“The challenge of sustainability demands much more than the protection or preservation of communities or nature reserves, and more than technical fixes for CO2 production or resource limitations: it requires re-imagining and reworking communities, societies and landscapes, especially those dominated by industrial capitalism, to help us build a productive symbiosis with each other and the many nonhumans on whom we depend.”

Brightman & Lewis, 2017

Climate change. Widening inequalities. Water Scarcity. War. Loss of biodiversity. Food insecurity. These are just some of the many challenges that humanity is currently facing. All of them are interlinked, forming global polycrises. All of them contribute to unsustainability – the impossibility of living in right relationship to each other and the earth. It is clear that in order to solve these issues, humanity cannot go on with business as usual. To tackle these problems, we will need to learn to work together, better. We will need to have a heightened awareness of local and global issues. We will need to be action oriented and willing to change our own habits as well as the social, political, and economic systems we have created that are at the center of these issues.

As sustainability educators, we are tasked with preparing the next generation of thinkers with the competencies (skills, attitudes, and knowledge) and tools they need to move towards sustainable, regenerative, and peaceful futures. There is much debate about exactly what competencies are needed and how to embed them into different disciplines and courses. Nevertheless, the IonE Educators each have their own experience in doing exactly this.

Each year, the cohort of IonE Educators is tasked with disseminating their work over the course of their fellowship. This dissemination happens in different ways each year and this year the group has chosen to produce a (as practical as possible) guide to what they did to embed sustainability into their classes. In this cohort we have three case studies: using backwards design to include sustainability outcomes in a general biology course; incorporating sustainability into fieldwork for medical students; and helping students enact sustainability on campus. We hope that anybody interested in applying sustainability to their own context will find this book a useful contribution.