Afterword: Ethical Literacies and Sustainability Education: Young People, Subjectivity and Democratic Participation

We have entered the Anthropocene (Gibson et al. 2015), an era of human-caused global systemic dysfunction where the same species that caused this dysfunction also has the responsibility to turn the tide and respond. How to live lightly, equitably, meaningfully and empathically (i.e. towards the past and the future, towards different cultures, the non-human and more-than-human world) on Earth is the key question of our time. Young people in particular might feel overwhelmed by such a heavy existential question as they have a full life ahead of them and may have serious doubts about having children of their own some day in the face of the declining state of our planet. How can schools help young people to engage meaningfully in such a loaded question? Or, morally speaking , how can they choose not to help them with this question or, worse, make them powerless witnesses and accomplices to this planetary demise by ignoring this question altogether and sticking to " education-as-usual " ? This edited volume brings together authors who are looking for principles , foundations and processes that enable educators, in a broad sense, to connect young people with the key questions of our time. This chapter is the afterword to the book with some critical observations.