Editorial/Introduction

Postdevelopmental Approaches to Environmental Early Childhood Education: Towards Environmental Education emerges at a moment of profound epistemic, ontological, and ethical disquiet in the fields of environmental education and childhood studies. As the felt effects of the Anthropocene intensify - marked by accelerating climate devastation, ecological degradation, settler colonial dispossession, racialised violence, militarisation, and planetary crises—the adequacy of developmentalist logic for conceptualising childhood, practicing education, and relating to the environment has become increasingly problematic. This collection wrestles with that inadequacy as a condition that demands refusal, and requires creative, brave gestures towards an alternative logic that can offer glimmers of hope for living life on a damaged planet. From diverse theoretical, empirical, and creative orientations, the chapters in this volume collectively contribute to advancing postdevelopmental environmental early childhood education as an onto-epistemological and ethico-political project: one that fundamentally reorientates what childhood is, the ways in which education comes to matter, and how relations with more-than-human worlds are thought of, and animated through everyday pedagogical and research practices with children.