Chapter 4: Something Else is More Important than Fear: Becoming-In/appropriate Educational Leaders on the Verge in a Time of Mass Extinction and Climate Catastrophe

Raising one’s research and/or leadership sails with an aim to navigate the turbulent currents of education in a time of mass extinction and climate catastrophe is and should be a vulnerable and risky enterprise. The risk increases as Western education generally (and the contemporary corporatized university specifically) moves in a direction diametrically opposed to more deeply comprehending and educating for a destabilized world of climate turmoil and alarming declines in biodiversity, with even the human project at risk of collapse. It is within these tumultuous and unpredictable currents that I found my own small craft as I set out to pilot my dissertation research a few short years ago. It was in setting out into these wild winds and rising waters to which my recent and ongoing research responds, and from which, in turn, I fashion this essay, drawing primarily on pivotal dual foci—the radical imagination and the in/appropriate¹—from several other themes generated by my enquiry into the meaning of education in a time of mass extinction and climate catastrophe.