Composting modernity

Abstract

We have reached the logical end of modernity as it lays waste to the natural world, discards people, and reveals its inherent and thus continual violence. Withdrawing our energy from and breaking down the constellation of modern beliefs, we can repattern ourselves and our communities for a life-giving future. In its structure and content, this article demonstrates a relationality approach to sustainability and climate education that undertakes practices to emplace humans back within the living world. Indigenous philosophies of place as well as posthumanism offer relational notions of time, space, place, and land to consider. Pedagogy-rich, the article provides practices for: restoring the history of modernity as a decolonial counternarrative; composting the most problematic beliefs and practices of modernity; providing tracings of and for possible futures; deriving pedagogical entry points of relevance to learners; and nurturing ways of being that can build a rooted, more life-giving way of being.