling to an ecological transition and encourage regular and direct interaction with the environment. Other countries have decided to take on the eco-citizen dimension of education on a national scale: this is the case in Ecuador and Bolivia, which have defined buen vivir – (‘good living’) as a school objective following a change in their Constitution. It is time for policy-makers in other countries to follow suit, so as to enable today’s young people to develop the knowledge, know-how and competences needed to meet the major challenges of the twenty-first century.

References Audigier, F. (2015). Domaines généraux de formation, compétences, éducation à. . . : les curriculums et les disciplines scolaires chahutées. D’un cadrage historique et pédagogique à l’éducation en vue du développement durable comme exemple emblématique. Swiss Journal of Educational Sciences, 37, 427–460. Audigier, F., Bugnard, P.-P., & Hertig, P. (2011a). Introduction. In F. Audigier, N. Fink, N. Freudiger, & P. Haeberli (Eds.), L’éducation en vue du développement durable: sciences sociales et élèves en débat (Vol. 130, pp. 7–23). Cahiers de la Section des Sciences de l’Éducation, University of Geneva. Audigier, F., Fink, N., Freudiger, N., & Haeberli, P. (Eds.). (2011b). L’éducation en vue du développement durable: sciences sociales et élèves en débat (Vol. 130). Cahiers de la Section des Sciences de l’Éducation, University of Geneva. Barthes, A., & Alpe, Y. (2013). Le curriculum caché du développement durable à travers les analyses curriculaires. In J.-M. Lange (Ed.), Proceedings of the international symposium « L’éducation au développement durable : appuis et obstacles à sa généralisation hors et dans l’école », Rouen, 17–18 novembre 2012 (pp. 11–18). Centre interdisciplinaire de recherches sur les valeurs, les idées, les identités et les compétences (CIVIIC).

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Berque, A. (2000). Ecoumène. Introduction à l’étude des milieux humains. Belin. Boulding, K. E. (1966). The economics of the coming spaceship earth. In H. Jarrett (Ed.), Environmental quality in a growing economy (pp. 3–14). Johns Hopkins University. Cornell, J. (1979). Sharing nature with children. Ananda. Curnier, D. (2016). Enseignement de l’éthique et éducation en vue d’un développement durable : comment concilier valeurs des élèves, valeurs scolaires et durabilité? Revue de didactique des sciences des religions, 3, 88–102. Curnier, D. (2017). Quel rôle pour l’école dans la transition écologique? Esquisse d’une sociologie politique, environnementale et prospective du curriculum prescrit (PhD thesis, University of Lausanne). de Gaulejac, V. (2005/2014). La société malade de la gestion. Managerial ideology, managerial power and social harassment. Seuil. Descola, P. (2011). L’écologie des autres. L’anthropologie et la question de la nature. Quae. Develay, M. (2000). Le collège ou la résistance au changement. Perspectives documentaires en éducation, 50–51, 49–52. Education21. (2016). L’éducation en vue d’un développement durable. An education21 understanding of ESD and a contribution to the discussion/debate. Author. Farber, P. L. (2003). Review of ecohumanism by Robert B. Tapp (2002). The Quarterly Review of Biology, 78(3), 345. Farley, J. (2014, August). Adapting to prisoner’s dilemmas. Economic institutions for the anthropocene. Paper presented at the International society for ecological economics (ISEE) conference, Reykjavik, Iceland. Gardner, H. (1983/1997). The forms of intelligence. Odile Jacob. Hertig, P. (2012). Didactics of geography and initial training of specialist teachers. Design and first evaluation of the new initial training scheme for upper secondary geography teachers at the HEP Vaud (Géovisions vol. 39). Institute of Geography of the University. Hess, G. (2013). Éthiques de la nature. Presses universitaires de France. Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Lange, J.-M., & Victor, P. (2006). Curricular didactics and “education for health, the environment and sustainable development”: What questions, what benchmarks? Didaskalia, 28, 85–100. Lauwerier, T. (2017). Education for development. The vision of the World Bank, OECD and UNESCO. Education in Debates: Comparative Analysis, 8, 43–58. Lebeaume, J. (2012). Effervescence contemporaine des propositions ‘d’éducations à. . .’. Regard rétrospectif pour le tournant curriculaire à venir. Spirale, 50, 11–24. Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J., & Behrens, W. W., III. (1972). The limits to growth; a report for the club of Rome’s project on the predicament of mankind. Universe. Morin, E. (2014). Enseigner à vivre. Manifeste pour changer l’éducation. Actes Sud. Papaux, A. (2015). Homo faber. In D. Bourg & A. Papaux (Eds.), Dictionnaire de la pensée écologique (pp. 536–540). Presses universitaires de France. Petrella, R. (2000). Education, victim of five traps. About the knowledge society. Fides. Raynal, F., & Rieunier, A. (1997/2012). Pédagogie, dictionnaire des concepts clés. Apprentissage, formation, psychologie cognitive (p. 189). ESF éditeur. Robinson, K. (2001/2011). Out of our minds. Learning to be creative. Wiley. Sigaut, O. (2009). La construction de la nature dans les manuels scolaires et parascolaires: entre affirmation de nouvelles valeurs éthiques et naissance des proto-politiques publiques éducatives. In M.-C. Zélem, O. Blanchard, & D. Lecomte (Eds.), Actes du colloque “L’éducation au développement durable de l’école au campus”, Albi, 25–27 juin 2008 (pp. 175–190). L’Harmattan. Sterling, S. (2010–2011). Transformative learning and sustainability: Sketching the conceptual ground. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 5, 17–33. Tapp, R. B. (Ed.). (2002). Ecohumanism. Prometheus Books.

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Tavignot, P. (2015). Synthèses. La question du changement dans le monde scolaire. In J.-M. Lange (Ed.), Actes du colloque « Les Éducations à » : un (des) levier(s) de transformation du système éducatif, 17–19 November 2014 (pp. 479–487). Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Values, Ideas, Identities and Competences (CIVIIC). Theys, J. (2016). The white elephant syndrome. Project, 2016/1(350), 67–75. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). (2017). Education for sustainable development goals. Learning objectives. Varcher, P. (2011). L’éducation en vue du développement durable : une filiation à assumer, des défis à affronter. In : Audigier, F., Fink, N., Freudiger, N. & Haeberli, P. (dir.), L’éducation en vue du développement durable : sciences sociales et élèves en débat (Vol. 130, pp. 25–46). : Cahiers de la Section des Sciences de l’Éducation, University of Geneva. Varcher, P. (2012). The ‘quality of education’. An analysis of the current debate and a prospective reflection for the “post-2015” period. Swiss Commission for UNESCO/Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Varcher, P. (2013). Mais où l’EDD se cache-t-elle dans le PER ? Prismes, 18, 12–14. Vygotski, L. (1934/1997). Pensée et langage. La Dispute. Weber, M. (1958). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Scribner.

Daniel Curnier Doctor in environmental sciences, high school teacher and independent researcher. He is particularly interested in ecological economics, agro-ecology, eco-psychology, the links between sustainability and education, as well as citizen movements claiming to be part of the ecological transition.

Will We Ever Be Indigenous? Permaculture and Depth Education Christian Arnsperger

Abstract Faced with the unprecedented challenges of the Anthropocene, we need to “retrace our origins” – in other words, we need to try and understand what we have allowed to be lost over at least three centuries of separation from our own naturalness, from our own roots. We are in the Holocene, which we should rename the Agrocene: the age of agriculture, which has massively consecrated the mastery of nature, its cycles and seasons, and the domestication of wild species, as the sui generis way of being human. To speak, think and, above all, live “outside mastery” simply seems absurd to us. This chapter mobilizes the notions of indigeneity and “indigeniosity” to find a new foundation for the letting-go of mastery, arguing for the radical fruitfulness of indigenous ways of living and thinking when it comes to rethinking an approach to education for our present time. Along the way, permaculture – rooted in a vision of the world and the human being that is both ancestral and contemporary – emerges very naturally as the key paradigm for carrying out such a profound transformation. Keywords Anthropocene · Permaculture · Education from the depths · Indigeneity

1 Indigeneity and the Re-crossing of Our Origins I do not have space here to offer the reader a deconstruction of the various ‘post’ clichés that haunt current thinking when it comes to ecology and cultural change. This is probably for the best, for what is most urgent today is to understand that it is the impact of the past on the present that we need to deconstruct, so as to thoroughly demystify the present age and to make what the French thinker Maurice Bellet once called a re-crossing of origins (Bellet, 2004) This is by no means a primitivist viewpoint – insofar as this word should be taken as a pejorative, which it seems to have become (is it a coincidence?) since the beginning of the seventeenth century

C. Arnsperger (✉) University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_11

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Enlightenment (see in particular Marouby, 1990). Today, with a certain humility that does not suit our egos that are fixated on ‘progress’, we need to understand what we have allowed to be lost over the course of at least three centuries where we have come to be separated from our own nature, from our own roots in a cosmos that is neither natural nor human, in an environment or ecumene that will clearly last, but from which our choice of words removes almost all of the power to inspire us, to orientate us, to limit us. In this chapter I will reflect on the question that I personally find the most painful, but also the most promising: that of indigeneity (Jackson, 1993) and the role it might play in an education in the Anthropocene that is something other than learning to master things well. Educating in the Anthropocene means, first and foremost, educating within a cultural world where repeated (and increasingly indiscriminate) linguistic references to a “geological epoch of the Human” tend to implicitly or explicitly reinforce the vision of a world in which the taming of nature has become an inevitable prospect (Weber & Kurt, 2015). The object of education must be to challenge this. In fact, the debate on post-nature and the supposed inevitability of its fate is not yet over. Artificiality and taming, such as ‘biomimicry’ or ‘nature in the city’, are only commonplace in an ideological and cultural context where the following questions would be pertinent: What is ‘good’ artificiality? What is ‘good’ taming? How do we educate for ‘good’ domestication?

2 ‘Indigeneity’ and the Mastery of Agricultural Letting-Go These questions are traps if asked in isolation. They become part of the problem by eclipsing other questions that are equally important, such as ‘Alongside taming, what place do we give to wilding and rewilding’?’ ‘How can we imagine an education in wildness?’ ‘How can we ultimately let go of the very conviction that it is up to us humans to decide what is the “right mix” of domestication and wildness?’ Let us just pause for a moment to realize how helpless and slightly annoyed we feel when faced with such questions. They stir something deep inside us that we were sure the modern Enlightenment had buried once and for all, and (so we were told) for our own good. And here they resurface because of deep uncertainties about what the Anthropocene can mean and about its very existence, at a time when the most radical question for us is now that of letting go of mastery and mastery of letting go. These issues are at the heart of what, with the German philosopher Andreas Weber (2018), I would call indigeneity, to use a term which is used by thinkers from ancestral cultures. The American Indian thinker Daniel Wildcat speaks in this regard of indigenuity (Wildcat, 2009), in order to emphasize the fact that all human culture consists of composing with a place, letting a place compose with us, and developing the ingenuity appropriate to this reciprocal composition. Great Western thinkers steeped in non-Western references, such as Augustin Berque, are venturing in what seems a similar direction, but it is to be feared that the dominant techno-educational establishment, whose stock in trade is that of solutions for good domestication, has

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little patience with such thoughts of non-domestication and de-mastery. In the prevailing educational paradigm, students themselves are demanding environmental ‘solutions’. In order to optimize their future employability, they demand to be taught the techniques, the forms of corporate ownership, the ways of producing and consuming, the ways of investing that will ‘solve’ the ecological problems by mastering mastery. Let us never forget that we are in the Holocene, which, following the very pertinent analyses of the American thinker Daniel Quinn,1 we should probably rename the Agrocene: the age of agriculture that depends on the mastery of nature, its cycles and its seasons, and the domestication of wild species, as the sui generis way of being human. To speak, think and above all live and feel “‘out of control’ seems to us simply absurd – worse, irresponsible and anti-humanist. For we have, quite mistakenly, come to confuse skilful cunning, mischievous cooperation or metis (Kingsley, 2004) with rigid mastery, disrespectful control or techne. According to Quinn, hunter-gatherer cultures, whom he calls leavers because they ‘leave’ the flow of life in the hands of the gods, wove a synergetic tapestry with the rest of life that was certainly marked by skill and efficiency (cunning and metis are needed to hunt well and also to avoid being hunted by predators), but free of the one-way hierarchies of mastery and techne that characterize agrocene cultures – as well as their deities who are magical beings, separated from nature. Leaver cultures are endowed, each in its own way, with the ‘indigenuity’ that Daniel Wildcat attributes to indigenous ways of being and thinking.

3 Sedentary Without Knowing How to Be Indigenous A people is not necessarily ‘indigenous’ just because it has settled forever in a single territory – after all, most hunter-gatherers are nomadic or semi-nomadic. Sedentariness and the population explosion have made us forget that true indigeneity presents us with a choice: either we collectively leave a territory whose ecological niche we have exhausted, before it becomes uninhabitable for the non-human species in existence today or for a future human group; or we remain on this land indefinitely, but we must then incorporate ourselves into it to such an extent that none of our actions or even our cultural values can ever jeopardize its perpetual regeneration. True sedentariness (which is fundamentally different from bouts of nomadism interspersed with long destructive periods of being in one place) is a constant game of tricking oneself and the rest of living things. The Agrocene has reinforced this challenge to the point of making it almost impossible: having become literally prisoners of the land that supplies their needs, humans have exhausted the fertility

1

Daniel Quinn has published three philosophical narratives which, in the form of Socratic dialogues, offer a rigorous reflection on the destructive dynamics of the holo/agro/stage; cf. Quinn (1992, 1996, 1997).

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of the soil, further depleted it though the extractive industries to the point of destroying the whole ecumene, and finally created an artificial nomadism called ‘globalization’, under the illusion of which they are now sedentary prisoners of the entire planet, which they cannot leave but which they are not capable of regenerating. The agrarian trap, of which industrial (and urban) destruction and then globalist imprisonment are just two of the most recent manifestations, has made us sedentary all over the planet, with ‘nowhere else’ to migrate to, while radically dispossessing us of the capacities for cunning and adaptation that enable most indigenous sedentary peoples to live in a place for a long time, or to leave it before having destroyed it. In this way, by being sedentary without knowing how to be indigenous, modern day humans have become the most destructive species the Earth has ever sheltered. It is the global demographic pressure, made possible by a technological capacity to source everything from anywhere (provided one has the material and financial means, an ambition which every new human born into the world rightly pursues), that makes this extractive and commercial sedentariness the core of our mode of being in the world. We, whom Quinn calls takers because we ‘take’ into our own hands (albeit very awkwardly and with many inequalities and injustices) the destiny that the leavers place in the hands of the gods – the forces of life and the capacities for adaptation and cooperation of all living species, including humans.2 This poses an important question – indeed, it could not be more radical – for education and also for democratic governance. How can we reintroduce as quickly and fundamentally as possible key elements of the leaver worldview (abandonment of the human/non-human dualism, consideration of living beings as having a voice, acceptance of human non-domination and renunciation of the human right to life and death over the non-human) into our educational curricula, both at the school level and in higher and further education? As is often the case, this issue is inseparable from the way in which our societies envision enabling young and older citizens, either during or following their studies, to put into practice the vision of the world they are perceiving. The basic institutions of our democracies will have to change completely if we want to experience and pursue leaver ways of life in a world that is still overwhelmingly taker.

4 Faced with the Mastery of Mastery, the Mastery of Leaving... I don’t want the deliberately polemical nature of this essay and its defence of leaver attitudes to lead to the impression that I reject any idea of design, strategy or preparation for the future as such. On the contrary, a leaver mode of being in the

2 For a detailed discussion of Quinn’s crucial distinction between “leavers” and “takers”, see the three books cited above, as well as Quinn (2007).

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world requires a great deal of design, a great deal of strategy, a great deal of guile and cunning, but in ways that are extremely different from those of the currently dominant taker mode of being. At the beginning of this chapter I said that the most urgent thing today is not preparing for the future. This is because I fear that if we ignore the arguments I have just presented, which run deeply counter to some of our most tenacious modern convictions, ‘preparing for the future’ would simply mean going back for another round of technological modernization and extraction of resources and making ‘efficient’ use of them for an ever-growing population increasingly devoid of ‘indigenuity’. We would then simply be preparing for a slightly different future, characterized, thanks to efficiency, recycling, etc., by a few more years or decades of ‘business as usual’. It is also to avoid coming to this common conclusion, one that is to my mind inadequate and ultimately fatal, that I criticized biomimicry above – not because clever and intelligent imitation of intelligence in nature (Narby, 2006) is not eminently part of ‘indigenuity’, quite the opposite (and indigenous and ancestral cultures are fundamentally biomimetic, as shown by their ability to understand living beings, in their medicine, for example), but because the current trend of reclaiming biomimicry for the purposes of creating new industrial products, generating growth and consumption in an attempt to extend the Western way of life to all those who currently feed it with their cheap labour and resources, seems to me to be yet another manifestation of the taker obsession with ‘progress’ and ‘growth’. The same is true of my criticism of agriculture, which some will no doubt have felt to be far too one-sided, and even untenable. This is indeed the case if we stick to the letter of what I appear to say in my rejection of the Agrocene. In fact, as Quinn himself insists many times in his work, what is at issue is not agriculture as such. Indeed many indigenous peoples have been and still are partly agrarian, and occasional agriculture is what, in addition to hunting and gathering, allows them to be momentarily sedentary.3 Many Amazonian peoples, for example, practise light and minimal forms of planting and herding. What is at issue is what Quinn calls ‘totalitarian agriculture’, which so monopolizes and regiments labour that it excludes other modes of getting food, and rapidly engenders an agrarian culture that is very often patriarchal, hierarchical, militaristic, sedentary and urban, to which we must add monotheistic and dominating. Once all sources of food (plants and animals) are under agrarian control, culture and society are completely transformed. It is this method of agriculture, standing for the whole taker metaphysics of the mastery and control of the biosphere, and therefore the precursor of industrialization, that is at issue. This agriculture, which, not surprisingly, has become industrialized and agro-industrialized, knows only one way to deal with the shortcomings of mastery: an even greater mastery of mastery, an even more intensive control of 3

This is not to be confused with their sedentarization. In fact, historically, and particularly as a result of the internal and external colonialism practiced by the dominant taker nations, the vast majority of indigenous peoples have been “sedentarized” by the de facto obligation they were put under to become agrarian and to give up (particularly through the frequent confiscation of their territories) hunting and gathering.

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control. It is hardly surprising that, faced with calls for ‘degrowth’ or ‘letting be’, the proponents of this ramped-up mastery and control raise the spectre of total control or even totalitarianism – the very spectre that is inherent in the position they are trying to defend and maintain. Totalitarian agriculture, Quinn rightly explains, has led to unprecedented gains in efficiency and hence population increases, but it has also ushered in one of the most arduous, gruelling, warlike and violent kinds of life in human history. It is not planting and ranching per se that are at fault, but their exclusivity and the immense population explosion, in parallel with an unprecedented explosion of ecological destructiveness,4 that their totalitarianism has brought about. What we need today is not a rejection of agriculture but a complete re-education of agriculture – towards an agriculture of letting go, of non-control, and therefore an agriculture that is no longer complicit in a perpetual demographic and economic headlong rush. I know this is a highly controversial subject, but when Gary Snyder insists that there will never be an Anthropocene, he doesn’t mean that humans will never have a disproportionate impact on the Earth-system (they already have, and have for far too long); he is saying that this impact will not be sustainable because it will not be tenable, and that wanting to ‘feed the planet’ so that an indefinite number of human organisms can all, together with their non-human animals, consume as much as the average Swiss or American is an absurd and murderous goal. It sacrifices the numerical multiplication of humans to their vitality, to their right to a wild and thrilling existence – without even mentioning the analogous right of every non-human animal. Will we be able in time to develop visions of education that will give us a glimpse of a possible departure from this mortifying vision of control? I think one of the most telling symptoms of this quest in our contemporary societies today is the immense, and some would say unreasonable, fervour for permaculture. As Daniel Quinn pointed out in one of the last articles he wrote before his death, permaculture represents the most credible global movement capable of reinvigorating our taker societies with leaver values and cosmologies. Let us not forget what is at stake: we must finally learn indigeneity and ‘indigenuity’, that cunning and paradoxical art of being sedentary while depriving ourselves of the totalitarian control that has pushed modern civilization beyond the limits of destructiveness. The significant contribution of permaculture is that, through the vision of the world it proposes, it embodies a letting-go of mastery while proposing, thanks to updated elements of ancestral wisdom traditions (in agriculture but also well beyond), a mastery of letting-go.

The depletion of natural resources, the depletion of human “resources”, the race for technology to make up for them, and the explosion of chemical pollutants are following identical paths in agriculture and in industry – and what is at issue in both cases is neither their cultivation of plants (or even the raising of animals) per se, nor their manufacturing of objects per se, but their totalitarianism leading to their gigantism. 4

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5 Permaculture as ‘Depth Education’ I don’t wish this essay to be yet another rehash of the increasingly commercialized and sanitized clichés about raised-bed farming, permaculture for city balconies, etc. Permaculture, as first envisioned by its principal founder, Bill Mollison (1988) and carried forward by the best current researchers (Chakroun & Linder, 2018), is a genuine grassroots movement that is both political and metaphysical,5 one of the most radical of our age. As seen through the ‘Permaculture Flower’ – a popular image grouping the multiple extensions of the permaculture paradigm in very different domains such as local complementary currencies, ecovillages, phytomedicine, animist spiritualities, low-tech, governance by sociocracy or holacracy, voluntary sobriety, cities in transition, car-free society, etc. (see Fig. 1) – permaculture is about inaugurating a human existence that, while accepting its mortal finitude and its need to eat animal and/or vegetable living beings, allows non-human nature to be, and deliberately disengages itself from the tendency to grasp and extract that is inherent in the taker mentality. It is important not to confine permaculture to its usual focus on method. It should be understood as equally a philosophy, with some roots in the Australian aboriginal depths and others in the ancestral cosmology of Japanese ‘natural agriculture’ or ‘wild farming’, updated recently by Masanobu Fukuoka (Fukuoka, 1978; Korn, 2015). Permaculture design is first and foremost simply a philosophy of cultural design. The twelve permaculture design principles proposed by Holmgren – among which “1. Observe and interact”, “4. “Apply self-regulation and accept feedback”, 9. “Use small and slow solutions”, “11. “Use edges and value the marginal” and 12. “Creatively use and respond to change” – all outline the contours of a new civilization, but the novelty lies in the re-crossing of our origins I mentioned at the beginning: old practices are taken seriously, put back into play, updated. According to Quinn, “our culture has been at war with the world for 10,000 years, snatching food from it as if it were an enemy to be conquered, dismembered, enslaved, poisoned, killed with labour and discarded. Permaculture, by contrast, is at peace with the world on every level; it is not just another way of growing food, it is a whole and complete culture, different from and healthier than ours” (Quinn, 2014: 148). In this sense, permaculture corresponds very precisely to what Daniel Christian Wahl (2016) has recently called the restorative, reconciliatory and regenerative stages of cultural design. These three stages concern humans (i) positively intervening in nature, then (ii) reintegrating themselves as integral parts into nature, and finally (iii) designing participation and appropriate design as nature (Wahl, 2016: 46) – all of which clearly reconnects with a leaver mentality. Increasingly prominent educational institutions, such as Schumacher College, Gaia Education, and the

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Leila Chakroun’s current research (rooted in Berque’s approach to milieux) on permaculture as a “heterotopia” and as a factor in the emergence of a new “sense of self” among permaculturists, is precisely along these lines. See Chakroun & Linder (2018) and also Glanzberg (1999).

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Fig. 1 The Permaculture Flower

Global Ecovillage Network, are developing university-level training programmes6 that encourage students to distance themselves from the taker presuppositions that govern our existences and that structure our value systems and the very nature of our aspirations. Such an educational shift truly represents what I would like to call depth education: permaculture as a holistic paradigm engages the very depths of our (sometimes unconscious, often deliberate) obsession with mastery... and the mastery of mastery. As evidenced by the writings of the founding fathers, as well as by the actual practices of farmers involved in permaculture existence, integrating with non-human living things in this way requires the letting-go of mastery and the mastery of letting-go that I have spoken of. This existential attitude, which is so old as to be new, was embodied by the great Japanese precursor Masanobu Fukuoka, who, in his ‘natural farming’, advocates doing only what is strictly required to But often – and this is symptomatic – they are not officially recognized as diplomas or as equivalent to a “real” university education.

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accompany natural metabolisms (and thus moving away from the idea that humans need to intervene or react) after having put a garden or a field in a suitable condition to grow things by itself, according to its own inclinations. What occurs here is an important gesture of putting our human destiny into the hands of ‘wildness’; and at this juncture, Miles Olson points out the interesting fact that the word wild comes from the word will (Olson, 2012): each being in the world possesses a will of its own, a conatus in the Spinozian sense, an efficient tendency that marks its specific wildness and embodies what domestication seeks to master. Of course, no agrarian culture, even permaculture, can (by definition) do without domestication, but permaculture offers a framework and practices that go beyond simply planting and growing crops – a paradoxical but fruitful form of wild domestication. It is hardly surprising that the defenders of our taker civilization feel rather panicked by this change, a panic which they of course disguise by accusing it of being unrealistic, or even by showing contempt for it and seeking by all means to discredit it as an absurd ‘step backwards’. Presenting as a regression what is in fact a progression that passes through a re-crossing of origins is one of the key strategies of any defence of the status quo. Permaculture wildness and its anchoring in real ‘indigenuity’ make this shift the most important, and perhaps the only, chance for a transmodern civilization that takes seriously the leaver mode of inhabiting the Earth, and thus the real indigeneity that can arise from a re-crossing of humanity’s indigenous origins. If we moderns have never been indigenous, we can finally become so. The taker mode has no future – this is what Gary Snyder means when he says there will never be an Anthropocene; or rather, the future he envisions for the Earth under a taker mode is not worth living for. Educating ‘for’ the Anthropocene, or even ‘in’ the Anthropocene, makes little sense, it seems to me, except on this level. To conclude, I would like to mention two major methodological focal points that need to be put forward in depth education: • Politically, permaculture wildness suggests a return to the commons of planting and hunting: there must be a move away from private, and therefore authoritarian, control of food sources. Elinor Ostrom’s work on the moral management of the commons7 gives a lead as to how to counteract the horrors all too frequently depicted by defenders of the status quo in the form of the alleged ‘tragedy of the commons’. • On the epistemological level, our science and humanities curricula would benefit from being restructured around what I would call a methodological animism that sees all life as having a ‘will’ and all living beings each having their specific wildness, which permaculture is best able to combine with a low-grade domestication governed by a respect for the plural, for the marginal and for non-imposed synergy. Such lines of educational reform seem to me to have a prominent place in our quest for a real education ‘in’ the Anthropocene, which is not simply education ‘for’ the Anthropocene and which takes Gary Snyder’s paradoxical assertion seriously when he says: “There will never be an Anthropocene”.

Cf. Wall (2017), as well as Princen’s (2005) ethnographic research on the ‘indigenous’ management of the commons.

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References Bellet, M. (2004). Le paradoxe infini: Pour une science de l’humain (p. 2004). Desclée de Brouwer. Butler, T. (2014). Lives not our own. In G. Wuerthner, E. Crist, & T. Butler (Eds.), Keeping the wild: Against the domestication of earth (pp. ix–xv). Island Press. Chakroun, L., & Linder, D. (2018). La permaculture comme foyer d’émergence d’un soi mésologique. In M. Augendre, J.-P. Llored, & Y. Nussaume (Eds.), La mésologie, un autre paradigme pour l’Anthropocène? (pp. 283–291). Hermann. Fukuoka, M. (1978). The one straw revolution: An introduction to natural farming. New York Review Books. Glanzberg, J. (1999). Permaculture as a way of seeing and acting in the world. In G. Cajete (Ed.), A people’s ecology: An exploration in sustainable living (pp. 225–242). Clear Light Publishing. Jackson, W. (1993). Becoming native to this place. University of Kentucky Press. Kingsley, P. (2004). Reality. Golden Sufi Center. Korn, L. (2015). One-straw revolutionary: The philosophy and work of Masanobu Fukuoka. Chelsea Green. Marouby, C. (1990). Utopie et primitivisme: Essai sur l’imaginaire de l’âge classique. Éditions du Seuil. Mollison, B. (1988). Permaculture: A designer’s manual. Tagari Publications. Narby, J. (2006). Intelligence in nature: An inquiry into knowledge. Tarcher/Putnam. Olson, M. (2012). Unlearn, rewild: Earth skills, ideas and inspiration for the future primitive. New Society Publishers. Princen, T. (2005). The logic of sufficiency. MIT Press. Quinn, D. (1992). Ishmael. Bantam. Quinn, D. (1996). The story of B. Bantam. Quinn, D. (1997). My Ishmael. Bantam. Quinn, D. (2007). If they give you lined paper, write sideways (p. 2007). Steerforth Press. Quinn, D. (2014). Afterword. In D. Quinn (Ed.), The invisibility of success and other investigations. Self-Publishing. Wahl, D. C. (2016). Designing regenerative cultures. Triachy Press. Wall, D. (2017). Elinor Ostrom’s rules for radicals: Cooperative alternatives beyond markets and states. Pluto Press. Weber, A. (2018). Indigenialität. Nicolai Publishing & Intelligence. Weber, A., & Kurt, H. (2015). Lebendigkeit sei! Für eine Politik des Lebens. Ein Manifest für das Anthropozän. Klein Jasedow: thinkOya. Wildcat, D. (2009). Red alert! Saving the planet with indigenous knowledge. Fulcrum.

Christian Arnsperger Professor at the University of Lausanne. Author of Critique de l’existence capitaliste – Pour une éthique existentielle de l’économie (2005, Cerf); Ethique de l’existence postcapitaliste – Pour un militantisme existentiel (Cerf, 2009); Critical political economy: complexity, rationality, and the logic of post-orthodox pluralism (Routledge, 2008) L’homme économique et le sens de la vie (Textuel, 2011); L’existence écologique: critique existentielle de la croissance et anthropologie de la post-croissance (Seuil, 2023) .

Transformation in the Anthropocene: Mimesis, Rituals, Gestures Christoph Wulf

Abstract Regardless of whether the Anthropocene is conceived as an event, period, or age, humans shape the planet and the consequences of their actions and behavior determine the fate of life on the planet. In view of this situation, fundamental transformations are required in all areas of society. For their realization, the education of the next generation is of considerable importance. It is necessary to familiarize the young people with the drastic changes in the system of the earth, in nature, in the world and in human self-image. Despite similar objectives, the educational processes for sustainable development vary considerably from region to region and culture to culture. In all cases, good practice-oriented mimetic processes and changes in the rituals and gestures of everyday life play an important role. The following explanations make clear how and why mimetic, ritual and gestural processes are important for education and social transformation oriented towards sustainability and global citizenship. Keywords Mimesis · Rituals · Gesture · Performativity · Transformation

1 The Anthropocene as a Challenge Since industrialization, and especially since the discovery and use of atomic energy, we have reached a point on our planet where humanity encounters mainly itself and the effects of its actions. The developments of climate change, the destruction of the environment and the disastrous use of force, which started in the past, have repercussions on the present and threaten the future, triggering in many people a fear of the future (Gil & Wulf, 2015; Wulf, 2022). For a long time, the negative developments of modern times, which are still barely correctable, have been ignored and then downplayed until now when it has been recognized that they have become unavoidable. Among them are the excessive exploitation of about half of the earth’s

C. Wulf (✉) Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_12

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surface, deforestation, the change in the nitrogen cycle, the increase of the greenhouse effect, the enlargement of the hole in the ozone layer and the continuous pollution and destruction of the environment. Between 1900 and 2000, the overall biomass of mammals living in the countryside increased to the point where carbon production soared. Measured in megatons of carbon, there have been the following increases (Smil, 2011, 619): • For human beings, it increased from 13 megatons in 1900 to 55 megatons in 2000; • In domestic animals, from 35 megatons in 1900 to 120 megatons in 2000; • In cattle, from 23 megatons in 1900 to 80 megatons in 2000; • In country wildlife, there was a decrease from 10 megatons in 1900 to 5 megatons in 2000 (Smil, 2011, 619). According to a UN report, 12% of bird species, 23% of mammals, 25% of conifers, 32% of amphibians are under threat by the millennium change (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005, 35). According to the WWF the population of marine animals has decreased by 49% between 1970 and 2012 (Tanzer et al., 2015, 16). Added to this is the destructive influence on the planet from: • waste from electronic devices such as televisions, smartphones, computers etc. • soil modified by human treatment • the materials produced from about 100,000 chemical syntheses, of which plastic products are a very large part • the many metals produced by humans, such as zinc, titanium and aluminium; • interventions in the structure of life through gene manipulation and culture • disruption of global atmospheric cycles, deposition in lakes, rivers and seas • man-made disasters, such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. The commandment of the Christian God that man should “subdue” the Earth has been fulfilled in the Anthropocene. Nevertheless, the unintended and unforeseen negative (secondary) effects of this development are so great that they threaten to destroy the very basis of life on our planet.

2 The Objectives of Sustainable Development from the Point of View of Education (Bildung) In view of this situation, it is up to human beings to confront the conditions of this planet and the problems of its sustainability. In autumn 2015, the community of states of the United Nations adopted in New York 17 goals for sustainable development. The goals of this 2030 agenda can be assigned to five areas: to people (poverty and hunger, life in dignity, equality, a healthy environment); to the planet (the protection of the ecological system), to peace (inclusion, peace, justice); to welfare (the welfare ensured to all people through economic and technical

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development); to cooperation. The realization of these tasks must be inspired by the principles of universality, indivisibility, inclusion, accountability, partnership (Michelsen, 2017). The development of the 2030 Agenda is an expression of the global concern that humanity feels for its future. Education and training is one of the most important areas for achieving this agenda. Inclusive, equal, high quality and lifelong education and training is the goal in this area. The programme is based on a humanistic vision of education and development that is grounded in human rights and dignity, social justice, security, cultural diversity and shared responsibility. Education and culture are understood as a common good and a fundamental human right. Their realization is necessary in order to guarantee peace, human achievement and sustainable development (UNESCO, 2015). This declaration and programme of action recommends the development of a 12-year public school system. Compulsory schooling with free, good quality education should comprise 9 years and include primary and secondary education. In addition, it is recommended that free compulsory pre-school education lasting at least 1 year be established, and that vocational training and adult literacy be strengthened. Education and training must be inclusive and equal in rights. Inclusive means not only the inclusion of children with disabilities, but also the rejection and combating of all forms of exclusion and marginalization. Equal rights of access and treatment within the education system are necessary consequences. In particular, there is still much to be done for girls and women in many parts of the world. In order to promote the knowledge and creativity of children and young people, it will be necessary to improve the quality of education and training, through better teacher training for example. Finally, the promotion of education and culture should not be limited to the school system. It is necessary to develop vocational training and lifelong learning and to promote both informal and non-formal training. 4–6% of GDP or 15–20% of public expenditure should be allocated to training. To achieve these goals, an additional investment of about $20 billion per year is needed.

3 Sustainability as a “Grand Narrative” This vision of inclusive, equal, high quality, lifelong education and cultural training, with its effects on the formation of the subject, serves as a frame of reference for education in the societies of the world, a framework that has been adopted by the community of states. Compared to previous eras, this development constitutes progress. This is true even where it is known how difficult it is to achieve progress by setting such broad objectives. As necessary as it is to orient education and training in relation to these goals, we must take account of Lyotard’s objection to the “grand narratives” of humanity (Lyotard, 1986). According to Lyotard, there is a danger that these narratives serve to mask the fact that it is scarcely possible to realize the visions and narratives they convey. Nevertheless, their very existence provides a degree of

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“satisfaction”. They suggest that we have already improved something by the mere fact that they let us know what to do and what to aim for. This criticism deserves consideration. It becomes plausible when we analyse the concrete strategies of the action programme and realise that the differences between points of view are almost insurmountable. The visionary nature of this statement runs the risk of concealing this difficulty, which becomes more important when we try to implement any of these reforms in practice. It is one thing to develop a vision and a programme of action, but quite another to implement them, for this brings with it a wide range of new difficulties in respect of which the visionary elements lose their fascination. These goals recall the great utopias of European history: for example Plato’s Republic, Tommasio Campanella’s City of the Sun, Thomas More’s Utopia (Plato, 1997; Campanella, 2009; More, 1967). Utopias and utopian thinking exert a great fascination in the field of culture. They show what would be possible if utopias could be realized and if people were not as they actually are. Utopias tend to restrict the diversity of human life in favour of a presumed good social order. But the goal of sustainable development is more diverse than any utopia conceived to date. Achieving its goals requires fundamental transformation of many social areas, including the culture of sustainability, which needs to be given central importance.

4 Sustainable Development as a Task of Mimetic, Ritual and Gestural Learning How can we learn sustainable behaviour that does justice to the criteria of openness, freedom and subjectivity? Among the many possibilities, we will outline three forms of learning: mimetic learning, ritual learning and gestural learning, through which sustainability can be incorporated into human action and behaviour.

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Mimetic Learning

When we look at behaving in a way that is focussed on sustainability, mimetic processes play a central role in the communication and transmission of behavioural patterns to the next generation. Children and adolescents learn sustainable behaviour largely by imitating the behaviour of their parents and siblings in everyday life. As a result of these mimetic processes, children and adolescents acquire behaviours, practices, and habits that resemble those of the older generation. If, for example, we want to teach the younger generation new, more nature-friendly behaviour with regard to plastic waste, non-renewable resources and electrical energy, it is necessary that the older generation practises and develops this type of behaviour itself so that the next generation can take it over.

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Cultural learning is essentially mimetic learning. Therefore, a culture of sustainability can only develop through mimetic processes. Mimetic learning has to do with staging and bodily representations as well as actions that can be understood both as autonomous and in how they relate to other actions, other things or other contexts. Acts such as mental calculations, decisions, reflexive or routine behaviours, as well as those that are done only once and or that break with the rules are not mimetic. Where people relate to an existing cultural practice whose objectives are sustainable development, and carry out a similar cultural or social practice themselves, a mimetic relationship is created between the two. This is the case when people behave in a sustainable way, when they act according to a model or when they express a representation of sustainability. In all these cases, there are no actions that simply copy others. In mimetic learning, there is no simple imitation that follows a model image exactly. Practices performed mimetically create something new (Wulf, 2002, 2013a, b). In contrast to mimetic adaptation processes, in which one simply adapts to already existing conditions, mimetic processes create a difference and also a similarity to other situations, to other ways of behaving or other people to whom they relate. By making themselves similar to previously experienced ways of behaving, cultural situations and worlds, individuals acquire the ability to orient themselves in a particular social field. By participating in the practices of other people that promote sustainable development, people behaving in a mimetic way expand their lives and create possibilities for action and experience in a sustainable context. In doing so, receptivity and activity overlap. In this process, the pre-determined world interferes with the subjectivity of people who relate to it. People create a new situation, behaviour or practices from what they have experienced in the past and make them their own as they repeat them. Only by analysing the practices and situations of the past do they forge their own subjectivity. The confrontation with the outside world and the self-formation of the subject take place in the same process. The outer world and the inner world are continually harmonising with each other, and they can only be experienced as part of this reciprocal relationship.. Similarities and correspondences are created between the inner and outer worlds. The subjects make themselves similar to the external world and transform themselves through this process. In this transformation a change in their perception of the outside and their perception of themselves takes place (Wulf, 2016, Wulf et al., 2018; Brougère & Wulf, 2018; Gebauer & Wulf, 1995, 1998). Mimetic processes lead us to perceive similarities and create correspondences between the social and cultural environment. Through this humans experience meaning. Producing similarities is one of the oldest human capacities. They can be seen between two faces or appear in processes in which one person acts mimetically in relation to the actions of another. But one can also discover forms of similarities between living beings and inert things. The human body serves to produce and express similarities. Dance and language are obvious examples. Neither in dance nor in language is there any difference between representation and expression or between representation and behaviour. They are two aspects that do not become

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separate from each other in the mimetic process but intertwine in one and the same act. In the processes of mimetic learning, previous social behaviour related to sustainability is re-enacted. This way of relating is not a result of theoretical thinking but is brought about in an aisthetic way, with the help of the senses. Compared to the initial social or cultural action, the re-enaction differs from it in that it does not directly challenge the latter, nor does it transform it, but rather recreates it. The mimetic action aims to perform and represent itself, and in this execution its own aesthetic qualities are reproduced. Mimetic processes relate to actual social or cultural worlds that are present either in reality or in the imagination. The dynamic nature of actions that promote sustainability is due to the fact that the knowledge required for their implementation or execution is practical knowledge. Only practical knowledge can contribute to a change in behaviour that will lead to sustainable developments in society. As practical knowledge, it is less subject to rational control than analytical knowledge. Sustainable practical knowledge is not a reflective, self-conscious knowledge (Kraus et al., 2021). It can become so but only in connection with conflicts in which the resulting actions require justification. When a sustainable practice is not questioned, the practical knowledge underlying it, remains semi-conscious. Like the knowledge of the habitus, it comprises images, schemas and forms of action employed during the bodily staging of practical action without us giving them any further thought. We simply “know” them and we use them during the staging of social practices. The residual instincts, the hiatus between stimulus and reaction, and also ‘excentricity’ are prerequisites for the extraordinary plasticity of human subjectivity and the possibilities this gives us for acquiring practical knowledge. The practical knowledge acquired in mimetic processes also involvesthe body. If one is in control of one’s body, a controlled and disciplined knowledge is formed which - stored in our muscle memory - leads to forms of action that are rooted in this. This practical knowledge contributes to the actions that must be taken in a culture of sustainability. In mimetic processes, we see actions and attitudes that relate to sustainability but that are not yet themselves sustainable actions as such. Herein lies the innovative potential of mimetic actions that promote both sustainability and individuality. This practical knowledge of sustainable actions is corporeal knowledge. It is largely constituted in face-to-face situations, it includes imaginary components, it cannot be reduced to intentionality, it includes a surplus of meaning and it is to be seen in how we carry out sustainable actions in everyday life.

