What If Sustainability Is Really About Learning How to Think?

When we talk about sustainability education, the conversation can quickly become about climate change, carbon emissions, recycling, conservation, or the environment. Those things matter, but what if they are indicators of something deeper? What if preparing young people for a sustainable future is not primarily about teaching them a collection of environmental facts, but about helping them understand how their thinking, choices, communities, and relationships are connected to the world around them?

At the Deeper Learning Conference at Ulster BOCES in Kingston, New York, Thinkering Media sat down with Jamie Cloud, founder of the field of Education for Sustainability, founder of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, and author of Response Able. What began as a conversation about climate education quickly became a conversation about how we think, how schools are designed, why experiential learning matters, and what happens when young people become disconnected from the places they are being asked to care about.

Jamie offered a simple chain of thinking that reframed the conversation. Climate change is an indicator of global warming. Global warming is an indicator of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere faster than the Earth can absorb them. That imbalance, she argued, is also an indicator of the ways we think and the education systems that have shaped that thinking. If we want different outcomes, we have to become capable of thinking differently.

That distinction matters because climate education can easily become education about everything that is going wrong. Young people hear about rising temperatures, extreme weather, disappearing ecosystems, pollution, and uncertain futures. The problems are real, but if our educational response is primarily to make children afraid of the future, we risk taking the very creativity and agency they will need to help shape it.

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September 11, 2025

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Fear is not the same thing as understanding.

Jamie described a simple way to explain carbon to young learners through the idea of a bathtub. Think about carbon in the atmosphere as the water in the tub. If the faucet is allowing water in faster than the drain can remove it, eventually we have a problem. We can reduce what is coming through the faucet and increase what can leave through the drain. Suddenly, a massive global system becomes something a young learner can begin to understand.

The power of that example is not simply that it makes climate science easier. It demonstrates what meaningful education can do. Instead of overwhelming learners with complexity, we can give them mental models that help them understand systems. Once learners understand the system, they can begin asking questions about how their choices interact with it.

Those mental models became one of the most important parts of our conversation. Jamie explained that all of us develop cognitive frameworks for understanding how the world works. Those frameworks are shaped by our experiences, families, communities, cultures, and education. They help us navigate life, but they can also become blinders if we are never challenged to examine them.

That is where education has an enormous responsibility. If learners are never encouraged to think about their own thinking, question their assumptions, consider different perspectives, and pay attention to the consequences of their actions, they can become trapped inside a particular way of seeing the world.

This is especially difficult in a complex and interconnected society because the consequences of our decisions are not always immediately visible. We can purchase something without seeing where its materials came from. We can throw something away without knowing where it goes. We can consume energy without seeing how it was produced. The cause and the effect can be separated by thousands of miles and many years.

If we cannot see the consequences of our choices, it becomes much harder to take responsibility for them.

That is one reason place based education becomes so powerful. When learning is connected to the community, environment, and systems immediately surrounding a learner, consequences become easier to see. Students can observe what happens to a garden. They can study the water in their community. They can understand where food comes from. They can participate in a composting program and watch materials change over time. They can notice how decisions made by people affect the places where they actually live.

Connection creates the possibility of care.

This idea came up repeatedly as we talked about outdoor learning. At Thinkering Collective, we regularly hear from educators who want to build gardens, outdoor classrooms, composting programs, and other experiences that move learning beyond the walls of the classroom. The desire is often there. The challenge is turning that desire into something sustainable enough to survive within the larger system.

Jamie pointed to an important lesson for educators trying to make that happen. It is not enough to have a great idea. You need a plan for the people who will eventually have to live with that idea.

A school garden might be an extraordinary learning environment during the school year, but what happens during the summer? Who waters it? Who maintains it? Can families or community members access it? What happens when the original teacher who championed the project leaves? These questions may feel operational, but answering them can determine whether an idea becomes part of the culture or disappears after a year.

Jamie specifically emphasized the importance of working with maintenance teams rather than treating them as an afterthought. That is a valuable lesson far beyond gardens. When we talk about transforming education, we often focus on teachers and school leaders while forgetting the many people who make a school community function. Sustainable change requires more than enthusiasm. It requires designing with the entire ecosystem in mind.

The same is true of the relationship between schools and the communities around them. Cities, towns, and counties often create sustainability plans, yet schools are not always meaningfully included in that work. That disconnect is difficult to justify when we consider that schools are home to the young people who will inherit the future those plans are attempting to create.

