Imagining well with almonds and honeybees in the Capitalocene – five multispecies movements for environmental and sustainability education

Abstract

Responses in resisting and subverting capitalist structures and practices often foreground imagination and experimentation. In environmental and sustainability education, imagination has been previously called upon as a way to sympathetically engage learners in environmental issues or to conjure alternative futures. But what other possibilities does imagination entail? We open this paper by arguing that to address the entanglements produced by the Capitalocene, imagination could be conceived of as thoroughly exploring and describing the assemblages in which particular beings exist – what we call imagining well. Next, we introduce and develop this idea of imagining well and proceed by experimenting with it in the honeybee-almond assemblage. To conclude, we offer five multispecies movements as practical and conceptual tools to environmental and sustainability education, to be used separately or in combination to attend to environmental issues within the constraints of educational institutions.