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Rituals

It is not only mimetic processes that are important if we wish people to behave in a way that will correct the negative developments of the Anthropocene. Rituals and ritual arrangements are equally important. Here, people perform actions and show sustainable behaviour, for example in their dealings with consumer goods. Above

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all, it is the ritual repetition of sustainable behaviour that leads to it being incorporated into the body. The Berlin Group’s research on rituals and gestures has already shown the many possibilities that rituals convey for the development of sustainable actions and behaviours (Wulf et al., 2001, 2004a, b, 2007, 2010, 2011). According to these studies, it is above all repetition (Resina & Wulf, 2019), performativity (Wulf & Zirfas, 2007) and the social character of ritual processes (Wulf & Zirfas, 2004) that lead to the development of sustainable actions in subjects and communities. Their task is to use education to reduce behaviours that have destructive effects on nature and the environment. New rituals need to be developed and implemented in everyday life that contribute to the protection of nature and the environment and promote sustainable development. In particular, it is important to replace excessive forms of consumption with sustainable behaviour. It is difficult to develop new rituals that aim at sustainability. But without them it is almost impossible to transform everyday behaviour into sustainable behaviour and action. For this reason, I mention below some points that show why rituals that relate to sustainability are indispensable if individuals and communities are to develop sustainable behaviour. 1. The creation of sustainable behaviour and sustainable communities is not possible without corresponding rituals. Communities that behave sustainably are formed and transformed through ritual processes and practices. Through performative processes, rituals create and stabilize sustainable communities through the symbolic content of how they communicate and interact. Through these performative processes they are able to transform unsustainable behaviour into sustainable behaviour. To do this, they develop a homogeneous process that is relatively safe. The techniques and practices employed serve to rehearse the achievements, to direct and control them, to supervise the necessary means and resources, and to recognise their effects and the disturbances they cause. 2. Rituals are necessary if structures of sustainability are to emerge. As communicative models of action, rituals provide the rules, conventions and correctness that promote sustainability. These result in an awareness and practical knowledge geared towards the values of the sustainable. Rituals are bodily practices that can determine, channel and form modes of experience, thought and memory in relation to sustainability 3. Rituals support individuals and communities to build an identity that considers sustainability important. When rituals create a spatial, temporal and social transition towards a sustainable reality, we speak of transitional rituals. This refers in particular to the function of rituals to produce identifications, to make transformations possible and thus to create conditions for sustainability. The transformative and innovative potential of rituals lies in their performative and symbolic character and in their creative aspect, which can produce sustainable forms of life. 4. Rituals promote memories and projections of sustainable behaviour. They help individuals and communities to constantly reassure themselves and serve to support a system that is centred on sustainability, to confirm their transformative

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potential of repetition. They help to keep them on track. They aim to stage the continuity of sustainable behaviour, the process character of sustainable communities and their orientation towards the future and new projects. Rituals are a synthesis of social memory and a future project that relates to sustainability in common. They promote the memories that are related to sustainability and make people forget others. Through their repetitive structure, they signal sustainability; their staging produces and controls those aspects of their memory that relate to sustainability. Rituals relating to sustainability play an important role in the work of transforming the destructive conditions of the Anthropocene. When Anthropocene communities experience crises, rituals are necessary to help them maintain their identity and focus on sustainability. Rituals are a relatively secure and homogeneous process. In the course of these rituals, communities experience integration and segregation that are related to the transition to forms of sustainability. The rituals serve to bring about a communicative understanding of the Anthropocene situation, which breaks down the framework of everyday life and is felt as a threat. Rituals have an important magical force for the development of sustainable behaviour. Sustainable behaviour is learned through ritual practices of sustainability. In many cases, these practices cannot yet be acted out in ‘real life’ circumstances, nor can they be performed, dominated or controlled. In these situations, rituals can be seen as uncomplex ways of behaving through which participants relate to their outside world. Participants draw a line separating them from the outside, they erase distances, and believe that the performative and mimetic forces deployed in the ritual can have a magical force which affects but the inner and outer worlds. Rituals are systems of action that deal with difference. By ensuring the integration of an interactive framework of action focused on sustainability, they aim to bring about the integration and cultural formation of the community. The concept of the performative community does not refer to a pre-existing natural or organic unity, nor to an emotional affinity, a symbolic meaning system or a collective value, focused on the sustainable, but to ritual patterns of interaction. It is the staging of the ritual that is central to how communities that desire sustainability are formed and how they assert and transform themselves. Other important factors are how participants use their bodies and words as well as spatial and temporal frameworks and forms of mimetic recreation. Thus a performative community is created that aims to realize sustainability as a ritualized space of experience and action that is characterized by its playful, mimetic and staged elements (Wulf et al., 2004a, b). Rituals initiate mimetic processes. Ritual action does not simply copy rituals performed in the past. Each ritual performance is based on a new staging that leads to a modification of previous ritual actions. Between previous, present and subsequent ritual actions there is a mimetic relationship in which new actions are created that relate back to past actions. Since mimetic behaviour is not simply copying, it can result in the creation of sustainability by mimetically relating to

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unsustainable behaviour, without which and this sustainable behaviour could not have come about. 9. Rituals as generators of practical knowledge. In order to be able to act in a sustainable way, one needs less theoretical than practical knowledge. The latter enables people to act sustainably in various fields, institutions and organisations. Much of the knowledge needed for this is acquired through ritual processes. With the help of rituals, a ritualistic action can be staged and performed that is one geared towards sustainability and which is needed in new contexts. Mimetic acquisition leads to practical knowledge that can be transferred to other situations in which sustainable behaviour is needed. The ritual nature of this acquisition means that mimetically acquired practical knowledge is practised, developed and transformed through repetition. The practical knowledge incorporated in this way is essential for the achievement of sustainability. 10. Rituals produce individuals and their subjectivity as necessary conditions for the realization of sustainability. For a long time rituality and individuality were understood as opposites. Only recently has it become clear that this is not the case in modern societies. The sustainable action of individuals is the result of practical knowledge, the development of which requires ritual arrangements. This does not mean that tensions and conflicts between communities and individuals could be avoided in the context of sustainability; the difference between the two is far too great. A sustainable individual life is only possible when individuals are empowered to act in communities that are oriented towards sustainability.

4.3

Gestures

Gestures, too, play an important role in the development of a culture of sustainability and in the training processes this requires. They are meaningful movements of the body that express an intentionality relating to sustainability (Wulf & Fischer-Lichte, 2010; Wulf et al., 2011). Such gestures can lead, for example, to a boycott of certain forms of food or packaging as part of a protest ritual. They are then part of the ritual action of the protest. Like rituals, they convey a meaning that relates to sustainability and is enacted and represented by an individual or group. Gestures contribute to the formation of a community focussed on sustainability. They create a kind of common behaviour and produce a cultural environment. In this way, they contribute to the identity of a group, to the identification with its objectives and to the development of a culture of sustainability. Gestures refer to something and, in so doing, they are showy; they are conspicuous and playful. They are closely linked to the production and passing on of sustainable behaviour. In everyday life, they can play a role, for example, in the acceptance or rejection of certain products. In an educational context and in relation to the development of sustainability, gestures that show something are of particular importance (Paragrana, 2018; Wulf et al., 2011).

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Gestures are often a concentration of ritual meaning that is expressed in a conspicuous gestural action. By concentrating complex relationships into one moment, they reduce differences and are completely unambiguous. This results in us being able to remember well the complexity that is in the gestures in concentrated form. Because of their performative clarity they can initiate future actions that are related to their meaning. They deploy a magical force that has an effect on people’s imaginations and inspires new actions. The clarity and demonstrative nature of the gestures make them particularly suitable for initiating mimetic processes. They are imitated creatively and encourage similar actions and behaviours. Because of their performative nature they have less affinity with verbal and reflective knowledge and more with practical knowledge. Without practical knowledge, there can be no transformation of individuals, communities and societies towards sustainability. Practical knowledge is collective knowledge and subjective, cultural knowledge based on the body. This is of primary significance for the development of sustainable societies.

5 Outlook In view of the many destructive conditions of the Anthropocene and the desperate attempts of the world community to control them, to prevent their spread and to reduce their impact as much as possible, the creation of sustainable development is essential (Wallenhorst & Wulf, 2022, 2023). Mimetic, ritual and gestural processes play an important role in achieving this goal. In relation to sustainability, learning processes are cognitive and performative; they are based on the body and the senses and have an aesthetic dimension. By means of their mimetic, ritual and gestural character, they aim at the development and incorporation of sustainable behaviour. To achieve this, it must be anchored in a culture of sustainability that embraces individuals, communities and societies (Kraus & Wulf, 2022).

References Brougère, G., & Wulf, C. (Eds.). (2018). À la rencontre de l’autre. Lieux, corps, sens dans les échanges scolaires. Téraèdre. Campanella, T. (2009). The city of the sun. Wilder Publications. Gebauer, G., & Wulf, C. (1995). Mimesis. Culture – Art – Society. University of California Press. Gebauer, G., & Wulf, C. (1998). Spiel, Ritual, Geste. Mimetisches Handeln in der sozialen Welt. Rowohlt. Gil, I. C., & Wulf, C. (Eds.). (2015). Hazardous future. Disaster, representation and the assessment of risk. De Gruyter. Kraus, A., & Wulf, C. (Eds.). (2022). The Palgrave handbook of embodiment and learning. Palgrave Macmillan. Kraus, A., Budde, J., Hietzge, M., & Wulf, C. (Eds.). (2021). Handbuch Schweigendes Wissen (2nd ed.). Juventa Beltz.

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Lyotard, J.-F. (1986). The postmodern condition. A report on knowledge. Manchester University Press. Michelsen, G. (Ed.). (2017). Die Deutsche Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie. Wegweiser für eine Politik der Nachhaltigkeit. Hessische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. (2005). Ecosystems and human well-being: Synthesis. Island Press. https://www.millenniumassessment.org/documents/document.356.aspx.pdf More, T. (1967). Utopia (Trans. J. P. Dolan). In J. J. Greene & J. P. Dolan (Eds.), The essential thomas more. New American Library. Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie. (2018). Rhythmus/Balance/ Resonanz, Vol. 27, Issue 1. Ed. G. Brandstetter, M. Buchholz, A. Hamburger, C. Wulf. Plato. (1997). The Republic (Trans. D. Lee, 2nd ed.). Penguin. Resina, J. R., & Wulf, C. (Eds.). (2019). Repetition, recurrence, returns. Lexington Books/Roman & Littlefield. Smil, V. (2011). Harvesting the biosphere: The human impact. Population and Development Review, 37(4), 613–636. Tanzer, J., Phua, C., Barney, J., Lawrence, A., Gonzales, A., Gamblin, P., & Roxburgh, T. (2015). Living planet oceans report. Species, habitats and human well-being. WWF International. UNESCO. (2015). Rethinking education. Towards a global common good. UNESCO. Wallenhorst, N. (2022). Qui sauvera la planète? Actes Sud. Wallenhorst, N., & Wulf, C. (2022). Humains. Un dictionnaire d’anthropologie prospective. Vrin. Wallenhorst, N., & Wulf, C. (2023). Handbook of the anthropocene. Springer-Nature. Wulf, C. (2002). Traité d’anthropologie historique. Philosophies, Histoires, Cultures. L’Harmattan. Wulf, C. (2013a). Anthropology. A continental perspective. The Chicago University Press. Wulf, C. (2013b). Das Rätsel des Humanen. Wilhelm Fink. Wulf, C. (Ed.). (2016). Exploring alterity in a globalized world. Routledge. Wulf, C. (2022). Education as human knowledge in the anthropocene. An anthropological perspective. Routledge. Wulf, C., & Fischer-Lichte, E. (Eds.). (2010). Gesten. Inszenierung, Aufführung, Praxis. Wilhelm Fink. Wulf, C., & Zirfas, J. (Eds.). (2004). Die Kultur des Rituals. Inszenierungen, Praktiken, Symbole. Wilhelm Fink. Wulf, C., & Zirfas, J. (Eds.). (2007). Pädagogik des Performativen. Beltz. Wulf, C., Althans, B., Audehm, K., Bausch, C., Göhlich, M., Sting, S., Tervooren, A., WagnerWilli, M., & Zirfas, J. (2001). Das Soziale als Ritual. performativen Bedeutung von Gemeinschaft. Leske und Budrich. Wulf, C., Althans, B., Audehm, K., Bausch, C., Göhlich, M., Sting, S., Tervooren, A., WagnerWilli, M., & Zirfas, J. (2004a). Penser les Pratiques sociales comme rituels. L’Harmattan. Wulf, C., Althans, B., Audehm, K., Bausch, C., Göhlich, M., Sting, S., Tervooren, A., WagnerWilli, M., & Zirfas, J. (2004b). Bildung im Ritual. Schule, Familie, Jugend, Medien. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Wulf, C., Althans, B., Blaschke, G., Ferrin, N., Göhlich, M., Jörissen, B., Mattig, R., NentwigGesemann, I., Schinkel, S., Tervooren, A., Wagner-Willi, M., & Zirfas, J. (2007). Lernkulturen im Umbruch. Rituelle Praktiken in Schule, Medien, Familie und Jugend. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Wulf, C., Althans, B., Audehm, K., Bausch, C., Göhlich, M., Sting, S., Tervooren, A., WagnerWilli, M., & Zirfas, J. (2010). Ritual, and identity. The staging and performing of rituals in the lives of young people. Tufnell Press. Wulf, C., Althans, B., Audehm, K., Blaschke, G., Ferrin, N., Kellermann, I., Mattig, R., & Schinkel, S. (2011). Die Geste in Erziehung, Bildung und Sozialisation: Ethnographische Feldstudien. V erlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Wulf, C., et al. (2018). Begegnung mit dem Anderen: Orte, Körper und Sinne im Schüleraustausch. Waxmann.

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Christoph Wulf is Professor of Anthropology and Education and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Historical Anthropology, the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB, 1999–2012) “Cultures of Performance,” the Cluster of Excellence (2007–2012) “Languages of Emotion,” and the Graduate School “InterArts” (2006–2015) at the Freie Universität Berlin. He was founding secretary of the “Education Commission” of the “International Peace Research Association”, president of the “Network Educational Science Amsterdam”, initiator and chairman of the Commission on Pedagogical Anthropology of the German Society for Educational Science. His books have been translated into 20 languages. For his research in anthropology and anthropology of education, he received the title “professor honoris causa” from the University of Bucharest. The German Society of Educational Science awarded him honorary membership. He is Vice-President of the German Commission for UNESCO. Major research areas: historical and cultural anthropology, educational anthropology, imagination, intercultural communication, mimesis, aesthetics, epistemology, Anthropocene. Research stays and invited professorships have included the following locations, among others: Stanford, Tokyo, Kyoto, Beijing, Shanghai, Mysore, Delhi, Paris, Lille, Modena, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Copenhagen, London, Vienna, Rome, Basel, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Sao Paulo.

What Does the Anthropocene Hold for Citizenship? Nathanaël Wallenhorst

Abstract This paper takes note of the anthropic alteration of the Earth system and asks what kind of citizenship is required when we consider education in the Anthropocene. We look first at Daniel Curnier’s thesis on the learning of a citizenship that is critical of neoliberalism in schools and then explore Christian Arnsperger’s concept of the ‘existential citizen’. We conclude with a presentation of the work of the German philosopher and biologist Andreas Weber with his thesis of life as a sharing between humans and non-humans, leading to the idea of convivial citizenship, which is characterized by a coexistence with those other earthlings, the non-humans. Keywords Anthropocene · Political education · Citizenship · Existential citizenship Debate continues as to exactly when it happened, but there is no longer any doubt that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch, caused by human activities. We are still in the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, so the characteristics that distinguish the new age are yet to be fully appreciated. Our aim now must be to allow the Anthropocene to stabilise into a state that still supports human life and society all over the globe. The further into the Anthropocene we go, the hotter the climate becomes, the more densely the atmosphere is polluted with CO2 and methane, the higher the levels of acidity in our oceans, and the more of the planet’s surface is underwater. As a result, there is less dry land available, the ecumene (i.e. the portion of Earth’s surface which is habitable for humans) is shrinking, biodiversity is greatly diminished, and heatwaves are increasingly intense and increasingly frequent, causing certain regions to become uninhabitable for humans. In a 2012 study in the journal Nature, “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere”, American biologist Anthony Barnosky et al. show the percentage of ecosystems that have been directly altered by human action, and the possibility that when a certain percentage is reached, the biosphere will switch from one state to N. Wallenhorst (✉) UCO – Catholic University of the West, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_13

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another. This threshold is estimated at between 50% and 90%, in view of the observed changes of state in local ecosystems. There is much uncertainty as to the type of state to which Earth’s biosphere could shift, but Barnosky and his colleagues feel we are very likely to see such a shift (Barnosky et al., 2012, p. 55). In 2012, 43% of Earth’s ecosystems had already been significantly affected, and in their view, it is ‘highly plausible’ that we will see another global-scale change within the coming decades or centuries (Ibid., p. 57). Six years later, in an article published in 2018 in the American journal PNAS, “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene”, the American chemist Will Steffen and 15 other scientists (including Barnosky) point out how close the Earth system is to tipping point (Steffen et al., 2018). Rather than direct ecosystem transformation, the reference indicator they use for their prospective study is the global temperature increase. They postulate that the threshold lies at around a + 2 °C increase in surface temperature with respect to pre-industrial levels (at the end of the nineteenth century). To date, the levels have increased by 1.1 °C, and in view of climate inertia, were we to halt greenhouse gas emissions completely and immediately, we would still see it increase to around +1.6 °C within the next few decades.1 If the threshold of +2 °C is reached, a chain reaction is likely to be triggered. Thus, independently of any further GHG emissions from human activities, the planet’s temperature will probably stabilise at around +5 °C. This would make it impossible for human society to exist, and much of the globe would become uninhabitable for humanity. Broadly speaking, then, we have only around +0.4 °C room for manoeuvre before turning our planet into ‘hothouse Earth’. The dawn of the Anthropocene brings the survival of the human adventure into sudden and immediate jeopardy. This emergency renders any long-term educative action nearly impossible – it is immediate action that is needed. However, it is crucial to continue to think – particularly about political education (amongst other things, the Anthropocene is indicative of the decline of politics, with neoliberal economic approaches becoming widespread – Wallenhorst, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023; Wallenhorst & Wulf, 2023). Therefore, this article examines what type of citizenship should be used as the basis for political education in the Anthropocene. It takes the form of a theoretical journey, exploring a number of recent publications on the subject. The first section offers a critical discussion of Daniel Curnier’s 2017 thesis in environmental sciences: What role for the school in the ecological transition? Esquisse d’une sociologie politique, environnementale et prospective du curriculum prescrit (Curnier, 2017). Curnier’s work leads us on to a discussion of Christian Arnsperger’s proposed concept: the existential citizen. In turn, Arnsperger’s thinking feeds into a discussion of Andreas Weber’s idea that existence should be shared between humans and nonhumans. Continuing in this vein, we propose convivial citizenship, characterised by coexistence with other terrestrial beings (nonhumans), which can be used as a reference when thinking about political education in the Anthropocene.

1

One example of climate inertia is that of glaciers and permafrost, which take many years to melt and release the CO2 and methane they contain, but those substances then contribute to global warming, fuelling the problem.

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1 The Purpose of Citizenship: To Ensure Society’s Continued Survival Daniel Curnier is among a group of thinkers who view education as the way to bring about sustainable development, on the basis of strong sustainability. In his writing, he frequently refers explicitly to the Anthropocene. Curnier’s work brings together the Anthropocene, prospective educative thinking and the concept of politics.2 As such a combination is particularly rare, it is helpful to begin with a critical discussion of this writer’s thinking. Curnier’s research is highly stimulating. He proposes knowledge that needs to be conveyed (in today’s Anthropocenic context) to facilitate the transition to a society founded on strong sustainability, by modelling a prescribed curriculum (Ibid., p. 189).3 Curnier’s prospective work is deliberately radical.4 He has a high regard for the potential of school to bring about the transition necessary to ensure the human adventure survives the Anthropocene: one of the functions of school is to ensure society’s future, by imparting knowledge to the students.

1.1

Citizenship That Is Critical of the School System’s Neoliberalism

Curnier identifies the failure of sustainable development as dating from the ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio in June 1992, because of the subsequent decades, which have been marked by neoliberal ideology (e.g. financialization of the economy, and maximisation of individual interests). Thus, we now urgently need to break with the neoliberal paradigm, “A transformation of the school system that contributes to the ecological transition can only take place if there is a major paradigm shift in society as a whole” (Ibid., p. 388). Curnier’s educative ideas, founded on a model of long-term sustainability, break away from the usual concept of sustainable

2

Curnier believes that one of the functions of school is to facilitate the emergence of societies founded on the strong sustainability, by instilling a sense of citizenship in the students. In his view, strong sustainability ‘requires us to observe and respect the ecological limits on the development of human activities’ (p. 192). Therefore, the adoption of strong sustainability ‘necessitates the rejection of productivism, whether unrestrained or structured’ (p. 192). 3 The prescribed curriculum is defined as the educational policies ‘which set out the framework and structures in which the pupil’s experience will take place, throughout their schooling’ (p. 20). If these set policies are apt, the schooling system will truly be able to contribute to the ecological transition. The prescribed curriculum is distinct from the real curriculum, which is the way in which educators actually implement the prescribed curriculum on the ground. 4 Curnier puts forward the bases for an alternative education system. In his prospective work to define such a system, he identifies the modern paradigm – from which we need to break in order to survive – as having the following set of characteristics: ‘rationalism, reductionism, anthropocentrism, the ideology of progress, the specialisation of knowledge, the subject-object duality, and the domination of technology’ (p. 112).

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development, which he says legitimises the modern paradigm, marked by “a Cartesian view of the world, and the productivist concept of development” (Ibid., p. 97). Curnier categorically states that the role of school “will be to contribute to a paradigm shift” (Ibid., p. 125). Here, we see the importance of the political purpose of education: it is a political tool to guide choices and effect change in society. Before addressing content (the prescribed curriculum), Curnier discusses the attitudes and behaviours needed to instil long-term sustainability in our society. His thinking about the curriculum includes political and existential reasoning that goes beyond conventional disciplinary knowledge. Curnier’s approach stands in opposition to an educational paradigm whose purpose is to shape individuals who are ready to join the job market – preparing students for integration into the contemporary neoliberal market. In this regard, Curnier shows how the guidelines published by institutions like the European Commission, or the OECD, establish educational approaches “explicitly driven by the need for global competitiveness, rather than the need to instil responsible citizenship” (Ibid., p. 276). Here, we see how problematic it is to refer to the OECD’s PISA study. The OECD’s assessment practices, which focus on the utilitarian aspect of schooling such as competition between countries, greatly discourage schools from contributing to the ecological transition. Education systems are standardised on the basis of skills acquired by a certain age (15, in this case), to optimise job prospects in a global employment market. However, this narrow focus is problematic from the standpoint of developing other skills that will prove crucial in the Anthropocene, which do not fit with the contemporary neoliberal job market. These guiding principles partly contradict those of UNESCO.5

1.2

Citizenship as the Raison d’être of Education

Curnier discusses four concepts that are central in the definition of school content: the Anthropocene, development, the biosphere and socio-economic systems. He is also careful to put forward potential solutions on how to live in the Anthropocene. However, in addition the knowledge that needs to be transmitted Curnier’s work discusses our relationship with knowledge (which is primarily political) through the learning of citizenship: “Learning to think critically, with complex, prospective and transformative reasoning, ethics and the transition to action, are integral parts of the civic and humanist concept of education, rather than tools to specifically deal with

5

Curnier demonstrates that axiological neutrality in education systems is a fallacy. On the question of whether it is possible to have conceptions of education that are axiologically non-neutral, Curnier states that it is ‘illusory that education can be politically neutral. Nevertheless, an educational project can respect religious, moral and political convictions, provided its political intentions are acknowledged, and civic debate replaces the imposition of a predefined agenda’ (pp. 291–292).

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issues of sustainability” (Ibid., p 217).6 For Curnier, education for citizenship “should be the goal of all disciplines” (Ibid., p. 295). Thus, he expounds a political view of education for sustainable development, far beyond simply learning standard eco-friendly actions – his vision is subversive, and would help bring about a new way of coexisting in the world.7 As Curnier states, “the challenges presented by the Anthropocene necessitate collective political mobilisation, far beyond encouraging individuals to change their behaviour” (Ibid., p. 353). It must be the goal of education in the Anthropocene to spark such collective political mobilisation. The education system must guard against “the individualist view which is at the root of the personal fulfilment”. Such personal fulfilment is offered by personal development activities, allowing people to find individual happiness more effectively. This self-focus is anchored “in certain pedagogical discourses centred on the students’ needs” (Ibid., p. 353). This component is undeniably present and regularly recurs in education to instil a sense of citizenship. We agree particularly strongly with Curnier’s educative views – for example, his statement that “Acting on attitudes with a view to instilling citizenship is not simply a matter of forming minds and expanding the use of eco-friendly actions at school. It is a matter of enabling students to understand the world, and the challenges facing humanity in the 21st Century. It is also a question of encouraging them to reflect on the ethical and philosophical issues surrounding humanity’s self-imposed plight, and developing their capacity to make decisions and take action” (Ibid., p. 162). He continues, “There are two opposing views in defining education for sustainable development. The first is that a student needs to be ‘formatted’ to become a docile social agent. The second is that the acquisition of skills such as critical awareness and the ability to put ideas into action will produce socially and ecologically responsible citizen-actors.” At its heart, Curnier’s approach is reformative and transformative, with a certain degree of radicality. The educational shift that he proposes breaks away from the conformative approaches that are usually developed, as he is critical of discipline-specific knowledge, and proposes that education should be based on interdisciplinary knowledge, to help effect a societal transformation. For Curnier, a portion of the knowledge passed down in school should relate to topical social matters – i.e. matters that excite public debate, and have a bearing on politics. Such topical social matters are opposed to the typical decontextualised, segmented and discipline-specific knowledge typically transmitted at school.

6

His view of knowledge is interesting: knowledge is not viewed as the students’ only means of relating to the world, but also includes the experience-based, emotional and cultural aspects (p. 203). 7 Curnier indicates the need to identify ‘consensual measures’ (p. 27). Such a quest for consensus in the Anthropocene is particularly interesting. Indeed, there is a burning temptation, which can be seen in Earth System researchers, to decide for others in the name of scientific expertise, which negates any political component. Whilst the search for consensus is important, it is particularly pressing because without a certain degree of radicality in the organisation of contemporary societies, it seems difficult to believe that humanity will have a future. Indeed, the actors must have the knowledge that will be structurally crucial in the long term.

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Extending the Proposed Paradigmatic Shifts to Bring About an Anthropological One

Curnier’s concept of education has a political aim, to build societies based on foundations other than the drive to maximise individual interests. He proposes to rethink the schooling system as a whole – i.e. “the material and organisational conditions in which learning at school takes place” (Ibid., p. 237) (doing away with strict disciplinary boundaries, reshaping school hours, outdoor learning, layout of the classroom furniture in class, and so forth). It is worth discussing Curnier’s work in some depth. Whilst political, his approach is still founded on the dominant developmental paradigm in educational sciences, focusing on the subject of the learning (the individual pupil), rather than on other people, or a sense of group membership (referred to as between us). He does not go as far as he could in replacing that developmental paradigm with a different one, on which to base an education system for the Anthropocene. Thus, we feel Curnier’s ideas ought to be critically extended. In today’s world, plainly, it is no longer citizenship which is at the heart of participation in society, but consumption (Latouche, 2010; Hétier, 2021, 2022). The logic of maximising profits irrespective of the environmental context is self-destructive, and ultimately threatens the very existence of the human adventure. The challenge we face in the Anthropocene is to conceive of a human race that is transformed and reshaped. The anthropological challenges which the Anthropocene presents can only be solved by a far-reaching anthropological shift – continuing in the same vein as Didier Moreau’s idea of education as metamorphosis (Moreau, 2011). While Curnier briefly touches on the idea of such a shift, he does not go into depth. The next part of this paper continues the discussion of what type of citizenship should be used as a reference when designing education in the Anthropocene, beginning with an examination of Christian Arnsperger’s idea of the ‘existential citizen’. The goal is to bring about the anthropological recasting that is so clearly needed.

2 Learning Convivial Citizenship: Between Humans and Nonhumans 2.1

Responsibility and Existential Citizenship

For political scientist François Gemenne, one of the main issues we face in this new geological era is cosmopolitanism, in that the concept of the Anthropocene generates the “false impression of humanity as a unified whole, in which all human beings are, in equal measure, responsible for the changes occurring on our planet”. However, inequality is growing in the Anthropocene, and “the actions of some are responsible

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for the suffering of others” (Gemenne, 2015, pp. 238–239)8 Gemenne is joined in his observation of the scale of the inequalities in the Anthropocene by physicist JeanPaul Deléage, who feels it is crucial, in this context, to rethink the social contract that exists in societies – for example, between northern and southern-hemisphere countries. In addition, the dawning of the Anthropocene leads us to think beyond the usual growth-based paradigm (which may or may not have a ‘green’ aspect to it) because that system of values carries Promethean greed and “disregard for the quality of human relationships” which have led us to our present peril (Sinai, 2013). We need to learn a new relational habitus is marked by responsibility and hospitality. Cosmopolitics is a central ingredient in a form of citizenship for the Anthropocene – cosmopolitics in both senses: kindness and hospitality to all (humans and nonhumans alike) and the physio-biological (cosmic) materiality of practising politics. In the view of Robyn Eckersley and similar thinkers, only by judicious practice of citizenship will a democratic society be able to survive the Anthropocene (Eckersley, 2017, p. 11). On the other hand, political scientist and educator Pierre Statius believes that the profound crisis that democracy is currently facing is anthropological in origin, and must be addressed through making changes in education (Statius, 2017, pp. 10–11). To instil us with a new form of responsibility for the world which has been sorely lacking in recent centuries (and especially in recent decades), which have catalysed the onset of the Anthropocene, Franco-German economist Christian Arnsperger calls for a new type of citizen – a so-called existential citizen,9 to “restructure the principles of life (Arnsperger, 2011, p. 75). Arnsperger emphasises the importance of existential learning in civic life; such learning is the foundation on which to build a viable future for generations to come. The practices of reflexivity and awareness of one’s own motivations – which Arnsperger calls anthropological experimentation – are viewed as cornerstones of political engagement. Arnsperger envisages an alternative type of citizen, based on a new way of experiencing the human condition, far removed from the experience in capitalist societies (Ibid., p. 79). Existential citizens are driven to break away from capitalist alienation – they are missionaries and militants. Fundamentally, Arnsperger’s ideas shift where growth takes place – instead of economic growth in businesses, he champions growth within each human existence. To make this transition, a twofold condition is necessary – there must be “enough goods and services, but not too many or too much” (Ibid., p. 86). Frugality, i.e. etymologically, ‘full and fruitful use of resources’, is a necessity. Of

The term ‘Anthropocene’ may give the illusion of a unified anthropos, which is responsible for the planet’s entry into this new geological epoch. This is absolutely not the case, though, and it is possible to assign different levels of blame to certain figures and certain socio-historical periods. For this reason, the term ‘Capitalocene’ has been proposed – it highlights the significance of capitalism and its tycoons in this new geological era (notably, that of thermo-industrial capitalism). 9 The term ‘existential citizen’ carries the risk of excessive essentialisation, so we prefer to work with the notion of existential citizenship. However, it is the notion of convivial citizenship that we adopt, because it is open to nonhumans as well as humans. 8

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course, this must not be confused with the depletion and ultimately exhaustion of natural resources (anthropological or environmental). The notion of an existential citizen is connected to that of Bildung, as Arnsperger himself notes: ‘we must promote the idea of human existence as experience, as a search for oneself, as a form of freedom’ (Ibid., p. 76). In the work of Arnsperger, who is of German and French extraction, we see the characteristic traits of the idea of value that is Bildung, experiencing one’s existence. Existence is thought of as the predominant experience upon which to base one’s actions. However, existential citizenship has a very different purpose than experiencing one’s existence and finding one’s own freedom. The notional connection of the existential universe that Bildung represents with the more political facet of citizenship allows us to accept political responsibility for the world and understand the intimate nature of our existence. The notion of existential citizenship is particularly fertile, in that it includes the existential component in the context of political education, and helps organise it in relation to our participation in the world. However, even with the notion of existential citizenship, we are still operating within an anthropocentric frame of reference. How can we move past the dualism of nature and society that is so present in today’s world and is a notable cause of the Anthropocene? It might be sensible to extend some of the paradigmatic shifts that are necessary in the Anthropocene, to apply to education as well. What about the earth, and its nonhuman inhabitants? Can they have a ‘voice’, and enjoy rights? Is it possible to share conviviality with nonhumans? Indeed, one of the main questions raised by the Anthropocene is how humans and nonhumans can coexist on the planet we share. Nonhumans cannot bear any responsibility for the future of the biosphere, and it would be difficult to perceive them as ‘citizens’, as such. Notwithstanding, it is crucial that they be considered true political subjects who have inviolable rights – extending Michel Serres’ Natural Contract (Serres, 2018), Valérie Cabanes’ Homo natura (2017) or Corine Pelluchon’s Animal Manifesto (Pelluchon, 2017) From this perspective, the kind of citizenship that humans need to learn may be a kind of ‘convivial citizenship’ marked by political co-existence with the whole of the living world.10

2.2

Convivial Citizenship Rooted in the Vitality of the Biosphere

The idea of convivial citizenship (based on Arnsperger’s existential citizenship) involves taking on board certain constraints and limits: the limits of the biosphere, the finitude of individual existence, the finitude of our Promethean model of

10

Here, the idea of conviviality refers to Ivan Illich’s school of thought, and convivialism, as developed in the Second Convivialist Manifesto (2020), which champions conviviality as opposed to hubris.

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civilisation, and the finitude of the human adventure itself. To acknowledge these constraints flies in the face of the limitless emancipation that the modern era promises – not least, the emancipation of the human adventure from the constraints of its environment. Here, educating in the Anthropocene is partly linked to the existential anthropological roots that are discussed, for example, by Hartmut Rosa in Resonance (2018) or The Uncontrollability of the World (Rosa, 2020), David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), or Andreas Weber in Sein und Teilen (Being and Sharing) (Weber, 2017). The latter, for example, writes: ‘The image of reality that we learn at school tells us nothing of the feeling of being alive, of why relationships are important and how they can be constructed – relationships with oneself, with others, and with all nonhumans, such as animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, stones and rivers, the air, the sea’ (Ibid., p. 19).11 Andreas Weber can be considered a critical theorist, given his references to Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, and the similarity of his thinking to that of Hartmut Rosa. His work, which has been translated into English, is particularly interesting because he assesses the most prominent literature about the Anthropocene in his anthropological and political thinking. In his philosophical stance, Weber holds that the Anthropocene may represent an opportunity for the human adventure. His anthropology for the Anthropocene is conveyed by poetic language and a confident attitude, but it never descends into a techno-modernist paradigm.12 The Anthropocene presents us with the opportunity to integrate more closely with the fabric of the living world, and grow in solidarity, both with humans and with nonhumans.13 By doing so, we can become more alive, more cooperative, more sensitive, poetic and creative. Weber sets out the anthropological shift which the Anthropocene requires of us. Solidarity with all beings is fundamentally important, “In order to become human, we must become animal, stone, water, and yes: the world”. (Weber, 2016, p. 137)14 The Anthropocene can help us break away from the sterile dichotomy between nature and culture. How can we learn to modify our representations and strengthen our sense of belonging to nature, which is one of the key points if we are to survive the Anthropocene? The creativity and vitality of the living world are at the heart of Weber’s anthropological views. He attaches a great deal of strength and importance to the paradigm of life, viewed through the lens of interaction with all living things. Life is possible only through sharing. Weber’s approach is philosophical and based on biological knowledge, as shown by the following quote: “The sea, the ocean, with all 11 Das Bild der Wirklichkeit, welches in der Schule gelernt wird, sagt nichts darüber, wie es sich anfühlt, am Leben zu sein, warum Beziehungen wichtig sind und wie man si aufbauen kann Beziehungen zu mir selbst, zu anderen Menschen, und zu allen, die keine Menschen sind, zu Tieren, Pflanzen, Pilzen, Bakterien, Steinen und Flüssen, der Luft, dem Meer’ (Weber, 2017, 19). 12 Here, it is opposed to the Great Anthropocene, as spoken of in the Ecomodernist manifesto (2015). 13 In that sense, his thinking is particularly valuable and interesting in devising political anthropology for education - hope is a necessary condition for thought in education. 14 ‘Um Mensch zu sein, müssen wir Tier werden, Stein, Wasser, ja, Welt.’ (Weber, 2016, 137).

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its creatures great and small, which regulates the climate and supplies our continents with water, is the very incarnation of a being that can only exist through sharing” (2017, p. 16)15 Bodies are viewed not ‘in and of themselves’, but on the basis of their interaction with the environment or their surroundings. Weber’s anthropology includes the idea of an omnipresent whole. Individuals are viewed as members of a coherent whole: “Like it or not: through our metabolism, which requires us to draw nourishment from other living beings, and incorporate the atmosphere into ourselves, making it a part of us, we are a part of the biosphere as a whole” (Ibid., p. 27).16 Not only do we incorporate the elements which surround us and make them part of ourselves; on the basis of that very simple observation of bio-physical exchanges, Weber goes further: we in turn become part of the environment: “The tissue which we create at a time ‘t’will become air again the next moment; then it will become part of a plant or a shell, and one day, become sediments of limestone, rocks or sand. From the standpoint of matter, this world is one large body; individuals merely represent momentary outgrowths therefrom” (Ibid. p. 27).17 This leads Weber to state that “our singular capabilities are an almost-meaningless variation of the whole” (Ibid. p. 27).18 We are at once far less and far more than the homo oeconomicus of the modern age, who is an individual with the capacity to grow by pre-emption. Weber’s anthropological concepts are opposed to homo oeconomicus but he does not discount the feelings and sensations that make homo oeconomicus cocoon himself and seek to maximize his own interests. Rather, Weber demonstrates that, fundamentally, we are not the isolated actors we think we are. Sharing is a crucial part of what makes us who we are; rather than diminishing us, it enriches us. Without exchange with our environment, no life is possible.19 “We are both: the world and individuals” (Weber, 2017, p. 29)20

15 ‘Das Meer, der Ozean mit seinen kleinsten und gigantischen Wesen, der das Klima reguliert und die Kontinente mit Wasser versorgt, ist der Inbegriff eines Seins, das sich nur im Teilen realisiert.’ (Weber, 2017, 16). 16 ‘Ob es uns gefällt oder nicht: durch unseren Stoffwechsel, der verlangt, dass wir uns von anderen Lebewesen ernährend und die Atmosphäre in uns hineinziehen und in uns verwandeln, haben wir an der Totalität der Biosphäre teil’ 17 Aber der Stoff, aus dem wir in diesem Moment bestehen, wird im nächsten wieder Luft sein, dann Körper einer Pflanze oder Schale einer Muschel, und eines Tages Kalksediment, Felsen, Sand. Stofflich ist diese Welt ein Großer Körper, von dem die Einzelnen momentane Auswüchse darstellen.’ 18 Unsere besonderen Fähigkeiten sind nur eine sehr unbedeutende Variation des Ganzen.’ 19 The idea of viewing the body social from a different perspective on the living world, and involving the body politic in that interaction with the biosphere, has much in common with recently published works, quoted frequently herein. We find it in the work of French biologists Pablo Servigne and Gauthier Chapelle, “Mutual Aid: The Other Law of the Jungle (Polity Press, 2021), or in Le vivant comme modèle: la voie du biomimétisme by Gauthier Chapelle and Michèle DecoustParis, Albin Michel, 2015). This same approach was employed by French anthropologist Flahault in 2018 in L’homme, une espèce déboussolée - Anthropologie générale à l’écologie (Paris, Fayard). This dynamic was also addressed, from a philosophical standpoint and without reference to biology as a science, by Corine Pelluchon in Nourishment (Paris, Seuil, 2015). 20 ‘Wir sind beides, Welt und Einzelner.’

