The Sustainability Tales

Drawing from the plot of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this innovative work imagines a conference about sustainability education to which ten academics from diverse disciplines and nations are attending. All are well known in their own fields, albeit recognised as something other than popular or mainstream. In their own institutions and discourses they all promote a message that higher education is losing its way and needs to change if it is to contribute to the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals though its teaching. A mysterious benefactor has paid for much of their costs, dictated the conference style (conversational rather than presentational) and selected a host to facilitate proceedings. Each academic is to tell a tale that encourages conversation. One of the ten is the book’s narrator, who writes a prologue and an epilogue and records and summarises each tale. The narrator suggests that each of the ten is using the conference as a form of pilgrimage. For each of the pilgrims their tale provides an opportunity to reflect on their career's achievements and failings, and on the purposes of universities. For readers, the tales collectively amount to a broad analysis of higher education’s teaching roles in the achievement of the sustainable development goals, its culpability in creating the need for these goals, and provide hope for change.