At our recent monthly meeting, members of the SCI discussed how to navigate eco-anxiety, hope and being critical in teaching sustainability.

Even a few years ago it still felt necessary to alert students to the worsening climate crisis, biodiversity loss and other social and environmental problems. Today, students hardly need reminding. The media landscape is full of stories about catastrophic events, while climate change is increasingly used as political currency, intensifying tensions within society. This is particularly visible in the growing backlash against energy transition policies, which some scholars describe as a confrontation between the “fossil” and “climate” coalitions (Charbonnier 2025). The emotional rollercoaster caused by the climate crisis increasingly forms part of the media and political landscape, and this takes an emotional toll on students, and on teachers themselves. Yet critical engagement combined with pathways towards positive action might encourage students to engage with sustainability issues, whether professionally or simply as citizens. The important question, then, is: how can we use social science to generate hope?

As several colleagues and former students mentioned, students sometimes find that studying sustainability means constantly confronting deeply troubling issues, which can leave them feeling powerless. Critical sociological accounts can further complicate the picture by dismantling some of the comforting assumptions about “doing the right thing”. Trying to be a responsible consumer, for example, can be understood as part of the “responsibilisation of the consumer” (Barnett et al. 2012), where responsibility is shifted towards individuals rather than towards the systemic conditions shaping how society consumes. Yet it is essential for sociologists to remain critical.

Anger as a strength

Acknowledging that people are not comfortable with the current state of things is important. Anger can seem like a “natural” response to systems that are unjust towards both people and the planet. Rather than seeing anger only as a negative emotion, we can also recognise its potential as a strength and as something that can be mobilised into political action.

Challenging the terminology used to describe the climate crisis can be helpful here. The concept of the Anthropocene, used to describe a geological age in which humans have become a dominant influence on climate and the environment, can gloss over structural inequalities by presenting the climate crisis as the result of humanity as a whole. Alternative terms provide a different perspective. The “Capitalocene” (Haraway 2015; Moore 2016), for example, points towards profit-driven socioeconomic structures and systems of power dependent on “cheap” material and human resources. The “Apocalyptocene” (Anson 2020), meanwhile, shifts attention towards the narrative structures and systems that produce catastrophe, framing apocalypse not simply as a future event but as an ongoing process of dispossession and extraction. Such concepts deepen the critique, but they can also open space for discussing possibilities for a democratically owned and negotiated future.

Imagining alternative futures

There is also something hopeful in the political act of imagining the future, whether through fiction, utopian thinking or theatrical interventions that challenge singular narratives of what the future will look like.

Green utopianism, for example, can provide scenarios for possible interventions, while examples of grassroots and Indigenous-led ecological justice movements or social movements such as the Extinction Rebellion offer ways of thinking about collective action. Perhaps we do not need to colonise Mars to imagine a better quality of life. Ecotopian visions that advocate more liveable futures for both humans and non-human life can be equally exciting. And such visions can sometimes materialise through practices such as ambitious rewilding efforts in Scotland.

As Holroyd (2025) argues in the introduction to Fashion Fictions, we are not “going to reason our way to a sustainable system. We need stories, inspiration, … insights into alternative modes of being”. Fiction, in this sense, becomes a way of visualising worlds organised differently and turning frustration into a positive “what if?” Using Holroyd’s fiction-making methods with students can help create compelling images of alternative worlds which catalyse social, technological and economic changes that might make them possible. In one of the fictional worlds, generated by Holroyd’s project participants and described in the book, rebels wear stained clothes in a culture obsessed with hyper-cleanliness. They eventually turn stains into fashion, challenging unsustainable washing practices along the way.

Being playful and joyful is important here, both for creating a different emotional setting around sustainability and for encouraging creative thinking. Stakeholder role playing exercises can serve a similar purpose. Students might, for instance, imagine themselves as future politicians confronted with decisions about mining rare earth minerals that offer short-term economic benefits but create serious ecological consequences for future generations. Working through such scenarios allows them to explore what a more just course of action might involve.

Ordinary life as motivation

At the same time, research suggests that people often struggle to imagine social change (Ehgartner and Welch, 2024). It can be relatively easy to imagine technological transformations, but much harder to imagine what social transitions would actually look and feel like. This is why examples drawn from ordinary consumption and everyday life might be no less valuable than imagined futures. Discussing everyday practices that could lay the foundations for greener ways of living can make sustainability more tangible. There are, of course, important limitations. Green consumption can become a way of expressing class distinction and social privilege. Political consumption (Jacobsen and Dulsrud 2007) is similarly constrained by the idea of voting with the dollar. But recognising these limitations does not necessarily mean dismissing the practices themselves. Everyday changes can still offer possibilities for experimentation and wider social change, and perhaps leave more room for hope than despair.

With business students, described by one SCI researcher as “the future managers of the world”, there is another opportunity. Tracing the evolution of business responses to sustainability, from the Brundtland-era idea of sustainable development to the circular economy and the growth of green initiatives during the Covid period, can help students see the bigger picture. Current turbulence can then also be approached as a potential window for change. Real-life examples of small but impactful initiatives from voluntary organisations and the third sector can also provide useful lessons. Local and practical examples, from repair initiatives to projects addressing food waste, can demonstrate how alternative practices work on the ground. Even more, repair, for example, can be incorporated into a company’s services as a way of extending product value or can become the basis of a business model in its own right. A constructive way forward, then, may be to make room for success stories and for the possibility of remaining positive while engaging critically with difficult subjects.

Sustainability education does not need to minimise the scale of the problems we face. But neither does recognising those problems have to end in despair. As Raymond Williams put it, “to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.”

Images in this blog have been supplied by the SCI blog editor.

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