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Also, in Weber’s thinking, though we are the world, it remains an external entity too, with which we can form a relationship, heed it and understand it. In Weber’s view, it is crucial to find, or to rediscover, a relationship with nonhuman entities: “We must preserve nature because we are, ourselves, nature; and also because nature is everything that we are not”‘(Ibid., p. 29).21 Weber, whilst preserving the singularity and uniqueness of the subject, shifts the boundary between the subject and the world, by showing that the subject is also the world. He weaves his theoretical framework around relationships of sharing that he describes as necessary and vital, between the world and the subject, through the acts of respiration and nutrition. Respiration, for example, is viewed as an act of sharing with the biosphere – ecosystems are based purely on exchanges. The process of becoming what we are is a bio-geo-physical process of interaction with our environment: “Parasol pines and blue-green algae in the water in an aquarium are also part of the vast alchemy of existence (Dasein) that permeates our being as our chests rise and fall. They absorb what they are, their external space, their environment, and transform it into something that is integrally themselves. It is a completely natural, physical process” (Ibid., p. 26).22 In his opposition to capitalism, Weber notably builds his arguments upon a poetic component, or the metaphysics of the link with nature. Elsewhere, Weber takes the ‘self’ into consideration, whilst breaking away from the individualism of homo oeconomicus and the logic of predominance attached to the emancipation of the individual. In that sense, his work is fertile in the development of a concept of citizenship for the Anthropocene. The characteristic feature of Weber’s work is that it opens up the philosophy of intersubjectivity to nonhumans, highlighting the fact that sharing conviviality with nonhumans is an important part of rediscovering our own humanity.

References Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous. Pantheon. Arnsperger, C. (2011). L’homme économique et le sens de la vie. Textuel. Barnosky, A. D., et al. (2012). Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere. Nature, 486, 52–58. Curnier, D. (2017). Quel rôle pour l’école dans la transition écologique? Esquisse d’une sociologie politique, environnementale et prospective du curriculum prescrit. Doctoral thesis in Environmental Sciences, University of Lausanne. Eckersley, R. (2017). La démocratie à l’ère de l’Anthropocène. lapenseeecologique.com, 1(1).

21 ‘Wir müssen Natur bewahren, weil wir sie selbst sind, und wir müssen Natur bewahren, weil sie alles ist, was wir nicht sind.’ 22 Auch die Schirmpinien und die Blaualgen im Aquarium Wasser beteiligen sich an der umfassenden Alchemie des Daseins, die uns durchherrscht, während unsere Brust auf und ab geht. Sie nehmen das, worin sie sich aufhalten, ihren Außenraum, ihre Umwelt, in sich hinein und verwandeln dieses Äußere in etwas, was sie selbst sind. Das ist ein Prozess, der auf einer ganz natürlichen und körperlichen Ebene stattfindet.’

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Ecomodernist. (2015). An ecomodernist manifesto. http://www.ecomodernism.org/manifestoenglish Flahault, F. (2018). L’homme, une espèce déboussolée – Anthropologie générale à l’écologie. Fayard. Gemenne, F. (2015). L’Anthropocène et ses victimes: une réflexion terminologique. In F. Gemenne (Ed.), L’enjeu mondial. Presses de Sciences Po. Hétier, R. (2021). L’humanité contre l’Anthropocène. Lutter contre l’effondrement. PUF. Hétier, R. (2022). La liberté à corps perdu. PUF. Latouche, S. (2010). Sortir de la société de consommation. Les Liens qui Libèrent. Moreau, D. (2011). Education et théorie morale. Vrin. Pelluchon, C. (2017). Manifeste animaliste. Alma. Rosa, H. (2020). The uncontrollability of the world (Trans. J. C. Wagner). Wiley. Serres, M. (2018 [1990]). Le contrat naturel. Le Pommier. Sinai, A. (2013). Le destin des sociétés industrielles. In A. Sinai (Ed.), Penser la décroissance (pp. 23–48). Presses de Science Po. Statius, P. (2017). La transition écologique et la démocratie: quelques remarques philosophiques, politiques, et anthropologiques. lapenseeecologique.com, 1(1). Steffen, W., et al. (2018). Trajectories of the earth system in the anthropocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(33), 8252–8259. Wallenhorst, N. (2019). L’Anthropocène décodé pour les humains. Le Pommier. Wallenhorst, N. (2020). La Vérité sur l’Anthropocène. Le Pommier. Wallenhorst, N. (2021). Mutation. L’aventure humaine ne fait que commencer. Le Pommier. Wallenhorst, N. (2022). Qui sauvera la planète? Actes Sud. Wallenhorst, N. (2023). A critical theory for the anthropocene. Springer. Wallenhorst, N., & Wulf, C. (Eds.). (2023). Handbook of the anthropocene. Springer. Weber, A. (2016). Enlivenment. Eine Kultur des Lebens. Versuch einer Poetik für das Anthropozän. Matthes und Seitz. Weber, A. (2017). Sein und Teilen – Eine Praxis schöpferischer Existenz. Transcript Verlag. Nathanaël Wallenhorst is Professor at the Catholic University of the West (UCO) where he is Dean of the Faculty of Education. He is Doctor of Educational Sciences and Doktor der Philosophie (first international co-supervision PhD), and Doctor of Environmental Sciences and Doctor in Political Science (second international co-supervision PhD). He is the author of 20 books on politics, education, and anthropology in the Anthropocene. Books (selection): The Anthropocene decoded for humans (Le Pommier, 2019, in French). Education in the Anthropocene (ed. with Pierron, Le Bord de l’eau 2019, in French). The Truth about the Anthropocene (Le Pommier, 2020, in French). Mutation. The human adventure is just beginning (Le Pommier, 2021, in French). Who will save the planet? (Actes Sud, 2022, in French). Vortex. Facing the Anthropocene (with Testot, Payot, 2023, in French). Handbook of the Anthropocene (ed. with Wulf, Springer, 2023, in English). A critical theory for the Anthropocene (Springer, 2023, in English).

To Educate Is to Begin to Do Something Renaud Hétier

Abstract The Anthropocene is emerging as a time of collapse. However, it seems to us that it is already the result of previous collapses, which are of a spiritual and psychological nature, and that we need to analyse them in order to design an education that will give us strength. Children and adolescents are in a special position today – overprotected and over informed, they are at the same time excluded from political life, which, particularly in the area of ecology, concerns them first and foremost. The question is how to help them to feel, think and participate. In our opinion, education is a battle, in that it has to combat the virtualization and abstraction of our lives and rebuild the power to feel. Individuals who are sufficiently ‘rooted’ will be resistant. This rootedness is not only being rooted in nature, it is also being rooted in life. It is important that children and adolescents feel the ‘pleasure of being’, so as to experience the ‘desire to be’, and also to want the world to be. Keywords Anthropocene · Political education · Life · Educational philosophy

1 Introduction The Anthropocene confirms our entry into a new era. And this era has already begun, with its own dynamic. Perhaps it was even prefigured by the collapses that preceded the current environmental collapse and those that will follow. If we see ourselves as existing in a long time frame, and not only that of the past few decades and those to come, the notion of urgency changes in meaning, and poses questions about profound and fundamental choices to be made concerning our society. But if the changes to be made are major, they are no less a matter of spiritual and psychological reorientation than of economic and material changes. The position of childhood in such a context is entirely up for discussion. It is partly obscured by the media coverage of an adolescent uprising (Greta Thunberg is

R. Hétier (✉) UCO – Catholic University of the West, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_14

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the emblematic figure). Children (those who are not yet teenagers), are both informed and excluded from this issue, even though they are the ones who will be most exposed to the difficulties to come. What role can education play in these circumstances? In our opinion, a certain kind of education is a way of beginning the battle. From childhood onwards, we must fight against a particular attitude of our societies – in particular its fantasies of unlimited resources and consumerism; we must also fight to preserve childhood and to root it in life, a life to be shared, a life to be protected.

2 The Anthropocene: A New Era The Anthropocene is now well identified (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2013; Bourg & Papaux, 2015; Malm, 2013; Federau, 2017; Wallenhorst, 2020a, b; Magny, 2019; Gemenne & Aleksandar, 2019). Here we would like to mark its particular time dimension. It is characterised by being recent (since industrialization, in the middle of the nineteenth century), but seems to have accelerated continuously, to have exploded from the emergence of the consumer society (1950s–1960s), and to have taken on yet another magnitude in recent years due to the increasing globalization of industrialization and consumerism. The Anthropocene thus resembles the ‘Snowpiercer’, the train that is set in motion around the world and never stops. And it is clear that despite scientific warnings, political declarations and commitments, technological innovations (which are still limited) and investments, in renewable energies in particular (which are still rather faltering), this time can no longer stop accelerating. We are thus assured not only that we will not be able to turn back the clocks, since the consequences of this runaway train are irreversible, but that we will not even be able to really slow down (today we talk about ‘mitigation’). In this way, we are precipitated into an abyss, that of an unprecedented time, which could be seen as the ‘end of all times’, no longer in the glorious mode of the Christian apocalypse, but in that of limitless destruction. A term seems to be necessary for this new time that makes the disappearance of time (of the future) loom large, and that is collapse. Again, this concept, and its ‘catastrophist’ equivalents, are already widely explored (Dupuis, 2004; Diamond, 2009; Fressoz, 2012; Servigne & Stevens, 2015; Servigne et al., 2018; Moreau, 2017; Cochet, 2019; Aillet & Testot, 2020). The dominant idea is that the environmental collapse that is already underway will first take the form of a chain of collapses (e.g. the scarcity of insects will lead to a problem of pollination, etc.) and moreover will not fail to provoke socio-political collapses (e.g. massive migrations destabilizing current economies and nations). Diamond pointed out that civilizations, including powerful ones, have already collapsed. But what is coming is unprecedented, in its globality (no entity is and will be immune to the destruction of the biosphere) and irreversibility (it will not be possible to rebuild a civilization as before).

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We propose to examine this concept of collapse further, firstly, by giving it a broader meaning, and secondly, by hypothesizing that there have been certain collapses that precede and explain the current environmental collapse. We refer here to the ideas of spiritual collapse and psychological collapse. Spiritual collapse does not primarily refer to the West’s turning away from religion, and in particular from Christianity. Affiliation with a religion has long been a phenomenon that is both widespread and relatively formal, even superficial. In order to approach this notion of spirituality, we will look at what, in our opinion, is clearly opposed to it. What clearly opposes it is a materialistic spirit marked by consumerism and accumulation of material objects. Such materialism is a major problem insofar as it aims at fulfilment. To seek fulfilment by such means (by buying objects, by increasing the time spent consuming leisure programmes, etc.) is thus to seek to avoid a certain ‘emptiness’. This notion is delicate. No one can probably stand being in a vacuum for very long, or even feeling empty themselves. No doubt because it means an absence, painful to bear since early childhood, and also because it prefigures our finitude. But this is not the problem we are interested in: we inhabit a world, and this world itself is not empty. The problem is that our propensity for material fulfilment is a major obstacle (Citton, 2014a, b). Pascalian ‘entertainment’ has taken on considerable dimensions, it has become part of everyday life, and is no longer only work-related. Our attention is constantly required, and we can even say that in the context of acceleration described by Rosa (2013), our attention is overwhelmed: it must multiply and superimpose several simultaneous activities. No more emptiness at all, then. That means, in concrete terms, no more boredom, no more silence, no more austerity in our habitats, no more waiting (by doing nothing), no more time spent daydreaming, hanging out, ‘wasting’ time. Marie-Louise von Franz, a colleague of Jung, put it this way: “As a result of the overdevelopment of the ego-consciousness, individuals no longer have the flexibility to take life as it is [...]. There are even a considerable number of stories in our countries in which the hero succeeds purely and simply out of laziness..., an obvious compensation for a collective attitude that places too much emphasis on efficiency” (Franz, 1979, p. 82). Yet it is in a certain ‘emptiness’ that something can manifest itself. This time it is Simone Weil who can enlighten us when she writes: “Attention consists in suspending one’s thought, in leaving it available, empty and penetrable to the object (...)” (Weil, 1950, p. 92). What can manifest itself in the void is life, the world, what is. But, curiously, our technical progress seems to separate us more and more from it. By saturation, by filling in the gaps as we have said, but also by an urbanization that separates us from nature and by a form of abstraction of our lives that are lived more and more in signs, in communication, and less and less in sensitivity. Full of occupations, preoccupations, objects, overflowing with messages and surrounded by screens, we can no longer simply be available to feel life in us and around us, to contemplate the beauty and grandeur of the world. In short, we miss out on what is there, and perhaps we are hardly present ourselves. Thus, a certain emptiness can be thought of as the condition for a certain presence to manifest itself. Simone Weil took this perspective to its extreme, “It is after a long and sterile tension that ends in despair, when nothing more

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is expected, that from outside, a marvellous surprise, comes the gift” (Weil, 1950, p. 101). And it is the possibility of having such experiences (feeling life, experiencing the world) that ultimately generates and justifies this kind of attentiveness (Hétier, 2020). Through such a journey – experience of emptiness, manifestation of a presence, attentiveness – we arrive at a conception of spirituality that may have been that of the ancient philosophers, described by Pierre Hadot as follows: “a practice likely to bring about a transformation of an existential and moral order (...)” (Hadot, 2019, p. 315). Spirituality is not necessarily about the experience of transcendence. For Hadot, it is clear that it is first and foremost a work of the self on the self, a work that aims to improve the self. Taking care, which we find today in the preoccupation with care, implies such work. In the Alcibiades, Plato puts it this way: “So what do you plan for yourself? Do you want to stay as you are now, or do you want to take some kind of care?” (Plato, 2000, p. 137) Now, the way to such care is through philosophy thought of as a therapy, in sustained questioning. This implies two notable consequences in relation to our subject. Firstly, we can do something other than act in the material world, dealing with objects that are external to us, as is promoted in our society of production and consumption. Secondly, the search for something beyond oneself, for fulfilment, moving towards happiness, is not simply ‘filling in the gaps’ but, one might say, of ‘digging in’, at a depth of which one is not immediately aware. How then is there a ‘spiritual collapse’? It is not, we understand, simply because of the decline of religion (in the West and in countries that are becoming westernized), although religion did in part support this existential and moral work that Hadot talks about. It is rather to the extent that the idea of transformation, always present, has become seen in material terms, and has become equivalent to the idea of increase (how can I progress in my career? increase my salary? buy a bigger house? a second (more powerful) car? have access to more TV channels? have faster internet? go on holiday to a distant country? etc.). Living better has become, in the capitalist and consumerist society, living with more and more money. The other side of this coin is that if we can’t maintain this then we experience a sense of lack, frustration and suffering. We are moving away from the simplicity evoked by Rousseau: “What do we enjoy in such a situation? Nothing external to ourselves, nothing if not ourselves and our own existence. As long as this state lasts, we are sufficient unto ourselves, like God. The sentiment of existence stripped of any other emotion is in itself a precious sentiment of contentment and peace (...)” (Rousseau, 1972, p. 102). In our societies, on the contrary, nothing being ever enough, we launch into a headlong rush that consumes the Earth, destroys life, and aggravates our spiritual misery, by making us lose the feeling of simply being alive and simply existing. As François Flahaut puts it, insofar as the desire for completeness invites us to identify with the infinite (in the literal sense of what is limitless), it hinders the feeling of existing that is part of coexistence from the outset (Flahaut, 2008, p. 283). And now we turn to our psyche, and a collapse that we postulate here too. There is a close connection between spirituality and our mental state (notably through the feeling of existing). We will however make a distinction. Firstly, our psyche is a given (we do not choose to have a balanced or a less balanced mind, to have more or

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less resources, etc.), whereas spirituality is a voluntary commitment. Then, if spirituality concerns the feeling of existing, the psyche gives us the strength to exist. This is what depressive feelings show, in contrast, as they deprive us of part of this strength. It is precisely here that we can speak of collapse, by noting that it takes place not only on an individual level but is a massive social phenomenon, as Alain Ehrenberg (2000) has shown. Ehrenberg describes the demand for action that the individual is weighed down by today (to be creative, responsible, entrepreneurial, etc.), and also the negative effects this has – a certain feeling of powerlessness, the feeling of never quite getting there, and finally the problematic feeling of emptiness that results. Addiction compensates for this state, which feeds the functioning of the consumer society. With this dependence, the ‘solution’ to the problem is found in an external object: the exhaustion of the individual’s strength (think of burnout, for example) is pathologized and medicalized. But this is a vicious circle in which individuals lose confidence in their own resources. The collapse of their mental strength is in a way confirmed by compensating for this through dependency and consumption. The problem is knowing how to measure one’s strengths and, measuring them, how to preserve them. As Rousseau, a good Stoic, said, “Let us measure the radius of our sphere, and remain in the centre like the insect in the middle of its web; we shall always be sufficient unto ourselves, and we shall have no cause to complain of our weakness, for we shall never feel it.” (Rousseau, 1966, p. 95). These considerations about spirituality (working on oneself) and psychic balance (preserving one’s strength), in order to avoid collapses, raise a secondary problem. From a certain point of view, self-help and self-preservation are ways of not feeding, or of feeding less, the infernal machine of industrial production, material consumption and the resulting creation of pollutants and waste. The ‘spiritual’ and ‘wellbalanced’ individual could be a kind of modern ‘renouncer’. There is a difficulty here. Louis Dumont (1991) hypothesized that every modern individual was ultimately outside of the world. In the words of Jean-Pierre Vernant, “the individual outside the world will have become the modern individual in the world” (Vernant, 1989, p. 212). And this author gives the counter-example of the Greek citizen, deeply embedded in the City, including making his own voice heard, like Socrates. Can we ‘individualize’ ourselves without, on the one hand, compensating for the loss of social ties through material consumption, and on the other, being an actor in the struggle to preserve the world? Being a ‘renouncer’ is undoubtedly necessary, provided that it is not to the detriment of our relationship with others, nor of our commitment to the world. Spiritual ‘conversion’ and mental equilibrium should not be seen as opposing relationship and commitment. There is first of all a moral reason lying behind this (and we saw with Hadot that spirituality also involved moral transformation). To be content, with ‘doing no harm’, i.e. a minimalist ethical stance (Ogien, 2007), does not respond to the real situation of the world. Others, those who are more vulnerable, may need us, and the world itself, in order to endure, demands that we take care of it (Tronto, 2009). Flahaut, who referred to our ‘sense of existence’, insists on the importance of co-existence. And he sees the prevalent Prometheanism as a denial of

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human interdependence (Flahaut, 2008, p. 254). The extreme vulnerability of an isolated individual, not to mention the survival of a baby to survive or an elderly person maintaining their autonomy, brings us back to our human singularity. From early childhood, we gain access to what makes us human (language, complex thought, moral sense, etc.) only through intense interactions with others. As Flahaut puts it, “our lives have been shaped by the way we interact with other people. . ., our ways of being (in the literal sense of the term) are developed from those of others, by transmission, by mimicry or by reaction” (Flahaut, 2008, p. 256). To isolate ourselves is to separate ourselves from our human, radically social reality. We can even say that the idea of an isolated individual is produced historically, by a certain society (bourgeois society), as in Marxist thought. On the question of commitment, the theory of care shows how, in order to maintain their autonomy, every individual needs others to ‘take care’ (of their children, their food, their car, etc.). Thus, to be committed is to recognize a duty of universal reciprocity: I take care of others as I need others to take care of me in one way or another, at one time or another. And we can even go so far as to consider the world as absurd (without finality, without justice, left to chance, bound for destruction) and think, along with Camus, of this absurdity as a vector of revolt and commitment. In the Anthropocene, we cannot be content with being ‘collapsonauts’, making do with the collapses, we must be ‘collapsagones’, fighters, fighting against the collapses.

3 Children and Adolescents in the Limbo of the Anthropocene Children and adolescents are in a very special position with regard to the Anthropocene. They are at one and the same time those of us who are least responsible for the destruction of the environment, and also the ones who will be the most affected. They are, as a minority, excluded from debates and decisions, even though it is their future that is at stake. In fact, although they are not political actors, children and adolescents are already economic actors – via their parents who support them – participating in the consumption of objects as well as cultural products. Children and adolescents in society today have a rather paradoxical place, between acceptance and exclusion. Modernity has led to an increase in the recognition of children’s rights (here in the generic sense of the term children, i.e. minors) (Renaut, 2002; Youf, 2002) following Rousseau’s great inaugural gesture in Emile. These rights they have been accompanied by an extraordinary evolution in living conditions over the past two centuries. Of course, a certain heterogeneity must be taken into account, depending on the specific region of the world, the culture and the environment. But we can begin by underlining the dazzling progress in medicine and hygiene that has enabled a much greater number of children to survive and lead healthy lives, whereas a very high infant mortality rate long seemed inevitable

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(Pinker, 2018). Furthermore birth control or contraception allows children to be ‘wanted’. This last notion does not fail to raise questions, but we can consider that children may be valued differently, depending on whether they arrive one after the other, in large numbers, whether we want them or not, or whether we plan to have them. This is no guarantee for the child, of course, as it is true that we never really know what we want and how we will welcome the reality of the otherness of the child who comes into the world. Another major advance was the establishment of schools and the withdrawal of children from the adult world over the centuries (Postman, 1994). This process began with the invention of the printing press and the manufacture of paper, enabling the dissemination of printed matter and requiring reading skills. But it was slow to take hold, in view of the need for labour on farms and in factories. This changeover was therefore a twofold process. It enabled children to benefit, via the school, from a formal education, developing skills, knowledge and values, and it also enabled the majority of them to escape various forms of exploitation – that of work, as we have said, and also that of sexuality (Postman insists on this last point by showing that children were, before the invention of the school, mixed up in the ‘secrets’ of adults). Whatever the criticisms that may be levelled at school (in particular the lack of equality, the importance of failure, the stigmatising nature of this failure), it must be admitted that it performs a basic function, that of protecting children, at least during the time when the children are there. On the other hand, and this is the paradox, protecting the child is at the same time accompanied by a form of general exclusion. In other words, any work other than school work seemed to become synonymous with exploitation of the child. This is elucidated in the philosophy of the great pedagogue Célestin Freinet, who, in L’éducation du travail, praised work that is shared. He describes all work, but particularly agricultural work in which he was able to participate from early childhood, commenting “of all this work I remember as an exceptional sun that would have illuminated my childhood, while your school slipped over me like raindrops on the flat, smooth stones of the river. No, the animator of life from the earliest age, the best ferment of healthy and dynamic satisfaction within the normal framework of the family and the community, is not play, it is WORK!” (Freinet, 1960, p. 115). Of course, the struggle against the industrial or agricultural exploitation of children on a full-time basis remains necessary where appropriate. But this does not mean that all participation in work would always be demeaning and anti-educational. In another text, Freinet explains how his father made him participate, and not just be the ‘little hands’ of his work. A certain participation, which is not, let us repeat, exploitation, is a vector of learning, and above all of social learning. The feeling of self-efficacy, theorized by Bandura cannot be based solely on academic skills without excluding a certain number of children and disregarding the individual. The same kind of remark can be made about domestic tasks. For a long time, girls took charge of these at their mother’s side, often to the detriment of their own emancipation and, very concretely, of their own access to schooling, as is still the case in some countries. Unfortunately, the entry of women into the labour market has

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not always, as we know, brought about much change. They often have to deal with the ‘double agenda’ of taking care of domestic work in addition to their work outside the home. On the other hand, the status of girls has changed radically – they are no longer automatically employed in domestic work. It is regrettable that children (and not only girls, of course) are not in a better position to take an active part in work, and to learn the many things that can be learned from it, first and foremost that of sharing, solidarity and responsibility. It is often on the grounds of needing to concentrate on their school work that children are exempted from participating from other tasks. However, it is now well established that children (and among them, especially adolescents), in fact spend most of their time (up to nearly 7 h a day) on recreational digital activities (Spitzer, 2019), and we will come back to this. This massive investment in screens in general and in recreational digital activities in particular deserves to be analysed in the light of the special position that children and adolescents occupy today. It performs the function of a playful activity, which has always been specific to childhood, and of an activity, that has emerged more recently, of withdrawal and intimacy, linked to adolescence. Here we emphasise that adolescents who keep themselves busy and entertained in this way are at the same time beneficiaries of schooling and, beyond that, of access to information (Corroy, 2008), which makes them individuals who are aware of the environmental situation we are in. This awareness of the situation is further heightened by the fact that they are the ones who will be in a position to live on an Earth that may be less habitable in the coming decades, even though, let us remember, they are excluded from political decision-making. We can therefore interpret this recreational digital investment as an attempt both to escape this overwhelming awareness of the future, and as a way of not letting themselves be completely crushed by inertia. When we talk to video game players, in particular, we cannot fail to be struck by the importance of the feeling of personal efficiency, the pleasure of progressing and succeeding, of mastering something. This is a good time to revisit the concepts of childhood and adolescence. Childhood has a generic meaning, which can include adolescence. However, these are two very distinct periods of life on a physical and psychological level (Braconnier & Golse, 2008). Talking about education in the Anthropocene can risk not understanding the differences between the two ages. In order to clarify these differences in this context, we will look at three aspects – feeling, thinking and participating. It is essential, as Jacques Tassin (2020) has stressed, to root childhood in a sense of nature and life, a sense of existence within the living world, without which, all information risks eluding individuals. This task, which involves a profound experience of life, must be initiated in early childhood and supported through childhood, which is the age of wonder, the senses and sensitivity. In a second phase, it is no less important to learn to think, and to think in the new situation of a humanity engaged with the Anthropocene. This learning must be commensurate with the global and complex issues at stake, and include the practice of problematization, the integration of complexity in the age of the Internet, the regular practice of building hypotheses and putting them up for debate, in preparation for a new convivialism (Convivialist International, 2020). Finally, it is also a question of

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participation. This notion can take on a broad meaning, and concern both childhood and adolescence, ranging from simple cooperative work to political struggle. We have seen above that from childhood it can be participating in concrete collective work, starting with family and domestic work. But it is only from adolescence onwards that it is a question of making one’s voice heard (we think of the example of Greta Thunberg), of entering into the struggle and into action, and thus opening up new forms of citizenship without waiting for legal majority, at least on ecological questions.

4 To Educate Is to Start the Battle Following on from the above, it is now a question of thinking of education not as a preparation for struggle, revolt or commitment, but as something that enlists these values, while taking account of the specific characteristics of childhood. We can even go further and welcome childhood, as did Rousseau, as being a precious manifestation of life and nature. In this sense, it could be a matter of preserving childhood as much as educating it, of seeing it as a ‘wild part of the world’ (Maris, 2018). However, it is not about seeing children as angels. What is ‘wild’ in us, from early childhood onwards, demands to be educated, which is an immense challenge in a consumer society that promotes regression. Rousseau, therefore, introduced a genuine child psychology into his philosophy of education. First of all, it is a matter of recognizing childhood as an age apart, with its full rights: “The wisest (...) are always look for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man” (Rousseau, 1966, p. 32). And it is no less important to preserve this time of childhood, deeply linked to a ‘pleasure of being’: “Love childhood; indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts” (Ibid., p. 92). And: “Do not lay up sorrow for yourselves by robbing them of the short span which nature has allotted to them. As soon as they are aware of the joy of life, let them rejoice in it, go that whenever God calls them they may not die without having tasted the joy of life” (ibid. our italics). There is a natural disposition of the child to be close to nature, to its manifestations of life, in all its forms (let us think of children’s curiosity for animals in particular), to not yet feel radically separated from the rest of the living world (“it is difficult to imagine”, writes Virginie Marris, “how citizens could motivate themselves, to defend a nature with which they have no relationship” (Maris, 2018, p. 235). Perhaps the child is still in that state of wonder (some would say philosophical wonder) that there is something rather than nothing (Leibniz), and its pleasure in being is then inseparable from its pleasure in being in a world. And if it is indeed a question of feeling this pleasure of being, and thus feeling oneself to exist, it is imperative to support this feast of the senses that childhood can be, and to cultivate them. Such support is in a way a protection of the ‘wild’ part, the animal part of human beings, of nature in us, which links us to the whole of the living world.

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It is clear from the above that the struggle cannot be waged on a solely intellectual or political basis. It is necessary to be rooted in life, and more than ever necessary in the face of the feeling of absurdity already mentioned, as well as in the face of the collapses that are both underway and looming. The awareness of the joy of life evoked by Rousseau is central, in that it bridges the abyss of the meaning of life, especially at a time when life is in general danger. From a certain point of view, being enough is to avoid consuming the world. It is also, from another point of view, to rejoice that what is, that there is something rather than nothing, and finally to marvel (Vergely, 2010; Hétier, 2020). But all this presupposes a feeling as much as the senses (to feel the joy of life). Indeed, it is impossible for there to be life, for us, without that life being perceived (Merleau-Ponty, 2009). In The Sensitive Life, Emanuele Coccia writes: “A world without media would be a world in which objects would be condemned to remain within themselves, incapable of producing the slightest influence on the living, in which the living would lead an entirely acosmic life, enclosed in their own psyche, incapable of being affected or touched by things (...)” (Coccia, 2010, our italics). To be touched is a formulation rich in meaning. It is both, Coccia suggests, to see one’s senses affected (“I see blue because I am sensitive to colours”, writes Merleau-Ponty (2009, p. 260)), but it is also to be moved, to be sensitized (it is then that blue, that of the sky for example, gives me a feeling of infinity which refers me to my feeling of existence, and to a ‘pleasure of being’ in front of this sky). Perceiving the world is all the more important because it is also what allows us to be, if there is no sense in imagining ourselves to be outside the world, although our urban and digital lifestyles may in part give us the illusion that we are. Subjectivity itself is constituted in a form of “reflection” of the world: “it is illusory to imagine the existence of an ego separated from the world that would like to be linked only to itself, as well as that of a world that could exist without a subject that inhabits it” (Coccia, 2010, p. 143). By supporting an education that values sensitivity (Hétier, 2011), we can aspire to shape subjects who are as resistant as they are rooted, which is of primary importance if we are regarding education as a struggle. It is indeed necessary to know what we are fighting for, and to have the strength to fight. This presupposes both a link, an attachment to the living, to being, and an energy that is vital, the energy of a life that is not only ‘interior’, but which is sustained by life and the world around us. This is what Jacques Tassin points out when he talks about green classes, and the importance of ‘direct observations’. He points out, “In addition to the collection of accumulated knowledge, a direct attachment occurs.” (Tassin, 2020, p. 270) This raises the principle of deep education. We can refer, in this sense, to depth psychology (psychoanalysis), and to a deep ecology (Næss, 2009), in connection with eco-psychology (Roszak, 2001). It is a question of going beyond rationality alone (for example, that of accumulating knowledge). What will make an individual resistant and resilient is not so much their knowledge as the way in which they have constructed themselves: their sensitivity, their imagination, their relationships. Such an education is structured less by a relationship to knowledge than by the objective of allowing experiences, as John Dewey recognised, experiences that involve the human person in his or her very sense of existence, within living beings,

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within the world. These experiences include exposure to the grandeur of this world (the sky, the night, the landscape, etc.) and contemplation, attention to the beauty of the world, attention to small things and to their vulnerability (Tassin evokes arthropods), experience of one’s capacity to “make life happen” (Hétier, 2019), encounter with all forms of otherness through which the living and the being are manifested. In evoking friendship, Fabrice Midal writes “To be is always to be open to another. (...) Forgetting, or even refusing, friendship reveals itself (...) as a lack of being, a defect in our own existence” (Midal, 2016, p. 192, our emphasis). It is more than merely the friend, but the whole of life and the whole world to which it is a question of opening up, whose lack we feel when we cut ourselves off from it. As we evoke ‘lack’, this leads us to the crucial question of desire. The philosophical history of this concept is vast, since Plato’s Banquet. What we can hope for, from early childhood, is that the pleasure of being is the source of a desire to be (not only for oneself, but for the world), and we know how much this desire to be must first be supported by an attentive, communicating and loving environment. In the Philebus, Plato writes: “The one among us who is empty seems to desire the opposite of what affects him, since he is empty and desires to be filled” (Plato, 2019, p. 139). The whole problem is to know how to take charge of this emptiness, or in other words how, if need be, to ‘fill ourselves up’. In this context, to struggle is also to struggle against oneself, insofar as one can be a stakeholder in a socio-economic model that is the very one that is precipitating us into the Anthropocene. The first temptation is obviously to fill ourselves with whatever we can get our hands on: food, consumer objects, entertainment of all kinds. And unfortunately, nowadays childhood is particularly susceptible to this, in the excitement of impulses and in the invitation to regression (Stiegler, 2008). Should we then, as in the philosophies of ataraxia, ensure that desire is limited or even extinguished? Midal is critical of this option, quoting Kierkegaard: “it is a kind of spiritual suicide to want to extinguish desire” (Midal, 2016, p. 175). The desire to live and for the world to be is therefore worth sustaining. We thus find Spinoza’s conatus, the desire to persevere in being. There is an opposition here between being and having. In fact, filling the void turns out to be a dead end. As Fromm notes, “greed, mental greed (and all greed is mental, even if it is satisfied through the body) has no point of satiation, since its satisfaction does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness and depression that it is supposed to overcome” (Fromm, 1976). It is necessary, therefore, to accept and endure (we return to the idea of resistance) the experience of a certain emptiness, which may be the very condition of the feeling of existence. This is what Rousseau had in mind in education, when he proposed to respond to the child’s needs, but not to his ‘fantasy’. It is in a certain ‘poverty’ (Rahnema, 2003), a certain ‘nakedness’, and not an over-solicitation and a ‘filling’, that the feeling of being can best be experienced, until one’s own desire to be extends to the desire for the world to be and to endure.

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5 Conclusion There is no doubt that the Anthropocene, and with it the collapses that are already occurring and are looming, make action, participation, commitment, resistance and even revolt necessary. In terms of education, however, it is imperative not to rush through the stages (even in an emergency situation) but to work in depth, at the age when what will form the individual is being shaped: sensitivity, imagination, the quality of links to others, to the living, to the world. Ecology itself is threatened by abstraction, even in its concepts (such as that of biodiversity, whereas “experiences of Nature have an effect on ecological awareness far greater than that obtained by communication about natural environments” (Tassin, 2020, p. 58). If the development of sensitivity is the basis of everything, it must be linked as early as possible with the fostering of thinking, of thinking together critically. The acquisition of knowledge must not be seen as something separate from this work of thinking, which is a never-ending process. Finally, the struggle, as we have seen, cannot be reduced to militancy alone. Being, wanting to be, persisting in one’s being, feeling oneself to be with and through others and always within a world, is what can allow one to resist one’s own temptation to ‘fill’ oneself up with consumer goods, and to be naturally motivated by the active struggle against the more general destructive forces of a globalized industrial economy.

References Aillet, L., & Testot, L. (Eds.). (2020). Collapsus. Albin Michel. Bonneuil, C., & Fressoz, J. B. (2013). L’événement Anthropocène. Seuil. Bourg, D., & Papaux, A. (2015). Dictionnaire de la pensée écologique. PUF. Braconnier, A., & Golse, B. (2008). Nos bébés, nos ados. Odile Jacob. Citton, Y. (2014a). Pour une écologie de l’attention. Seuil. Citton, Y. (Ed.). (2014b). L’économie de l’attention, nouvel horizon du capitalisme? La Découverte. Coccia, E. (2010). La vie sensible. Rivages poche. Cochet, Y. (2019). Devant l’effondrement. Essai de collapsologie. Les liens qui libèrent. Convivialist International. (2020). Second manifeste convivialiste. Pour un monde post-néolibéral. Actes Sud. Corroy, L. (Ed.). (2008). Les jeunes et les médias. Les raisons du succès. Vuibert. Diamond, J. (2009). Collapse. Folio. Dumont, L. (1991). Essais sur l’individualisme. Seuil. Dupuis, J. P. (2004). Pour un catastrophisme éclairé. Seuil. Ehrenberg, A. (2000). La fatigue d’être soi. Dépression et société. Odile Jacob. Federau, A. (2017). Pour une philosophie de l’Anthropocène. PUF. Flahaut, F. (2008). Le crépuscule de Prométhée. Contribution à une histoire de la démesure humaine. Mille et une nuits. Franz, M. L. (1979 [1972]). La femme dans les contes de fées. La Fontaine de pierre. Freinet, C. (1960). L’éducation du travail. Delachaux et Niestlé. Fressoz, J. B. (2012). L’apocalypse joyeuse. Une histoire du risque technologique. Seuil. Fromm, E. (1976). To have or to be. Harper&Row.

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Gemenne, F., & Aleksandar, R. (2019). L’Atlas de l’Anthropocène. SciencePo les Presses. Hadot, P. (2019). La philosophie comme éducation des adultes. Vrin. Hétier, R. (ed.) (2011). Quelle reconnaissance du sujet sensible en éducation? Chemins de formation, 16. Hétier, R. (2019). Apprendre à faire vivre. In N. Wallenhorst & J. P. Pierron (Eds.), Éduquer en Anthropocène. Le Bord de l’eau. Hétier, R. (2020). Cultiver l’attention et le care en éducation. À la source des contes merveilleux. PURH. Magny, M. (2019). L’Anthropocène contre l’histoire – Le réchauffement climatique à l’ère du capital. Le Bord de l’eau. Malm, A. (2013). La part sauvage du monde. Penser la nature dans l’Anthropocène. La Fabrique. Maris, V. (2018). La part sauvage du monde. Penser la nature dans l’Anthropocène. Seuil. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2009). Phénoménologie de la perception. Gallimard. Midal, F. (2016). Comment la philosophie peut nous sauver? Pocket. Moreau, Y. (2017). Vivre avec les catastrophes. PUF. Næss, A. (2009). Vers l’écologie profonde. Wildproject. Ogien, R. (2007). L’éthique aujourd’hui. Gallimard. Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment now. The case for reason, science, humanism and progress. Penguin. Plato. (2000). Alcibiades. Garnier-Flammarion/Cambridge University Press. Plato. (2019). Philebus: A philosophical discussion. Oxford University Press. Postman, N. (1994). The disappearance of childhood. Vintage Books. Rahnema, M. (2003). Quand la misère chasse la pauvreté. Actes Sud. Renaut, A. (2002). La libération des enfants. Hachette. Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration. A new theory of modernity (J. Trejo-Mathys, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Roszak, T. (2001). The voice of the earth: an exploration of ecopsychology. Phanes. Rousseau, J. J. (1966). Émile ou de l’éducation. Garnier-Flammarion. Rousseau, J. J. (1972). Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. Gallimard. Servigne, P., & Stevens, R. (2015). Comment tout peut s’effondrer – Petit manuel de collapsologie à l’usage des générations présentes. Seuil. Servigne, P., Stevens, R., & Chapelle, G. (2018). Une autre fin du monde est possible: vivre l’effondrement (et pas seulement y survivre). Seuil. Spitzer, M. (2019). Les ravages des écrans. Les pathologies à l’ère numérique. L’Échappée. Stiegler, B. (2008). Prendre soin de la jeunesse et des générations. Flammarion. Tassin, J. (2020). Pour une écologie du sensible. Odile Jacob. Tronto, J. (2009). Un monde vulnérable. Pour une politique du care. La Découverte. Vergely, B. (2010). Retour à l’émerveillement. Albin Michel. Vernant, J. P. (1989). L’individu, la mort, l’amour. Gallimard. Wallenhorst, N. (2020a). La vérité sur l’Anthropocène. Le Pommier. Wallenhorst, N. (2020b). Entrer en résistance ou en résonance? Le Pommier. Weil, S. (1950). La pesanteur et la grâce. Plon. Youf, D. (2002). Penser les droits de l’enfant. PUF.

