The interlocked triple crisis of capitalist globalization-driven inequality, bought-and-paid-for democracies, and pervasive cultures of violence—from our most intimate relationships to the militarism of the U.S.—has for a long time been bound up with the truly wicked fourth crisis of climate chaos. And now we are experiencing the wake-up moment of the coronavirus and the global rebellion for social justice breaking upon these structural, systemic burdens.
So, how do we connect this many dots? Many movements, organizations, systemic alternatives, and countless activists, theorists, and intellectuals are asking this as this wicked crisis unfolds. The time has come to ask new questions of our own as teachers:
1. What role does/can higher education play in addressing these crises?
2. How can we draw on our movements and systemic alternatives now to create a different kind of university—one that’s fit for purpose?
3. Sooner or later, climate change will force systemic and radical social change on states and institutions. In what ways can we assist in the birth of a pluriverse of possible paths for this journey?
Providing Transformative Resources to Teacher-Activists of the Climate Crisis
Two resources available to teacher-activists of the climate crisis are the University of California (UC) and California State University’s (CSU) NXTerra platform and the UC-CSU Knowledge Action Network
NXTerra is an innovative website, designed by teachers in the US-CSU system, that was launched in late 2019. Its aim is to provide the materials for a “transformative education for climate action,” and it offers 19 topics within the three broad categories of climate crisis, climate justice, and critical sustainability.
Crossing the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, topics range from climate change and religion to systems thinking, from climate fiction to climate governance, and from oceans and wildfires to community-engaged research, indigenous leadership, consumerism, and inclusive environmental identities. Here students and teachers who are looking for videos, readings, syllabi, classroom activities, and more can draw freely from the resources archived and curated for this purpose. If, for example, a teacher of climate science wants to consider the importance of movements for climate justice by global youth in order to offer their students an outlet if they want to take action after learning the disturbing facts of our predicament, those materials and links can be found on the site.
Any teacher who has noticed the distress and anxiety surrounding climate change that students increasingly feel today can find resources on the Climate Emotions page, put together by Sarah Jaquette Ray, author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (University of California Press, 2020).
The two topics I have contributed to the site are “Climate Justice Movements” and “Systemic Alternatives.” Both offer learners practical hope and ideas for engagement outside the classroom, some of which I detail in the next section. Under “Systemic Alternatives” are materials on transition towns, buen vivir, degrowth, and ecosocialism, among others. Under “Climate Justice Movements” there is an introduction to the massively growing and inspiring global network of movements led by young people, frontline and fenceline communities of color, indigenous peoples, inhabitants of small island states, and people who are doing the work of climate justice in all these settings.
These are not just theories about radical transformation or stories about far-away struggles. They are invitations and maps for teachers and students who want to learn and connect with those who are like-minded in the real world.
From the UC-CSU Knowledge Action Network comes what I argue is another important resource—the Nearly Carbon Neutral Conference. British climate scientist Kevin Anderson, California-based scientist Peter Kalmus, and others are working hard toward the goal of ending the practice of academics flying to conferences on climate change.
At the University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB), we didn’t wait for the pandemic to teach us the lessons of doing conferences differently. Ken Hiltner, UCSB professor of English and environmental humanities, has developed a climate conscious model, as articulated in the white paper “A Nearly Carbon-Neutral Conference Model.” We have now held a half dozen such conferences, the most recent of which can be found here.
Eco Vista and the World in 2025: Taking the Classroom into the Community
Humanity’s challenge to confront the climate crisis is evidently not going to be met by governments, university-based climate scientists, corporations, and other market actors. It will have to come from the bottom up and draw on new pedagogies in our own classrooms.
In 2017, two UCSB undergraduates, Jessica Alvarez-Parfrey and Valentina Cabrera, started a project to lay the groundwork for an ongoing effort to turn their community of Isla Vista, an unincorporated community in Santa Barbara, into a model “eco-village” through a thoughtful process of engagement.
