Learning Sustainability

Goal: Produce a special issue of "Sustainable Earth", SpringerNature.
This interdisciplinary article collection focuses on the intersection of four main areas: Experiential learning, sustainability (including climate change), the Earth and ethics.

Learning is a relatively new concern in sustainability. Much attention has been given to sustainability education, especially in tertiary education, but rather less on how people learn about sustainability and learn to become sustainable, especially from experience.

Sustainability has traditionally been defined with three pillars: social, environmental, economic. We seem to have forgotten a fourth pillar, learning, without which none of the other three could ever constitute a solid element in sustainability.

The objective of this article collection is to examine and improve the learning of sustainability; it is to build, as it were, a fully sustainable concept of sustainability. It is to develop and broaden the realization that learning is a crucial component of sustainability and to make explicit the practice of learning in sustainability for sustainability. If the world (people, institutions, education, science, organizations, professional associations, research, industry, governments, etc.) pays insufficient attention to this pillar of learning, then sustainability will at best simply hobble along, at worst wither and even die, taking humanity with it.

We wish to examine how people and communities typically learn about sustainability, learn to become and be sustainable, learn to help others learn, learn about helping others learn, sustainability. We wish to examine, make explicit and improve what it is to learn sustainability – as a way of life, as second nature, just as we learn language, culture and maths, often from direct or vicarious experience.

We welcome articles from ordinary citizens, scientists, trainers, citizen scientists and learners, especially those who have learned from their experience of the Earth (e.g., through floods, adventure, tsunamis, exploration, earthquakes, field work, rescue missions, professional work, disasters, organizational work, travel, etc). A wide range of structured experiential learning types is relevant, such as debriefing, simulations, Companion Modelling, role-play, internships, field trips, games, museums, school outings, activism, voluntary work, conferences, project work, etc.

Key themes:
• Learning and sustainability
• Experience and learning for a sustainable Earth
• Experiential learning for sustainability
• Ethical dimensions of experiential learning for sustainability
• Processing experience of the Earth to turn it into learning sustainability

Please consider submitting an article proposal if you:
• Are a sustainability or climate change workshop facilitator;
• Are concerned or even passionate about making the Earth sustainable;
• Are learning, or helping others to learn, about sustainability;
• Consider that experience is an important way in which people learn sustainability;
• Consider ethics to be important in learning (about) sustainability;
• Are an environmental educator, using participatory learning methods;
• Have a story to tell about helping the Earth to become more sustainable; or
• Would like to share your own learning experience in sustainability.

https://e4l-jrnl.weebly.com/cfp-se-long.html
https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/ls