Renaud Hétier is Professor at the Catholic University of the West (UCO). He is Doctor of Educational Sciences. He is the author of books on education, and anthropology in the Anthropocene. Books (selection): Freedom with impetuosity. Falling back to earth (Le Pommier, 2022, in French); Humanity versus Anthropocene (PUF, 2021, in French); Cultivating attention and care in education (PURH, 2020, in French); Create an educational space with the fairy tales (Chronique sociale, 2017, in French); Education between presence and mediation (L’Harmattan, 2017, in French).

Part III

Some Educational Recommendations in the Anthropocene: Pedagogical Approaches, Experiments

Ecological Transformation and Education as an Odyssey François Prouteau

Abstract We are living through a change in our world, which is destabilizing for many. Those who thought they were the masters and owners of nature are disillusioned by the catastrophes that are happening to us. Close to the ground, individuals, the young generations in particular, the ‘Telemachus’ of today, are beginning to take action. Could this be an invitation to read Homer’s epic with new eyes? To think of the ecological transition and education as an odyssey? Keywords Anthropocene · Political education · Odyssey · Ecological transformation Clearly, this transition is a major part of the new ecological thinking in our societies and our educational practices. But if it is not defined and developed along clear principles, the ecological transition may, while being a big topic in the media and politics, remain a pious hope or simply be a way for us to ease our consciences. We are struggling to find the words to understand the crises of recent times. Talking about ecological transition seems inadequate or derisory in the light of the human adventure being exposed to such dangers and catastrophes. What measures should be adopted? How can we be resilient in the crisis? Are we on the right track? To the question as to where the stories are that tell us how we’re going to get through this (Hopkins, 2015a) we need to find a fitting epic and a fitting fall. What if Homer’s story could illuminate the ecological revolution underway, provided we see it as an odyssey? Odyssey! A notion that seems all the more relevant to the history that our civilization owes so much to Homer. The epic of Ulysses unfolds in a time of crisis, from the collapse of the city of Troy, through exploration and adventures, experiences and transformations, until he finds Ithaca. I believe that such an adventure can express, in a way, what it means not only to return home but also to live on Earth and respect the environment. Better still, the ‘Telemachus moment’ of the Odyssey, F. Prouteau (✉) UCO – Catholic University of the West, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_15

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named after this iconic figure of youth, invites us to think about the educational consequences of our ecological odyssey, a new generation having been raised (in the sense of ‘educating’) and rising up, determined to take charge of the future of the world.

1 Critique of the Ecological Transition Since the industrial revolution and its prodigious technological progress, but also its excesses spread by unbridled and destructive capitalism, the Anthropocene (Prouteau et al., 2020) is making devastating marks on the Earth, because of the impact of humans. A little more each day, in contrast, these areas highlight the blessed existence of oases, living signs of the harmony and original beauty of the cosmos praised by the Greeks since Homer (around the eighth century B.C.), or of Creation according to the story of Genesis, in the Bible. Such springs at the beginning of our Western civilization have never ceased to be sources of irrigation for our culture, testifying that every existence is worth living as a human adventure to be undertaken. Such views are also nourished by accounts of experience of concrete reality or of the imagination, by artistic works or by scientific research on physics (in the Greek sense of phusis, nature). In all cases, it is the narrative which, by combining the time of the soul and the time of nature, makes it possible to (re)figure human time, as Paul Ricoeur has shown. Through the combination of our Greek and Judeo-Christian heritage which are the founding narratives of our civilization, we modern humans can allow ourselves to be questioned by the adventure of human liberation that these stories recount, and by the possibility of a future in which language connects human existences and histories, in the time and space of living together. Indeed, I would suggest that learning about this space and time, which is left to the care, intelligence and creativity of each person in community with others, is the raison d’être of education in the human odyssey we are living in the Anthropocene. Because this sharing of our lives on a habitable earth, which is the essence of politics in the Anthropocene, is compromised more than ever before. In such a world change, we find two extremes, ideas of fleeing towards what is ahead, towards the heights of the ‘great acceleration’ of the industrial revolution, attracted sometimes by the lures of transhumanism (Wallenhorst et al., 2018), and on the other hand, the withdrawal of the ego or immobility (border closures, putting up barriers between ourselves, processes of isolation, self-protection in survival mode) of which the Covid-19 pandemic would be just one of the premises of catastrophe that await us. In all these situations, egoism (indifference to the suffering of the living), fear (permanent anxiety about being in the world), or cynicism (the attitude that predation and evil are inevitable) will lead us nowhere (Vernant, 2001). In each of these three attitudes we can hear the sirens of apocalyptic discussion about the end of the world. Between all these extremes, we are seeking the balance and the movement of the human odyssey today. This is the human adventure and the future –, open to

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creativity and encountering the other. “We must set a course for Earth, using the forces of gravity and attraction, with all our limits and the risks of bad weather, storms and shipwreck, like Ulysses, ‘testing the very limits of what it means to be human” (Berut, 2018), keeping the will to return and find ourselves. This requires courage, determination and humility, because in order to restore harmony and ‘build a more humane and just world’, the king arrives naked, a beggar, a stranger in his kingdom. From the shores of the Mediterranean to the borders of Phoenicia, under the Oak of Mamre with Abraham, hospitality, which has become so problematic in these parts today, is a civilizational marker: It would be wrong, stranger, for me to disrespect a guest, even if one worse off than you arrived, for every guest and beggar comes from Zeus, and any gift from people like ourselves, though small, is welcome. (Odyssey, XIV)

Hospitality for Homer is divine, as it is for the author of Genesis. Today, exchanges in the age of globalization offer the opportunity to cultivate human unity in diversity, and human diversity in unity; this reciprocity the foundation of relationships and oases of brotherhood, as well as centres of resistance to the diktat of growth and the reification of the world by Big Data: I said that everywhere the need for the ‘we’ and the ‘you’ is constantly reborn: in adolescent gangs, in our friendships, in our lawful or clandestine loves [...] and, in our imaginary or in a psychological way, in our projections and identifications with the heroes of films, novels or plays. These are spontaneous ways in which we resist the great calculating, algorithmizing machine, reducing human life to its techno-economic dimensions and reducing the human being to an object of calculation, ways in which we resist the great machine [...]. (Morin, 2019, p. 45)

In order to achieve this conquest of an Earth that is once again habitable in a sustainable way, the notion of transition has spread over the last few years to all areas of contemporary thinking. There is no sector of human activity or politics that does not have its views on transitions, whether they be digital, ecological or concerning energy and. However, in these different situations, it is rare for the expression ‘ecological transformation’ to be really defined and explained. The ecological transition can be observed by analysing trajectories relating to the evolution of certain key indicators of the Earth system and the risks that threaten it. The study of the dynamics of these parameters “emphasizes the central role of mankind in geology and ecology” (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000, p. 17) characteristic of the Anthropocene. This new era begins with the industrial revolution, in a first stage up to 1945, with technical advances having a major impact: invention of the steam engine (patent filed by James Watt in 1769) and, since then, growth of massive fossil emissions; drilling of the first oil wells and beginning of the oil industry from the 1850s; invention of the Haber-Bosch process (1913) which enables the manufacture of explosives and nitrogen fertilizers from the industrial synthesis of ammonia. A second stage began in 1945 and is marked by the great acceleration (Stephen et al., 2011) represented on a global scale by the exponential and correlated evolution of 12 social indicators (population, world GDP, telephones, motor vehicles, etc.) and 12 natural indicators (in particular, concentrations of CO2, N2 O and CH4). In

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April 2022, a concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere of more than 420 parts per million was recorded (1 ppm is 1 g of CO2 in 1 m3 of air). This concentration recorded at Mona Loa in Hawaii continues to increase year after year, with adverse effects on climate and other key Earth system factors such as biodiversity. “Our climate is changing before our eyes. The heat trapped by human-induced greenhouse gases will warm the planet for many generations to come. Sea level rise, ocean heat and acidification will continue for hundreds of years unless means to remove carbon from the atmosphere are invented. Some glaciers have reached the point of no return and this will have long-term repercussions in a world in which more than 2 billion people already experience water stress.” (WMO report, 2022). According to the Potsdam Institute For Climate Impact Research, more than 400 ppm has never been recorded in the last 3 million years (Pliocene geological epoch) according to ice core and marine sediment sampling conducted in 2019. At this rate, we are not on the global warming trajectory limited to +2 °C, and even less on the +1.5 °C trajectory (compared to the so-called 1850–1900 reference period for the estimation of the average temperature in the pre-industrial era) targeted by the Paris agreement. We are in fact heading towards a world with a temperature increase of +3 °C close to the Pliocene where trees grow in Antarctica and the ocean level is 15 metres higher. And that is without mentioning the acidification of the oceans which, already at +1.5 °C, is significantly affecting marine biodiversity, fisheries and marine ecosystems. Not to mention the risk of the permafrost melting up to 70% of its surface and to a depth of three or four metres. In addition there is the release of hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gases, as well as millions of viruses and bacteria that had been sleeping under the permafrost. Other disasters threaten us if we exceed the tipping thresholds of the planetary system with unknown and unpredictable chain phenomena. Collective human action is needed to move the Earth system away from a potential danger threshold and stabilize it in an interglacial-like habitable state (Stephen et al., 2018). Faced with such a challenge, how can we agree on the ‘ecological transition’ with a discourse marked with inertia and an underestimation of the transformations in lifestyles and actions that need to be undertaken? The truth is that the transition is seriously handicapped from the outset, due to the lack of a common diagnosis and a shared awareness by politicians and the public. As never before in history, our common destiny invites us to seek a new beginning, the Earth Charter stressed in 2000. What are we waiting for? To speak of a new beginning, with the events of Covid-19 only just behind us, leads us to ask ourselves fresh questions: What is the beginning of the world that Covid-19 represents? It is up to each of us, and to us as a society, to answer this fundamental question. The time has come to speak more of an ecological odyssey than of a transition, by taking note of the crises and creating a collective impetus to set a course for the Earth. All of these crises, whether climatic, social, economic or health-related, are one and the same crisis, a crisis of excess, in a word hubris. So if hubris is the cause of all our ecological and environmental ills, there is nothing worthwhile in the ecological transition if measures, from the point of view of law and justice, are not taken to meet the challenges. We see this at the international level. Each COP must

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seek a universal, legally binding, differentiated and ambitious agreement in terms of adapted resources and means used, which protects against hubris and its ravages on the living world. In France, at the national level, following the work and proposals of the Citizens’ Climate Convention (formerly called the Citizens’ Convention for the Ecological Transition) of June 21, 2020, protection of the environment and biodiversity, and also the fight against climate change, by integrating into French law the crime of ecocide, must be included at the highest level of democratic and republican institutions, in the Preamble and Article 1 of the Constitution, after having been submitted to a referendum.

2 Resilience and Socio-ecological Systems Research in ecology as an ecosystem science came into being at the turn of the twenty-first century, with the notion of the ‘socio-ecological system’ (Clause, 2015) that fully incorporates societal reality (with economic, technological, environmental, political, social, cultural and religious elements). This notion highlights a relationship of reciprocity and mutual dependence between societal reality and ecosystem reality. On the one hand, ecosystems provide ecosystem goods and services which are vital for the well-being of societies. On the other hand, they are altered by human societies that degrade or destroy ecosystems, or conversely, maintain or take care of them whether through acts of restoration (repair or self-regulation), conservation (avoiding overexploitation by including humans in the process) or preservation (exclusion of all human activities). It is essential to keep the concern for a complex and global approach, and to deal with the relationships between each part, so as not to lose sight of the interest of what Pope Francis, in a marvellous formula taken from Gorbachev, calls ‘the common house’. Pope Francis refers to ‘integral ecology’, which does not want to convert everything to the cult of the Earth, and to subordinate everything to it. “He shows that ecology deeply affects our lives, our civilization, our ways of acting, our thoughts” (Morin, 2015). Thinking about resilience is central to the concept of SES (socio-economic status), as it allows us to better understand its structure and functioning. Resilience has many meanings, and we will not mention here all the definitions in physics (shock resistance of a material), in psychology according to the work of Boris Cyrulnik, or in ecology. What they have in common is that they evoke a reaction to a shock. There is a consensus among researchers today that considers that, in a socio-ecological approach, resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances and reorganize itself while making changes in such a way as to maintain essentially the same function, structure, identity and reactions (Walker et al., 2004), in other words to maintain the same dynamics (quantitative and qualitative) or ‘domain of attraction’. This can be defined according to three essential characteristics of resilience (the amount of change that can be endured by the system; the degree of difficulty in making the system change; the extent to which the current state of the system is close to a limit or ‘threshold’). Social reality incorporates the capacity of

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humans in the system to manage resilience (concept of adaptability) or, conversely, to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, social or political conditions make the existing system untenable (concept of transformability). All these dynamics are intertwined and operate in particular organizational scales or subsystems that can be studied in a bottom-up manner (from households to villages to nations, from trees to gardens or plots etc.). But the management of a socioecological system is linked, as we have seen, to the understanding of what happens, in societal reality and also in natural reality, on the one hand on each scale, in the different phases of change that take place according to a cycle of adaptation consisting, in general of four phases (rapid growth, resource conservation, resource release and reorganisation) and, more globally, on multiple and interconnecting scales according to a configuration of adaptation cycles called a ‘panarchy’ (Resilience Alliance, 2010). Such scientific research in resilient thinking and socialecological systems, with sometimes sophisticated mathematical modelling, supports policy measures to promote resilient systems: complex interdependent relationships between people and ecosystems; understanding of and the future evolution of the Anthropocene; and learning and adaptive capacities in the face of a wide range of complex challenges and the contemporary crisis of our societies under multiple pressures (safeguarding the common home, keeping the planet below its habitability limits). At the heart of any crisis where forces of disintegration and regeneration come about jointly, with an outcome of regression or progression, or even death and life for individuals or communities, transition issues are transformed into a search for and implementation of resilient processes of interconnected socio-ecological systems (Latour, 2018). In this sense, a major objective is the development of the resilience of communities: it is this that gives them the capacity to resist shocks that are both economic and ecological, and to provide for themselves in times of crisis. It is the stories of individuals working on issues of local resilience that have brought together a set of principles and practices, first by Rob Hopkins, that gave rise to the concept of ecological transition. It is linked to the capacity of individuals who are connected to each other and to the living world, to transform themselves and tell their own narrative in order to work together to re-imagine and re-construct a habitable and equitable Earth. “This future is being written” (Hopkins, 2015b). Hopkins highlights the idea of closeness. It is not necessarily physical, although that may help, but it is predominantly an acknowledgement of the presence of the other, in an interplay of resonance between the socius (the social being, the individual belonging to society) and the alter ego (the other than me), the political – in the sense of the polis, of living together – which takes place in the ‘together’ and the ethics which relate to the other. In ‘the socius and the neighbour’, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur (2016) commenting on Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan, shows that the neighbour is the one who becomes close through his living presence to the other (and we could extend this quality of presence to all living species and to the whole cosmos) and becomes capable of active hospitality, thus indicating what needs to be done in suitable and fitting manner.

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In my view, talk of an ecological odyssey is entirely consistent with the human adventure captured in stories of resilience in social-ecological systems in the Anthropocene. In this storytelling adventure, a web or mesh of common threads is woven, including care for others and the living world, and the unforgettable character of these stories, as Hopkins points out. Also important are fragility, the exercise of human plasticity in adapting to the environment, and finally, in the face of adversity, the ability to pull through, both ‘from below’ and ‘from above’. Thinking about resilience, restoring the world and its vitality and repairing the planet are therefore not possible only through exteriority and our human and social relationships. All this implies working on the transformation of the self in relation to the other and to the environment. The gravity of existence takes place inside us, its depth which gives it meaning, where the soul sings, where life takes its breath but also its strength by enabling us to survive the worst sometimes. There will be no successful ecological transformation without the awakening of resonance, where the world speaks to us and we hear it speak to us, according to Rosa. In this contact with the world, there is the need to let ourselves be affected and to let go. Stepping back to reflect is essential, as in the example of Telemachus, whose name means one who fights (in Greek makhé) from a distance (in Greek têle). Inspired in Homer’s Odyssey by his mentor, Athena Promachos, Telemachus receives divine grace to prepare not only for battle with a keen sense of strategy, but also for the way in which justice must be exercised in carrying out his responsibilities. Today, there is still a ‘Telemachus’ generation, which in their twenties wants not only to show their discontent and ecological fears, but also to learn and to be builders with others, in the fight to save life on Earth and its habitability.

3 Odyssey and Ecological Education What if Homer’s Odyssey were beckoning us? Almost 3000 years old, the story of the eventful voyage of the ‘Man of a Thousand Tricks’ seems so close, he “who wandered full many ways [. . .] Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades.” (Odyssey, I, 1–5). Ulysses undergoes hardship but stays on course for his land; in fact, he knows nothing more beautiful. Is this the kind of happiness to which everyone can aspire, especially in this time of global ecological crisis when a new world is taking shape? In the twenty-first Century there is no shortage of thinkers, philosophers and theologians who have cast anchor on the shores of this new world, nor of contemporary writers who, in their literary works, display their intention to collaborate to save, heal, or at least do good (Gefen, 2017). In the present crisis, the reader of the Odyssey is particularly interested in what happens to ‘Man’ and in the dramatic elements of Homer’s work. In the preface, the hero is not called by the name of anthrôpos, in Greek ‘human being’, which gave rise to the words anthropology and Anthropocene. The ‘man’ referred to here, from the

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very first word of the Odyssey, is andra (in Greek, accusative singular of aner) the male, or manly man, with his warrior attributes. Western civilization, in this sense, has long promoted this model of a hero. Its land is the Greek island of Ithaca, the prototype of a community that is about to become a polis, of which Athens is the model, as Eva Cantarella points out in Tout Homère. Homer sketches the first features of the Greek polis as a political organization of a human community, from the oikos (the origin of the words economy and ecology) towards which Odysseus is returning. This roadmap is quite clearly outlined in the opening scenes of the first song of the Odyssey where, after the preface and a short glimpse of Olympus, we follow Athena’s descent to earth, to find the first character, Telemachus, in his domain that has been besieged and sacked by the Pretenders. One could say that learning to tame hubris, the excess that causes all crises, is the very purpose of the plot of the Odyssey. After more than 12,000 verses, just before the end of the epic where agreement between the people and their king is sealed, Homer shows us that Athena, in the guise of Mentor, still has to tame her protégé’s hubris: “Industrious Ulysses, restrain yourself,” she tells him. From Homer to Camus, the entire history of Western civilization tells of the pressure of hubris on humanity and the effort we must make to say ‘no’. It is a matter of safeguarding and elevating what is most human in humanity (Camus, 2008b, p. 779). Camus refuses to follow Prometheus, ‘the first rebel’, but chooses, “in order to share the common struggles and destiny, [...] Ithaca, the faithful land, audacious and frugal thought, lucid action, the generosity of the man who knows” (Camus, 2008a, pp. 268 & 323). Today, new generations are rising up and drawing strength from the impetus and fragility of their youth. They are shouting to the world and its leaders: “Save the planet”. The most significant achievements of higher education in France, undoubtedly came in the wake of the “Manifeste étudiant pour un réveil écologique” (Student Manifesto for Ecological Awakening), published in November 2018. It has had a strong impact on business and industry. They have been criticised for playing a ‘greenwashing’ game for the benefit of their image, and are being asked to make a transparent and coherent strategic commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Resilience should be at the heart of ecological transformation and publications that deal with this, but there is still a lot of research and communication work to be done. The “Manifeste étudiant pour un réveil écologique”, for example, makes no mention of the term ‘resilience’ except in an endnote with a reference to the Stockholm Resilience Center. On the other hand, the determination of the more than 32,000 signatories of the student manifesto to change the current economic system in which they no longer believe is clear. Moreover, reflections on economic theories and changes in models are at the heart of educational approaches and new practices in a variety of areas. For example, for more than 3 years, a public regional establishment has linked nine municipalities in Seine-Saint-Denis to encourage young people and adults to develop a new ‘contributory’ economy (Stiegler, 2016). The approach is based on developing new production processes and new criteria for the redistribution of wealth, with particular attention to the resilience of living things. From such experiments, based on discoveries related to unstable dynamic systems and the

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concept of entropy, scientific research is inspired to rethink the economy in relation to ecology. The student manifesto also questions the environmental policy of companies and the way they work together, integrating the transformation of the human being, which some companies are already doing by cultivating resilience factors as well, such as Hubert de Boisredon, CEO of Armor (Les Echos, June 25, 2020). Courses, academic posts and seminars relating to environmental and societal challenges have also emerged on campuses around the world. In addition schools such as HEC or the Fondacio Institutes (IFF) have introduces learning visits and immersion in ecosystems with questionable resilience, based on a ‘crisological’ conception of training (Prouteau, 2006, pp. 152–156). This network of institutes, the first of which I created in 1990 in Europe (IFF Europe, a centre associated with the UCO) and then extended the concept right across the world, also includes workshops on ‘awareness-raising and ecological renaissance’ based on the climate fresco (understanding the components of climate disruption and its systemic nature) and the ecological renaissance approach. There are 24 sites for tomorrow’s world based on the Allegory of Good Government, a fresco panel painted in 1338 by Lorenzetti. Educationally, this last tool, which Julien Dossier explores like a real treasure map, enable us to represent and link the components of a resilient system, compatible with the biological and physical constraints of our time (Dossier, 2019). In the wake of the student manifesto, the Transition Campus (Domaine de Forges Seine-et-Marne), in conjunction with the academic world and several grandes écoles (ESSEC, École des mines, Sciences Po., etc.), also aims to be a place where the transformation of ecology-related curricula in higher education are encouraged. The campus favours an integral approach to education (head/body/heart) and a reflection on multi-scale socio-ecological systems. There are two main educational objectives. One is to encourage existential and collective awareness of the aims of living together (a political aim) and of the desirable world to be built within an ethical horizon and according to very diverse practices (work on the principles of the UN’s SDGs for example). The second is the implementation of new intellectual and practical paths, in a situation of uncertainty. Its standpoint is critical (for example, questioning the dominant economic paradigm, analysis of the insufficiencies or structural contradictions of the Paris agreements on climate or of the SDGs), in order to bring about the common future we desire. The Transition Campus with more than 70 teacher-researchers and experts from all disciplines has embarked on writing the Great Transition Handbook (Fortes, 2020). By describing this transition as ‘great’, do we not once again emphasize the need to evoke the metaphorical universe of the human odyssey on which we are all embarked today? The educational path envisaged by the Transition Campus for such an odyssey passes through six doors opening onto a succession of problematic fields. These refer to six Greek concepts, oikos (common home), ethos (ethics of responsibility), nomos (governance and administration), logos (rationalities), praxis (acting in diversity and synergies between stakeholders), dynamis (combining the forces present and setting them in motion by reconnecting to oneself, to others and to nature).

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In resonance with these gateways to this new world, the travel narratives of Ulysses show that the “inventive man”, as a resilient person, knows how to deploy an inner resource when, in the course of his many shipwrecks, he draws knowledge, learning and stories full of lessons, to bounce back from difficult situations, to transform his relationship to the world and to hold his course towards his land. He is the icon, in a way, of the resilient person, on the sea as a shipwrecked sailor, or back in Ithaca as a beggar king or a stranger at home. This ‘inner resource’ undergoes a transformation under the pressure of the forces that are exerted on it and develops resilience by adapting to new internal and external configurations until a new open and dynamic equilibrium is reached. Resilience is a life process that is continually being woven and unwoven, like Penelope weaving at her loom. Boris Cyrulnik (1999a, b) likens resilience to a piece of knitting, like knitting that joins ‘developmental’ wool and emotional and social wool together. While waiting for the return of her husband Ulysses, Penelope uses the passage of time and turns it to her advantage, with the close environment, family (Ulysses absent but whose return she hopes for, and Ulysses’ father, Laërte, whose future shroud she weaves) and society (the suitors). She pulls and withdraws the threads of her web, unbeknownst to those who, while courting her and eating away at her house, see their plans to marry her and ascend to the throne of Ithaca postponed. The shroud underlines the condition of humans, the ‘mortals’ as Homer calls them, but as long as the mortuary veil, like life, has not finished being woven, its weft remains open to a 1000 round trips, adaptations and new configurations, transformations of the subject and the world at the same time. Philippe Jaccottet, in the foreword to his French translation of the Odyssey, aptly describes the effect reading the Odyssey has on us, saying that at first, we will experience freshness of water in the palm of our hand. After that, we are free to comment endlessly, if we wish. Different pedagogical currents have emerged in the history of education. In our current human odyssey, the Telemachus moment continues. As we can see today, Telemachus still inspires educators. It was after the appearance of Fénelon’s book, Les aventures de Télémaque, published in 1699, that ‘mentor’ became a common word in our vocabulary, and is also used in the form of ‘mentoring’ to describe a coaching and learning experience based on a voluntary, free and confidential interpersonal relationship in which the mentor makes his or her experience, acquired wisdom and expertise available to help another person ‘know how to become’. Today, the multi-faceted practices around coaching, from coaching to tutoring to mentoring and counselling can be analysed from a critical perspective and thought in terms of ‘ingenium’ (Boutinet, 2007) where we distinguish coaching from mentoring. Even if both can be part of a process of transformation of the subject, coaching works on personal development, whereas mentoring is mainly concerned with the transmission of knowledge or techniques, or the enhancement of acquired experience, often towards a younger person: this is the case here with Telemachus. From the very beginning of the Odyssey, Telemachus takes centre stage in the history of Western culture, as a precursor to many other episodes. For he is reborn every time a young person, like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, “seeks experience and needs it; like him, he goes on a journey” (Citati, 2002, p. 128), and, by overcoming all the obstacles that stand in his way, learns about life. Goethe’s novel Wilhelm

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Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796) exemplifies the concept of the Bildungsroman, (novel of education). I would argue that this learning, in the case of Telemachus, is specifically part of a mentorship of resilience. What does the poet’s narrative highlight about his situation and how it develops, through Telemachus’ first steps in the Odyssey? In the oikos, at once a home and a world of feelings, a family system and a power structure, spirited and licentious suitors squander all the property of the estate, and, for a Greek of that time, they embody “Absolute Evil” (Citati, 2002, p. 127). They do this in more ways than one, especially by violating by hubris all the limits of morality. Telemachus is devastated by this. If we follow the poet’s account step by step in the first chapter of the Odyssey, we can easily see the narrative scheme in which a pedagogical device is outlined, which starts first of all with the young Telemachus. Here we find the observation of an unacceptable and revolting situation; the dream of radical change that is resistant to the adversity of the present situation; a lively indication of what may happen; the expansive and direct welcome of the unknown, with concrete signs of hospitality; choosing someone you trust, to whom you can talk in confidence without fear of revealing your vulnerability; sharing an analysis of the situation, dreams of change and also your own doubts; taking advice in return, listening all the way, reflecting. The second stage begins with developing the relationship further, in what is more akin to mentoring than coaching as we understand it today - mentoring professionals would now speak of in-take. Resilience mentoring has two strands, the mentoring relationship and resilience, which are woven into the narrative suggested by the poet. Telemachus, like his father, not only has the talent of hospitality, but also enjoys πων” meeting and getting to know people “καὶ κεῖ νoς ἐπίστρoφoς ἦν ἀνθρω (Odyssey I, 177). The ever-relevant themes of education, kinship and passing things on from one generation to another are brilliantly addressed in Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey. A Father, a Son and an Epic (2017). In the third stage, through the trust he has been able to instil thanks to his expertise and wisdom, the mentor exercises his authority by asking Telemachus to listen carefully and to ‘weigh up well’ (discern, judge) the advice he gives him (Odyssey I, 271).1 He will play a leading role in battle and in the exercise of justice, in order to save Ithaca from predators and usher in an era of peace in his kingdom.

References Berut, R. (2018). La joie d’être au monde. Guilde des Créateurs de Mondes & Germe. Boutinet, J.-P. (Ed.). (2007). Penser l’accompagnement des adultes. PUF. Camus, A. (2008a). Œuvres complètes (Vol. 3-1949-1956). La Pléiade. Camus, A. (2008b). Œuvres complètes (Vol. 4-1957-1959). La Pléiade.

1 I develop this “Telemachus moment” at greater length in F. Prouteau, Odyssée pour une Terre habitable, Paris, Le Pommier/Humensis, 2021.

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Citati, P. (2002). La pensée chatoyante. Ulysse et l’Odyssée. Gallimard. Clause, J. (2015, October 29). Introduction à la résilience – Résilience écologique à résilience socio-écologique. Ceres 1 workshop, ENS. Crutzen, P. J., & Stoermer, E. F. (2000). The anthropocene. Global Center Newsletter, 4, 17–18. Cyrulnik, B. (1999a). Un merveilleux malheur. Odile Jacob. Cyrulnik, B. (1999b). Carnets/Psy n° 47, 01/09. Dossier, J. (2019). Renaissance écologique (preface by Rob Hopkins). Actes Sud. Fortes. (2020). Manuel de la Grande transition. Les liens qui libèrent. Gefen, A. (2017). Réparer le monde. La littérature française face au XXIe. Éditions Corti. Goethe (1795–96). Wilhelm Meister’s apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre). Hopkins, R. (2015a). Tomorrow. Documentary film about global warming and other environmental issues, Dion, C. & Laurent, M. Hopkins, R. (2015b, October). Transition network, COP21 – 21 stories. Wallonia-Brussels. Latour, B. (2018, July 20). Interview with Nicolas Truong. Le Monde. Mendelsohn, D. (2017). An odyssey. A father, a son and an epic. Knopf. Morin, E. (2015, June 19). La Croix. Morin, E. (2019). La fraternité, pourquoi? Actes sud. Prouteau, F. (2006). Former... oui, mais dans quel sens?? L’Harmattan. Prouteau, F. (2021). Odyssée pour une Terre habitable. Le Pommier/Humensis. Prouteau, F., Wallenhorst, N., & Hétier, R. (2020). Interprétation de l’Anthropocène et anthropologies politiques. Interviews with Dominique Bourg and Erle C. Ellis. Raisons politiques, 77, 35. SciencesPo Les Presses. Resilience Alliance. (2010). Assessing resilience in social-ecological systems: Workbook for practitioners. Version 2.0. Online: http://www.resalliance.org/3871.php Ricoeur, P. (2016 [1954]). History and truth. Northwestern University Press. Stephen, W., et al. (2011). The anthropocene: Conceptual and historical perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 369(1938), 842–867. Stephen, W. et al. (2018). Trajectories of the Earth system in the anthropocene. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ Stiegler, B. (2016). Dans la disruption, comment ne pas devenir fou. Les liens qui libèrent. Vernant, J.-P. (2001). The universe, the gods, and men: Ancient Greek myths. Harper. Walker, B., et al. (2004). Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society, 9(2), 5. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5/ Wallenhorst, N., Prouteau, F., & Coatanéa, D. (Eds.). (2018). Éduquer l’homme augmenté. Le bord de l’eau. World Meterological Organization (WMO). (2022). Four key climate change indicators break records in 2021. https://unfccc.int/news/four-key-climate-change-indicators-break-records-in2021?gclid=Cj0KCQjwpompBhDZARIsAFD_Fp8uQ5oecONQK_6hAzZsYbrF1 gmxWOaBOMWfY_HPffqqPEUYiD9UJ38aAmbIEALw_wcB

François Prouteau holds a postgraduate degree in engineering awarded by the French Grandes Ecoles Institut Mines-Télécom Atlantique. He is Doctor of Educational Sciences. He is teacher and associated researcher at the Catholic University of the West (UCO). He is the author of scientific articles and books on education, and anthropology in the Anthropocene. Books (selection): Former...oui, mais dans quel sens? (Harmattan, 2006, in French); Éduquer l’homme augmenté – Vers un avenir postprométhéen (with Nathanaël Wallenhorst and Dominique Coatanéa, 2018, in French); Odyssée pour une Terre habitable (Le Pommier/Humensis, 2021, in French). Developing an educational philosophy in the Anthropocene - Courage at the Crossroads (Springer, 2024, in English).

Educating for a Sense of Limits and Limitlessness in the Anthropocene Jean-Marc Lamarre

Abstract The Anthropocene challenges the capitalist model of indefinite growth and unbridled consumerism. In order to face climate change, humans must limit themselves. What can motivate them to self-limitation without giving up on selfrealization? How can we educate people in the sense of limits? We show that we cannot teach about a sense of limits without developing the sense of limitlessness by reorienting the human potential of limitlessness, from having unlimited material things to having no limits in how we relate to others and the world. Keywords Sens of limits · Limitlessness · Anthropocene · Political education We have entered the Anthropocene, that geological epoch in which the human species has become a major telluric force irreversibly altering for centuries, millennia even, the functioning of the Earth system. “What is happening to us”, write Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, “is not an environmental crisis, it is a geological revolution of human origin” (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2013, p. 10). The Anthropocene calls into question our capitalist economic model of indefinite growth and unbridled consumerism. To deal with climate disruption, which is now accelerating and threatening the very survival of humanity, we must radically transform our societies and change our lifestyles. We must place limits on ourselves. What can motivate us to fight to change our economic system? What can motivate us to limit ourselves and to renounce the enjoyment of unrestrained consumption? How can we educate ourselves to develop a sense of limits? We cannot educate people in the sense of limits without at the same time teaching the sense of limitlessness, such is our thesis. There is in humanity, according to Christian Arnsperger and Dominique Bourg, “an anthropological potential for limitlessness [...] a push towards the unlimited deeply rooted in the human” (Arnsperger & Bourg, 2017, p. 111). Education should not, and cannot, aim to extirpate this potential from humanity, but it should give it shape by orienting it in such a way that it makes self-limitation possible. “Can one have the art of J.-M. Lamarre (✉) University of Nantes, Nantes, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_16

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measurement”, writes Corine Pelluchon, “if one does not experience incommensurability?” (Pelluchon, 2018, p. 95). A sense of limitlessness is the condition for a right relationship to oneself, to others and to nature. But what limitlessness? We have entered, with the Anthropocene, the era of non-separation, of interdependence between humans and between humans and non-humans: a potentially unlimited space of relationships is opening up to us. To educate people in the sense of limits and limitlessness is to re-orientate the human potential of limitlessness, away from the desire to have unlimited material things and towards having no limits in the poetic experience of how we relate to others and the world. This reorientation of the aspiration for the unlimited is the precondition for the transformation of politics and political education.

1 The Meaning of Limits: Self-Limitation Humans have always acted locally on their natural environment, but the Anthropocene differs from anthropization in that, through human action on the climate and its feedback effect on the conditions of life on Earth, it constitutes a major break in the overall functioning of the Earth system. Paul Crutzen traces the beginning of this new geological epoch, which he calls the Anthropocene, back to the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century and the invention and gradual improvement of the steam engine by James Watt between 1769 and 1788 (Federau, 2017, p. 115). However, the name Anthropocene is the subject of debate. The entry into this new geological epoch dates from the mass adoption of the steam engine by British capitalists in the textile industry between 1825 and 1850. It is not anthropos, it is not the human species in its entirety that is responsible for climate disruption, but, as Andreas Malm has shown, first ‘fossil capitalism’ and then the development of industrial capitalism, colonialism and imperialism (Malm, 2017). The Anthropocene is actually a Capitalocene. Unbridled capitalist productivism and its corollary, consumerism, are based on the illusion that natural resources are infinite and that they allow for infinite growth. They are at the root of the current ecological disaster (global warming, collapse of biodiversity, water, air and soil pollution, ocean acidification, depletion of natural resources). Productivism, in its excess and excessiveness, leads to the production of anything and everything as long as there is a profit to be made, with no regard for the usefulness of the products, the real needs of humans and the preservation of ecosystems. By making consumption the law, capitalism, especially in its neoliberal form, produces a consumer individual who desires constantly new, often useless, even harmful objects, manufactured on the other side of the world in generally undignified working conditions. Productivism sustains desire instead of satisfying need. Need can be satisfied: it is finite. Desire, in contrast, is insatiable and infinite. It moves from one object to another and its satisfaction is postponed indefinitely. The market apparently gives us great freedom of choice between various products, but in reality this freedom is illusory because it is paid for by submission to the imperative to consume without limits. We must

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therefore limit ourselves. But in what way? And what kind of education in limits is this? The modern idea of education is based on the realization that the human being is not confined by nature but is perfectible. Conservative education, on the other hand, is essentially an education in self-sacrifice, in renunciation of freedom, in resignation to a mutilated life. This education reproduces the relationships of domination and social inequality; it keeps the dominated in their place, that is to say, within the limits of an enslaved life. Rousseau bases his liberating conception of education on the concept of ‘perfectibility’, i.e. “the faculty of self-perfection; a faculty which, with the help of circumstances, successively develops all the others, and resides among us both in the species and in the individual” (Rousseau, 1964, p. 142). This faculty, which distinguishes man from animals, is “almost unlimited” (idem) but it is ambivalent. If it allows man to make all sorts of acquisitions and progress, it is also “the source of all man’s misfortunes [...] it is this faculty which, as the centuries go by, brings forth his lights and his errors, his vices and his virtues, and in the long run makes him the tyrant of himself and of nature” (idem). It seems to us that we can take up this concept of “almost unlimited” perfectibility by distinguishing two manifestations of it: on the one hand, the development of technical and productive capacities, which, combined with capitalism, have led man to become “the tyrant of himself and of nature” and, on the other hand, self-perfection in non-productive work and the use of techniques that do not destroy nature, education, the arts, festivals, religions and spiritualities, etc., that is to say, everything that allows people to become “tyrants of nature”, that is, everything that allows human beings to realize themselves in their relationships with themselves, with other humans, with non-humans and with the world. Today, in the age of the Anthropocene, we must limit ourselves in the expansion of techno-sciences, material production and consumption and, on instead enlarge without limits our relational space, widening it beyond the too limited circle of our relatives and fellow human beings. It is by investing in our relationships with others and with nature that we will succeed in putting a stop to the indefinite accumulation of commodities in production and consumption. In other words, we must cultivate being-with (being-with extended to non-humans, to nature) in order to renounce the enjoyment of having (Fromm, 1976). Just as there are two kinds of limitlessness, there are two kinds of limits. There are limits that are oppressive, unjust, and that hinder human self-realization; they are imposed by relations of class domination, gender, sexual orientation, and racial stereotyping. Everyone is in his or her place and forced to stay there: the dominated at the bottom, and the dominant at the top. There are limits that are just and liberating, especially those that aim to prevent domination over both humans and nature. Modern education has an emancipatory purpose: it rejects any limitation of perfectibility. There is no limit at which human beings should stop in the free realization of themselves. Rousseau writes in Emile: “I know of no philosopher who has yet been so bold as to say: this is the limit of what man can reach and beyond which he cannot go” (Rousseau, 2009, p. 83). In the Anthropocene era, education must call for both self-emancipation and self-limitation. Human beings

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must free themselves from that which locks them into a mutilated life and limits their self-realization, especially in their freedom to form relationships, and at the same time they must limit their own destructive power in their relationship to themselves, to others, to the living and to nature. It is by self-limitation that they can really enter into a relationship, in a true relationship, with others who are themselves free to be themselves; conversely, it is by opening ourselves to relationships that we can place limitations on ourselves. Self-limitation is not a mutilation, it is true freedom, freedom in relation to humans, to non-humans, to the world. Now, in the Anthropocene era, a potentially unlimited space of relationships is opening up: the space of inseparation.

