Illuminating Limits: Educating for Postgrowth Futures in a Time of Polycrisis

The authors examine how environmental education is being reconfigured in an era of polycrisis, urging a move beyond reductive, growth-driven and technocratic paradigms. They advocate for a postgrowth educational approach that embraces ecological overshoot, social unravelling, and the systemic limits of industrial modernity. Drawing on heuristics rooted in complexity science, disaster studies, land economics, and traditional ecological knowledge, they propose a pedagogical framework that fosters existential questioning, subjectification, and bioregional engagement. The article calls on educators to develop practices that engage with the realities of the Great Acceleration and prepare learners for futures beyond economic growth.