The Cruel Optimism of Transformative Environmental Education

Overview & Synopsis

The article is a reflection on the author's experience teaching a Master's seminar in Philosophical Debates in Environmental Education. It frames the attachment to transformative environmental education as a form of cruel optimism, in the sense proposed by Lauren Berlant. Instead of continuing to foster an optimistic attachment to environmental education as a site where transformation may occur, but often does not, the article proposes an aporetic environmental education, which does not seek to get environmental education 'right', but rather experiments with different ways of thinking and living the impasse in which it finds itself.