2 Inseparation: Opening Up a Space of Unbounded Relationships We have entered, according to Dominique Quessada, the era of “inseparability”. “We are now all inseparable human beings. Without knowing it we have always been; now we know it, and above all we live it” (Quessada, 2013, p. 13). The ongoing ecological, health and social catastrophe forces human beings to think of themselves not only as inseparable from each other, but also as inseparable from other living species and even as inseparable from all terrestrial entities (forests, mountains, rivers, etc.) and from the Earth itself. Human beings form a we that is itself part of a global we. “Everything is happening to everyone on a global scale. The idea of a community of destiny emerges, which passes first through the tragic awareness of the possibility of the end of the human species” (ibid., p. 270). A potentially unlimited space of relations between humans and between humans and other entities also emerges: not an abolition of limits but their relativization. Quessada distinguishes two logics and two ontologies: those of separation and closure and those of ‘inseparation’ and relation. In the former, reality is made up of separable and separate entities, of fixed essences, of closed identities; relations are only relations of externality between already constituted identities. This ontology characterizes Western metaphysics and the West in general. “The West could not do otherwise than fence off and separate, in other words to invent and destroy the Other” (ibid., p. 66). Invented in 1874 by an Illinois farmer, “barbed wire constitutes a highly representative object of a certain Western ‘way’ of ‘treating’ the Other” (idem). On the contrary, in the logic and ontology of inseparability, what is ontologically primary is relation and process. The real is relational; entities are constituted through the processes of relations; relations and processes create the boundaries. We have gradually left the regime of separate substances and entered that of inseparability. We have moved historically from a humanistic (with the human being at the centre of the world) and national (relatively independent nation-states) age to an ecological and global age that relativizes the boundaries between humans, between the human species and other species, between life and

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matter. The regime of inseparability is characterized ontologically by of the generalised term ‘uncloaking’ (ibid., p. 87). Un-fencing is a gradual breaking down of fences: according to Quessada, it means destroying or getting round every wall (material or symbolic). Un-fencing is not so much a destruction of limits as an opening of them: an opening up to a relational limitlessness. But is this limitlessness not also a ‘bad infinity’, such as the infinite list of our ‘friends’ on Facebook or our sexual partners on dating sites? Relationships can indeed be part of the economic, or capitalist, logic of limitless consumption. But they are then less relationships than an instrumentalization of the other or a mutual instrumentalization. By being open to unlimited relationality, we mean not the accumulation of relationships, but the absence of limits in the freedom to enter into relationships with others without discrimination, which presupposes freedom of movement on earth, in other words, ‘uncloaking’. This openness is also the openness of the boundaries between the human species and other living species and the possibility of building multi-species relationships. “The experience of the incommensurable, which alone gives the measure” (Pelluchon, 2018, p. 100) is, according to Corine Pelluchon, the experience of our belonging to a common world, “it is the experience of our community of destiny with other living beings, human and non-human, and is inseparable from the desire to take care of them and to pass on a habitable world to future generations” (ibid, p. 102), it is “a profound understanding of the solidarity that unites us with other living beings, informing our relationship with what is around us and with those who are with us” (ibid., p. 101). Inseparability is the fact that the disappearance of living species also means our own disappearance. At this time when we are witnessing with anguish, horror even, the extinction of countless species we also marvel at the infinite richness and beauty of nature and are becoming aware of our responsibility to care for it by places limits on ourselves. In the poetic experience of the beautiful and sublime, we expand and elevate our relationship with the world to a sense of the infinite.

3 The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Sense of the Unlimited Human self-limitation is conditioned by a different relationship to the world than the limitless economic relationship of production, exchange and consumption that leads to the plundering and destruction of the planet. In capitalism, natural elements are resources to be exploited, materials to be worked, goods to be bought and sold, products to be consumed. There can be no limitation of this economic relationship to the world unless, at the same time, we cultivate a poetic and spiritual relationship to the world and to the unlimited immensity of the universe. There can only be economic degrowth if there is poetic and spiritual growth of humanity. Natural beings do not only have a function in nature, they are often beautiful, even sublime. Beauty sets a limit to consumption, but a fragile limit - I contemplate a beautiful flower, I smell it, I paint it, I photograph it, but sometimes, because I want it, I pick

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it. Let us take the example of Goethe’s poem Discovery.1 Walking in the woods, the poet sees a beautiful flower. “I felt like plucking it/but it said softly to me: /Is it to wither me/that you want to break me?” Goethe hears the flower’s voice, pulls it out of the ground with its roots and replants it: “now it never ceases to spread/and to bloom again.” Goethe’s relationship to the flower, Fromm comments, was established in “the being mode” and not in “the having mode” (Fromm, 1976). Seized by the beauty of the flower, the poet not only did not destroy it, but he listened to it and cared for it. Beauty constituted a limit and opened a relationship between man and plant. Beauty itself has its limits, and Kant, in the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime (Kant, 2012). The feeling of the sublime is the feeling of the beautiful extended beyond all limits to the immensity of the universe. But between the beautiful and the sublime, there is not only a difference in degree, there is a difference in nature. Kant wrote as early as 1764 in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, “The night is sublime, the day is beautiful” (Kant, 2003, p. 82). The feeling of the sublime is experienced in the face of that which exceeds all form, the formless or the deformed, that is to say, nature as immensity (the mathematical sublime) or nature as power as it manifests itself in wild disorder and chaos (the dynamic sublime), immensity or power that reduce our imagination to impotence. Nature is sublime in the immensity of the skies and oceans, the desert and the starry night; it is sublime in storms, tempests, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Then it is as if the imagination were confronted with its own limits, but, in the face of the immensity and the unleashing of forces, the imagination feels overwhelmed. The sublime, unlike the beautiful, always includes a negative overwhelming moment and sometimes even terror, but this painful moment is surpassed by another in which man becomes aware of his greatness. Kant’s thesis is that the sublime is not a characteristic of natural phenomena, but of man as a suprasensitive being. In the sublime, the imagination is linked to reason, the faculty of rising above sensation. Thus the vision of the night sky and the countless stars above our heads is the symbol of the moral law in our hearts, which attests to our freedom. The sublime of the starry sky is the symbol of the sublime in us, the symbol of the infinite moral greatness of man. Kant first analyses the mathematical sublime. This is absolute greatness (Kant, 2003, p. 87). Greatness is relative or absolute. Gulliver is a giant among dwarfs and a dwarf among giants: his greatness is relative. In the nature, greatness is always relative, and no matter how immense an expanse may be, it is always possible to imagine a greater one. It follows, according to Kant, that the sublime is not to be sought in the things of nature, but only in our ideas. The experience of moral greatness is the experience of absolute greatness. The immense greatness in the aesthetic field awakens in man the idea of absolute greatness in the moral field. Kant then analyses the dynamic sublime. This time, the sublime is no longer in the mathematical immensity of the universe but in the dynamic intensity of the forces that unfold within it. The dynamic sublime is nature unleashed. A force

1

Quoted by Fromm.

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that can be mastered by man is not sublime; an uncontrollable force that threatens human existence inspires not a feeling of the sublime but a feeling of horror or terror. The sublime lies between the beautiful and the horrible. The dynamic sublime arouses fear, but a fear that we feel capable of morally overcoming. It is the fortitude with which we oppose the threat of death that is reflected in the dynamic feeling of the sublime. The infinity of our moral greatness in fact is aroused by the proximity of death. The sublime awakens in man the infinity of his moral destination which makes him capable of facing the danger of death and thus asserting a strength (moral strength) greater than any natural strength. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe”, Kant writes in the Critique of Practical Reason, “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” (Kant, 2015, p. 295). The first overwhelms me and brings me down: as an animal, I am nothing. The second lifts me up and exalts me: as a person bearing the moral law, I am a free being, independent of animality. In the experience of the sublime, man takes the measure of his finitude and discovers himself capable of infinity: the sublime lowers us and raises us up. Today, ecological disasters, the consequences of climate change, give rise to a feeling of horror in the face of natural forces over which man has no control and which threaten his very existence. However, the sublime, which exists somewhere between the beautiful and the horrible, insofar as it signifies both the smallness of man in the universe and his greatness through his freedom, sustains us, in the face of the horror of catastrophes, in the act of self-limitation.

4 Rethinking Politics and Political Education We cannot confront the current catastrophe without a transformation of politics and consequently of political education. Up until now, politics has been defined as what organizes human communities, and these are mainly organized in nation-states. However, climate change affects the Earth as a whole: it disturbs the whole of humanity and not just this or that State, and even all living species and terrestrial entities (rivers, mountains, oceans, etc.). The Anthropocene, in this sense, unifies humanity and unifies the Earth. Today we are becoming aware that we are one humanity, inseparable, beyond political, cultural and geographical differences, and we are becoming aware of our interdependence with all living species and earth entities and of forming a community of destiny with them. This awareness (which should also be a goal of political education) does not make the community of destiny a political community, but it does prompt the transformation of the political in the direction of building collectives of humans and non-humans (Latour, 1999; Descola, 2014). Only humans are citizens and they have the responsibility to create a common world with non-humans by taking into account, politically and legally, their intrinsic value. Non-humans, especially animals and natural entities, such as rivers, mountains, etc., have a value of their own, regardless of the use humans may make of them, but this value is recognized and conferred by humans. The reorientation of the

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human potential for limitlessness from material limitlessness to relational and poetic limitlessness is a condition not only of self-limitation, but also of the political consideration of nonhumans, just as this consideration, and in particular the attribution of rights to nonhumans, is a condition of the self-limitation of humans. Political education in schools is inseparable from other educations, and in particular from education in the sense of limits and limitlessness. Five principles for political education in the Anthropocene era can be identified: the ethical principle of one diverse humanity and also of interdependence with non-humans; the political principle of global citizenship and also of the rights of animals and the rights of nature; the cultural principle of the intercultural and also of the interspecies; the ecological principle of the “Earth as a homeland” (Morin & Kern, 1993); and the poetic and spiritual principle of openness to the unlimited. These principles are also the basis of our unlimited openness to others (to people of present, past and future generations), to living species, to nature and to the immensity of the universe, and to our self-limitation with regard to people, animals and nature. 1. The ethical principle of a single yet diverse humanity and of interdependence with animals and nature. It is a question of developing awareness of human identity as a fundamental identity (I am human before being French), of teaching the moral idea of a ‘society of the human race’ and of the equal dignity of all human beings as persons. Moral cosmopolitanism must be extended to the idea of a community of all living and natural beings, of the dignity of animals, not as persons, but as sentient beings. We must therefore rethink moral education in this sense. 2. The political principle of world citizenship and the rights of foreigners as world citizens. Political cosmopolitanism can be expanded to include the rights of animals and the rights of nature. Non-humans are not citizens, but humans have a responsibility to animals and to nature. It is about forming a cosmopolitical consciousness. All people are citizens of the world, even though there is no world state, and the problems posed by the Anthropocene can only be dealt with on a global scale and through political action by people from all countries as citizens of the world (cf. the global youth climate protests). Civic education must therefore be rethought in this sense. 3. The cultural principle of interculturality and interspecies. Societies are becoming more and more multicultural. The educational challenge is to move from multiculturalism to interculturality. We have to learn about our own culture and foreign cultures at the same time. In particular, we have much to learn from cultures that have a different relationship to nature than the dominant and exploitative one of Western cultures. Interculturality can be extended to interspecies. Strictly speaking, there are no animal cultures, even if there are animal protocultures; but we can learn from the life forms of other living species and, above all, learn to forge links with them. We must therefore rethink intercultural education in this sense. 4. The ecological principle of the ‘Earth as a homeland’. Education must be earthly, in the sense of forming our earthly consciousness. We are of this or that

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nationality, but we are first and last earthlings and we share this identity with other living beings and earthly entities. We must take care of the earth. We must therefore rethink environmental education in this sense 5. The poetic and spiritual principle of openness to the unlimited. Through the relationship to other humans, to other living species, to nature and to the universe, what is important, especially in the experience of the sublime, is becoming open to the unlimited and the formation of an awareness of the human being as a being both finite and capable of infinity. It is a matter of cultivating sensitivity to beauty, a feeling for nature, ‘the oceanic feeling’ (to use Romain Rolland’s expression2) and of rethinking poetic and aesthetic education in this sense. In capitalist productivism, nature is conceived of and used as a reservoir of resources, it is only valuable insofar as it is available to capitalism. In this context, the limitless expansion of individual desires can only be contained by fear. In contrast, however, by entering into a relationship with nature, by contemplating its beauty and feeling its immensity, we become aware of its intrinsic value and we become or will become capable of setting limits on our economic relationship, or even of leaving capitalism. Rimbaud, in Ma Bohème, expresses magnificently what it is simply to be. He has nothing but a worn-out coat and a pair of trousers with holes in them, his feet are hurting from walking, but he lives poetically between the earth and the sky and between the stars of the Big Dipper, dreams of ‘splendid loves’ on the scale of the universe and poetizes while listening to the ‘soft rustling’ of his stars. Being in the ‘being mode’, he does not need to be in the ‘having mode’. In the relationship with nature, we hear the voice of nature, like Goethe, who, admiring the beauty of the little flower, heard it telling him not to destroy it. Perhaps this is what political education is all about in the Anthropocene era: training people to become spokespersons for nature.

References Arnsperger, C., & Bourg, D. (2017). Écologie intégrale. Pour une société permacirculaire. PUF. Bonneuil, C., & Fressoz, J.-B. (2013). L’Événement Anthropocène. La Terre, l’histoire et nous. Seuil. Descola, P. (2014). La composition des mondes. Interviews with Charbonnier. Champs Flammarion. Federau, A. (2017). Pour une philosophie de l’Anthropocène. PUF.

R. Rolland wrote to Freud on December 5, 1927: “Your analysis of religions is correct. But I would have liked to see you analyze the spontaneous religious feeling, or, more exactly, the religious sensation, which is quite different from religions properly so called, and much more lasting. By this I mean: [...] the simple and direct fact of the sensation of the ‘eternal’ [the italics are R.R.’s] (which may very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible bounds, and as if oceanic)” (Quoted in Vermorel et al., 2018, pp. 251–252). 2

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Fromm, E. (1976). To have or to be? Harper & Row. Kant, I. (2003). Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime [1764] (J. T. Goldthwait, Trans.). University of California Press. Kant, I. (2012). Critique of judgment [1790] (J. H. Bernati). Dover Publications. Kant, I. (2015). Critique of practical reason [1788] (M. Gregor, Trans.). CUP. Latour, B. (1999). Politiques de la nature. Comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie. La Découverte. Malm, A. (2017). The progress of this storm: Nature and society in a warming world. Verso Books. Morin, E., & Kern, A.-B. (1993). Terre-Patrie. Seuil. Pelluchon, C. (2018). Éthique de la considération. Seuil. Quessada, D. (2013). L’Inséparé. Essai sur un monde sans Autre. PUF. Rousseau, J.-J. (1964). Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes [1755]. In Œuvres complètes, t. III. Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Rousseau, J.-J. (2009). Émile ou de l’éducation [1762]. GF Flammarion. Vermorel, H., Sigmund, F., & Romain, R. (2018). Un dialogue. Albin Michel.

Jean-Marc Lamarre has a doctorate in philosophy and is an honorary lecturer at the University of Nantes. His work focuses on the philosophy of education (Saint Augustine, Rousseau, Fichte, Pestalozzi, Lévinas) as well as on cosmopolitical and intercultural education and spiritual education.

Learning to Live in the Anthropocene Renaud Hétier

Abstract Associating the Anthropocene, as a trace of human activities on the Earth system, with education is not at all obvious. We could certainly consider an education for the environment and/or sustainable development, but this education does not address two fundamental questions, that of responsibility, and that of abstraction. From the point of view of responsibility, things are complex. If the Anthropocene has begun (undoubtedly since the industrial era), it is surely the responsibility of those who came before us, and not of those who are coming into the world (Arendt, Between past and future. Viking Press, New York, 1961; Wallenhorst, L’étudiant face à la désorientation. Les transitions en contexte scolaire. PUR, Rennes, 2015). And because of the delayed nature of the effects of human activities on the climate in particular, the most alarming realities of the Anthropocene seem to be yet to come. In short, the phenomenon is still unclear. Yet it is our current activities that continue to make this Anthropocene and that will affect our children. But children cannot be held directly responsible. Although they too are consumers and actors, they are only indirectly so, depending on the choices made by their parents (for food, for travel, for heating, etc.). From the point of view of abstraction, it is a matter of considering that our entry into the Anthropocene is not really clear, especially in terms of how our senses perceive it. How exactly to define it is also under discussion (Federau, Pour une philosophie de l’Anthropocène. PUF, Paris, 2017). Changes, especially climatic ones, occur in a relatively imperceptible way, and, as mentioned, are caused over a long period of time. It is not directly possible to link human activities to a number of observable phenomena; it is necessary to analyse them scientifically. Keywords Learning to live · Anthropocene · Political education · Life It is possible, and undoubtedly necessary, to devise a form of education in the Anthropocene era, that is more than merely conveying information. Indeed, from R. Hétier (✉) UCO – Catholic University of the West, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_17

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the point of view of the limits that should be put in place and respected (Manifeste convivialiste, 2013), we support the principles of an education that is fundamentally opposed to the feeling of omnipotence, which psychoanalysis has shown to be rooted in infancy. The education of the child takes place through methods that are based on relationships and not only in a rational and scholastic framework, which means that it is important to reflect on the way in which children are given the opportunity to learn to how to live by supporting themselves with limits. Furthermore the state of things, the force of inertia that characterizes the Anthropocene calls for a specific learning process that opposes the power of consumption. Consumption is a force of withdrawal and destruction that is partly necessary to sustain life. It is a matter of working towards creativity, insofar as it is this that makes us live. It is no longer a matter of learning to live, but of learning to make ourselves live.

1 Childhood and the Anthropocene Childhood, or youth, has taken on new dimensions in recent decades (Postman, 1994). It has become both broader and denser. Expanded in the sense that the length of university courses has increased (on average), with many courses leading to a Master’s degree. It has become denser since children are now asked to learn a great deal at a very early age, and for a much longer period of time. The paradox is that our children and young people are undoubtedly particularly well informed, while at the same time being excluded from a number of decisions for a long time (Buckingham, 2013). This imbalance in itself raises the issue of accountability. Jonas (1984) asserts that we are responsible for what we have power over. Yet youth is that a priori immature age that seems to justify being left out of the institutions of power and decision making. What could be called a ‘playing down the importance’ of youth, or side-lining, is, from a certain point of view, irresponsible. In this respect, adolescence is a critical age, due to a propensity for regressive activities, through which something of early childhood is replayed (Braconnier & Golse, 2008), such as games or social media. This state of affairs obviously does not prevent formal education (such as environmental education and/or education for sustainable development), but this very formality makes it possible to dissociate what we learn from what we experience. Learning to live in the Anthropocene involves already exercising a certain power over things, and feeling this power. However, the Anthropocene poses two main problems from a cognitive point of view. The first, which we noted at the beginning, is that of time scale. The transformations of the Earth system linked to human activity are already underway (there is nothing we can do about it), and they are still to come (we cannot feel them yet). The second problem is that of spatiality. The Anthropocene is a result of a ‘change of scale’, and, through the effect of cumulation, a shift from local to global (Federau, 2017, pp. 29–30). This change of scale, in view of the period preceding the industrial era and the situation where humans could directly observe the effect of their actions

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on their environment, makes it particularly difficult to take responsibility for this. Basically, it is a question of feeling responsible for a time that is not present and that remains partly unpredictable, and also for a space (the Earth) that I do not inhabit as such (I only inhabit a limited space). In other words, identifying the Anthropocene can only be done through a continuous process of reflection, which implies abstraction from one’s immediate sensations (my personal contribution to global warming, for example, is imperceptible), in order to think in terms of long-term accumulation. “We would be unable,” Bourg writes, “through our senses alone, to [...] become aware [of climate change], and even more so the extent of it” (Bourg, 2018, p. 221).1 On this basis, it is clear that the state of childhood, the importance of which, as we have already underlined, is played down, can distract us from such reflections. Overprotectiveness, on the one hand, and the freeing up of time for leisure purposes, on the other, are likely to reinforce impulsive and regressive living in the here and now, to the detriment of an experience of the world that is operative. What is already difficult for everyone, namely to think about one’s responsibility in the accumulation of anthropic forces on the Earth system, is even more difficult for the young, who have been simply considered as minors for a long time. On the other hand, we may also ask whether it would not be harmful to make children feel guilty for choices that have been made previously and by someone else. A distinction must be made between guilt and responsibility, based on the real state of being minors: children and adolescents are not responsible for the state in which they find the world, but they are responsible for what they can do on their own level. From early childhood, an age when we learn to sort and classify, separating our own waste is an example of what can be done. Empowerment comes through concrete activities, which allow us to feel the power we have over things. Taleb (2016, p. 85), in his article on eco-training, uses Dewey’s term experiencing to avoid the term ‘experimentation’ which is less subjective. Experience, for Dewey, is a global and complete process, which involves the existential aspects of the person existentially, not just their intellect. Taleb believes that experiencing means verifying and feeling in one’s being, including physically, the truth of any proposition. It is therefore important for the child to have experiences that make sense to him or her, that are on his or her scale. In this respect, we cannot fail to mention Rousseau and, in his Emile, ‘the education of things’. By this term, the philosopher essentially means education through confrontation with reality (and therefore a certain withdrawal of the educator, hence the expression ‘negative education’). In Rousseau’s fictional narratives, the child at the centre of the scene (it is not always Emile) is put to the test (Hétier, 2013). Because of his tendency to ‘be over exuberant’, he comes up against the limits imposed on him by his environment, and in particular the reaction of the people who are the victims of this exuberance and who defend their person or their property. We will come back to this when we discuss the question of ‘limits’, but we see here that

See also Larrère and Larrère, 2018, p. 311: “The clues to an ongoing catastrophic process are imperceptible, insidious and do not correspond to any lived experience”.

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‘the education of things’ is confrontation not with authority (that of the educator) but with this reality which always makes what I do have an impact on others. In this sense, we can quote Pineau who speaks of solitude as being the absence of others which can make things more present and more meaningful in their very silence (Pineau, 1992, p. 23, quoted by Taleb, ibid., p. 86). We understand that the educator’s withdrawal does not refer only to objects but also to third persons. From this point of view, it is worth emphasizing this early empowerment envisaged by Rousseau, which is achieved through experiencing and not through discussion. It makes it possible for us to be aware of the effect of our actions on the other. The relationship to the world in the Anthropocene requires more than objectification: it requires a ‘re-enchantment’ (Taleb, ibid., p. 88). Indeed, it seems that the mere formation of reason is not enough. It is not for lack of information that we are sinking into the quagmire of the problems of the disruption of the Earth System. Cottereau writes that a scientific approach to understanding the environment is no longer enough. If a rational pedagogy develops science and a scientific spirit, a pedagogy of the imagination and ecology education will provide the awareness that has become necessary today in any action in which we use the earth’s materials (Cottereau, 1994, p. 123, quoted by Taleb, ibid., 88). We will come to this pedagogy of the imaginary in Sect. 3.

2 Learning to Live with Limits The notion of limits has a particular history in education. As mentioned above, it is implicitly omnipresent in Rousseau’s Émile (1966), a point emphasized by Imbert (1989). These experiences that the child has are all the more educational as they do not have the artificiality of educational situations in which the child depends on the mediation of a teacher. It is true, and this is the paradox here, that the teacher is in charge of how these situations are conceived and develop, although he or she intervenes little or not at all in the course of them. We can take as an example one of the fictions that Rousseau proposes in his text, where the child has some beans to sow. The governor, who follows the child, finds favourable soil. They tend the crop with great care. One day, when the plants have grown well, they find the land all dug up. They look for the culprit and discover that it is Robert, the gardener, who has ‘done it’. They complain to him, but he replies that the land the apprentice gardeners had cultivated was his own. The gardener then proposed a contract, in which he gave up a portion of the land in exchange for part of the harvest. We noted above that education according to ‘things’ was, in our view, an education in reality, a reality from which the educator does not protect the child, but on the contrary, exposes him to it (according to Rousseau, the whole scene was planned by the ‘governor’ for educational purposes). Since these experiences are not artificial, at least from the point of view of the child, who lives these situations intensely, it can be said that they allow the child to learn how to live, and not only to

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learn something, and even more so something abstract (such as a discourse). This education, which is not a programming of knowledge, but rather one that integrates experience, would appear to have no limits. However, it is precisely an education in limits. The child, who has a tendency to be over-exuberant (in Rousseau’s fictions, he breaks windows, wakes up his governor in the middle of the night, etc.), will come up against very firm limits, given by the reaction of the person on whose ‘territory’ he is encroaching. The child will lose (part of) his freedom, his illusion of omnipotence, and will learn to contain himself. But this process is not negative: the child discovers that within the space where he tends to be over-exuberant, there is a place for him. Imbert has put this into psychoanalytical terms. The educator withdrawing into the background is thus what allows an experience of things, which have a mediating dimension with regard to educational authority: “Instead of direct, authoritarian intervention, Rousseau substitutes an indirect intervention, which happens through the mediation of ‘things’, the setting up of situations in which the child can experience his power, discover for himself what is possible and what is not. The intervention is no longer directly (in an authoritative way) on the child, but on his environment. The result is that the child, in contact with this sufficiently stable and consistent environment, can exercise his or her own control and regulate the development of his or her ‘strengths’ by ‘exercising’ them” (Imbert, 1989, p. 83). It is not, therefore, a matter of ‘letting go’ by renouncing authority. The educator thinks and prepares educational situations that will, on the contrary, defeat the child’s illusion of omnipotence: not everything is possible. In this respect, we can envisage a shift in Imbert’s approach: not everything is possible in a social life. Indeed, the child arrives from the start in a social world, a world that is marked by property. The ‘things’ that he or she comes up against are not only ‘objects’ but also ‘subjects’ that defend their rights. As we have seen in the example of the garden, it is a question of moving from an illusion of omnipotence, which may be innocent in this case, to an awareness of the necessity of contracts, of agreements with others, and to a possibility of beginning again. Within the limits of possible action, the child can experience effective power, what Imbert calls ‘limited but real power’ (ibid., 84). Thus, we can see that limits certainly have a negative role: to stop the child in his impulse of omnipotence (and from this point of view, nature is not ‘good’), but even more a positive role: they allow the child to experience ‘real power’. The fact that this power is limited, with clear limits, is not only a social necessity (not to adversely affect others), but also a psychological necessity. Rousseau himself wrote about a child who breaks the windows of his room, which he does not want to repair immediately: “it is better for him to have a cold than be mad” (Rousseau, 1966, p. 122). This illusion of omnipotence is decisive during childhood, in that it is there that it takes root. It is by obstructing it that one can hope to form a balanced, sociable personality. But from another point of view, we realise that this illusion has no age. The temptation to be omnipotent remains strong, especially in cases where education has not managed to keep the child within the desired limits. It is a question of taking

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into account the possibility of regression, which can happen at any time, including in adulthood. From a sociological point of view, these same limits are mentioned in connection with consumerism. Bourg writes: “We would have no other way of accomplishing, of completing our own humanity, than through consumption. Paired with growth which is itself deemed to be infinite, consumption would allow us collectively to access the only boundlessness possible, namely that of repeated and ever more greedy consumption, saturating all kinds of anguish and other sources of dissatisfaction, all forms of desire for boundlessness” (Bourg, 2018, p. 104). We can see how much we are all affected by this limitless consumerism. We also see how exposed children now are, since they are already consumers and, either in their own right or on behalf of their parents, targets of advertising.

3 Learning to Make Life Easier The need for limits must therefore be taken into consideration, from a psychological, social and environmental point of view. But this is only viable if we take into account the impulse of limitlessness that is part of our human make-up, and not simply by repressing it. Arnsperger and Bourg (2017, p. 111) refer to an ‘anthropological potential for limitlessness’. They assert that recognising this potential does not mean uprooting or destroying it, for such attempts fail, since they are counter to the desire for limitlessness that is deeply rooted in the human beings. Rather, it is a matter of directing this potential for limitlessness to those ‘relational’ or ‘spiritual’ areas of existence, where the absence of limits serves authentic freedom rather than hindering it, and where, paradoxically, self-limitation on a material level makes possible a different kind of limitlessness. Two arguments support this perspective. The first is the importance of a space of experience that can be both unlimited and tenable. Bourg acknowledges the “material impossibility of consumerism” (Bourg, 2018, p. 231) and suggests that we “stop seeing the world as endlessly to be exploited and transformed, [and] relearn to contemplate it” (ibid., 184). This is opposed, in particular, to self-realization through consumption (Bourg, 2018, p. 77). The second argument has to do with the relevance of an education that stimulates the imagination, in the face of a future, in the age of the Anthropocene, that is radically new. It will be a case of considering the variety of possibilities rather than following the furrow that the past commits us to follow (Pache et al., 2016, p. 52). They argue that the citizen, will have to be creative in solving the problems of tomorrow’s world. It seems that engaging the creativity of children and adolescents can be a way of responding to the question of an ‘anthropological potential of limitlessness’ and be part of a ‘pedagogy of the imagination’, to which we will return. It is indeed in the work of the imagination that an infinite space can be opened up, particularly in creativity, while at the same time solutions can be found to unprecedented ‘anthropocenic’ problems.

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The spark needed for creativity undoubtedly presupposes a ‘pedagogy of the imagination’, as Duborgel calls for. This author, like Taleb, is against the overvaluing of reason. Duborgel observes that in the school institution as a whole experiences of the imaginary and the powers of the imagination are colonised and repressed (Duborgel, 1992, p. 89). Bourg’s and Duborgel’s views on a more contemplative relationship to the world converge, especially when the latter refers to an ‘imaginary museum’ as a “marvellous and anthropological repertoire of symbols – iconographic and ritualistic as well as mythological and poetic” (Duborgel, 1992, p. 239ff.). But the stimulation of the imagination and, even more so, the appeal to creativity cannot be limited to (cultural) reception. Reception is the first necessary stage of a process that allows a second stage to follow, that of (creative) action. In this respect, it is important not only that children do not start from nothing (hence the relevance of the moment of reception), but that they are not ‘made passive’ by continuous teaching and/or an activity based on a simple exercise. Moreover, we said above that the maintenance of life includes an element of destructiveness. Eating, for example, always means taking a part of the living world, even if only from plants. So it is not a question of adopting a self-satisfied attitude that is opposed consumerism. Rather, it is a matter of investing in a creativity that deals with destructiveness in such a way as to surpass it, or in other words, to ensure that it is creativity that opens up to limitlessness, and not destructiveness alone, even in a euphemistic form such as that of consumerism. In the process of creativity there is a certain expenditure (of energy, of material) that connects destruction with creation. This can be illustrated with three works of children’s literature, which are particularly creative works, and which offer an interesting “mirror” to the children they are intended for. In the French children’s book Petit-Gris, the author Elzbieta follows the wanderings of a family of rabbits (two parents and a child) who are poverty-stricken and forced to flee, pursued by the police. At the end of the book, the family escapes to sea on a floating island. The police catch up with the family. The little rabbit then uses a sponge and erases the drawing of the police and their boat, putting an end to the threat. In Quand j’étais petit, an album without words, we see on each double page a particular animal (a giraffe, then a chimpanzee, then a pig, etc.) in its adult form, and then, behind this first drawing (by a system of flaps that open), in its child form. The overall vision is one of loss (the adult lion begs for money when as a child he wore a crown, the cat waits at the window without seeing the mice that pass by her feet when as a child she was chasing them, the owl sleeps at night when as a child she was celebrating, etc.). But there is one exception, the one on the cover and back cover. We see an adult elephant painting on a canvas, whereas as a child he was daubing a wall. In Ça va pas, a little girl is plagued by an unspeakable malaise, which takes the form of an octopus that imprisons her in the drawing. At one point, the octopus starts spitting ink, which the little girl uses to draw a balloon with which she will fly away and feel much better. In Petit-Gris, the author plays with representation by having a character intervene in the drawing itself, as if the character were emancipating herself from the author. Indeed, and for the record, the main character erases with his sponge a part of the drawing which is none other than the author’s own drawing (but of course the

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drawing of the character erasing a part of the drawing is also the author’s drawing). The character, in this way, becomes an author, his gesture of ‘destruction’ is at the same time a gesture of creation (of a new possible way of living). In Quand j’étais petit, the author offers the solution of creative sublimation: the only character who has not let the promises of his childhood be lost is the one who has become an artist, and the work of art can finally represent a kind of mirror of the artist/author. In Ça va pas, the little girl converts the very representation of her malaise into a source of creativity. In these three albums, it is a question of the characters with whom the child reader can identify, asserting the rights of life. The reception can operate on at least two levels: in the identification with the characters it is a question of (continuing to) live, and in the reception of the work itself, by internalizing the creative gesture, it is a question of bringing it to life. It is therefore, in the light of such works, on the path of creative sublimation, that educational practice needs to be shaped. It is not a question of withdrawing (shutting oneself away in an artistic activity to escape the reality of the world), but rather of making changes in the world through creative gestures. At the time of the Anthropocene, it is thus a question of opposing the downward spiral of consumerism and the huge amount of destruction that it produces. Creative initiatives, even if they involve partial destructiveness (in the plastic arts: tearing, cutting, scraping, etc.), are already a form of resistance to consumerism.

4 Conclusion “Thinking the future,” write Pache et al. (2016, p. 52), “consists (...) in proposing solutions that break with dominant thinking”. As regards the break that creative gesture and thought can make, it is a question, in education, of stimulating these qualities in the youngest children and continuing them. Because of the curricula restrictions and dealing with pupils en masse, schools tend to require pupils to conform. A pupil who is content to reproduce what he or she is taught can thus be made to fit the school requirements. The challenges raised by the Anthropocene call for the stimulation of creativity in two ways. On the one hand, this is because this creativity is, and will remain, necessary if we are to find answers to unprecedented problems. As stated by the authors of Problèmes complexes flou en éducation (Complex Problems in Education) (Fabre et al., 2014), the increasing complexity of the world requires us to train to the skills of analysing problems. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the ‘anthropological potential for limitlessness’ cannot be realised in contemplation alone, particularly during childhood. Involvement in creative gestures allows for transformations of the world that are likely to give life to works. In either case, there are limits to what we can do to stimulate our imagination. “Our complex, rapidly evolving societies,” Fabre writes, “are marked by urgency and uncertainty: we must mobilize more and more quickly because the present does not wait, the opportunity slips away, and at the same time we are more or less condemned to act on the spur of the moment, without predefined reference points, to

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confront the immediate without a long-term perspective, even if we know that our action henceforth escapes us in its possibly perverse effects to the point of being able to place a heavy burden on the future of humanity” (Fabre, 2009, p. 7).

References Arendt, H. (1961). Between past and future. Viking Press. Arnsperger, C., & Bourg, D. (2017). Écologie intégrale. Pour une société permacirculaire. PUF. Bourg, D. (2018). Une nouvelle Terre. Desclée de Brouwer. Braconnier, A., & Golse, B. (2008). Nos bébés, nos ados. Odile Jacob. Buckingham, D. (2013). After the death of childhood. Polity Press. Convivialist Manifesto. (2013). http://www.lesconvivialistes.org/pdf/Manifeste-Convivialiste.pdf. Acessed 7/08/2023. Cottereau, D. (1994). À l’école des éléments. Écoformation et classe de mer. Chronique sociale. Duborgel, B. (1992). Imaginaire et pédagogie. Privat. Fabre, M. (2009). Philosophie et pédagogie du problème. Vrin. Fabre, M., Weil-Barais, A., & Xypas, C. (2014). Les problèmes complexes flou en éducation. Enjeux et limites pour l’enseignement artistique et scientifique. De Boeck. Federau, A. (2017). Pour une philosophie de l’Anthropocène. PUF. Hétier, R. (2013). Lier le geste à la parole pour faire réalité. In A. M. Drouin-Hans, M. Fabre, D. Kambouchner, & A. Vergnioux (Eds.), Rousseau’s L’Émile: regards d’aujourd’hui (pp. 283–289). Hermann. Imbert, F. (1989). Émile ou l’interdit de la jouissance. Armand Colin. Jonas, H. (1984). The imperative of responsibility. In Search of ethics for the technological age (translation of Das Prinzip Verantwortung) (H. Jonas & D. Herr, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Larrère, C., & Larrère, R. (2018). Penser et agir avec la nature. Une enquête philosophique. La Découverte. Pache, A., Cunier, D., Honoré, É., & Hertig, P. (2016). Penser l’avenir de manière créative: un enjeu central de l’éducation en vue du développement durable. Revue Française de Pédagogie, 197, 51–62. Pineau, G. (1992). De l’air. Essai sur l’éco-formation. Païdéia/Sciences et Culture. Postman, N. (1994). The disappearance of childhood. Vintage Books. Rousseau, J. J. (1966). Émile ou de l’éducation. Garnier-Flammarion. Taleb, M. (2016). Ecoformation. In A. Choné, I. Hajek, & P. Hamman (Eds.), Guide des humanités numériques (pp. 83–91). Septentrion. Wallenhorst, N. (2015). L’étudiant face à la désorientation. Les transitions en contexte scolaire (pp. 281–293). PUR.

Renaud Hétier is Professor at the Catholic University of the West (UCO). He is Doctor of Educational Sciences. He is the author of books on education, and anthropology in the Anthropocene. Books (selection): Freedom with impetuosity. Falling back to earth (Le Pommier, 2022, in French); Humanity versus Anthropocene (PUF, 2021, in French); Cultivating attention and care in education (PURH, 2020, in French); Create an educational space with the fairy tales (Chronique sociale, 2017, in French); Education between presence and mediation (L’Harmattan, 2017, in French).

Critique, Utopia and Resistance: Three Functions of a Pedagogy of ‘Resonance’ in the Anthropocene Nathanaël Wallenhorst

Abstract The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa – a contributor to the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory – introduced the concept of ‘resonance’ in his latest book, published in Germany in 2016 and translated into English in 2019. Rosa regards the greatest social ill of modern times as ‘acceleration’ (2005), and resonance is an antidote of sorts – a way to counteract the alienation caused by acceleration. The concept of resonance is particularly relevant when thinking about education in the Anthropocene for three reasons. Firstly, in Rosa’s thinking, nature (the natural world) is an important sphere of resonance. When viewed through the lens of resonance theory, ‘subjects’ are always thought of in relation to their inalienable connection with the natural world. Rosa explicitly mentions the dawn of the Anthropocene. Secondly, resonance is understood as a relationship that develops over time, which we learn to maintain, and thus it is partly linked with an educational dynamic. Thirdly, resonance, thought of as the antithesis of technological acceleration, the social changes and the shifting pace of life, could perhaps teach us something that we need to learn, in this new geological epoch – ‘the great acceleration’, which is an alternative name for the Anthropocene. Keywords Resonance · Hartmut Rosa · Anthropocene · Political education · Critique Resonance, which is a musical metaphor, relates to the ‘string’ which connects us with the world, which we sometimes feel vibrate. Why is it that we occasionally feel ourselves in harmony with the world, with other people, causes, aesthetic or spiritual phenomena? Rosa’s approach – which he describes as the sociology of our relationship with the world – follows in the footsteps of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (phenomenology), and the German thinkers from the Frankfurt School (Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Alex Honneth). He also revisits the concept of self-efficacy developed by Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura. In Rosa’s N. Wallenhorst (✉) UCO – Catholic University of the West, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_18

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social theory, resonance is a criterion for a successful life. It flies in the face of the idea that each individual must decide for themselves what they regard as a ‘good life’; this idea of individualistic freedom has even become something of a maxim for educational institutions (Rosa, 2019, p. 11). Resonance is not an emotional state, but rather, is a way of relating to others and to the world, which includes an emotional component. Resonance is not the same thing as harmony: it is characterised not by beauty, but by a person’s response. It refers to those times when individuals feel an active connection with the world. Another benefit of resonance is that it is not essentialist, unlike the concepts of identity or authenticity on which educators sometimes draw. Resonance is a descriptive concept, referring to a particular part of social reality: certain individuals, more than others, feel they are living a ‘good’ life, or a life ‘worth living’, irrespective of their material wealth. However, it is also normative, in that a life lived in resonance with the world is preferable to one marked by silence from the world. Finally, it is a prospective concept: the author is seeking a way to escape the dynamic stabilisation of modern societies (which results in an everincreasing pace of life). Such acceleration means that ‘subjects’ become mere objects, and the constant drive to swell one’s own coffers causes alienation. Rosa calls for a post-growth society, founded on relational habits other than the individualistic insatiability characteristic of homo oeconomicus: ‘a different type of beingin-the-world is possible, but can only result from a simultaneous and concerted political, economic and cultural revolution’ (Rosa, 2019, p. 38). We appropriate the concept of resonance here, and build upon it. Our proposal hinges on three ‘functions’ of an educator, which it is important to revive and develop, in light of the world’s entry into the Anthropocene. The first is criticality: the ability to understand and rectify certain mistakes made by modern humans. Next is a utopian function: educators must give us reason to continue to hope – to believe in a possible future. However, criticality and utopian vision are fruitless unless combined with a function of active resistance in the here and now, in the real world. It is vital to build opposition (resistance) on the basis of identified problems (criticality) so that the longed-for future (utopia) may come to pass.42 Rosa’s concept of resonance is firmly rooted in the idea of nature. However, its connection to the concept of the Anthropocene is far more tenuous. Rosa has only a vague awareness of the environmental crisis we now face – particularly, the extent of the systemic shift humans have triggered on the planet. It is quite plain that he does not have in-depth knowledge of the work on the Anthropocene in the field of Earth system sciences. For that reason, to understand the idea of a ‘pedagogy of resonance’ which we propose here, it is helpful to read Andreas Weber’s (2017) book Sein und Teilen (Being and Sharing). Weber is a German philosopher and biologist, and a disciple of Merleau-Ponty’s (he is also cited in this book by Christian Arnsperger and Cécile Renouard). Weber’s thinking links in with Rosa’s on a number of points. Importantly, Weber’s biological understanding of the living world, and his interpretation of the geoscientific literature on the Anthropocene, supports Rosa’s anthropological idea of immersion in nature.43 These two German authors have particularly radical ways of thinking.44 What they have in common is that they reject two

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paradigms on which modern society is founded. The first such paradigm is that contemporary societies can only achieve stability dynamically, by constant acceleration (this is particularly evident in the race for growth). The second is the distinction between a silent non-human world and an articulate human one.

