In this closing chapter, we provide a summary of the previous ten chapters. Each chapter has addressed different perspectives of human relationships with the natural environment and with the more-than-human world, which are shown to be relevant to education for sustainable development. In this anthology, we have encountered contexts from South Africa, Canada, Sweden, and Australia and even contexts of imagined places and documented art projects. Not least, we have encountered the context of our contemporary situation itself, with reference to the ongoing climate emergency and mass extinction. The authors have brought our attention to sustainability issues, implicitly and explicitly, some in more well-known ways and others by using more surprising approaches. We have encountered approaches that include the art of being and sensing, inquiry-based teaching and learning with children and young people with regard to their place-based opportunities and challenges, and also an approach that includes the position of facing an uncertain future ecology while creating hope. In retrospect, this anthology instantiates a collaborative effort that spans across nations and scientific disciplines. As editors, we are most grateful for this international and interdisciplinary collaboration. This anthology deals with the problematic situation we have positioned ourselves in by overexploiting the planet’s resources. Regarding this fateful situation, intertwined themes are made visible in the chapters, with reference to belonging and sensing, critical thinking, and acting. Furthermore, the authors acknowledge the despair and anguish the current condition creates and, yet, they also offer us hope. These intertwined themes connect despair with hope, anxiety with possible ways of action, true wonderment with criticality, ecology with art, theory with practice, education with society, and, as alarming as it might sound, human existence with the collapse of humanity.
Cham: Springer, 2022. p. 171-182