The impacts of climate change, a global recession and recent turbulence in oil and commodity prices suggest that the future will need to be 'green'. The transition to a low carbon economy will be extremely challenging, however, and it requires us to rapidly rethink and redesign not just products and services and the energy infrastructure but the sorts of education which will bring the skills and competencies and, not least, a hope and optimism that such an economy is not only possible - but aspirational. As Worldchanging.com 's Alex Steffen describes it: 'A bright green future.'

This book makes the case for a practical, positive, education for sustainability based on understanding the ideas and innovations behind the leading edge of design, business and industry as it faces up to this urgent transition. This can be summarised as the 'circular economy', the sustainable low carbon economy inspired by understanding living systems where the materials economy flows like nutrients. This emerging sense of a circular economy is transforming the possibilities of what a sustainable future might be.

ESD contributes most to the future of our young people when it opens up discussion on how sustainable can be desireable rather than just getting by. In our view, it needs to be about ‘better and better’ not ‘less and less’. In this it leaves to one side ESD as 'education-for-doing-slightly-less-harm' and reaches out to possibilities and the imagination.

We are confident that Sense & Sustainability shows how the core ideas underlying participative learning, seeing ‘Nature as Teacher’ and the ‘closed loop’ economy spring from the same sources, and thus transform and simplify how we approach our ESD work.

Ken Webster and Craig Johnson