1 Critical Pedagogy: I Am Not Separate from the Earth; I Am the Earth Rosa’s concept of resonance follows on from Critical Theory. Thus, a pedagogy of resonance is critical, so one of its functions is to promote critique. Out of all possible targets for such critique, one seems particularly fundamental: we must decry the modern ideology of abandonment of nature, and promote the anthropology of immersion in nature. Such critique is crucial, because the fallacy of that approach is one of the main things that the Anthropocene reveals. Rosa’s anthropology is marked by subjects’ immersion in the world; they exist ‘not against the world, but in the world’ (p. 43). This anthropology includes a cosmic component. Rosa sets out to identify the root of the problem in our relationship with nature. It is possible to have a different kind of relationship with the world – not the relationship that typifies modern society, based on rationalised distancing, where we consider ourselves removed from nature, and seize or harness its ‘resources’ to extend our own. Besides causing alienation, such a relationship with the world jeopardises the long-term survival of the ‘human adventure’, because it is based on a fundamental error: that the subject and the world are two separate entities. In Rosa’s view, relations between the subject and the world should be responsive and reciprocal, and it is important to begin forging such a relationship. Rosa identifies several ‘axes of resonance’ – among them, the way in which we relate to objects. He remarks that the modern western world, with its rational thinking, cannot conceive of establishing a relationship with an inanimate object (Rosa, 2019, p. 257). This attitude – which Rosa, following on from Tobias Röhl, terms ‘the reification of things by objectification’ (p. 258) – is learned at school. This separation between humans and objects reveals the distinction drawn between nature and culture, and our relationship with the world is the poorer for it. Rosa feels that this is one of the reasons for the current ecological ‘crisis’. There are two consequences of this radical reification of everything not human: the destruction of nature (which is crucially important), and the sapping of humanism (a goal in itself). The desire to establish relations of resonance with objects is not mere sentimentality or nebulous spiritualism. It is directly connected to our ability to continue being human in the environment in which we live. Rosa’s environmental view is interesting, but is not backed up by sufficient data from Earth system science. While he does identify some anthropological causes of our broken relationship with nature, he plays down the importance of our exceeding the capacity of the Earth’s system: “At the heart of the ecological crisis is not our

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unrestrained processing of natural resources, but the fact that, in seeing nature merely as a resource, we fail to recognize it as a sphere of resonance” (p. 53). Rosa does not appear to appreciate that what we need to do goes beyond simply establishing a new type of relationship with nature. We need to reorganise society to be able to go on living on an Earth that has been profoundly altered. For example, he writes: “Here, I believe, is the root of the ecological anguish of recent times: behind the profound environmental concerns of our times is not the fear of losing nature as a resource, but the threat of losing it as a sphere of resonance – an interlocutor that can answer us and give us guidance” (Rosa, 2019, p. 314). While Rosa’s analysis ‘resonates’ with us, he fails to acknowledge a source of profound concern – the fact that a swathe of humanity will no longer be able to live on a planet whose climate is 5–6 °C warmer than at the start of the twentieth Century. Given the limitations of Rosa’s reasoning about the scope of resonance as a critical theory for the Anthropocene, Andreas Weber’s thinking is particularly interesting. Weber is in agreement with Rosa that it is crucial to re-establish a relationship with nonhumans: “We must preserve nature because we are, ourselves, nature; and also because nature is everything that we are not” (Weber, 2017, p. 294).45 Weber acknowledges that the subject is unique, but shifts the boundary between the subject and the world, showing that the subject is also the world. His theoretical framework is woven around vital relationships of sharing with the world, through respiration and nutrition. Respiration, for example, is viewed as an act of sharing with the biosphere – ecosystems are based purely on exchanges. We become what we are through a bio-geo-physical process of interaction with our environment: “Parasol pines and blue-green algae in aquarium water are also part of the vast alchemy of existence (Dasein) that permeates our being as our chests rise and fall. They absorb what they are – their external space, their environment – and transform it into something that is integrally themselves. It is a completely natural, physical process” (Weber, 2017, p. 26).46 Weber’s anthropology includes the idea of an omnipresent whole. Individuals are viewed as members of a coherent whole: “Like it or not: through our metabolism, which requires us to draw nourishment from other living beings, and incorporate the atmosphere into ourselves, making it a part of us, we are part of the biosphere as a whole”47 (Weber, 2017, p. 27). Not only do we incorporate the elements which surround us and make them part of ourselves; on the basis of that very simple observation of bio-physical exchanges, Weber goes further – we in turn become part of the environment. “The tissue which we create at a time ‘t’ will become air again the next moment; then it will become part of a plant or a shell, and one day, become sediments of limestone, rocks or sand. From the standpoint of matter, this world is one large body; individuals merely represent momentary outgrowths therefrom”48 (Weber, 2017, p. 27). This leads Weber to state that “our singular capabilities are an almost-meaningless variation of the whole”49 (Weber, 2017, p. 27). We are at once far less and far more than the modern homo oeconomicus – an individual who grows by pre-emption. Weber’s anthropological concepts are opposed to homo oeconomicus; however, he acknowledges the emotions and sensations that make homo oeconomicus cocoon himself and seek to maximize his own interests. Rather,

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Weber demonstrates that, fundamentally, we are not the isolated actors we think we are. Sharing is a crucial part of what makes us who we are; rather than diminishing us, it enriches us. Without exchange with our environment, there can be no life.50 “We are both: the world and individuals”51 (Weber, 2017, p. 29). Also, in Weber’s thinking, although we are the world, it is still an external entity as well, to which we can relate; we heed it and understand it.

2 Utopian Pedagogy: Hearing What the Earth and the World Have to Say Resonance pedagogy is also utopian – that is, it aims to bring about utopia. One of an educator’s ambitious goals, in this postmodern era of disenchantment, is to allow the world to sing (even as the Anthropocene takes hold). As Rosa points out, the idea that teachers are there to help pupils to hear the music of the world (rather than just understand and exploit it) is not entirely new. Notable proponents of the idea include Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gottfried von Herder and Friedrich von Schiller (Rosa, 2019, p. 278). The idea of utopia based on listening to the nonhuman world, and conducting a dialogue with it, stands in opposition to the utopia of humanity’s salvation through technical prowess. The earth and the world52 may have things to teach us, if we can set aside the paradigms of techno-scientific mastery of the world and appropriation of nature’s resources: “Subjects in the late modern era are losing sight of the world as a responsive, communicative interlocutor, as they increasingly use tools to exploit it. Personal effectiveness is not measured by one’s resonant sensitivity to the world; rather, it is measured by one’s reification and domination of it” (Rosa, 2019, 493). Throughout the pages of his book Resonance, Rosa carefully distances himself from the thinking of Axel Honneth.53 Honneth’s ideas are based on the concept of recognition: what is important is to be seen, and this quest for recognition is the struggle that pervades all existence. Rosa, meanwhile, suggests that the important thing is not to be seen, but rather, to hear what the world has to say about us – presumably a message of understanding. Resonance is less of a combative concept than recognition, which can only be understood in the context of a struggle (in which there must be a winner and a loser). Resonance suggests moving past cutthroat capitalist competitiveness. One of the aims of Resonance is to suggest ways in which to create a hospitable, responsive world. This is an attempt to break away from the hubris that characterises the way we live today. Explaining the theory of resonance, Rosa goes so far as to say that the world speaks to human beings.54 On this point, it must be borne in mind that Resonance is primarily a work of political theory, and certainly not one of personal development. The utopian aspect of a pedagogy of resonance lies not in attempting to conquer the world, but in allowing us to hear it. It is not a matter of broadening our access to the world, controlling or conquering it,

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but of making the world available: “A better world is possible: one where we no longer aim to possess the Other, but to hear it and respond to it” (Rosa, 2019, p. 527). Rosa (with the concept of resonance) and Weber (with his concept of sharing with the biosphere) share the intellectual goal of allowing the planet and the world to speak once more. The views of these two scholars are particularly close to those of American philosopher David Abram, who examines the root of the world’s mutism in western societies in The Spell of the Sensuous. In all three theories, sensory experiences play a central role, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology gives these theories an intellectual platform on which to stand. Can we take seriously the idea (shared by Rosa, Weber and Abram alike) that the earth speaks, and that we can hear it if we only listen? Rosa explicitly states that we must allow the world to sing once again. Weber aims to restore the voice to the world which has been silenced; to reinvigorate the Earth with life. Abram begins The Spell of the Sensuous by telling of his experience of relating with nature and the living world in Asia. He then compares it with his experience of returning to the United States, where he says that he lost that relationship with nature, because of the ubiquity of technology in western civilisations. Elsewhere in the book, he investigates the root of this phenomenon. Here, we can see that a pedagogy of resonance requires silence (easy to demand but tricky to deliver in a typical educational context – the classroom is filled with a continuous stream of speech). In order to allow the world to speak, we must learn to listen... and in order to do that, we must begin by falling silent ourselves. An important element in the concept of resonance, and in Weber’s idea of existing as sharing, is that intersubjective relations are taken as an anthropological cornerstone. Both Rosa’s and Weber’s anthropological theories are relational: coexistence is paramount. Such coexistence is a central element in the re-politicisation of society which these two authors advocate, with the need to create post-growth societies. Neither author answers the question ‘How can it be done?’ However, this does not mean that it cannot. After all, we managed to transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era. What we now need is to find a way to move on from the Modern Era, and reorganise or societies so we can exist in the Anthropocene.

3 A Resistant Pedagogy: A Post-promethean ‘Us’ to Counter Homo Oeconomicus The function of the pedagogy of resonance, proposed here, is to develop social resistance. Here, it departs from the ‘positive psychology’ model that has been prominent since the 2000s; positive psychology serves the market mentality, and espouses the neoliberal paradigm in which happiness becomes a commodity (Cabanas and Illouz, 2018).55 In contrast, pedagogy of resonance seeks to re-politicise our existences without sacrificing the individual to the causes of justice, knowledge, the future or the environment. Under the current model, individuals feel they have a ‘good’ life if they feel themselves to be ‘successful’, but our proposed

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approach, which is political rather than emotional, breaks with such considerations. Currently, primacy is given to individual freedoms. Pedagogy of resonance, on the other hand, does not advocate primacy of the common good (over the individual), but togetherness and the sharing of freedoms.56 Rosa encourages readers to consider that a life can be a good one without being defined either by the drive for emancipation or by the individualistic, neoliberal quest for happiness. In keeping with Rosa’s idea, we postulate that the contemporary structural crisis, in which we can no longer hear the world, can be resolved through a post-growth society. This is what the pedagogy of resonance aims to bring about. Nature, with its trees, oceans and heavens, has no goal other than to exist. The reason for establishing resonant relationships with nature is to disarm the modern Promethean individual, and allow a post-Promethean ‘between us’ collective to emerge. The focal point of resonance is not the individual subject, but an us: the us to which the subject belongs along with other subjects, the world, objects and nature: “I am recognised, but it is between us that resonance occurs” (Rosa, 2019, p. 225). Resonance is a departure from competition. Resonance is about learning how to relate to the world, and has a political focus. Thus, the concept is an ideal tool when thinking about education for politics in the Anthropocene. The political learning of resonance involves learning to listen and respond, as part of a process of mutual transformation between the subject and the world. It requires hospitality towards that which is Other, rather than conformism and uniformity. Rosa and Weber take the ‘self’ into consideration, but break away from the idea of action to emancipate oneself, and from the individualism of homo oeconomicus. Rosa’s main consideration is not the subject, but the subject’s relationship with the world. Weber never addresses the subject as such, but always in relation to sharing with the cosmos. In this regard, Weber’s book Sein und Teilen, is a type of bio-phenomenology with the political aim of advancing a functioning alternative to capitalism. With his arguments founded on biological concepts, Weber’s philosophical view of identity is based entirely on solidarity, and he defines sharing, which is necessary for life to exist, as being contrary to capitalism. Weber’s critique of neoliberal capitalism, whilst not built on so sturdy a theoretical framework as Rosa’s, is more radical. He condemns not the monopolisation or consumption of resources, but the sapping of life itself, to the point of exhaustion (Weber, 2017, p. 83). Under such circumstances, it is impossible to live: “Capitalism consumes bodies. It harnesses life force. Exploitation is the imbibing of another’s life force”57 (Weber, 2017, p. 84). Weber identifies capitalism as having drained us of our ability to even exist in the world, and to maintain a relationship with it: “At the heart of modern capitalism is the idea that human beings are not merely elements of nature, like any other. However, this idea is not limited to viewing the human body as removed from the living world, rather than a part thereof. The very concept of identity has been colonised, and we have been robbed of our very ability to exist”58 (Weber, 2017, p. 86). David Abram, for his part, shows that when we silence the voice of the earth, a collection of man-made objects begin bombarding our senses. When the earth is silent, these objects speak to us in tones of desire – the idea of

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being able to be more. Ultimately, the multiple objects that adorn our shop windows tell us we are ‘not enough’.

4 “Indeed that Very Night, the Impossible Had Already Been Set in Motion” (Charly and the Chocolate Factory) To use Hannah Arendt’s term, the vocation of pedagogy of resonance is to allow the wonder that is politics to emerge, through establishing collaborative actions. When thinking of education in the Anthropocene, we must consider radical alternatives. Whilst it is relatively easy to conceive of pedagogy of resonance in the Anthropocene, it is far more difficult to actually implement, as today’s education systems are among the main driving forces behind contemporary neoliberal capitalism. How can we help students become future citizens, forming an integral part of society, without feeding into the market mentality that prevails in that society? The standards set by international rankings of skills that pupils have acquired over their school careers (such as PISA, implemented by the OECD) reflect liberalised economic competition (Curnier, 2017). Nevertheless, in education, there is still hope: “At the heart of the experience of resonance, we hear the cry of the non-reconciled, and witness the suffering of the alienated. At its core is not the denial or suppression of resistance, but the momentary certainty, merely experienced as a presentiment, of a ‘but...!’ that heralds a step forward. First, though, we must sense the alienation in order to form resonant relations” (Rosa, 2019). It is possible, necessary and intellectually honest to foster hope for education. Such hope will be grounded in the possibility that the world can be revived, and that an anthropological shift will allow us to become more human, through conviviality with nonhuman partners (Wallenhorst, 2023; Wallenhorst & Wulf, 2023).

References Cabanas, E. et Illouz, E. (2018). Happycratie. Comment l’industrie du bonheur a pris le contrôle de nos vies. Premier Parallèle. Curnier, D. (2017). Quel rôle pour l’école dans la transition écologique ? Esquisse d’une sociologie politique, environnementale et prospective du curriculum prescrit (Doctoral thesis in Environmental Sciences). University of Lausanne). Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance. A sociology of our relationship to the world (Wagner, Trans.). Polity Press. Steffen, W., et al. 2004. Global change and the earth system. A planet under pressure. The IGBP Book Series. Springer. Wallenhorst, N. (2023). A critical theory for the anthropocene. Springer. Wallenhorst, N., & Wulf, Chr. (Eds.) (2023). Handbook of the anthropocene. Humans between heritage and future. Springer. Weber, A. (2017). Sein und Teilen. Transcript.

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Nathanaël Wallenhorst is Professor at the Catholic University of the West (UCO). He is Doctor of Educational Sciences and Doktor der Philosophie (first international co-supervision PhD), and Doctor of Environmental Sciences and Doctor in Political Science (second international co-supervision PhD). He is the author of 20 books on politics, education, and anthropology in the Anthropocene. Books (selection): The Anthropocene decoded for humans (Le Pommier, 2019, in French). Education in the Anthropocene (ed. with Pierron, Le Bord de l’eau 2019, in French). The Truth about the Anthropocene (Le Pommier, 2020, in French). Mutation. The human adventure is just beginning (Le Pommier, 2021, in French). Who will save the planet? (Actes Sud, 2022, in French). Vortex. Facing the Anthropocene (with Testot, Payot, 2023, in French). Handbook of the Anthropocene (ed. with Wulf, Springer, 2023, in English). A critical theory for the Anthropocene (Springer, 2023, in English).

The Role of Science Education in the Anthropocene Pierre Léna, David Wilgenbus, and Lydie Lescarmontier

Abstract Education has a triple role, directly linked to the passage of time in which all human life is embedded. It transmits to each new generation the heritage of a very long past. It helps this generation to read the present. It prepares it for a future that will be the fruit of both the past and the present. It is easy to see that in every age, from the most remote antiquity, the first of these roles was easy to put in place, while the others required changes of varying magnitude. Being closely linked to the functioning of society and its projection into the future, education almost necessarily takes a political turn and cannot be limited to acquisition of knowledge. This traditional role, which has always been questioned, is even more under scrutiny today. For science and technology are transforming, the world and the representation that each individual makes of it, as never before. In addition to the transformations society has undergone since the beginning of the industrial era, at the beginning of the twenty-first century we are entering an Anthropocene in which humanity is taking control on a planetary scale. We propose here a brief reflection on the impact that this major change may have on education. The universality of science and the knowledge it establishes, the lightning development of global communication, or at least of information exchange, allows us to assume that a new educational vision cannot be limited to a particular nation or culture. Whether it is physics, biology, mathematics or technology, science education traditionally teaches these disciplines in a specialised and analytical way, being concerned above all with the way in which this new knowledge is placed at the service of society (technology), or participates in the elaboration of new knowledge (research). We apply this to the issue of climate change. This change is highlighted by science and largely caused by the use of technology. It calls on both to cope (adaptation) or to be controlled (mitigation). This change is emerging as a challenge to all, institutions and individuals alike. It is

P. Léna (✉) Observatoire de Paris & Université Paris Cité, Meudon, France e-mail: [email protected] D. Wilgenbus · L. Lescarmontier Office for Climate Education, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_19

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becoming increasingly clear that the response to this challenge, whether or not it is met, has a significant impact on the future of humanity. Keywords Science education · Anthropocene · Education

1 Representations of the World and Science The human is a representational being (Schopenhauer). Language expresses and makes explicit the representations that this human being makes of the world and that are constructed by founding stories, myths, cultures and religions. From its very first steps, science has contributed to establishing this relationship to the world by naming phenomena, by questioning their causes and consequences, by discerning regularities that will become laws (Omnès, 2008), by constructing concepts of increasing abstraction, by seeking to understand the place of the human being in the universe.

1.1

A Multitude of Representations

It is easy to enumerate the essential representations that inhabit the human being today and that over the centuries science has constructed. Among them we have this vast but still too partial inventory: infinite space, irreversible time; the homogeneity of the universe in its material constitution as well as in the laws that govern it; the question of origins; the emergence of life on Earth; the evolution of life up to Homo Sapiens sapiens; the transmission of character from one generation to another; the role of chance; the possible unimportance of the Earth in the universe; the nature of consciousness and intelligence; information and energy. There are so many representations both in individual and in cultural consciousness. To show the extent of this movement and the recent acceleration, we need only mention relativistic spacetime, the indeterminism of quantum physics, the problem of non-equilibrium states in the thermodynamic maintenance of living structures, the existence of chaos, and the externalization of certain brain functions in what is called, by abuse of language, artificial intelligence. The achievements of the last century and this reject more intuitive and more traditional representations. Let us also note that these themes are more than simply philosophical or epistemological speculation. The knowledge they cover and the power they attribute to humanity bring about social or economic transformation on a large scale. Thus, this knowledge shows that science is rooted in reality. Unlike an opinion or an ideology, science reveals in a progressive way how the world works without ever exhausting its mystery (d’Espagnat, 1994). This allows us to understand why researchers, by bringing to light the very foundations of a reality that is external to them, consider themselves to be doing the work of truth. The power over nature and over ourselves that this knowledge confers on humanity are a striking demonstration of this.

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If anthropology, in its modern sense, is a science that describes and analyses the characteristic facts of hominisation and humanity1 – a broader sense than the brief definition given by the French Robert dictionary (‘all the sciences that study man’) – then the phenomena we have just reported deserve the attention of anthropologists. In the contemporary era, these events, which have been going on for a very long time, seem to have changed in scope and speed. Affecting humanity as a whole, as well as the natural world to which we belong and the planet we inhabit, these phenomena raise questions about the traditional separation between nature and culture.

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Challenges for Education

Education has great difficulty in keeping up with the accelerating pace of these changes in representations, especially since at first sight they seem to be increasingly complex, defying being shared outside a circle of specialists. Yet it is these changes which, by their impact, transform the daily lives of millions of people! Let us give two examples. The first is quantum mechanics. It has made possible a computer revolution that is now changing the world; at the same time, it seems almost impossible to share even the rudiments of quantum mechanics with the majority of the population, through high school programmes. In contrast to the elementary classical mechanics taught since Newton – a speed, a force, an acceleration, a mass and a weight – this quantum world appears counter-intuitive and inaccessible to ‘common sense’! The second example, developed below, is that of the Earth’s climate and its current change. This is no longer a problem for physics alone, chemistry alone, biology alone, astronomy alone, economics alone ... for here it is a question of thinking globally about a complex ‘system’ and how it functions (Morin, 2014; Léna, 2014). The current education system hardly prepares pupils and students for this because of the division of sciences into separate disciplines, and more broadly that of knowledge. There is also a problem because of the accelerated pace of construction of new knowledge. More than 20,000 scientific articles are published each year with the keyword ‘climate change’ alone. This is a challenge for researchers, and also for teachers. At the heart of any educational project is the question of synthesis and choice. What should be extracted from this mass of knowledge? For whom and for what purpose? How can new knowledge be constantly integrated without losing the essential coherence of the whole? How to teach a subject that has never been taught before? In these examples, the crowd is reduced to consuming the products of knowledge, whether they reject them, ignore them or resign themselves to accepting them. While ignorance of the quantum world may be judged to have little practical consequence except for engineers, blindness to climate change is leading humanity into great peril.

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Wikipedia, Article Anthropology.

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Moreover, it is impossible for these rapid and major changes to remain without impact on the cultural constructs of the societies in which they occur. Mechanisms of protection or refusal, however illusory and sometimes dangerous they may be, are often put in place. Here are a few examples: the mutation faced by contemporary Islam when it comes to recognizing the symbolic character of certain founding texts (Charfi, 2013); the refusal to take into account, in individual behaviour, the statistical foundations of a vaccination policy, as the Covid-19 pandemic has sadly shown; the denial of climatic evidence (Marshall, 2015); not to mention the outrages of creationists or ‘platists’ who say the Earth is flat. These are very different illustrations of widely shared resistances, whose social or political impact can be serious.

2 Some Educational Recommendations 197 states unanimously adopted the Paris Agreement at COP21 in 1995. As of May 2022, 193 of them have ratified it. It entered into force in November 2016, the threshold of necessary ratifications having been reached by that date (Paris Agreement, 2015). These signatory states have updated the need to address proven and threatening climate change, primarily caused by the radiative forcing of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The role of education is underlined by Article 12 of the Agreement, which states that the Parties “shall take measures [...] to develop climate change education”. This objective was already underlined in 1992 by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which now includes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This educational recommendation could be nothing more than an incentive to pursue an evolution that has emerged over the past two decades under the name of “education for sustainable development” (ESD), in parallel with the emergence of ‘education for. . .’ health, sexuality, citizenship, digital literacy, respect, secularism, religion..., deemed necessary by societal developments. However, this recommendation in Article 12 goes far beyond such continuity. Its legitimacy lies in the content of the other articles of the Paris Agreement which, in order to keep the commitment of limiting an increase in global warming to below 2 °C, require profound transformations in all areas of society: industry, food, transport, housing, finance, health, international solidarity, etc. In democratic countries at least, such upheavals cannot be undertaken without full understanding and acceptance by their populations. Education therefore appears to be an imperative necessity, not only to prepare the younger generations to live in a changing world, but also to make these changes possible. This represents a real challenge for education systems, which are faced with the need to take new objectives into account, whether in terms of curricula, training or support for teachers. This challenge extends to the need to open up schools to families and the local community as a whole, since the aim is not only to educate, but also to initiate the ecological transition, even if only in everyday actions. These objectives are most often seen as cutting across traditional disciplines. Thus, in most of the world’s education systems, the place reserved for them remains

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mostly marginal, and teachers are powerless to implement them in the classroom. This is the observation made by the World Education Monitoring Report: Education for People and the Planet (UNESCO, 2016) and in the two reports that followed (UNESCO, 2019, 2021). Can we simply add climate change, the subject of Article 12 of the Paris Agreement, to this long list of educational recommendations? We do not think so, because this theme requires us to think afresh about education in the age of the Anthropocene. The major transition, whether it is called ecological or climatic, which must be carried out urgently at the risk of humanity, places it before an alternative. A very explicit term ‘business as usual’ (BAU) has come to designate one of the possible choices. The term BAU is used in IPCC reports and graphs to describe the most worrying climate projections for the next decade or century, where nothing is done to control greenhouse gases and the radiative forcing they cause. You don’t need to be a specialist to see the tremendous economic, financial and social transformations that the second alternative choice, which is to abandon BAU, as recommended if not prescribed by the Paris Agreement, will mean in the short term. This is a great challenge for humanity, which by its inaction, ignorance or blindness has changed the climate and which by its action must restore it. Faced with this necessary transition, the school, from primary to university, must also weigh the alternative. It can choose to transform itself or, on the contrary, remain ‘school as usual’. For it is the school, through the education it offers, which shapes conceptual categories, induces individual or collective behaviour, and prepares young people for entry into the professions by offering them a vision of the future, whether implicit or explicit. If schools do not precede and accompany the ecological transition with the same degree of urgency, it will not be possible to achieve it on the scale of the whole of humanity. Let us therefore examine a few aspects of this indispensable transformation that the entry into the Anthropocene calls for, whether it be new ways of thinking, behaviours to be promoted or the vision of the future that is proposed to young people.

2.1

Understand

Climate change requires a systemic understanding, taking into account the inescapable complexity of terrestrial phenomena. Taken as a whole, the Earth system, with its physical components and biosphere, is governed by a multitude of interactions between sub-systems. It is also characterized by a diversity of spatial scales, ranging from the most local (temperature or rainfall, for example) to the most global (the Earth in its relationship with the Sun)-; of temporal scales, from 1 day to a million years or more; of multiple parameters, linking oceans, continents and the atmosphere; and of evolutionary regimes that are sometimes predictable, sometimes chaotic, sometimes intermediate, and likely to be unstable with major consequences. The participation of the human biosphere in the Earth system in turn introduces elements of social sciences, human geography, economy and demography, which

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further complicate the understanding of the global behaviour of the system. Should we then give up on trying to understand it? Limiting the present discussion to the climate does not prevent us from noting that the need for a systemic understanding is apparent in other major issues, such as the depletion of biodiversity, demographic saturation and risk management. These issues cannot be reduced to the climate question, even if it is never far away. Faced with the traditional analytical division of knowledge, on which education has been organized, new elements of understanding and interdisciplinary work are required, which, however, must not replace the traditional division. How can this be done? This is an important issue, which has been addressed since 2019 by the introduction of a ‘scientific education’ (ES) in the first and final classes (grades 11 and 12) of general and technological high schools in France, accompanying the reform of the baccalauréat. That involves about 540,000 young people each year. In addition to the specialist subjects, which are heavy in terms of timetable and chosen by the pupil (three in Première and two in Terminale, or the final year of schooling), there is a common core, including this ES course of 2 h per week. It should therefore be aimed at all students, whatever their profile and particular skills in science which they have inherited from the middle school, from the Second Class (grade 10) and from their choice of specialist subjects. If possible, it should also interest them. While climate occupies only a small place in the specialist subjects, the aim is to give it one that is significant within the ES (Bulletin Officiel, 2019). What are the major points that we need to understand? By summarizing some of them, we would like to show how difficult it is to transmit this knowledge to young students. The Earth is illuminated by the Sun and receives energy from it. Radiating into space, it loses energy. A dynamic equilibrium is established, which determines the average temperature of its surface. This balance, and therefore this temperature, is the result of complex exchanges of energy and matter between the atmosphere, the oceans, the soil and the biosphere. When, over long periods of time, the astronomical parameters of the Earth’s motion change, such as the precession of its axis of rotation or the excentricity of its elliptical trajectory, the equilibrium is modified and the temperature changes – the ice ages are a sign of this. When, over comparable or shorter periods of time, physical (volcanic eruptions) or biological (emergence of photosynthesis) changes affect the composition of the atmosphere, the equilibrium also changes. This global equilibrium of the system is accompanied by significant spatial (with latitude) and temporal (seasons) variations, whose average characteristics nevertheless remain stable. Climate is an average, based on the statistical distribution of a set of properties of the Earth’s atmosphere in a given region over a given period of time (temperature, pressure, humidity, cloud cover, wind, etc.). Climate can be global or local. Climatology is distinct from meteorology, which analyses local and short-term variations. Since the middle of the twentieth Century, when climate science emerged, the many processes involved in this balance have gradually been identified, quantified and measured. Climate models are numerical tools that aim to represent the average

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climate, its variations in space and its changes over time, based on measurements and calculations that integrate all known science, as well as measurements made on the ground or from space. In particular, they produce projections for the coming decades or centuries. The models have limits of accuracy, assessed in terms of the probability of occurrence of the projections. Humanity’s energy consumption, linked to the industrial revolutions, the demographic explosion and so-called development, is essentially based on the combustion of fossil materials (coal, gas, oil). By injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, these combustions disrupt the equilibrium that existed in the Earth system in the pre-industrial era, before 1850. This disturbance, called radiative forcing, temporarily increases the energy absorbed by the Earth’s surface. If the amount of CO2 stabilizes, a new equilibrium is established, characterized by a higher average surface temperature. While energy exchange times in the atmosphere are short (in the order of a year), those in the oceans reach the millennium mark. The new equilibrium is slow to occur, and the effects of the disturbance are only dampened over long timescales. If the accumulation of CO2 continues, the average temperature continues to rise, additional energy is injected at the surface, and the achievement of a new equilibrium state is delayed. Climate models account for these developments in detail, as well as the different time scales that characterize them. Let us illustrate this with some values. The change in the Earth’s average temperature over the past century and a half has been of the order of 1 °C. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is produced by combustion and is the main cause of this change, has risen from 300 to more than 400 parts per million – it seems that this concentration has not been reached since the Miocene, i.e. 5–25 million years ago. The atmospheric concentration of methane (CH4), another anthropogenic greenhouse gas of which 60% of emissions are linked to human activities, has increased by 150% since the industrial revolution. Ocean levels, caused by the absorption of thermal energy, are rising by just under 4 mm/year. Ocean acidity has increased by 40%, with a significant impact on the marine biosphere. Compared to these values, global energy consumption for ‘development’, which is very unevenly distributed among countries and regions, has doubled between 1973 and 2015. These temperature changes seem small, but it is the nature of a system in dynamic equilibrium, when it is complex, to be very sensitive to apparently very small changes. This is the case for the human body, for which a variation in internal temperature of 2 °C can lead to serious disorders, or even death. We quote these few elements of the curriculum of these final classes of the French high school in order to underline the challenges of understanding them, and in particular their interdisciplinary character. Somewhat abstract concepts: energy, average temperature, stable equilibrium and transient regime. A multiplicity of factors: physical, chemical, biological. A considerable range of spatial scales (from village to continent) and temporal scales (from year to millennium). Most often multifactorial causality. A large number of subsystems (agricultural land, forests, ocean surface and depth) that are linked, as illustrated by the carbon cycle. Anthropogenic elements (gases and aerosols produced by combustion, deforestation,

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transport, urbanization) combined with natural elements (solar flux), etc. Major effects for very small relative variations. Etc. Such an ensemble, even if presented in an elementary manner, cannot fail to highlight some essential aspects of the scientific process, which are too often omitted in what is taught in schools. Research never ceases to deepen, and the truth, however true it may be in representing reality at a given moment, is never ultimate. The assertions of the natural sciences are not mathematical theorems. They are always accompanied by margins of uncertainty or by the statement of a probability. In this tangle of notions, it is therefore necessary to “help each student build solid reference points, so that they can make sense of current events and position themselves rationally” (Masson-Delmotte, 2019). With these benchmarks, placing the present in the perspective of the 4.6 billion years of the planet Earth’s history, and at their own level, students will perceive the totally unprecedented character of the current era, the Anthropocene.

2.2

Trust

The search for ‘understanding’ also brings into play the trust that it is possible and even necessary to place in what science proposes, since the absolute necessity of the ecological transition results first and foremost from scientific analyses, those regularly summarised in the IPCC reports. In order to accept the facts and the probabilities of occurrence of the projections, we cannot limit ourselves to a necessarily approximate and fuzzy understanding. We must also establish a relationship of trust with science, by understanding how it works and how its conclusions are validated, within the so-called scientific community. Here, the examples drawn from the history of scientific ideas and their slow adoption have a pedagogical force that is largely under-exploited today. The relationship of trust is today, as we have already mentioned, severely undermined. This objective of educating about the nature of science, combining scientific spirit, critical spirit and confidence, the role of proof, and collective functioning, is an issue for school curricula and everyday teaching, as set up by the action of La main à la pâte (Fondation La main à la pâte, 2022, Zimmermann et al., 2017; Farina et al., 2018). We extract the following sentence from a recent letter exchange with a climate sceptic, who is nonetheless well versed in scientific culture. “In my opinion,” he writes, “the scientific community cannot behave like a chapel with its prohibitions and its certainties”. His refusal to accept certainty, within the limits of probability of occurrence, reflects a confusion, so common among the general public and which we mentioned earlier, between opinion and scientific fact. If we remind him that the Earth is a sphere and not flat, he agrees that this is a certainty, but he relies precisely on the climatic complexity that we have just underlined to conclude that a conclusion is impossible. “To say”, he writes, “that this human activity has as much weight, although on a completely different scale, as the Milankovic cycles [astronomical cycles of a hundred thousand years], surprises me and makes me question it”.

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Education must take on this complexity and make it intelligible, taking it away from blind belief and basing it on another form of belief that implies reasoned trust. However, it is not possible to advocate blind trust in science, which would mean that citizens would give up their own capacity for judgement and action. As in any complex situation in life, well-founded trust in other people and personal judgment must go hand in hand. In this way, an attempt can be made to establish a representation of the Anthropocene among the younger generation that has a solid, non-emotional or fantasized content.

2.3

Act

There can be no education without hope for the future. If education, at secondary school or university, were limited to transmitting the alarming message that the climate projections and their human impacts (climate migrations by the millions, for example) address in the successive IPCC reports, it would completely miss its goal. Children or teenagers whose future would be so bleakly presented would find no reason to live. Veer Ramanathan, a climate scientist from San Diego, California, assigns to education a dual purpose: a critical mind and a hopeful heart (Ramanathan et al., 2017). It is easy to observe the extreme sensitivity of youth to climate issues. The presence of these issues in the news, repeatedly, has certainly changed our awareness, which was still absent a few years ago. These reactions alone are a reason for hope. But the reaction must be more than simply emotional: that is the purpose of understanding. It must also find a way of linking the tiny field of action of the individual to the immensity of the global problem. The Eco-schools and green high schools movements are all opportunities for a different kind of school where action is combined with understanding, requiring and illustrating it. Carbon offsetting strategies offer a field of practice on various scales, since one can try to offset the carbon footprint of one’s personal car travel as well as that of one’s school, city or country. Even when implemented on a small scale, offsetting leads to quantitative awareness of one’s own carbon footprint, with a meaningful measurement tool (carbon mass or CO2 equivalent), then to identifying its origins and doing everything possible to reduce it, and finally to actively seeking out non-carbon processes that could be used to offset2. The construction of a decarbonised society represents a tremendous shift in the way ‘development’ has worked for over a century. The IPCC special report Global Warming of 1.5 °C (2018) underlines how fighting climate change goes hand in hand with the objectives of sustainable development. By building a low-carbon society,

2

For example, see https://www.goodplanet.org/fr/agir-a-nos-cotes/compensation-carbone/. Many organizations offer to receive compensation. It is advisable to be vigilant on their seriousness, in particular financial.

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we also build more just and sustainable societies. The ‘developing’ world, whose own industrial development over the past 150 years has been responsible for global warming and its consequences, has a great opportunity to bring sustainability to the rest of the world through this fight. Rich societies, the sources of most of the radiative forcing, are facing radical changes in their modes of transport, housing and consumption. Poor societies are confronted with the very modalities of their legitimately sought-after access to energy and water, as well as the uses of their land. In both cases, the importance and direction of financial flows are decisive (Jouzel & Larrouturou, 2017). All the intelligence and energy of the world’s youth will not be enough to imagine, design and implement, with all the tools of science and technology, the new configurations that this decarbonised and sustainable society requires. As Pierre Larrouturou and Jean Jouzel point out, humanity has managed to mobilize and enthuse its youth in other times by building Europe or conquering the moon: these examples are there to give hope. More pragmatically, the example of the Montreal Protocol (1992) and the measures that followed to resolve the problem of the ‘hole’ in the ozone layer show that sometimes states and economic actors can mobilise effectively to respond to a major environmental problem. It is not impossible to hope for a similar movement on the climate issue.

2.4

Be Supportive

Education is never limited to knowledge, its goal is also to put forward values. Above our schools in France we find the words Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, which express the educational ambition of the schools of the Republic. In contrast to the authoritarian teaching of an ideology, schools educate the child to be free, so that the adult they will become will have learned to exercise this freedom (Léna, 2004). Beyond knowledge, climate change education calls for values of humanity and solidarity that have probably never been encountered on such a scale. Let us cite two examples. The first is that the global nature of the climate means that the borders on which the world was built after the Treaty of Vienna (1815) and decolonization (after 1945) are disappearing. CO2 and other greenhouse gases know no borders, nor do global warming or rising oceans. Each human being becomes physically linked to all. The second is that the inertia of the climate system maintains its effects over the very long term, even if the cause ceases. Thus, present action or inaction will have an impact on three to ten generations into the future, or even much longer. The traditional generational solidarity, which in the past did not go beyond the second generation, is being replaced by a new one. Solidarity with distant spaces or times is not self-evident. Climate justice is the search for a concrete and efficient translation of these new solidarities. Trusting in the ability of people to face the climate challenge with all their scientific, technical, economic and political intelligence, and bearing witness to this in concrete terms, is essential if we are to offer a future to young people. On

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the other hand, trust in technology has its limits, which Pope Francis’ Encyclical Laudato Si′ abundantly emphasizes (Pope Francis, 2015). The belief that the possibly untoward consequences of ‘business as usual’ would be easily corrected by better technology is bound to lead to a race to the bottom (Blamont, 2018). One example is the temptation of geo-engineering, where the effect of increasing the average temperature could be counteracted by acting, on a planetary scale, on the terrestrial albedo, thus producing an opposite cooling effect. Faced with this technological temptation, or others of the same kind, the choice of technological frugality is also one of values. Another example is the recent decision by the French government to replace the objective of dividing national carbon emissions by four by 2050 (the ‘Factor 4′) with the apparently more ambitious objective of achieving carbon neutrality. This new target is criticized because it allows us, in theory, to maintain emissions at a high level (‘business as usual’, or almost), on the very fragile assumption that carbon capture techniques will later solve the problem.

