Sustainability Frontiers is an international alliance of sustainability and global educators dedicated to laying bare the assumptions, exposing the blind spots and transgressing the current boundaries and orthodoxies of mainstream sustainability education, while envisioning, theorizing, researching, promoting and putting into practice sustainability learning that seeks transformation and healing of the human condition through repaired and restored earth connection.
Members of the alliance are concerned with formal, non-formal and informal education that works fluently across social, psychological and spiritual levels of experience as it addresses the current confluence of threats to the environment and human society globally. Members embrace the intrinsic value and right to exist of the other-than-human and of natural environments, and recognize that the pursuance and advocacy of a planetary ethic of environmental and social justice needs to be grounded in, as well as restorative and celebratory of, local and indigenous communities and cultures.
Sustainability education with the potential to truly sustain must be whole-person, whole planet education that is locally and deeply experienced as it engages the rich, but oftentimes dormant, reservoir of potentials in the learner. As such, it necessarily embraces themes, concepts and insights from educational fields marginalized or left untouched by mainstream sustainability education, such as education for peace, holistic health education, humane education and indigenous education.
Belonging to a deliberately small group of academic educators, each with a strong practitioner history, members of Sustainability Frontiers have agreed to collaborate in different combinations as they undertake local, national and international projects, consultancies and initiatives at the leading edge of sustainability education, often in partnership with other organizations.
Six key interconnected themes are currently being addressed by the alliance, more than one theme being taken up in any particular project or initiative, the range of themes being subject to periodic review:
- Theme One: Climate Change Education
- Theme Two: Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience Education
- Theme Three: Transformative Environmental Education
- Theme Four: Transgressive Sustainability Learning
- Theme Five: Life Skills, Child Rights and Child Friendly Education
- Theme Six: Active, Activist and Action Learning