What would happen if schools and communities approached sustainability together?

Students could participate in authentic community challenges rather than simulations disconnected from their lives. Municipal leaders could gain the perspective and creativity of young people. Teachers could connect academic standards to real problems. Community organizations could become learning partners. Sustainability could move from something students read about to something they actively practice.

This is where experiential learning becomes essential.

During our conversation, I shared an example from curriculum work Thinkering Collective has done with schools. While unpacking an elementary science curriculum, we found a lesson about energy from the sun. The activity instructed the teacher to grab a flashlight.

The sun was right outside.

That moment captures something much larger about the way we sometimes design school. We create simulations of things learners could experience directly. We teach about nature while sitting inside. We teach about communities without entering them. We teach systems through diagrams without allowing learners to participate in the systems themselves.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a flashlight as a teaching tool. The larger question is why our first instinct is sometimes to simulate the world when the world is available to us.

Jamie put the consequence plainly. The more we disconnect young people from life, the more disconnected they become. And when learners are disconnected from something, it becomes much harder for them to develop a meaningful relationship with it.

You cannot expect young people to care deeply about a place they have never been given the opportunity to know.

This does not mean experiential education has to come at the expense of academic standards. Jamie described work mapping garden education directly to state standards so teachers can clearly understand the academic value of bringing students into those environments. The question is not whether outdoor and experiential learning can meet standards. It is whether we are willing to recognize how much learning can happen when standards are connected to meaningful experiences.

A garden can become a science classroom, a mathematics classroom, a writing environment, a laboratory for systems thinking, and a place for understanding responsibility. The disciplines still matter, but they become tools for understanding something larger.

Jamie described academic disciplines as necessary but not sufficient. That distinction should matter to anyone thinking about the future of education. A learner can perform extraordinarily well within individual subjects and still struggle to connect those subjects to a larger purpose. They can earn strong grades, pass tests, complete assignments, and eventually wonder what any of it was actually for.

Jamie experienced something very different in her own education. Beginning in sixth grade, she participated in an experimental global education program built around interdisciplinary learning, simulations, field trips, and experiences within the community. Decades later, she still remembers what she learned.

Perhaps more importantly, she remembers thinking.

She described reaching the end of a school year and realizing how much she had learned without remembering her teacher standing in front of the room teaching it to her. The adults had designed experiences that required learners to participate in the thinking rather than simply receive the information.

That might be one of the clearest descriptions of powerful teaching.

The teacher does not disappear. Their expertise becomes visible through the environment they create, the questions they ask, the experiences they design, and the connections they help learners discover.

There is a lesson here for sustainability education, but there is also a lesson for education more broadly. We spend enormous amounts of time debating what information young people should know. We spend less time asking what ways of thinking they should develop.

Can they recognize a system? Can they understand that changing one part of that system can affect another? Can they notice the consequences of their decisions? Can they reconsider a mental model when new evidence challenges it? Can they connect what they are learning to the place where they live? Can they imagine a future that does not exist yet and believe they have some ability to help create it?

Those questions become increasingly important as we think about the world young people are inheriting. Sustainability is not simply an environmental topic. It touches economics, culture, community, health, infrastructure, technology, food, energy, transportation, design, and the choices people make every day. Teaching it as an isolated subject misses the point because sustainability itself is about relationships.

At Thinkering Collective, we see this same principle when educators begin building learning experiences with their communities rather than simply for their classrooms. A garden becomes more sustainable when families, maintenance teams, local organizations, school leaders, and students see themselves as part of it. An outdoor classroom becomes more powerful when it is connected to curriculum rather than treated as an occasional escape from curriculum. A student project becomes more meaningful when someone beyond the teacher actually needs what the learner is creating.

That is how education begins to feel connected to life again.

If we want young people to help build a more sustainable future, telling them everything that is wrong with the present will not be enough. They need opportunities to understand systems, experience their communities, examine their assumptions, see the consequences of choices, and practice creating alternatives.

Most importantly, they need to believe the future is something they can participate in.

Maybe education for sustainability is ultimately not about convincing students to save the world. Maybe it is about helping them become thoughtful enough, connected enough, curious enough, and responsible enough to recognize that their choices are already shaping it.

And if we want them to think differently about the future, perhaps we first have to think differently about school.

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