Decoupling and techno-optimism be damned, there is a harsh biophysical reality behind our energy and climate crisis: we’re fucking fucked. What does it means to teach that truth to students, and what should you teach after you’ve taught that truth?
In this episode, Wouter Mulders and Mayte Beekman talk to Ginie Servant-Miklos about education under collapse. Ginie is an Associate Professor of at Erasmus University Rotterdam, director of the Bildung Climate School and the author of Pedagogies of Collapse. Societal collapse represents the most fundamental change imaginable, so that should be of interest to transition makers all around. But she also argues that there’s a hidden psychological side as well: phone addiction, substance use, and the slow, grinding “small-t trauma” of a system that leaves little room to cope.
The conversation also turns a critical eye on insular academia itself, including spaces like DRIFT. She makes a case for “imperfect solidarity”: staying engaged with people whose politics or circumstances don’t match your own, rather than retreating into like-minded bubbles. The result is less a doom-laden forecast than a practical philosophy: tell people the truth, then give them the tools to build a meaningful life within it.
