The Sustainability Map

I created this 'map' during my PhD research. I was working with schools helping them become more sustainable and working with teachers and kids, helping them to understand sustainbility.


Understanding and using this map requires four main insights:
  1. Sustainability is not a 'thing' it is a perspective relevant to all things.
  2. Present is the only place and time human beings can be, think, learn, know and act.
  3. Sustainability is not present. It exists in the pasts and the futures, big pictures and unseen-able micro realities.
  4. Nature is not 'out there' or 'environmental'. Nature is all of time and all of space. (that moves through us and constitutes 'us')

Navigating using the Sustainability Map


PRESENCE: My self and my experience is centre. Everything I see, hear, taste and feel is here and now.

PAST: The past is conceptualised as behind me. It tells the story of where things came from.

FUTURE: The future begins immediately after my nowness; it is the reality of consequences, and the impact of choices and actions. It is a scale from tomorrow to infinity and can locate the temporal dimensions of biodegradability, energy, waste etc.

MACRO: The bigger picture is above me like the sky, these are global perspectives, other people and other places.

MICRO: These are the little pictures; the invisible worlds of nutrition, bacteria, energy and molecules. This might also be underground.

How to use The Sustainability Map


It is called the 'Sustainability Map' because it provides an easy framework to apply the dimensions of sustainability into any discipline or topic. I like to call it The Environmental Imagination Map because everything outside the inner circle is beyond our experience, and can be best imagined to be understood. 
​This Map is a conceptual framework that came out of years working with schools and my research that lead to my PhD.

It is simply two lines and a circle. 
The simplicity  is useful to demystify the complexities of environmental knowledge.
The Map is a useful framework for working with sustainability concepts and identifying the sustainability dimensions of any issue, product or topic.
It is a simple diagram that can demystify the complexities of sustainability issues.
The map is the only student-centered framework we have in Environmental Education.
The Environmental Imagination Map/Sustainability Map is a thinking tool.
Accordingly, it can be used as a teaching and learning tool to make it clear how sustainability is relevant to everything, as a dimension of everything.
Teachers use this map to orient the topic and locate the concepts in relation to self and each other.
The map is used as a curriculum concept and planning tool to integrate sustainability across disciplines.