Introduction

This introductory chapter frames the scope and orientation of the three-part book. The term “polycrisis” has emerged to describe the interconnected environmental and social crises we are confronting in the 21st century. This book seeks to articulate responses and interventions, both existential and educational, to grapple with and navigate the polycrisis. A simple heuristic or roadmap is presented: we are in what is likely the end stages of a period of rapid and accelerated industrialization and consumption—what scholars have identified as the Great Acceleration . This Acceleration is showing signs of withdrawal, resulting in various forms of social and environmental unravelling. Cary Campbell seeks to articulate how the aims we commonly subscribe to in education are being reconfigured in this time of unravelling, presenting a terrestrial vision for critical eco-pedagogy with the difficult task of “reconciling” ourselves to the world by confronting us with the reality and conditions of our freedom to act (or not) within our locally embedded contexts. This unique kind of educational freedom is not unlimited or unbounded but rather cultivated through a responsibility that is enacted precisely by confronting limits and limitations; most fundamentally, the limits of a planet with limited resources and carrying capacity.