Economics, ecology, and a new eco-social settlement informing education

In the age of the Anthropocene, we are in a rapid transition from unnecessary consumerism to a post-carbon world. Biodiversity and ecological wellbeing in its local and planetary forms are at the core of this transition. For the last 250 years elite profit and economics has driven the Social Contract. Environmental concerns were explicitly externalised from the awareness, calculations, and concerns of modern organisation. Pollution, plastic waste, resource exhaustion and climate change have all reached a climatic point of saturation, that radically challenges our conventional economic assumptions, and the habitus of our social organisation. If we are to survive, and return the excessive levels of CO2e in the earth?s atmosphere to life enhancing levels, serious change will occur in the next three or four years. A new Social Contract will need to emerge, that challenges our institutional apparatus to step up, in profoundly ecological ways. Laws and governance will protect ecosystems, technology will have an ecological orientation, agriculture will aim at biodiversity rather than corporate profit, and infrastructure, the media, health, and education will all shift in orientation away from neoliberalism towards social and ecological health.