Sustainability as Relational Practice: The School of the Environment on Navigating the Polycrisis
Story image: Through art, we consider a hopeful and agentive reimagining of the "ecological footprint." /scan/resources/eco-art
As we continue to reflect on this year’s conference theme, Generative Hope: Possibilities in Education Research, we sat down with faculty and staff from the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto ahead of their upcoming panel discussion to hear their thoughts. In advance of their themed, Navigating the Planetary Crisis through the Arts: The University and the Polycrisis, they offered reflections on sustainability and on the role of the university in a time marked by interconnected global crises.
For the School of the Environment, sustainability is not limited to ecological preservation. It is relational, systemic, and deeply human. They frame this through the lens of social-ecological systems, an approach that understands natural systems (such as climate, forests, freshwater, and oceans) and social systems (including human communities, institutions, and infrastructure) as deeply interconnected and mutually influential.
Within these systems, disruption in any one component can ripple outward, producing consequences that are often felt most acutely by sensitive ecosystems and marginalized communities. Conversely, sustainability in one part of a system can strengthen resilience across others. Ecological, political, and social sustainability are therefore inseparable. To advocate for sustainability is to simultaneously call for justice, governance, care, and collective responsibility.
Their panel title invokes the concept of the polycrisis - a term used to describe the compounding and interconnected nature of today’s global challenges, where environmental, social, political, and economic crises overlap and intensify one another. By situating their discussion within this framework, the School of the Environment signals a commitment to thinking expansively about global change, not only through data and analysis, but through creativity, imagination, and feeling.
Distress within universities, they suggest, is not abstract. Students, researchers, and staff experience grief through the very act of learning, a grief rooted in our evolutionarily grounded connection to the natural world, what biologist E.O. Wilson described as “biophilia”. As the faculty at the School of the Environment write, “Because of this innate connection with nature, the grief we feel is so strong that words may not express what our heart bears.”
In this context, art becomes more than an aesthetic practice. It becomes a mode of expression when words fail, a space for insight when analysis feels insufficient, and a catalyst for dialogue around the climate crisis. In a time of planetary crisis, the university is not insulated from emotion. As the School of the Environment reminds us, universities can play an important role in helping their communities navigate these unsettling feelings. While our pursuits are intellectual, they also yield grief, worry, and — sometimes — hope.
To acknowledge these emotions through art, communication, and shared reflection is not peripheral to scholarship; it is integral to it. If sustainability is relational, then so too is resilience, cultivated through spaces where intellect and emotion are held together rather than forced apart.
[The Opening Keynote Panel Discussion of the 2026 Ƶ GSRC is a wonderful collaboration with Ƶ SCAN, School of the Environment and Ƶ Library]
Mariam Vakani is a PhD student in Higher Education. Her work examines caregivers and institutional life through relational and equity-focused frameworks. She writes across academic and creative forms, drawn to the spaces where pedagogy, ethics, and storytelling meet and where imagining more responsive futures becomes possible.
