Abstract

Education for Sustainable Development is a broad and varied field of study replete with compelling advocacies for a more humane world. Across a majority of its instances however, ESD might yet be seen to labour in stealth fidelity to a mode of political economy and model of human-nature relations complicit with planetary ecocide. This essay draws largely from the thinking of Jean Baudrillard in an effort to identify the implications of ESD’s mainstay commitments, particularly as expressed in the field’s lingering fidelities to anthropocentric production and modes of protagonistic optimism. Such alliances are contrasted by the immanence of inhuman planetary difference as it might habilitate more eco-centric approaches and attitudes for thinking the very possibility of sustainable development in the present era of rapid ecological transformation.