Activity on the project, named Eco Vista, began over the summer of 2017. Since then, students and community members have been building it together. Students and guests have participated in such classes as:
- Interdisciplinary Studies 133B: What’s Wrong with the World? How Do We Fix It? (co-taught with Ken Hiltner)
- Sociology/Environmental Studies 130SD: The World in 2025: Creating Systemic Alternatives
- A new course called Sociology 130EV: Eco Vista
Some 700 people have worked in the community on projects to address food issues, housing, energy, transportation, local cooperative start-ups, a newsletter/zine, community outreach, and a rich spectrum of cultural creativity. In fall 2019, the Environmental Studies/Sociology class 134EC: Earth in Crisis engaged in a two-week exercise to produce the beginnings of an “Eco Vista Green New Deal” that resulted in a 27-page list of proposals for aligning Isla Vista’s next community development planning process with the most progressive versions of ecologically and socially just policies, such as the Red Deal, plans by The Green Party of the United States , the feminist agenda for a Green New Deal, Bernie Sanders’s detailed environmental platform, and eco-socialist ideas.
There are now more than 300 people on the Eco Vista e-list and a general assembly that meets bi-monthly, even online during the pandemic. There are ongoing working groups involved in projects that include a food forest and community gardens, a community plan, circular economy, social media, a UCSB student organization, and more. As the Eco Vista community imagines the future, we draw on the precious legacy and ideas of the late resident scholar and activist Michael Bean’s 2020 Eco Vista Sourcebook of imaginative ideas and detailed proposals for bringing about Eco Vista. Much of our writing has recently been published as The Whole Eco Vista Catalogue (published by the Eco Vista Climate Justice Press, 2021).
Conceptually, our efforts are grounded in the latest thinking about transition towns, degrowth, buen vivir, just transition, radical climate justice, and the many worlds to be found in the compendium of systemic alternatives Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary (Tulika Books, 2019). Another approach that guides our thinking and practice is adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (AK Press, 2017), which counsels working from the bottom up in an inclusive and un-predetermined way to generate collective analyses enabling members to articulate their desires and most sought after outcomes.
We are aiming high: to assist in laying the foundations for the establishment of an ongoing, multigenerational, student-community initiative for an equitable and just transition in Isla Vista, and to put the result, Eco Vista, forward as an experiential model that other small towns with college students might want to freely adapt for their communities. We see our efforts as skill-building experiments in sustainable, resilient, participatory development, in a place we call Eco Vista, a very real place and also a timeless, cosmic community of radical visionaries and seekers.
Toward a Pluriverse of Climate Justice Universities
There are a few exciting visions of a new type of university, some of which I have encountered in my pedagogical strolls across the web. One of the most generative pedagogical projects is the Ecoversities Alliance, which was founded in 2015 as a gathering of 55 people from 23 countries at the Tamera eco-village in southern Portugal. One might think of the alliance as a sort of world social forum of alternative education and pedagogy that has met in this series of what the Zapatistas call encuentros (encounters). These are diverse gatherings which, after the initial gathering has forged relationships, meet to collectively analyze common problems, and co-create alternatives based on a network model.
With more than 100 schools and projects of all kinds taking part, the Ecoversities Alliance does not take itself as a formal organization but rather “a process of trust and mutuality, a growing web of relationships that have been nurtured through our gatherings and beyond. We are committed to learning from/within/beyond diversity.” Readers may be familiar with some of the learning spaces and resources involved, such as Findhorn College (Scotland), Schumacher College (England), Gaia University (Colorado), and Universidad de la Tierra in (Oaxaca, Mexico) and its California counterpart, the Convivial Research and Insurgent Learning set of tools.
One of the significant outcomes of their collaboration is the Pedagogy, Otherwise Reader (2018), edited by Alessandra Pomarico and featuring essays, testimonies, poems, and images by many members of the Ecoversities Alliance. Pomarico writes of a “third pedagogy,” to be found (or imagined) somewhere between the business-as-usual university setting and the “deschooled, unlearning, creative” setting. She invites us to enter this space with no road map or boundaries, where the real magic of “a radical tenderness can appear, that commitment and support develop, friendships blossom, alliances form, people fall in love, heal, build, and weave their paths together. It is in those intimate contexts that a revolutionary, radical love made of a thirst for justice, militant gentleness, and subversive soulfulness can form.”
Ending Universities-as-Usual
How can systemic alternatives thrive in a malfunctioning global economy and in nation-states whose primary raison d’être is to support that economy to the detriment of their own inhabitants and life itself?
It will take new ways of doing new things to solve problems that the usual ways have not been able to do. Universities will have to center public-facing research, pedagogies, and knowledge co-creation—and a not-so-far-away future where every class touches very concretely on the crises of our time.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the authors and not the American Sociological Association.