3 Supporting Teachers Transforming science education is a major project that has been underway throughout the world for two decades under the name of inquiry-based education,3 although it has not yet been confronted with objectives that go beyond the natural sciences in the strict sense. Initiated by renowned scientists and developed in nearly a hundred countries in the form of pilot projects, it has been extended in France under the name of La main à la pâte (Charpak et al., 2005; Fondation La main à la pâte, 2022). Its guiding principle is to provide support to teachers (primary, secondary and possibly high school) to help them teach an attractive kind of science, involving the active participation of pupils in observation, experimentation, hypothesis generation, argumentation and reasoning. The scientific community is closely involved in the support and professional development of teachers, the production of relevant resources for the classroom, and the creation of national and international networks. The considerable development of these actions throughout the world has helped to develop in more than 10 million schoolchildren a sense of wonder, curiosity, imagination, rationality and understanding of the process on which science is built. Since its creation, this action has considered it necessary and fruitful to address young children, at the age of curiosity which is so lively in nursery school. Many scientific concepts are obviously too difficult, too abstract to be communicated or even evoked in children of primary school age. That is not the point. The point is to develop in the child the process of reasoning, the foundation of science, based on careful observation, imagination and creativity in the search for explanations. It is therefore more a question of understanding this process and participating in it by practising it, rather than accumulating knowledge. It is therefore a learning process

3

IBSE = Inquiry Based Science Education.

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that involves a capacity for dialogue and listening to the thoughts of others, a modesty in reaching conclusions and a capacity to question oneself, together with an appreciation of the potential of one’s own intelligence and the self-confidence that this creates. All of this also makes sense when it comes to climate change education. The scientific concepts are complex, and the young child will only grasp the broad outlines, but his or her involvement prepares him or her for a moral virtue of care, respect, trust and personal commitment.

3.1

The OCE, a Specific Action

This successful model has provided a solid foundation for an original international project focused on climate change education and the objectives of Art. 12 of the Paris Agreement. This project was conceived shortly after COP21 in 2015, during a discussion between the Academy of Sciences and the French Development Agency (Colloquium, 2016), then constructed through an in-depth dialogue with climate scientists4 and educational networks (Colloquium Vatican, 2016) leading in 2017 to a feasibility study within the Fondation La main à la pâte in France based on an international meeting entitled Climate change: a challenge for education. In addition, in December 2017 the InterAcademy Partnership, a federation of more than 100 science academies worldwide, published a Declaration on Climate Change and Education, adopted by all science academies (IAP, 2017). The creation in 2018 of the Office for Climate Education (OCE), concluding the feasibility study, is the result of all these preparations, in which key members of the IPCC Secretariat participated. Global awareness of climate change and the analysis of possible actions are based on the regular publication of the IPCC’s work, and in particular on its sixth Assessment Report (2022–2023), referring to three Interim Reports (2018). These reports, which are interdisciplinary in nature, are accompanied by a Summary for Policy Makers, which, in a more concise form and in less technical language, summarizes the conclusions and proposals. In order for educational leaders, and teachers in particular, to be able to structure their activities and pedagogy according to accessible scientific content and the public debates it provokes, the Office for Climate Education has set itself the goal, throughout the period 2018–2025, of making available to the teaching profession the Summaries and Tools for Teachers (OCE, 2022). These are consistent with the investigative pedagogy mentioned above, and are prepared in close collaboration with a network of actors around the world that the OCE facilitates and with the scientific community, in particular the IPCC Technical Support Units and the Academies of Science around the world. Through their teachers, the project mainly targets young people between the end of primary school and high school, while

4 Among others: Anny Cazenave, Marie-Lise Chanin, Jean Jouzel, Hervé Le Treut, Valérie MassonDelmotte, Mario Molina, Veerabadran Ramanathan, John Schellnhuber.

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others focus on the essential task of reforming university education. In 2021, the OCE became a Unesco Associate Centre and in 2022 an Observer to the IPCC. Many actions to communicate issues in the broad sense5, many educational resources on the theme of climate already exist throughout the world, and are accessible on the Internet, although sometimes their language does not allow their use in developing countries. The originality of the project is to specifically address education systems and teachers, to propose a precise pedagogy that has been proven and to provide them with a variety of means to implement it, all supported by a constant commitment of scientists and the thirst of youth, which we analyse elsewhere (Léna & Lescarmontier, 2023). To date, such a synergy does not generally exist.

4 Conclusion Preparing young people to live in the Anthropocene is an immense challenge that must be taken up by the generations currently responsible for education, especially in schools, colleges and universities. Without being the only characteristic of our entry into the Anthropocene, climate change is certainly emblematic of it. Moreover, acting on it is undeniably urgent. This is why we wanted to take up the challenge it poses to schools without delay. It simply cannot be satisfied with a complacent school as usual attitude anywhere in the world.

References Blamont, J. (2018). Réseaux. Le pari de l’intelligence collective. Editions du CNRS. Bulletin officiel. (2019). Bulletin officiel de l’éducation nationale (BOEN) special n°1, 22 January. Charfi, F. (2013). La science voilée. Odile Jacob. Charpak, G., Léna, P., & Quéré, Y. (2005). L’Enfant et la science. L’aventure de La main à la pâte. Odile Jacob. Colloquium. (2016, November 3). Sustainable development, climate change and education. Joint symposium of the Academy of Sciences and the French Development Agency, Paris. http:// www.academie-sciences.fr/fr/Colloques-conferences-et-debats/developpement-durablechangement-climatique-et-education.html. D’Espagnat, B. (1994). Le réel voilé: analyse des concepts quantiques. Fayard. Farina, M., Pasquinelli, E., & Zimmermann, G. (2018). Esprit scientifique, esprit critique. Un projet pédagogique pour la classe. Le Pommier.

5

Here are some examples. In Hamburg (Germany), the International Climate Change Information Program (ICCIP: https://www.haw-hamburg.de/en/ftz-nk/programmes/iccip/); in the United Kingdom, the Climate Outreach and Information Network (https://climateoutreach.org); in France, the Shift Project, a think-tank for the carbon transition, is aimed at universities (https://theshiftproject. org/); in the United States, Teach the Earth produces resources for teachers (https://serc.carleton. edu/NAGTWorkshops/climatechange/index.html)

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Fondation La main à la pâte. (2022). www.fondation-lamap.org. IAP. (2017). A Statement on Climate change & Education, InterAcademy Partnership (IAP). https://www.academie-sciences.fr/fr/Rapports-ouvrages-avis-et-recommandations-de-lAcademie/une-declaration-sur-le-changement-climatique-et-l-education-iap.html. Jouzel, J., & Larrouturou, P. (2017). Pour éviter le chaos climatique et financier. Odile Jacob. Léna, M. (2004). L’esprit de l’éducation. Parole & Silence. Léna, P. (2014). Faut-il faire simple à l’école quand le monde est si complexe? Résonances, Monthly magazine of the Valaisan school, n° 2, October. Léna, P., & Lescarmontier, L. (2023). Education and climate change. In Handbook of Anthropocene. Springer. Marshall, G. (2015). Do not even think about it. Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change. Audible Studios. Masson-Delmotte, V. (2019), Pour une culture générale du climat. Cahiers pédagogiques, 551, 1er February. Morin, E. (2014). Introduction à la pensée complexe. Points essais. OCE. Office for Climate Education. (2022). Office for Climate Education. Retrieved from https:// www.oce.global Omnès, R. (2008). La Révélation des lois de la physique. Odile Jacob. Paris Agreement. (2015). United Nations framework convention on climate change. http://unfccc. int/files/essential_background/convention/application/pdf/english_paris_agreement.pdf. Pope Francis. (2015). Laudato Si’. Pour la sauvegarde de la maison commune. Salvator. Ramanathan, V., Han, H., & Matlock, T. (2017). Educating children to bend the curve. In A. Battro, P. Lena, M. Sanchez Sorondo, & J. von Braun (Eds.), Children and sustainable development. Ecological education in a globalized world. Springer. Unesco. (2016). Education for people and the planet. Unesco. Unesco. (2019). Country progress on climate change education, Training and Public Awareness: An analysis of country submissions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Retrieved from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000372164 Unesco. (2021). Getting every school climate-ready: How countries are integrating climate change issues in education. Retrieved from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379591 Vatican Colloquium. (2016). Children and sustainable development. In A. Battro, P. Lena, M. Sanchez Sorondo, & J. von Braun (Eds.), Ecological education in a globalized world. Springer. See Recommendations and details of the network in the Annex to these Proceedings. Zimmermann, G., Pasquinelli, E., & Farina, M. (2017). Esprit scientifique, esprit critique. Un projet pédagogique pour l’école primaire. Le Pommier.

Pierre Léna. Astrophysicist, Professor Emeritus (Observatoire de Paris & Université Paris Cité), member of the Académie des sciences. Co-founder of La main à la pâte and the Office for Climate Education. Author of Enseigner c’est espérer (Le Pommier 2012), L’Enfant et la science (id. 2005) and Une Histoire de flou (id. 2019). David Wilgenbus. Executive delegate of the Office for Climate Education since its creation, author of several educational guides related to climate change, including Le climat, ma planète et moi! (Le Pommier, 2008) and L’Océan, ma planète et moi! (Le Pommier, 2015) Lydie Lescarmontier. Glaciologist, Antarctica Director International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI) and representative of young researchers at the French National Committee for Arctic and Antarctic Research (CNFRA). Author of L’Empreinte des Glaces (Elytis, 2018) and La Voix des pôles (2021).

Ecology and Education: The Example of Ecotopias Damien Delorme

Abstract “ECO- from the Greek oikos (household or home) -TOPIA from the Greek topos (place)” – the source of the title of the literary utopia Ecotopia, published in 1975 by the Californian author E. Callenbach (1929–2012). In a manner analogous to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), a traveller, the Times-Post reporter William Weston, discovers an isolated place which is an exemplary form of social and political organization. The three states of the American northwest (California, Oregon, and Washington), formerly American, seceded from the rest of the federation some 20 years previously, following a period of political unrest. During this relative isolation, the territory of Ecotopia was able to develop a system and culture of its own centred around ecological issues. Distancing itself from the ‘modernism’ of the United States (capitalist, consumerist, based on fossil fuels and the myth of growth) Ecotopia explores the possibility of a regime rooted in the earth (Latour B, Down to Earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. Polity Press, Medford, 2018) i.e. having as its principle a harmonious inhabitation of the earth. The narrative imagines the implementation of many of the ideals of the hippy movements of the 1970s, which themselves having a link with the socialist and anarchist emancipation movements of the nineteenth Century and are now being taken up again in ecological alternatives, for example as Cities in Transition (Hopkins R, The power of just doing stuff. UIT/Green Books, 2013). Here we find new forms of governance (decentralization, women in power, less authoritarian administrative structures and hierarchies, citizen participation), self-management and a circular economy (recycling of all organic waste in the capital San Francisco, soil production for local agricultural production, a 20-h working week, integration of ecological and social factors in economic decisions), urban organization centred on eco-mobility (no individual cars, autonomous electric minibuses and free bicycles for all), renewable energies, bio-sourced and biodegradable materials, eco-spirituality, education in nature, egalitarianism and individual emancipation, etc. The topicality of the problems posed by this literary utopia and the transformation of certain imagined ideas into concrete

D. Delorme (✉) University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_20

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political projects is striking. It is probably because Callenbach recognized what feeds how we imagine a transition might take place today: the Anthropocene obliges us to take seriously the fact that our relationship with our living environment is one of interdependence and realize that this is a principle of politics. In 1990, Michel Serres called this adding “to the exclusively social contract [...] the making of a natural contract” characterized as “a contract of armistice in the objective war, a contract of symbiosis” (Serres M, The natural contract. The University of Michigan Press, 1995, p. 38) in order to consider nature, not a fund of resources to be exploited, but as “the new partner of our actions” (Serres M, Retour au contrat naturel. In Bindé J (ed), Signons la paix avec la Terre. Albin Michel, UNESCO Publishing, pp 169–180, 2007, p 178). Influenced by ‘equilibrium ecology’ a dominant paradigm in the 1970s assuming that nature is a set of stabilized ecosystems, Callenbach expresses in an analogous way the new politico-religious principle, or the dogma of equilibrium which organizes the new relationship with nature: People’s happiness no longer depends on their domination of all earthly creatures, but on a peaceful and balanced coexistence with them. This implies both an overhaul of our legal, political and economic organizations, and also a subjective metamorphosis, which makes education a central issue for surviving or coping with the Anthropocene. But what is an ecotopia? What are the characteristics of an ecotopic education, pedagogically and sociologically? And how can such education play a role in dealing with the Anthropocene? Keywords Ecology · Anthropocene · Political education · Ecotopias

1 What Is an Ecotopia? 1.1

From Ecotopia to Ecotopias

In a 2009 lecture entitled From Capitalism to Ecotopia: a Successionist Manifesto, Callenbach questions the historical possibility of realizing what was, in 1975, only a literary fiction. In particular, he observes the emergence of multiple alternatives, proliferating like weeds full of vitality in a hostile environment, and aiming to replace the dying capitalism with a system that is ‘earthly’, cooperative, ecological, egalitarian and emancipatory. Callenbach calls these marginal actors of ecological transformation ‘ecotopians’. I also propose to use the concept of ecotopia to designate any place that has committed itself to making a cultural transition in response to the global ecological crisis. An ecotopia is thus a place of resistance to the ideological, economic and political paradigm that has produced this catastrophe. It is also a place where new relationships with nature, new theoretical and practical ideas, and new collective organizations are invented around the key ecological question of how to inhabit a place in a harmonious and sustainable way? This can refer natural parks, agro-ecological farms, cooperative gardens, training centres in natural construction, centres for spiritual retreat and education in nature, ecovillages, etc. What they have in common is that they are minority, marginal places, places of local experimentation

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but linked together to form a network, no longer under the control of a technocratic authority but emerging from interstitial centres of vitality taking as a model the mycelium (Tsing, 2017; Vidalou, 2017), the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980) or weeds (Callenbach, 2009).

1.2

Concrete Utopias, ‘Intentional Communities’ and Ecovillages

This topical use of the concept of ecotopia is not new. Anthropologists and sociologists use it as a generic term to designate ‘intentional communities’, which, from the nineteenth Century to the present day, in the socialist and anarchist tradition, have carried these values of harmony with nature, equality among individuals, emancipation through cooperative organization of work, and education in nature (Anderson, 2010; Lockyer & Veteto, 2013).1 Ecotopia then refers, in a narrow sense, to an ecovillage. Exploring this history of concrete utopias in the United States, Ronald Creagh suggests that, due to the lag between writing and practice, there are far more realized utopias than those written about (Creagh, 2009, p. 22). The Ecotopia narrative thus builds on a historical tradition and a series of realized utopias that, on a modest scale, implemented resistance to the productivist system and invented new ways of relating to with nature. Serge Audier notes in his history of the social thought of nature that “The movements of the 1960s-1970s, beyond their heterogeneous, complex and multiform character, had opened up important “breaches” in the history of emancipation, as much for their democratic, antihierarchical and libertarian dimension as for their questioning of productivism, of which the resurgent ecological critique constituted one of the essential dimensions. These “breaches” were in fact not the first, and were more or less consciously part of a long history going back to the socialist and libertarian utopias of the 19th century” (Audier, 2017, p. 82). Ecotopias, particularly in the socialist and anarchist tradition, have preceded Ecotopia. But how do they stand up to the discourse of the Anthropocene?

1.3

Terraformation or Return to the Earth?

If we agree to call our time the Anthropocene, and if this name is also the designation of crucial problems that we must face, it remains to be determined where ecotopias

1

Eugene N. Anderson, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, claims to have used the concept since 1969 although he acknowledges that it is Callenbach who popularized the term (Lockyer & Veteto, 2013, p. xi).

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fit into the spectrum of possible reactions. Indeed, Anthropocene discourses reconfigure controversies and polarized political options. There are two extremes here: on the one hand, the human shaping of the Earth (terraformation)2 and on the other, the “return to the Earth” (Latour, 2018). On the one hand, the Anthropocene is the place where the increase of human power over the system Earth is recognized, calling for geo-engineering, ‘smart cities’, ‘eco-modernism’ and ‘new conservation’; on the other hand, the trigger for a cultural, political and spiritual surge calling for the reconsideration of the ways of inhabiting a “New Earth” (Bourg 2018).3 Ecotopias are clearly on the side of the “return to the Earth”, inviting modern, capitalist Western culture to reinvent its ways of feeling, knowing, acting and organizing itself in order to pacify its relationship with the Earth. They express an awareness of planetary limits rather than a logic of limitlessness justified by a ‘techno-fix mentality’, i.e. an inordinate confidence in techno-scientific solutions – often hypothetical. Ecotopias take up a stance that is resistant towards the system of globalized capitalism rather than, through the introduction of superficial green policies, prolonging the dominant economic thinking, which is extractivist, productivist and consumerist. They are part of a deep or integral ecology insofar as ecological concern, the awareness and care of interrelations with one’s living environment and its inhabitants, becomes the new centre of gravity of a culture, of its moral and religious norms, of economic and political organisations. They are driven by minority collective movements emerging in a natural, local way and not by technocratic decisions assuming a hierarchical power within a globalized system. They promote gentleness (reciprocity, humility, partnership, symbiosis, listening, etc.) rather than domination, separation, control, appropriation and exploitation. They thus fulfil two functions typical of utopianism, one critical and the other emancipatory: to resist, that is, in Ronald Creagh’s words, “to challenge the social system” and “to shake up fundamental beliefs”, but also to invent, that is, “to be a creative force for the present” and “to reveal the infinite possibilities of our finite condition” (2009, pp. 28–29). In this sense, ecotopias are a laboratory for implementing an integral response to the Anthropocene, this “Great Turning” that involves, according to eco-psychologist Joanna Macy, three essential dimensions: (1) resisting catastrophe: acting to slow down the damage inflicted on the Earth and its inhabitants; (2) promoting alternatives: analysing and transforming the foundations of our common life; (3) spiritual transformation: making a fundamental shift in our worldview and values (Macy & Brown, 2014). Ecotopias thus refer to all places of resistance, invention and metamorphosis where grassroots actors of the ecological transition live. More specifically they refer

2

For a critique of geo-constructivist discourses, see Hamilton, 2013; Neyrat, 2018. For an analysis of the plurality and political polarization of anthropocenic discourses see Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2017; Latour, 2018; Beau and Larrère, 2018 (especially part one: narratives and counter-narratives); Maris, 2018.

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to ecovillages and intentional communities formed around ecological concerns. How does this translate into education?

2 The Sources of Ecotopian Education 2.1

Education in Ecotopia

In Ecotopia, Callenbach devotes a chapter to ecotopian education, which is education in and through nature. Nature is first and foremost the place of instruction: students attend a classroom for only 1 h a day. The rest of the time is devoted to “project” teaching outside. There are no hygienic precautions to prevent contact with nature due to danger or dirt. Nature is then the object of knowledge and biology is the architectonic science. Alongside basic skills (reading, writing, arithmetic), most of the skills are based on naturalist knowledge of the environment and practical knowledge: “An Ecotopian 10-years-old [...] knows how to construct a shelter [...], how to grow, catch and cook food, how to make simple clothes; how hundreds of species of plants and animal live both around their schools and in the areas they explore on backpacking expeditions” (p. 120). The pedagogical relationship is based primarily on an exchange of interests and passions on the part of the educators, who emphasize cooperation rather than competition among the students, and do not have to use violence to discipline the children, who evolve in an atmosphere of calm and self-regulation.

2.2

The Pedagogical Lineage of Natural Education

In fact, the ecotopian education described by Callenbach is part of a pedagogical lineage according to which ‘nature teaches me’ – to borrow a formula from Cartesian metaphysics.4 From a historical point of view, this ‘natural education’ can be traced back to antiquity (Hannoun, 1979), but it was the founders of modern pedagogy, and in particular Rousseau, who formulated the principle in a paradigmatic way: “It is you whom I address, tender, foresighted mother – you who know how to stay away from the busy highway and protect the growing seedling from the impact of human opinion! Cultivate and water the young plant before it dies: its fruits will one day be your delight. Early on, form an enclosure around your child’s soul. Someone else can mark its circumference, but you alone must build the fence. Plants are fashioned by cultivation, man by education” (Rousseau, [1762] 2010, p. 19). The plant metaphor allows Rousseau to justify, on the one hand, resistance to an environment and practices that are hostile or harmful to the child’s development, and

4

Cf. Descartes, ([1647] 2011), p. 191, AT, IX, 64.

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on the other, to characterize pedagogical action as an aid to the maturation of the natural powers present in every newborn child. Pedagogical action is modelled on gardening care, which enabled Julie in The New Heloise to revitalize and produce an area of abundance from an abandoned place, by working with nature: “It is true,” she says, “that nature has done everything, but under my direction, and there is nothing here which I have not ordered” (Rousseau, [1761], 2000, p. 41). In Experience and Education, John Dewey, following the same principle, proposes an elementary distinction between ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ education: “The history of educational theory is marked by opposition between the idea that education is development from within and that it is formation from without; that it is based upon natural endowments and that education is a process of overcoming natural inclination and substituting in its place habits acquired under external pressure” (Dewey, 1938). This distinction points to a fundamental problem in the relationship of education to natural endowments: should one go along with a child’s potential or against tendencies that must be subverted? Should nature be taken as a guide to accompany development or as an adversary to be eradicated and replaced by a civilised ‘second nature’? Ecotopian pedagogies are on the side of the ‘progressive’ pole, based on the potentialities and dynamics of vital development, and envisaging pedagogical action not so much as manufacturing something that can be reproduced for all, but as ‘steering’ what is there.5

2.3

A Pedagogy of Emancipation in, Through and with Nature

Ecotopian education can be said to combine ‘natural education’ and what Serge Audier calls a ‘pedagogy of emancipation’.6 In the words of Élisée Reclus, a supporter of non-coercive and anti-hierarchical education, “The school that is truly freed from ancient servitude can fully develop in nature” (Reclus, 1905, p. 433). From the nineteenth Century onwards, emancipation movements (socialism, anarchism and republicanism) took up this plant metaphor and thought of education as care, allowing the deployment of full natural potentialities rather than an unnatural forcing which they labelled as bourgeois. For example, among the Fourierists, a distinction is made between the good educator and the bad educator using the metaphor of the good and the bad gardener. The first knows the delicacy of a plant and succeeds in making it flourish. It can then unfold all its beauty thanks to this care. In contrast, however, the bad gardener mistreats the plant and causes a rapid

5 I transpose to pedagogical action the distinction between “fabrication” (manufacturing) and “pilotage” (steering) proposed by Catherine and Raphaël Larrère to think of two fundamental modalities of technical action. Cf. Larrère, 2015 and Larrère, 2017. 6 The pedagogy of emancipation isl be a pedagogy that promotes contact with nature, in every sense of the word. (2017, p. 535).

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depletion of its vital energy (Audier, 2017, p. 534). Moreover, the first concrete socialist or anarchist ecotopias of the nineteenth Century are conceived of as places of education in nature (as a living environment) and in the service of nature (as a principle of harmonious individual and collective development).7 The experience of the Cempuis orphanage, directed by Paul Robin from 1880 to 1894, is a striking example of this ecotopian conception, in this case libertarian and democratic, of an emancipating education in and through the natural environment. The aim was to remove children from social misery by offering them holistic development in a favourable environment. According to Serge Audier: “almost ten years before the new schools in the countryside of England and Germany, Robin set up the Cempuis experiment as a laboratory for a pioneering school given over to the ‘natural environment’, that is to say, in the middle of fields, with a park and gardens, a small farm and surrounding crops. In this spirit, the physical life advocated by Robin consists of spending time in the open air with natural exercise: walking, riding bicycles, swimming in a pool dug by the students, the ‘simple and easy’ work of gardening” (Audier, 2017, pp. 539–540). Education was based on an invigorating relationship with nature, benevolent cooperation and simple, balanced vegetarian food! In the twentieth Century, a whole series of great educators took up these principles and put them into practice, often within ecotopias: Francisco Ferrer, Adolphe Ferrière, Maria Montessori, Ovide Decroly, Célestin and Élise Freinet, Rudolf Steiner, Alexander Sutherland Neill, Daniel Greenberg, etc. Ecotopias are therefore in line with the pedagogies of emancipation through education in, by and with nature. Educating consists essentially in taking care of vitality through a holistic and differentiated approach, resisting authoritarianism and promoting creative originality at all ages. How is this expressed in the organization of contemporary ecotopias?

3 Education in Contemporary Ecotopias 3.1

The Invention of Alternative Models

In ecovillages and other initiatives for the peaceful habitation of our living world, the importance of education is widely recognized. The former president of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), Jonathan Dawson, considers “holistic, whole person education” (Dawson, 2015, p. 62) as one of the five main areas of eco-responsible living experiments in which ecotopias are inventing alternative models. He adds: “The area in which ecovillages have perhaps had great success in creating bridges to mainstream society is in the area of education. This forms the bedrock of many ecovillage economies” (ibid., p. 62). How can this be explained? Jonathan Dawson

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See, for example, the educational principles of New Harmony, a community founded in 1826 by the English socialist pioneer R. Owen (quoted by Audier 2017, p. 532).

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suggests formal reasons related to the nature of ecotopian collectives: “Freed from the constraints of conventionl educational structures and pedagogies, and given the availability of the entire community as a grand technical and social laboratory and classroom, ecovillages have become masters in the design and delivery of this type of educational package [unaccredited courses outside of any formal school or university curriculum covering a wide range of topics such as permaculture and ecovillage creation, renewable energy systems, arts and crafts, performance art, and spirituality]” (ibid., p. 62).

3.2

Ecotopias as a Counter-Model

I would add that ecotopias function as counter-models, i.e. as alternative, places that contest the hegemonic system. It is thus the difference and the potential offered by the exceptional nature of the ecotopia that makes it possible to innovate and introduce new knowledge and know-how, by addressing a population in search of change. Ecotopias thus have the function of challenging the ‘radical monopoly’ (Illich, 1973), i.e. the colonization of the imaginary by hegemonic practices. They make it possible for another model to exist, one that revives the imagination, and for different institutional structures to evolve. For example, ecotopias function as the ecological bad conscience of the prevailing educational system. What is the value of an education system that produces pupils who are unaware of their vital relationship with their environment and who are likely to desire its destruction as a good?

3.3

Sanctuaries, Resource Centres and Transition Laboratories

But beyond this differential function, it seems that contemporary ecotopias structurally place education at the heart of their collective project for three reasons which are inherent in their embracing the natural environment. First, ecotopias function as sanctuaries, i.e. places preserved from destruction caused by urban culture.8 The place where one lives is a provider of air, water and food necessary for one’s health, the possibility of partnership, care or diplomatic negotiations with the co-inhabitants of this place, the possibility of personal synchronization not with the metric time of productivity but with the existential time of vitality and the cosmic time of circadian rhythms, or even the daily frequentation of the beauty of nature’s beings. There are so many elementary practices that have become rare and precious for city dwellers

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The UN estimates that 55% of today’s population lives in urban areas, and this rate reaches more than 80% for the most developed countries. https://population.un.org/wup/ accessed on 3 January 2019

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who forget the ancestral culture of our relations with our living environments. As a result, ecotopias can function as resource centres where we can learn what urban culture neglects. Thus, many ecotopias offer or host training in permaculture, natural construction, environmental education, survivalist knowledge, collective decision making and conflict management, eco-psychology, spiritual retreats, etc. Finally, ecotopias function as laboratories of transition. Education is at the heart of ecotopias, not only because it allows for the economic viability of these collectives, but also because it legitimizes the commitment of an active minority within the global problem of dealing with the Anthropocene. Education, reception and dissemination to an outside audience help to reinforce the idea that, even if they are drop in the ocean in the face of the global challenges of the Anthropocene, subjective transformations serve as examples (the hero model), contagious metamorphoses based on micro-organisms (fermentation or virus model), modifications of the global balance by targeted actions on crucial points (acupuncture model) are all useful and can be decisive in the face of the common challenges of ‘re-terrestrialization’. Here are two examples of the centrality of education in contemporary ecotopian projects.9

3.4

Example 1: O.U.R. ecovillage

O.U.R. ecovillage is an intentional community located on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. It was founded in 1999 by social workers and environmental activists interested in exploring the potential of community living. The ten hectares comprise a farm, gardens, living quarters and buildings for communal activities (meals, meetings, parties, events). The place is economically viable as a demonstration and training centre for natural construction, permaculture and environmental education. It is also a place for children’s groups, volunteers, workers, trainees and a place where a spirituality of connection to the earth is attempted. The permanent members of the community also see themselves as guests passing through. The name O.U.R. is an acronym for One United Resource, but it plays on the shifting use of the possessive pronoun our to signify this revolution in the order of ownership. From the time of its incorporation in 2000–2001, the ecotopia set out to be a model, a centre of education, a living laboratory, and a hub for connection to a larger network. In 2004, the on-site school began. It is called Topia and offers different training such as weekends in the forest for children, introductory or professional permaculture trainings, and different environmental education trainings especially through the

The first one is the result of a study trip carried out in 2016 with about 30 North American ecotopias (see the description of the Untaking space project and our research notebook: https:// usproject2016.com/), the second one is the result of recent encounters, notably around questions related to the practice of a field philosophy.

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international network Gaïa education10 in connection with the Global Network of Ecovillage Trainers for a Sustainable Earth (GEESE). In 2016, O.U.R ecovillage welcomed around 10,000 visitors who were made aware of community life and various modes of conscious relationships with other members of the collective living in this territory.

3.5

Example 2: The Practical School of Nature and Knowledge (EPNS)

The Ecole Pratique de la Nature et des Savoirs (EPNS) is located in the Haut-Diois valley in the Drôme. It is an association run by about 20 people, experts in their fields, which presents itself as a ‘school’ laboratory’ “for rediscovering and experimenting with the links of alliance with this nature that supports us and sustains us”.11 It is structured around nine sites12: “(1) The secular primary school Caminando; (2) the ‘in nature’ school of naturopathy Naturilys; (3) the farm school in mutation Permacole in Montlahuc;- (4) the consulting activities for companies NovaSens; (5) a research laboratory, Territory Lab; (6) the Coopération Lab training courses for the general public;(7) the Gens des bois wilderness workshops;(8) the Comtesse site, a nature immersion site at the source of the Drôme river and (9) the opening up of spaces for dialogue between the root societies and our modernity through the cercle des passeurs. By addressing a variety of recipients, each of these ‘work camps’, nourishes the project of assisting a personal transformation that is always taking place, in order to understand how we relate to our living environment and also to learn to inhabit this environment collectively in a harmonious and joyful way. The primary school project is particularly interesting because, whilst it follows the national curricula, it is project-based and of most of its practices take place in the open air.13 Caminando welcomes about 20 students between the ages of 6 and 10. At least half of the activity time is devoted to ‘sensory’ activities, linked to work on the land and to seasonal changes, notably through a permaculture vegetable garden which provides part of the meals shared at lunchtime, but also through visits to other places in the EPNS (the Montlahuc school farm and the Comtesse immersion site). Cooperation, autonomy and transversality are at the heart of the educational project which aims at the acquisition of fundamental knowledge, the blossoming of the pupil in all dimensions, taking care of social skills and human development with a vision of permaculture. On another level, among other new projects, in partnership with the

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https://gaiaeducation.org/ accessed 03 Jan. 2019. https://www.ecolenaturesavoirs.com/ accessed 03 Jan. 2019. 12 They take up the nine principles of life analyzed by one of the founding members of EPNS, geographer and specialist on the Kagaba-Kogi Indians of Colombia, Eric Julien. Cf. Straus and Julien, 2018. 13 https://www.ecolenaturesavoirs.com/caminando/ accessed 3 Jan 2019 11

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Tchendukua association and the ENS of Lyon, the EPNS contributed to an exchange of experience inviting Kagabas-Kogis Indians to meet French academics.14 Each of these two ecotopias, according to its own cultural and territorial specificities, is therefore a place of innovation, experimentation and metamorphosis which indicate that resistance to the catastrophic system can be a source of creative joy. But in what way does ecotopian education enable us to face the challenges of the Anthropocene?

4 Ecotopian Education and the Challenges of the Anthropocene The recognition of the Anthropocene produces at least one consensus: the conditions of habitability of the earth we inhabit are in the process of changing abruptly. In the face of this, ecotopias, small experimental structures that are rooted in the earth and on the fringes of ordinary educational institutions, do not find it difficult to transfer the educational centre of gravity, a change that is made necessary by this “new climate regime” (Latour, 2017). Education should no longer aim only at individual emancipation through the acquisition of skills that can be valued in society and in the market. It must also enable us to connect in an elementary way with what constitutes our vital relationship with nature, in order to transform the logics of domination and destruction into partnership and symbiosis. Facing the Anthropocene therefore requires shifting the main objective of educational processes towards what could be called ‘ecological emancipation’, which would involve the exploration of interrelationships with one’s living environment and with the collectives that inhabit it, on different levels: sensory, cognitive, social and spiritual. At stake is the transition from the subject promoted by modernity, who is autonomous or independent, but not rooted in the earth, to the plurivalent or earth-dependent subject. In Biogea (2015), M. Serres deploys a critique of the modern subject that has reduced the relationship to the world to that of objectivity, i.e. to a “partial work of reason”; (p. 32) that produces correlatively an isolated subject, tendentially depressive and destructive. To this “subject deprived of valences”, Serres opposes a subjectivity experienced as the power of connections. The self would no longer be an entity separate from a world of objects, but we would be like “pseudopod bunches” (p. 34), that is to say, with the power to create links through our senses, through receptivity and the gift of caresses, evolving between the two poles of being open and closed, of life and death, of symbiotic creation and narcissistic destruction. Thus, in the face of the Anthropocene, it is important to promote the kinds of experiences that will develop a ‘connected’ subject, that is present to itself, to others and to the world, that would recognize ecological relations as part of its own subjectivity, in short, what Arne Næss (1987) called the ‘ecological Self’. 14 https://www.ecolenaturesavoirs.com/assets/NOV-18-DOC-OK-REMECIEMENTS-DIAGCROISE.pdf accessed 3 Jan 2019

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5 The Challenge of Ecological Emancipation Ecotopias are a laboratory for an education centred on the territorialized person, i.e. one who is aware of the pacts he or she has with nature. As there is no age limit for recognizing oneself as a ‘child of the earth’, ecotopian education is not limited to childhood, but envisages training and education processes for all. By repairing the absence of self and the rupture with the living environment induced by cultures that are not ‘earthbound’, this ecotopian education responds to several challenges of the Anthropocene. Against consumerism and pathological imaginaries of limitlessness, ecotopian education contributes to reconfiguring the economy of desires according to what is vital and essential to us and not what is socially and economically shaped and superfluous. In contrast with obedience and conformism, ecotopian education, emanating from active minorities, contributes to ecological emancipation, the emergence of persons who are attentive to their desires, which are sometimes contentious and on the fringes of the hegemonic system. In the face of the storm, the brutal mutations that threaten the current system, and even the possible prospects of collapse, ecotopian education revalues root knowledge, vital because it is elementary in the knowledge of oneself, of one’s environment and of the techniques that enable life. Finally, in contrast to the chimera of global mastery, ecotopian education proposes as an alternative attending and listening to vital relationships in order to resist parasitism (which takes everything and gives nothing back) and to promote a joyful symbiosis (which cares for living together).15 If education is always “the production by the other in myself of a third”, as Serres once showed (Serres, 1997, p. 53), then it can be said that ecotopian education aims at the ideal of a third Party with its feet in the nourishing earth and its head in the ever-changing sky, a craftsperson and a scholar of vital relations, rich in elementary knowledge and joyfully alive in the face of the Anthropocene.

References Anderson, E. N. (2010). The pursuit of ecotopia: Lessons from indigenous and traditional societies for the human ecology of our modern world. Praeger. Audier, S. (2017). La société écologique et ses ennemis: pour une histoire alternative de l’émancipation. La découverte. Beau, R., & Larrère, C. (Eds.). (2018). Penser l’Anthropocène. SciencesPo les presses. Bonneuil, C., & Fressoz, J.-B. (2017). The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso Books. Bourg, D. (2018). Une nouvelle Terre. Desclée de Brouwer. Callenbach, E. (1975). Ecotopia: The notebooks and reports of William Weston. Banyan Tree Books. Callenbach, E. (2009, November). From capitalism to Ecotopia, a successionist manifesto. Lecture delivered at the Carl-Schurz-Haus, Freiburg (Germany). Creagh, R. (2009). Utopies américaines: Expériences libertaires du XIXe siècle à nos jours. Agone.

15

See Serres, 2015, pp. 169–170.

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Dawson, J. (2015). Ecovillages: New frontiers for sustainability. UIT. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). Mille Plateaux. Éd. de minuit. Descartes, R. (2011 [1647]). Méditations métaphysiques: objections et réponses suivies de quatre lettres, GF Flammarion. Dewey, J. (2007 [1938]). Experience and education. Simon and Schuster. Hamilton, C. (2013). The new sorcerer’s apprentices. Earth Island Journal. https://www. earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/hamilton/ Hannoun, H. (1979). L’Éducation naturelle. Presses Universitaires de France. Hopkins, R. (2013). The Power of Just Doing Stuff. UIT/Green Books Illich, I. (1973). Energy and equity. Harper and Row. Larrère, C. R. (2015). Penser et agir avec la nature: une enquête philosophique. La découverte. Larrère, C. R. (2017). Bulles technologiques. Éd. Wildproject. Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press Latour, B. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press. Lockyer, J., & Veteto, J. R. (Eds.). (2013). Environmental anthropology engaging ecotopia: Bioregionalism, permaculture, and ecovillages. Berghahn Books. Macy, J., & Brown, M. Y. (2014). Coming back to life: The updated guide to the work that reconnects. New Society Publishers. Maris, V. (2018). La part sauvage du monde: penser la nature dans l’Anthropocène. Édition du Seuil. Næss, A. (2013 [1987]). Self-realization: An ecological approach to being in the world. In: Drengson, A. and Devall, B. (Eds.), Ecology of wisdom: Writings by Arne Næss. Counterpoint. Neyrat, F. (2018). La part inconstructible de la Terre, critique du géo-constructivisme. Édition du Seuil. Reclus, É. (1905). L’homme et la terre. Librairie universelle. Rousseau, J-J. (2000 [1761]). Julie or the New Heloise. In: Œuvres complètes / Théâtre; Poésies; Essais littéraires (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778. – Œuvres complètes 2). Gallimard. Rousseau, J-J. [2010 [1762]). Emile ou de l’éducation. In: Œuvres complètes/Education; Morale; Botany (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778. – Œuvres complètes 4). Gallimard. Serres, M. (1995). The Natural Contract. the University of Michigan Press. Serres, M. (1997). The Troubadour of Knowledge. the University of Michigan Press. Serres, M. (2007). Retour au contrat naturel. In J. Bindé (Ed.), Signons la paix avec la Terre (pp. 169–180). Albin Michel, UNESCO Publishing. Serres, M. (2015). Biogea. the University of Minnesota Press. Straus, M.-H., & Julien, E. (2018). Le choix du vivant: 9 principes pour manager et vivre en harmonie. les Liens qui Libèrent. Tsing, A. (2017). Le champignon de la fin du monde: Sur la possibilité de vivre dans les ruines du capitalisme. : les Empêcheurs de penser en rond. Vidalou, J.-B. (2017). Être forêts: habiter des territoires en lutte. Zones, La découverte.

Damien Delorme He has a doctorate in philosophy and theology and lectures in environmental ethics at the universities of Geneva, Lausanne and Lyon. His research focuses on the question of the link between first-person ecology and political ecology. As such, he is interested in ecospirituality, ecofeminism, environmental aesthetics and ecotopias. In 2016, he completed the project Untaking Space: from Miami to Vancouver, 10,000 km by bike, meeting 30 ecotopias.

