This article will investigate the philosophy of science of Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014) as a coherent basis for environmental education. The work of Bhaskar serves as an in-depth approach to understanding how to apply critical realism (the critical and the realist) to matters such as environmental education, because he concretely theorises the connections between science, social change and metaphysics. By mobilising key Bhaskarian motifs — that is, the primacy of ontology over epistemology, the laminated system as a means to understand reality, the ways in which inquiry may be organised through the real, actual and the empirical, and the positive application of dialectics — this article constructs a new approach to environmental education and positions it in the field of environmental education by comparing it to posthumanism and the new materialisms. This article contains inquiry-based study outlines for enhanced thinking around: (1) climate change and social justice; (2) movements towards a carbon-free economy; (3) water, food and population; and (4) the future of human habitation.

We argue that to face climate change, all education, from kindergarten to tertiary, needs to be underpinned by environmental education. Moreover, as a site of reframing, education when coupled with philosophy is a possible site of influencing societal reframing in order to re-examine our relations to nature or our natural environment. However, we contend that as philosophy has been largely absent from curricula, it is vital to redress this issue. Further, the environment cannot be viewed simply as subject matter for study but, reconceptualised in the Indigenous sense as Place. Only in this way can we overcome the human-nature divide. We conclude that educators must look for what Plumwood calls ‘experiences that do not fit the dominant story’ to disrupt an important link in the chain of climate change by developing ‘traitorous identities’ able to challenge the dominant culture.

Theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of education and activism in the Anthropocene will be enriched by an embrace of non-hegemonic thinking. Lakshmi Ashram, a small girls’ school in the Himalayan mountains of Uttarakhand, India, provides an object lesson in thinking differently: in an imbrication of education/research/activism. This article acknowledges a continuing lack of attention in the literature to local, cultural and place-based diversity in transformative learning for sustainable community. However, the central story in this article is not one of critique, but rather one of a Himalayan approach to creating the pedagogical conditions for transformation in thinking and behaviour, in a connected socio-ecological community. Writing across an intercultural space, the two authors describe their ethnographic methodologies, exploring the long-term impact of a Lakshmi Ashram education on students and inhabiting the pedagogical experience of the school. A seamless flow of socio-material practice between pedagogy, research and activism in the school’s educational approach speaks to a Gandhian philosophy-in-action that is worth considering as a contribution to global educational praxis in the Anthropocene. In telling this tale of one small school’s pedagogical philosophy, the authors aim not towards ideological posturing, but towards creating further openings in thinking differently in education.

In these Anthropocene times humans are vulnerable through the effects of socio-ecological crises and are responsible for attending to past, present and future socio-ecological injustices and challenges. The purpose of this article is to challenge discursive structures that influence knowledge acquisition about/of the world through binary logics, acknowledging that we are never apart from the world we are seeking to understand, but that we are entangled through a mutual (re)configuring with the world. Through storytelling and entangled poetry from outdoor education and environmental science education contexts, this article explores discursive/material forces (socially meaningful statements/affective intensities) enacted through pedagogies ‘attuning-with’. As pedagogies ‘attuning-with’ take up a relational ontology, in which sense-making is generated from the grounded, lived, embodied and embedded politics of location in relationship with broader ecologies of the world, they illuminate a transdisciplinary environmental education. A transdisciplinary environmental education is important for these Anthropocene times, because it not only promotes a multivocal approach to environmental education, but in acknowledging our inherent and intrinsic responsibility and accountability for the kinds of worlds that we are co-constituting, it provides opportunities to change the story of how we choose to live with/in/for these Anthropocene times.