In this article, we address the issue of how we can give an educational answer to the current global environmental crisis. We believe that Arendt's definition of the 'essence of education' is still highly relevant because of its attention to the possibility of the world's future renewal. Therefore, we read Arendt together with Bruno Latour, who draws attention to how particular (mis)understandings of the notion 'world', both in its spatial and temporal dimensions, play a role in the crisis at hand. By reading both together, we hope to develop an educational response to our current predicament.

In this article we address the issue of how an instrumental approach to sustainability education has dominated the scientific debate of the last 20 years. By conducting interviews and focus group interviews, we have investigated a community arts initiative in the Flemish city of Antwerp in which artists together with local inhabitants engaged in activities around two art installations and address the sustainability of a particular living environment. Our empirical study of this place-based initiative that we call a ‘critical zone observatory’ has been enriched by the work of Bruno Latour, Richard Sennett and Hans Schildermans. We conclude that a temporal and spatial shift in sustainability education (research) is needed from (1) development (a steady movement towards a planned future) and (2) human stewardship (the capability of people to shape their passive living environments) to (1) what we call co-sperity (a collective hope in the present) and (2) inhabitation (an attached and undetermined engagement with the dynamic of one’s habitat). By proposing a collective study pedagogy as an alternative to individual training, we suggest a need for future research on critical zone observatories.