TESOL and Sustainability: English Language Teaching in the Anthropocene Era

Abstract

As a recent convert to a more explicit environmental perspective in my teaching and research, the opportunity to review the edited volume TESOL and Sustainability: English Language Teaching in the Anthropocene Era came as a wonderful gift. I read the book from the viewpoint of an EFL teacher educator located in the Global South—to be precise, in the expanding-circle country Chile—and from the first pages noticed an important commonality with the various authors of the book. Although all of them are located in North America and are engaged with various TESOL contexts possibly more typical of inner-circle countries, they very clearly share with me the plight of TESOL professionals attempting to come to grips with our—unwanted but implied—complicity with cultural and linguistic imperialism; it is no coincidence that Suresh Canagarajah, author of Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching (1999) contributed the foreword to this volume. The connection between the global status of the English language and the environmental consequences of economic globalisation is one of the recurring themes of the book: ‘English owes its hegemony—and TESOL professionals owe their livelihoods—to the overproduction of urban sprawl, carbon dioxide, air and water pollution, herbicides, pesticides, nuclear waste, and the like’ (Delavan, p. 31). Like myself, the authors of the book have made it part of their research and teaching to find and practise viable alternatives, looking for ways to promote values and ideas that may help to deconstruct this hegemony. It is a clear aim of the book to persuade TESOL professionals to ‘counteract … anthropocentrism and anti-posteritism (that is, discrimination against future generations)’ (p. 20). In times when ‘[e]nvironmental sustainability is not business as usual in ELT anymore’ (Canagarajah, p. x), TESOL practitioners are called to develop creative, innovative pedagogic practices to offset the cultural ‘normality’ under which not only other living species, but also language—the focus of our work—have been ‘treated … as a profitable resource’ (p. xii).