Dialogic Encounters With the More-Than-Human: Indian and Japanese Perspectives on Environmental Education

Abstract As ecological scholars situated within a dominant educational system that privileges human-centred, competency-based education, we problematise its tendency to promote singular, monologic narratives of environmental education rooted in scientific and technological knowledge. In response, we offer interpretations of relationships with the more-than-human world (e.g., trees, insects, rivers, mountains, animals, rocks) through dialogic inquiry informed by Asian worldviews, specifically the Indian principle of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam meaning that the whole world is one family and the Japanese Shinto-Buddhist belief that all entities, living or non-living, embody spirits or deities. Beginning with a narrative grounded in one author’s lived experience as a forester – compelled to view forest as commodity, we explore its deeper significance for environmental education. Writing to one another in ways that attend to Asian relational and ecological perspectives, our work emphasises reciprocity, intercorporeality, and embodied immersion in forest, offering transformative possibilities for reimagining environmental education within planetary interdependence.