Promoting a Radical but Not Marginal Educational Innovation at the Campus de la Transition Cécile Renouard

Abstract In the autumn of 2018, a ‘student manifesto for an ecological awakening’ was circulated in France, written by students of the Grandes Ecoles, frustrated by the very inadequate nature of the measures taken in ecological matters, and eager to commit to the necessary transformations by paying with their own hands: “We, future workers, are ready to question our comfort zone so that society changes profoundly”. By the end of December, more than 28,000 students had signed this statement. Following on from institutions such as Schumacher College (Sterling et al., 2018), the Campus de la Transition (Transition Campus) was created in 2017 by a collective of teacher-researchers, students and professionals concerned with promoting high-level academic training in the service of the ecological and social transition, by giving all participants in this project the experience of ‘putting themselves in transition’, in a place that is itself in transition (from the point of view of the ecological renovation of the building, mobility issues, food, social inclusion, etc.). This place is the Domaine de Forges, in Seine et Marne, 12 hectares made available to the project by the religious congregation to which the author belongs, convinced of the urgency of action in this area and open to the non-confessional dimension of the approach. How can the Transition Campus contribute to generating a new way of relating to the world among those who feed unsustainable economic models and lifestyles? Keywords Campus de la Transition · Radicality · Anthropocene · Educational innovation The first point to be made is that current changes make it urgent to collectively clarify the aims of living together. On this point, even if climate scepticism exists, if geopolitical priorities mask or delay collective decisions and if negligent and antiecological attitudes are legion, there is a move to seek agreement on the diagnosis and on the ethical objective. This is demonstrated, despite all their limitations, by the C. Renouard (✉) Campus de la Transition, Forges, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6_21

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principles underlying the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement (2015): intra- and intergenerational solidarity, equity, attention to ecosystems, co-responsibility. From an educational point of view, it is a question of reinforcing this intellectual and existential awareness, which favours a certain consensus on the world that it is desirable to build – from an ethical and from a practical point of view. Opinions are necessarily diverse – how do we draw universal conclusions? Secondly, it is important to discuss the ways in which the objectives of this shared vision can be achieved, without just paying lip service to the issue. The example of the international agreements mentioned above is an example. The SDGs can be mutually contradictory: the quest for GDP growth for all countries is incompatible with access to clean energy for all (Wackernagel et al., 2016; Giraud, 2017). The objective is to promote pedagogies that encourage such questioning and paths, both intellectual and practical, marked by progressive steps, breaks from ‘business as usual’, decisive advances. . . Dialogue is needed, capable of informing ethical and political questioning. It is also necessary to test and experiment in a concrete way with the means of making the transition to effectively implementing the hoped-for future, in an uncertain context. The Transition Campus project is situated on both levels. It aims to participate in achieving the objective of transformative education, sharing in the search for suitable methods, in conjunction with various actors, from higher education and research establishments as well as elected officials and regional figures, members of associations and entrepreneurs. The chapter will be divided into three parts, which correspond to the ‘Three Horizons’ approach (Sharpe, 2013), designed to set various groups in motion. Here we take up, in a very loose way, the proposed link between the Three Horizons, three ways of looking at reality: the everyday and the usual ways of doing things (Horizon 1), the hoped-for and aimed-for future (Horizon 3), and the appreciation of the changes to be made (Horizon 2). A central element of the proposed path consists in discerning whether the innovations and steps envisaged in H2 contribute essentially to acting so that nothing changes (H2-) or to carrying out actions in the service of the advent of H3 (H2+). Horizon 1 is that of diagnosis, that of the inadequacies of the curricula currently offered in higher education with regard to the challenges of sustainability. The need for epistemological deepening will be highlighted, along with a reflective and critical approach. Horizon 3, addressed in a second section, is that of the world we wish to make. We will study the role of transformative utopia to design the desirable future, which meets the requirements of an ‘eco-justice of the commons’ (Renouard, 2016). From then on, a creative and interpretative approach is used. Horizon 2, which will be the subject of the third part, is that of the paths of transformation. It involves combining the construction of knowledge with experimentation, with room for controversy and fruitful disagreement (Viveret, 2018). This is an experimental, transdisciplinary and holistic approach. Higher education today faces the challenge of contributing to cultural change – which brings it face to face with its ambivalence: while education should lead to ‘daring to think for oneself’, it is also a vehicle for cultural reproduction. The notion

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of human experience is key to linking all human faculties and giving them direction. It is not understood as a laboratory experiment or a natural experience in the sense of econometricians, but as that which deserves to be lived, experienced, interpreted, discerned, and constantly reoriented. The goal is a transformative experience, both individually and collectively. Instead of experiences as Erlebnisse, which are fragmented and have no real impact on a person’s life, we should prefer Erfahrungen, “which leave a mark, which connect to, or are relevant for, our identity and history: experiences which touch or change who we are” (Rosa, 2010, p. 95). If we are plagued by various forms of alienation in our lives, in the face of our aspirations for meaningful lives, fostering a quality of relationship to others, to nature, to things, to ourselves, how do we elicit experiences that establish new paradigms, new ways of thinking and living? And how do we connect them together to make them the matrix of a new social fabric?

1 (Horizon 1) Diagnosis: Higher Education Falls Victim to the Tragedy of Horizons In 2016, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, spoke of the tragedy of horizons to describe the current inability of the world of finance, which focuses purely on the short term, to include climate goals. Here Horizon 1 prevails (i.e. the everyday way of looking at things) and there is no guidance from Horizon 3 for a transformative H2 strategy. A look at curricula for sustainability shows that they are essentially H1- or H2-centred, which opens up a critical perspective and other ways of relating to the world. 1. Higher Education has not yet integrated ecological issues in a cross-curricular way. This is evidenced by a recent study on sustainability training in different bachelor’s and master’s degree programmes (O’Byrne et al., 2015). The authors make a thorough analysis of 54 programmes, in different countries around the world, looking at the proportion of compulsory core courses in ten areas that are either single subject (natural sciences, social sciences, engineering sciences, business sciences, arts and humanities) or cross-curricular (general sustainability, applied sustainability, methods, research, applied projects). The pathways contain very few requirements in terms of mandatory training in the natural sciences. The arts and humanities represent on average 1% of the master’s programmes in sustainability. There is also a deficit of critical social sciences that question certain aspects of modernity. Finally, the authors point out the great heterogeneity of the courses and the reading required, and the absence of common bases for real sustainability programmes. This global analysis is in line with the diagnosis established by the study recently published by the think tank The shift project (Vorreux et al., 2018) on the place of energy transition training in curricula in France. The authors mapped energy and climate-related courses in 36 Higher Education institutions – universities, business

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schools and engineering schools. The study shows that these issues are still considered secondary. They are taught mainly in specialised courses and in a technical manner, although they are gradually appearing in general courses. The content is very heterogeneous from one institution to another. It is important to note that more and more courses are trying to offer links between disciplines. Secondly, efforts are being made to actively engage students in the curricula and to create links (Swaim et al., 2014). However, these efforts are not enough to initiate a real transformation of economic models and individual and collective practices. They frequently reflect a dominant vision of the development of societies or find it difficult to challenge it. This is clear if we look at it from a historical perspective. As Schoenfeld points out, whilst between 1966 and 1976 the number of courses with the term environment in their title increased fourfold in the United States, “on the whole, the image of the 1960 American campus presented the very antithesis of the intellectual efforts needed to integrate the complex relationships between biophysical environments and cultures” (Schoenfeld, 1979, p. 293). A more recent study (Christensen et al., 2007) reviews the curricula of 50 Financial Times-ranked schools, just under 20 years after another study of business ethics education: the number of schools with a compulsory course in the environmental field has risen from 5% to 25%, linking ethics to Corporate Social Responsibility and sustainability. However, the study does not look at how the content is presented and taught. To conclude, the studies mentioned indicate how little sustainability education contributes to a profound revision of the assumptions on which our societies are built. It is at best a reforming vision rather than a transforming one (Blake et al., 2013). 2. From then on, an approach that places critical analysis at the forefront appears to be a sine qua non condition for the development of education models. As early as 1972 Everett denounced the pressure groups that prevented ecological threats from being taken seriously. He called for an education that would “provide increased knowledge about the capacity of economies and institutions to provide support and status to the poorest groups in society without the means of (GDP) growth” (Everett, 1972, p. 94). Springett gives the example of a course on Business and Sustainability which aims to re-evaluate the concept of sustainable development in the light of the evolution of capitalism and international institutions in the twentieth Century, to show the ambiguities and power relations that underlie the dominant rhetoric. The course calls for “a pedagogy based on action methods that develop skills such as ‘critique’, ‘social engagement’ and ‘reflexivity’” (Springett, 2005, p. 153). This echoes my own teaching experience over the past 12 years at ESSEC Business School, at the engineering school Ecole de Mines de Paris, and for 6 years at Sciences Po Paris on topics related to globalized capitalism and social and ecological justice. The courses combine an in-depth study of ethical sources with student presentations, meetings with stakeholders or case studies, linked in particular to field research conducted by the “CODEV - Companies and development” research programme I created at ESSEC on the effects of the activity of multinationals. One of the objectives is to provoke reflection among students on their criteria for

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professional choices. Their reviews show how this type of course encourages a change of perspective. In the words of a student at the end of the course, in June 2018: “I’m always quite dismayed to hear friends from a grande école say to me, ‘I’d like to do that (often: go into entrepreneurship, go to an NGO, work in a social startup...) but I can’t, so I’m going to go into finance and consultancy.’ I am convinced that on the one hand our studies allow us to have a real choice about our profession, and on the other hand, we must feel the responsibility to make things happen in terms of social and ethical issues. Indeed, we are perhaps the best placed to do so – if we don’t do it, who will?” Another student said, “It was only when I arrived at business school that I became aware that I was going down completely the wrong path – all the values conveyed by all the courses lead towards a capitalism that has no connection with me. Indeed, having lived all my life in the South, since my childhood, I have been aware of realities and values that are perhaps not always compatible with the path I am on. It was by taking this course that I found a kind of comfort in approaching business from a radically different point of view than what I had seen before. I was able to take a course where questions that are important to me are finally being asked. The benchmark I can essentially draw on is Rawls’ theory of justice. Indeed, the concept of equality is appealing, but it is not enough in my opinion. Thinking about business means thinking about fairer societies, with a fair, supportive and respectful sharing of resources to ensure a future for future generations”. Such experiences are recurrently recounted by students from various backgrounds. However, participation in an isolated course or even in a specific field of study is not enough. How can we go deeper into the problems posed by our economic models, if not by re-examining their foundations? 3. It is impossible to give a complete overview of the ways in which researchers from different disciplines, from physics to anthropology, have come together in their ways of considering their relationship to nature and the world. One could argue that there have been many internal debates in Western thought and many recent challenges to a rationalism that approaches reality from the perspective of linear causality and the mastery and appropriation of things to know and transform. There have been many currents of thought, starting with Descartes, encouraging us to engage in a respectful, frugal and supportive relationship with the world. In a sense, we do not need the Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock, 2000) or a detour through animist thought (Descola, 2005) to question our own ways of living and thinking; the great contribution of modernity and democracy, going back to the politics of Ancient Greece, is that it favours a self-critical relationship to our own tradition (Castoriadis, 1996). However, a certain type of critique is undoubtedly only possible thanks to scientific knowledge from the hard sciences and thanks to a detour through other ways of representing the world. For example, economic research in dialogue with physics and biology, notably based on the laws of thermodynamics (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971), shows the need to integrate questions related to energy and the finiteness of resources into economic models. Neoclassical models do not take into account the fact that economic activity increases entropy (the disorder of a system), dissipates energy and generates waste. These studies converge in a relational conception of the universe, compatible with many ancient and contemporary wisdoms from various

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traditions, in a renewed relationship to life, to our perceptions and to our spiritual resources (understood in the broadest sense). These relational approaches to life allow us to re-enchant our personal and collective lives, to give them meaning, beyond the absurdity that inevitably runs through them. Andreas Weber (2013) proposes complementing the enlightenment approach with the notion of enlivenment. The modern aspiration for autonomy and democratic values is retained, with an emphasis on ‘subjective experience’ and ‘objective poetics’. It is a question of looking at the world of the subject from the viewpoint of others. A ‘first-person’ science is inseparable from the experience of interdependence, with individual freedom growing with that of a whole community; hence the interest of the notion of the commons, popularized by the work of Elinor Ostrom (1990), but also related to the notions of global commons and common good. I define the commons as “an approach to interpretation and collective action for the distribution and use of goods in the service of social and ecological bonding; these goods can be referred to as relational goods, participating in the search for the common good, as an individual and collective horizon” (Renouard, 2017). The perspective of the commons commits us to moving away from worldviews in which a form of human-nature dualism goes hand in hand with an atomized understanding of relationships between human beings. The commons make it possible to envisage the economy as being at the service of the organic development of people and communities. Recent scientific, biological, physical discoveries are based on epigenesis, on the adaptation of organisms to other living beings and on the fact that the organisms develop in interdependent networks (Strohmann, 1997; Broeways, 2018). Biologists such as Francisco Varela, for example, describe the capacity of each organism to generate its own organization, as a result of relationships with others. Each living being develops with the need to live in interdependence with other living beings. Therefore, an economy of the commons takes care not to create externalities that endanger the balance of the whole, but to generate wealth for all. “Commoners realize that their household needs and livelihoods are intimately connected to the specific place and habitat where they live and to the land as a living being. They realize that their physical needs (hunger, thirst, health) are intertwined with their search for existential meaning (a good life, joy, meaning). Finally, they realize that communing, as an alternative system for meeting needs, consists of a constant embodiment and redefinition of a multitude of relationships, both material (metabolic) and psychological (symbolic)” (Weber, 2013, p. 44). Weber mentions the buen vivir or Max-Neef approaches to basic human needs, to which we can add the Capability Approach (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2000), work around collective and relational capabilities (Giraud et al., 2013), including relationships with ecosystems. Ultimately, most sustainability training does not question the dominant economic paradigm, and is not articulated in a structured way. The first requirement for a more coherent approach is the implementation of a critical perspective. An approach centred on the participation of human beings in the living environment, and on cooperation between living beings takes into consideration what destroys or favours

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the sustainability of relationships. Is it possible to reach an agreement on what kind of future in common we desire?

2 (Horizon 3) Transformative Utopia: The Eco-Justice of the Commons When we ask about the possibility of a common vision we are confronted with several difficulties to be overcome, if we are to envisage what could be a transformative utopia. 1. There are four main criticisms of a holistic perspective. The first is that it relates predominantly to the West. Thus, the discourse on the SDGs reflects first and foremost a conception inherited from the notion of sustainable development, combined with an economist vision of the world. This obscures other ways of understanding development (Rist, 1996; Rahnema, 2003, Escobar, 2018). Backing the research of sustainability training in universities with such notions is to continue in the same register. However, if the self-critical thinking mentioned above is at work, dissonant, marginal voices must be taken into account. The second criticism is the risk of the discourse being taken over by capitalist thinking (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999). How can we avoid remaining in a logic of display? How can we go beyond a social market perspective, of ‘nudge’, which does not lead to a profound reform of behaviour (Corner & Randall, 2011)? How can we encourage genuine individual and collective emancipation? This point ties in with the third criticism, relating to the formal nature of the approach – the risk being all the greater when it comes to education; how do we get out of the Schism of Reality (Dahan & Aykut, 2015), the schism between the intention and the reality of trajectories? This involves the link between objectives on different levels, to avoid the effect of individual commitment being diluted in a general approach, or global decisions being separated from the actual fate of specific populations and ecosystems. Finally, a major objection consists in comparing such an approach with geopolitical issues (from the strategic preferences of nations to the ‘survival mode’ in which certain populations find themselves) which do not allow us to look at the longer term. How can ecological concerns be integrated into the core strategies of countries and large companies, in a spirit of collaboration, in the face of the tragedy of diverging interests? 2. There are various educational responses to meet these objections. There is the recognition that we only have one planet, which is precious and fragile. Of course, refusal to accept climate change comes in many forms – there is a playing down of the threat, consumer diversion tactics, shifting responsibility and blame onto others, indifference, unrealistic optimism... (Frank et al., 2018, pp. 128–129). But there is also a growing awareness of the fact that we belong to the same wounded world and, including for those driven by short-term financial strategies, an awareness of the cost

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of doing nothing, which is financial, economic, and leading to a deteriorating quality of life for all, not just the poorest (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). Transforming educational curricula must bring in all these arguments. In view of the risk of an empty rhetoric, marked by a Western and/or extractivist conception of the world, it is important not to see all narratives as having equal validity. All cultures and traditions have to examine themselves in order to discern the paths of enlivenment described above. The search for concrete universals (Walzer, 2004) is fundamental to link the sharing of macro-ecological, economic and social issues with the diversity of contexts – from the ‘thick’ contexts in which people and groups evolve, sharing representations of what is the good life in a given political space, we can also identify ‘thin’ elements, that are common from one culture to another. Therefore, this interpretation must be made in a dialogue between cultures. In the case of the Transition Campus project, the relationship to a particular region, in this case the Seine et Marne, is considered central: it is a question of helping to train people destined to become social actors within the spaces where they will be working. This requires us to be open in particular to the common reference points identified by scientists as to the state of our planetary limits, and also to be open to the reference points of other cultures and other schemas concerning the relationship between humanity and nature. The notion of sustainable development, popularized by the 1987 Brundlandt Report and taken up many times, notably in the SDGs, plays an integrating role. Can it be the vector of a transformative utopia? The term utopia, coined by Thomas More and whose underlying perspective is present in various cultures, refers to a vision of society from an ‘out-of-place’ that allows us to imagine a better world. The critical arguments against utopia consist are that they are abstract and fixed, even totalitarian, and there is an argument instead for policies of small progressive changes, which allow us to get rid of the concrete ills of our societies (Popper, 1948). Mannheim (1936) and Ricoeur (1986) respond to such a critique by explaining its link with ideology. Utopia proposes an alternative to the present. Under what conditions is sustainable development a utopia rather than an ideology? This vague term can indeed be used by economic and political leaders to invoke change that is needed, without taking measures that could contribute to weakening their position. Here the concept of sustainable development plays the role of an uncritical ideology. Its utopian potential is linked to its radical nature and the coherence it seeks between orientations that challenge the existing order. JeanPhilippe Pierron speaks of sustainable development as a constructive utopia (Pierron, 2007) and I myself as a transformative utopia (Renouard, 2008), which I see as being linked to the language of the commons. Utopias involve both intellect and practices, and these two aspects meet the challenges of the Transition Campus project. The aim of economic models should be desirable models of society. We must envisage practical experiences that can give them substance, and anticipate tomorrow’s world in a concrete way. Ecological utopias have proliferated over the last two centuries, depicting different types of societies marked by a renewed relationship with nature. A distinction can be made (Geus, 1999) between ecotopias or utopias of sufficiency (More,

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Thoreau, Morris, Howard, Huxley, Callenbach, Bookchin) and technological utopias or utopias of abundance (Bacon, Owen, Saint Simon, Fourier, Bellamy), the former emphasizing the finitude of resources and the inability of science and technology to solve humanity’s unresolved problems, and promoting a simple life style. Thomas More’s utopia denounces the system of enclosures that deprives the poor of land to which they previously had access. The ‘good mother nature’, on the other hand, must be respected and nurtured. Growth is not a goal, nor is the idea of increasing wealth or lifestyle. Human progress is not defined in terms of material growth, but in terms of free time, spiritual and intellectual development. A culture of simplicity, frugality and moderation is valued. Production is used to fulfil basic needs, not unlimited desires. Such utopias can be seen as compasses for navigation (Geus, 1999). It is not about building a completely new society. The ecotopian ideal is not a fixed and abstract goal, but can help to make a clear distinction between many decisions to be made, and to move gradually towards an ecologically stable society. The ideal images can help to stimulate creative ideas, to orient oneself, to privilege a behaviour that intelligently adapts to the circumstances and to the living relations between people and their environments. The Transition Campus is part of this perspective. 3. The transformative ecotopia of the Transition Campus: the search for the eco-justice of the commons. Liberal societies are faced with three points of tension. The first is linked to the objective of escaping from dependence, through the defence of individual freedoms and rights (including the right to private property).This can lead to a rejection of our vulnerability, fragility and the need for others. The second point of tension is the refusal of limits, in the name of progress that is made possible by science and technology, with a view to the objective of well-being for all. The third is the concealment of the social struggle, in the name of a harmonizing view such as ‘the invisible hand’ (Adam Smith) or ‘the gentle trade’ (Montesquieu). In the face of these, three principles of eco-justice emerge: autonomy in a recognition of our interdependence, development through frugality and sharing, participation/ empowerment and representation through our concern for other beings and consideration of conflict. Each principle is also linked to a concrete dimension of the Transition Campus project, in the Seine et Marne area where it is located. This spot is in the greater Paris area, 1 h by train from the capital. The Domaine de Forges is located in a village of 500 inhabitants, 3 km from the upper town (recently built) and 7 km from the old town of Montereau (20,000 inhabitants). In the wider community of municipalities there is diverse agricultural and industrial activity, and also a level of unemployment that is twice the national average and there are a large number of people living below the poverty line (30%). The link between the social, economic and political dimensions of eco-justice is therefore important. Socio-cultural recognition aims at fostering the capacity to speak, to act, to narrate and to be made responsible (Ricoeur), and to fight against the social invisibility and oblivion that mark our societies. Recognition is also an expression of gratitude, of a receptive or even contemplative attitude. It seeks to make the

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concern for social and ecological connection an integral part of daily life, through concrete attention to beauty and vulnerability. In the Campus project, this is expressed both by the care of the estate, in all its aspects, and by the promotion of social diversity: the welcoming of a young refugee, from the very beginning of our small living community; the search for future links with associations in the community of communes that are committed to social issues; the concern to develop educational projects with companies and actors in the SSE; the attention paid to the quality of interpersonal relations, to benevolence and mutual trust. Whilst physical, natural and material limits are rejected, the second objective is the search for the equitable and sustainable distribution of the resources of creation. This involves questioning the dogma of GDP growth, in order to examine, before economic development decisions are made, how wealth can be created and distributed fairly. The aim is to combat predatory practices and reduce inequalities. In the Transition Campus project, such an objective is achieved through the experience of frugality and solidarity, nourished by work on our consumerist imaginations. This means in particular the agreement of the Campus stakeholders to minimize our global ecological footprint and contribute to a sharing of our resources. Some aspects are more advanced than others and we are at the beginning of the process. Achieving a carbon-neutral footprint as soon as possible means considering the entire life cycle of the goods and services we use. This means measuring what we use, both those who live on the estate and those who spend a few days there, in terms of the building and its insulation/heating, travel (regular and exceptional), food resources, internet use, data storage, the carbon footprint of the minerals used by the computer equipment, our water consumption, the waste we generate, etc. We believe it is very important to address these issues through scientific analysis as well as through the arts and everyday creativity, in order to make these goals the subject of an attractive lifestyle and not an obstacle course. We have set up several ‘workshops’ to advance the transition of the estate, in particular from an economic and cultural angle: the ‘Bater’ workshop (building-energy), the bio-regional economy workshop (links with the people living from the land, particularly in terms of agri-food); the finance workshop (financing the project – buildings and educational activity) and the community workshop (ways of living together as a community of people with various commitments to the project). Our goal is also to make these workshops the place for a research into the transformation of the place, which has implications for education. The eco-justice of the commons also has a political dimension. The objective here is that of participation and representation of those who are affected by decisions. For the Transition Campus, it is a question of giving approval to processes of collective ‘discernment’ and social creativity. Our mode of governance (which is currently being developed) aims to be regularly re-evaluated to ensure that it is in line with the objectives we collectively pursue, and also aims to contribute to nourishing processes of collective intelligence, of discernment based on the search for the justice of the common. I am deliberately using the term ‘discernment’ which marks our approach to governance. The participants in the collective adventure of the Campus come from diverse political backgrounds, and have had varied experiences of

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governance – in companies, associations, movements and communities. Decisionmaking by consensus is the way we consider best to implement our project, but we do not reject the need for certain management decisions to be taken by those mandated to coordinate the different pillars of the project (the legal structuring, the workshops, the academic laboratory, etc.). It seems to us that the priority is the attitude of the various members. This approach to governance through collective discernment is marked by the fact that some of us are members of forms of political organisation influenced by our Christian heritage or, more precisely, in Christian churches or religious congregations. From the horizontal mode of decision making of Quaker communities over several centuries to more vertical traditions such as government in the Society of Jesus or in my own congregation, a common thread emerges: a concern to uphold the interest of all, the common good. This perspective leads us to identify the attitudes required for the functioning of groups marked by the same search – without ignoring the power relationships, the egos, the conflicts and the differences in interpretation. To sum up, when considering educational methods there are two major points that emerge from this. On the one hand, the importance of creativity and interpretation means that there must be a place for the arts and humanities in the context of collective narratives, in dialogue with the natural and social sciences, as well as a place for solidarity and play. On the other hand, there must also be a concern for the participation or representation of the most vulnerable, and for learning participatory and collaborative methods without denying the place of authority.

3 (Horizon 2) A Transdisciplinary and Holistic Approach The first two parts of this chapter have shown the importance of critical thinking and of creative and interpretative dimensions in order to deconstruct models that do not enable transition and to write narratives of the world that we want to emerge. We must still explore the transitions to be made from the point of view, in particular, of the link between knowledge and the type of education that needs to be promoted. The notion of environmental humanities highlights the importance of links between actors from the academic world and citizens. We also highlight here some of the challenges of multi- and trans-disciplinary working methods. 1. The environmental humanities developed from the 1970s and 1980s onwards out of an awareness that certain topics in the departments of philosophy, literature, history, geography, anthropology and social sciences overlap. These include subjects from “medicine, animal rights, neurobiology, race and gender studies, urban planning, climate, and digital technologies” (Emmett & Nye, 2017, p. 7). This approach highlights the links between ecological and social aspects and the centrality of ethical questioning about the meaning of human actions and their beneficial or non-beneficial effects for humanity and the planet. These include the way tourism operates (Urry, 1990) and relate to spaces considered ‘wild’, undomesticated, to be preserved or conserved, etc.; also sensitivity to the extinction of many species (van

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Dooren, 2014); the way we use energy sources and limit or not fossil fuels; the promises and threats of biotechnologies that can commodify nature and humans; alternative approaches to consumerism and productivism; the use of geo-engineering (Hamilton, 2013); inequalities in the face of pollution; the role of the arts in speaking about disasters and their silent victims, e.g. after Chernobyl) Alexievitch, 2006), etc. The environmental humanities are therefore a specific way of doing research and teaching, in which the Transition Campus wishes to participate, with a particular emphasis on ethical discernment. They allow for the decompartmentalization of knowledge, and the (selective) disengagement from the usual ways of knowing, arguing and evaluating. 2. An approach built on situated experiences and in a back-and-forth with the knowledge of other experiences can lead to different levels of engagement, which is also at the heart of the Campus project. The immersive dimension makes possible a shift away from the classical structures of learning and living. “Participatory approaches to education seek to create situations in which, through ongoing interactions with the social and ecological elements of the larger system, students acquire the capacity to play a meaningful role in shaping their own and their community’s future” (Krasny et al., 2009, p. 3). This form of learning seeks to go as far as possible on a transformative journey for all members of the educational community. Moore (2005) draws on his experience at his university in Vancouver, where he achieved a Master’s degree in zoology and then specialised in education, to suggest a link between cooperative, collaborative and transformative learning models (Cranton, 1996). Cooperative learning consists of learners taking ownership of an objective together and achieving it; the teacher remains in a position of superiority. In the collaborative model, a collective production of knowledge is sought, based on the contribution of each individual. The educator is a co-learner. In the transformative model, participants move towards decisions based on their life experiences, mental habits and points of view. The reflective perspective of each person can lead the group to collective action. Such an approach can create discomfort for both the learner and the educator – we are used to our unsustainable lifestyles and have no desire to change them. We, as teachers, do not want to change our standpoint. But this concern for transformation also makes us grow in self-confidence, in inner strength, in new skills. The ways in which students, and also teachers, can access this worldview that is informed by ethical issues are varied. As far as the philosophy underlying the Transition Campus is concerned, we have already emphasised the concern for concrete universalism which makes it possible to link the diversity of systems of cultural representations with the concern for a coherent treatment of the issues at stake on different scales (from global to local). We do not accept an approach that would deny the specific contribution of those who have knowledge in certain technical, scientific, intellectual fields, etc. in the construction of collective knowledge. Therefore, the idea that learning essentially follows a bottom-up trajectory seems to us to be erroneous. The objective is the contribution of each individual to a collective dynamic that cannot be confined to the reception of a top-down lecture. It is necessary to combine the use of specific knowledge, the implementation of

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individual skills in different fields, with the co-construction of knowledge and life paths. Finally, the power of language to shape the way we interpret what we experience must be emphasized. 3. Multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are distinct and complementary approaches. Whereas multidisciplinarity consists in the study of an object (of a discipline) by several disciplines at the same time, transdisciplinarity aims at a unity of knowledge, beyond disciplinary research – which makes it suspect for researchers who see in it a lack of methodological rigour. The implementation of these perspectives, which fundamentally invite us to decompartmentalise knowledge, to grasp ‘what is woven together’ (Morin, 2000), involves defining the objects in relation to which contributions from different disciplines are necessary in order to deepen the questioning and to seek paths of action that are consistent with the ethical problems of our time. This implies a reflection on the capacity to link languages, to translate what is said from one discipline to another. Many possibilities exist, and I would like to point out three that are particularly topical in environmental issues: a systemic approach, a management approach and an interpretative approach. The systems approach seeks to approach nature, ecosystems and climate from the natural sciences and by appealing to the humanities. The managerial approach takes into account the human dimension, from the point of view of incentives and the possible transformation of behaviours to make them more socially useful, particularly with regard to ecological transition (Federeau, 2017). It can be conceived as a tool to present a socially acceptable version of capitalism, in an instrumental way, which limits its transformative scope (Kesteman, 2004). The interpretive approach aims to honour the question of meaning, the global understanding of what is at stake for humanity and for the societies of the planet. From this point of view Kesteman refers to it as a ‘utopian transdisciplinary’ approach. It is this version of transdisciplinarity that seems to us to be the most suitable for the Campus project, which also involves opening up a space for various forms of dialogue between disciplines (multidisciplinarity) with regard to the aspects of the transition of places and people.

4 Conclusion The Transition Campus proposes the development of a reflective, creative and holistic pedagogy, which is nourished by personal and collective experience and which, for its part, provides its members and participants, students and various actors, with resources to discern and act. The courses and support programmes for higher education institutions currently offered by the Transition Campus are inspired by the six gates that form the framework of the Manuel de la Grande transition (Great Transition Handbook): this work (Renouard et al., 2020) is a common core of knowledge and skills developed by more tahn 70 teachers-researchers brought

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together since 2019 by the Campus at the request of the French Minister of Higher Education. The future will tell if and how this laboratory of an eco-justice of the commons will have played its role!

Content

Disciplines to be given priority Method

Educational tools

Horizon 1 – Diagnosis Deconstruct Identify ambiguities in discourse and training Open to other ontologies Philosophy, epistemology and economic and social sciences, in dialogue with hard/nature sciences. Critical and reflective approach Living contact with nature Newspaper Personal readings, small group seminars, lecture-debates

Horizon 3 – Aiming Proposing a transforming utopia: Eco-justice of the commons Arts and humanities, ethics and hermeneutics Creative and interpretative approach Play and artistic creation Social commitment Learning about governance for the commons

Horizon 2 – Paths Experiment, learn, debate and decide: Controversies, discernment, choice of routes Applied sustainability, engineering sciences, management sciences, ethics and political science Experimental, multi and transdisciplinary approach Stakeholder meetings Lively and transdisciplinary investigation of the subject Acquisition of concrete and technical skills Personal and collective discernment process

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Sterling, S., Dawson, J., & Warwick, P. (2018). Transforming sustainability education at the creative edge of the mainstream: A case study of Schumacher college. Journal of Transformative Education., 16(4), 1–21. Strohmann, R. (1997). The coming Kuhnian revolution in biology. Nature Biotechnology, 15, 194–199. Swaim, J. A., Maloni, M. J., Napshin, S. A., & Henley, A. B. (2014). Influences on student intention and behavior toward environmental sustainability. Journal of Business Ethics, 124(3), 465–484. Urry, J. (1990). The tourist gaze. Sage. Viveret, P. (2018). Reconsidérer la richesse. Rapport réalisé à la demande de Guy Hascoët, Secrétaire d’Etat à l’économie solidaire, http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/var/storage/ rapports-publics/024000191.pdf. Accessed 28 Oct 2018. Vorreux, C., Berthault, M., Renaudin, A., & Treiner J. (2018). Interim report. The future of the planet in higher education. The Shift Project. Wackernagel, M., Hanscom, L., & Lin, D. (2016). Are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) consistent with sustainability? Global Footprint Network Working Paper. Walzer, M. (2004). Thick and thin. University of Notre Dame Press. Weber A. (2013) Enlivenment. In Towards a fundamental shift in the concepts of nature, culture and politics (p. 31). Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Publication Series Ecology. Wilkinson, R. G., & Pickett, K. (2009). The Spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better. Allen Lane.

Cécile Renouard Professor at ESSEC Business School, author of Manuel de la Grande Transition (with Rémi Beau, Christophe Goupil, Christian Koenig, collectif FORTES, LLL, 2020); L’entreprise omme commun (with Swann Bommier, ECLM, 2018); Ethique et entreprise (Editions de l’atelier, 2015); 20 Propositions pour réformer le capitalisme (with Gaël Giraud (eds.), Flammarion, 2012); La responsabilité éthique des multinationales (PUF, 2007).

Conclusion: Education Awaits Us Jean-Philippe Pierron, Renaud Hétier, Nathanaël Wallenhorst, and Christoph Wulf

Following what we have just read, is it possible to conclude? Should we even do so? The critical, prospective and creative scope of the proposals presented here opens up a new perspective for education in the Anthropocene. This is welcome and stimulating, despite the worries and anxieties that also accompany our awareness of the ecological transition. Education is to be viewed not as a programme to be carried out, a mass of knowledge to be acquired, but also as a process of awakening and opening up to the affective, imaginative, cognitive and relational resonance of what it means to be human on Earth. To educate is not to fill a vessel but to light a fire, as the Renaissance educators said. Is it not this incandescent fire that is our presence to ourselves, to others and to nature that we must take care of and which we are invited to keep burning for the times that lie ahead? A century after the ideas of Progressive Education, we are required once again to be inventive. To help the youngest among us to reach a profound understanding of themselves, to work towards an education that is part of the ecological transition requires educators to exercise their “hormones of the imagination”, as Gaston Bachelard would say. Taking the Anthropocene seriously means asking what kind of human being we want to create, and in so doing, going more than simply reforming education, thinking about subversion and even revolution. We recognize here a utopian motive that is present, to a greater or lesser extent, in all educational J.-P. Pierron (✉) University of Burgundy, Dijon, France e-mail: [email protected] R. Hétier · N. Wallenhorst UCO – Catholic University of the West, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] C. Wulf Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Wallenhorst et al. (eds.), Political Education in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40021-6

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projects. It is true that the totalitarianism movements of the twentieth century have made us wary of the pathologies of the imagination that inhabit the desire for utopia, so much so that they have contributed to alienating education and using it for to ideological ends. And the pacifism of Progressive Education, inspired by the disaster of the Great War, did not help in the fight against totalitarianism. Remembering should not prevent us from trying, in a fresh way, to envisage a new educational utopia. We have encountered some of these in this book. If we remove the utopia, all we are left with is a strategy that puts projects in the straightjacket of a rather poor school curriculum curricula or else a kind of ‘expertocracy’ that focuses on specializations, or soulless educational engineering at the expense of our desire to be. We sense that we need not a dreamy utopian delirium that is fleeing an unbearable reality, but what Paul Ricoeur liked to call “concrete utopias”. In these the power of imagination to explore possibilities joins with the expectations and hopes that are also part of educational initiatives and institutions. They do their best to liberate education from being weighed down by management, by the cumbersomeness of engineering and the dryness of the prevailing cognitivism, asking what kind of child psychology underlies our educational system? This psychology, marked by developmental psychology and today by cognitivism, seems to encourage a certain ‘acomism’ by exalting education as mastery of skills? Instead what is important is to the presence of the world and its support, as the sensory manifestation and poetic meaning of human existence on Earth. This is not a question of ‘delirium’, but for an anthropology of education, of the awareness of this ontological anchorage that makes us fundamentally terrestrial beings. To dare to dream in a situation where so-called realism is imposed; to dare to be inventive in a situation where submission to the market is slavishly encouraged; to dare to have an educational utopia, not in order to escape but to anchor oneself in the texture of the world. To explore the possibilities capable of supporting a renewed understanding of the relationship between humans and the Earth. This is the challenge that awaits us. Thus, for education, the Anthropocene, is both backward and forward looking. The Anthropocene, despite its geoscientific syntax, is not a totalizing concept that would explain the whole meaning of history, which it would embrace from an absolute point of view. Such a point of view does not exist. The concept of the Anthropocene is rather a proposal for interpreting our historical situation. Since we do not have a total and definitive vision of the world as a whole, it is always from the middle of the world that we dare to formulate our future in an attempt to find our way and take care of the generations to come. We try to understand our time through ourselves and what we are. For the Anthropocene there are many conflicting interpretations of the meaning given to our time. Thus it has a retrospective aspect: how can we think and rethink education on the basis of the unfulfilled promises of the past? It is a question of knowing how to take advantage of our rich heritage, from Rousseau to the twentieth Century, and of reinterpreting the previous educational utopias of which we still retain a memory. Thinking about education in the Anthropocene means creating more memories of education in order to free ourselves from the obvious proposals and ways of doing things that appear self-evident and which are only the mark of a successful ideology. Looking to the future, the

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Anthropocene, in the light of the unpredictability that childhood brings, mobilizes a creativity that is continually renewed, enriched by contact with new generations, capable of opening up and exploring what we thought was closed. Education has the power to make what is ordinary extraordinary, not with the intent of burdening children with the responsibility that falls to older people, but of enhancing the capacity of both to be creative in order to reopen time. It has the power to ensure that the educational potential of ‘grown-ups’ is fully revealed, demonstrating the possibility of always investing in the future and in a present that is capable of hearing that education most urgently awaiting us and making demands on us. Jean-Philippe Pierron Professor of philosophy at the University of Lyon 3. Author of, among other works, Prendre soin de la nature et des humains. Médecine, travail et écologie, Les Belles Lettres, 2019; Paul Ricoeur: Philosopher à son école (Vrin, 2016); La mort et le soin (with Elodie Lemoine, PUF, 2016); Parole tenue (with Jean-Pierre Charcosset, Mimésis, 2014); Où va la famille (Les liens qui libèrent, 2014); Les puissances de l’imagination (Cerf, 2012); Repenser la nature (with Marie-Hélène Parizeau, Presses Universitaires de Laval, 2012). Renaud Hétier is Professor at the Catholic University of the West (UCO). He is Doctor of Educational Sciences. He is the author of books on education, and anthropology in the Anthropocene. Books (selection): Freedom with impetuosity. Falling back to earth (Le Pommier, 2022, in French); Humanity versus Anthropocene (PUF, 2021, in French); Cultivating attention and care in education (PURH, 2020, in French); Create an educational space with the fairy tales (Chronique sociale, 2017, in French); Education between presence and mediation (L’Harmattan, 2017, in French). Nathanaël Wallenhorst is Professor at the Catholic University of the West (UCO). He is Doctor of Educational Sciences and Doktor der Philosophie (first international co-supervision PhD), and Doctor of Environmental Sciences and Doctor in Political Science (second international co-supervision PhD). He is the author of 20 books on politics, education, and anthropology in the Anthropocene. Books (selection): The Anthropocene decoded for humans (Le Pommier, 2019, in French). Education in the Anthropocene (ed. with Pierron, Le Bord de l’eau 2019, in French). The Truth about the Anthropocene (Le Pommier, 2020, in French). Mutation. The human adventure is just beginning (Le Pommier, 2021, in French). Who will save the planet? (Actes Sud, 2022, in French). Vortex. Facing the Anthropocene (with Testot, Payot, 2023, in French). Handbook of the Anthropocene (ed. with Wulf, Springer, 2023, in English). A critical theory for the Anthropocene (Springer, 2023, in English). Christoph Wulf is Professor of Anthropology and Education and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Historical Anthropology, the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB, 1999–2012) “Cultures of Performance,” the Cluster of Excellence (2007–2012) “Languages of Emotion,” and the Graduate School “InterArts” (2006–2015) at the Freie Universität Berlin. His books have been translated into 20 languages. For his research in anthropology and anthropology of education, he received the title “professor honoris causa” from the University of Bucharest. He is Vice-President of the German Commission for UNESCO. Major research areas: historical and cultural anthropology, educational anthropology, imagination, intercultural communication, mimesis, aesthetics, epistemology, Anthropocene. Research stays and invited professorships have included the following locations, among others: Stanford, Tokyo, Kyoto, Beijing, Shanghai, Mysore, Delhi, Paris, Lille, Modena, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Copenhagen, London, Vienna, Rome, Basel, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Sao Paulo.