Abstract Environmental education is never neutral; through what is emphasised or ignored, education shapes how learners understand their relationships with the more-than-human world. This editorial introduces the Special Issue Beyond the Metacrisis: Educating for the Future World to Come, situating environmental education within a planetary metacrisis produced by intersecting ecological, social, economic and epistemic failures. Drawing on critiques of colonial modernity, neoliberal growth imperatives and Enlightenment dualisms that separate culture from nature, the authors argue that the metacrisis is an educational paradox: education systems reproduce normative conditions—like resource extractivism, alienation and technocratic optimism—that threaten collective futures. The metacrisis is conceptualised as an entanglement of multiple polycrises, including climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, international and local violences, toxic pollution, social inequity and public anxiety, whose planetary scale distinguishes the present moment from historic civilisational crises. This editorial synthesises contributions challenging assumptions of progress, neutrality and individualism. Collectively, the Special Issue papers engage with the problematic of modernity, neoliberalism and the marketisation of everything, the alienation embedded in the Enlightenment. Each essay has an introductory synopsis, categorised as an activation about neoliberalism, a response to collapse, and a reworking of the modern alienation between culture and nature. Instead of alienation, the papers foreground Indigenous, place-based, relational and post-growth approaches to environmental education, offering alternative pedagogies, curricula and institutional imaginaries grounded in care, reciprocity and ecological limits. Together, they position environmental education as a site for ethical re-worlding, supporting cultural regeneration, social justice and renewed human–Earth relationships.
Irwin et al. (Mon,) studied this question.