In recent decades, there has been mounting concern by the world community over the global changes that our environment is undergoing in light of complex issues such as deforestation, biodiversity loss and climate change. In his book Education, Sustainability and the Ecological Social Imaginary: Connective Education and Global Change, Jeff Buckles takes a straightforward, simple look at these issues of global change and interrogates their roots in what he terms a ‘Modern Social Imaginary’, and offers readers a vision of an alternative future rooted in an Ecological Social Imaginary. Buckles goes further to outline the type of education that is needed to facilitate the shift to this Ecological Social Imaginary. Indeed, one of his main aims is to ‘investigate whether the current education system [is] able to meet the challenges of the 21st century’ (p. 183).

Buckles begins his text by setting the context in a concise, simple manner, using some facts to facilitate this, including simple data on recent population projections and the implications for the Earth’s resources, atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ and their linkages with anthropogenic causes, and a 2015 letter from Pope Francis highlighting humans’ deleterious impact on our planet. Building on this, he outlines two critical things that need to happen to pave the way for an alternative future for our planet:

It is these two imperatives that drive Buckles to interrogate the type of future needed for the planet: the shift in human consciousness needed, and education’s role in facilitating this shift and, by extension, this future.

Buckle’s exposition revolves around a key idea — that of the ‘social imaginary’ — an ‘implicit background that shapes people’s thoughts and actions, that explains their reality’ (p. 5) and that guides people’s perspectives and views about the world they inhabit. This social imaginary, Buckles states, is organised around the three domains of space, time and matter. Education becomes an important corollary, as it is education that plays a central role in ‘forming, legitimating and perpetuating the social imaginary’ (p. 13).

The Modern Social Imaginary that Buckles discusses is the dominant imaginary that characterises our world, characterised by a root metaphor — that of the machine. In this imaginary, contempocentrism dominates the temporal domain, with a focus on the here and now and on the fulfilment of present needs at the expense of adequate consideration of the future; nationalism dominates the spatial domain, where identity and allegiance focuses on the nation state, consequently obscuring a focus on the global community; and anthropocentrism is the focus of the ontological domain, which renders humans at the centre of the universe, ready to dominate nature and utilise it primarily as a resource for meeting human needs. This constrains human thinking to the ‘nation, the now, and humankind’ (p. 77). Education in the Modern Social Imaginary perpetuates this human-nature dualism, as the mechanisation associated with the root metaphor of the machine also organises the education system with its ‘set lessons, starting and finishing times, breaks, and terms’ (p. 63). Additionally, there is an emphasis on materialism (at the expense of values and emotions) and on the ‘rational’ subjects such as science and mathematics. This is problematic, because education promotes the idea that the natural world is predictable, measurable and controllable, and thus subject to humans’ manipulation.

Buckles moves on to consider the current and future challenges facing our world, focusing on issues such as population growth, biodiversity, climate change, food, water, energy and land resources. It is the challenges surrounding these that have resulted from humans’ perspective and use of the natural world in the Modern Social Imaginary, necessitating a change in humans’ mindset.

This context provides the basis for the new social imaginary that Buckles calls our attention to — the Ecological Social Imaginary — one that counters the Modern Social Imaginary in its future-oriented, global and ecocentric outlook. The new consciousness underlying this Ecological Social Imaginary is one that must see ‘humans as part of the web of life, implicated in the world not simply as isolated, self-maximising individuals’ (Howard, as cited by Buckles, p. 126). While the root metaphor of the Modern Social Imaginary is the machine, an organism metaphor underlies the Ecological Social Imaginary as ‘organisms exist within relationships to both biotic and abiotic elements’ (p. 128). This new ecological consciousness centralises Sterling’s critical call for a new ecological paradigm that moves humans away from the current “untenable” mechanistic perspective of the world to one that is organic in nature (Sterling, Reference Sterling2001, p. 49).

What then is the role of education in this new Imaginary? Indeed, this is a critical point and Buckles offers an outline of what this new education should look like. To counteract the disconnect between humans and nature in the current educational construct, a ‘connective’ education is now needed that, among other things, establishes that the world is a community or web of life encompassing present and future generations, male and female persons of all nationalities and races, and, of course, the natural world; that inculcates a global awareness and understanding; and that allows learners to experience ‘transcendence, that there is something bigger than themselves, and to explore how they connect with that, so that humans are living things that come to be of the world and who also assume responsibility for the world’ (p. 166). This education is one that unites the abilities and sensibilities of human head, hands, heart, and spirit: ‘The head, which represents cognitive ability in seeking truth; the hands, which represent activity in the production of beauty; the heart, which represents emotion in the seeking of goodness; and the spirit, which represents making connections by engaging in good acts’ (p. 146). In doing so, Buckles calls for education itself to be transformed in order to harness its own transformative potential.

Although the ongoing summaries of previous chapters and foreshadowing of the content of upcoming chapters and sections can be tedious at times, this does not detract from the substantive content, which is woven together in a simple yet forceful manner. Buckles, citing Callicot, points out that ‘to change what humans do to, and in, the natural environment, they have to change how they think about it’ (p. 127). This book is therefore critical in highlighting the mindset needed for a more ecocentric approach to the natural world. Further, Buckles articulates the type of education needed to perpetuate this new consciousness wrapped up in the Ecological Social Imaginary. This book, therefore, is a must read for anyone involved in environmental and/or sustainability education specifically, for educators in general, and for all individuals interested in not only protecting this planet but also in forging a new relationship with our world.