A BMC Pedagogy: The confluence of two rivers  

Dr Natalia Eernstman – February 2026 

At Black Mountains College, we prepare people for a warming world by asking: what must students know and be able to do in an age of climate and ecological collapse? Our answer has taken shape in a range of FE courses and the degree Sustainable Futures: Arts, Ecology and Systems Change. The specifics evolve with our teaching, new research, climate projections, and the shifting social and political landscape.  

My latest narration of the degree imagines two tributaries -one carrying science, the other imagination- flowing together into a single river. This represents the journey students travel with us over three years, cultivating the skills and capacities needed to navigate an uncertain future. 

Confluence of the Zanskar River and the Indus. Source 

The first tributary: Science. 
What is 

This tributary carries certainties and uncertainties, scenarios and predictions, alongside the adaptive skills needed to respond. Climate change is an uncertain business: there are a few things we know, and many we do not. As science advances, some uncertainties shrink while new ones emerge, giving us a clearer view of some critical thresholds. For example, in 2018 the IPCC’s SR15 still treated 1.5 °C of warming as uncertain; by 2024, global average temperature had reached 1.55 °C, making 1.5 °C a reality, 2 °C almost certain, and 3-4 °C increasingly likely. Research and science sharpen predictions and generate scenarios that can guide our preparation and present action. (In practice, however, such warnings are too often ignored, and meaningful preparation remains minimal.)  

In the BMC degree, this tributary translates into climate literacy: understanding both what is certain and what remains uncertain, and facing the environmental conditions already locked into the system. With emissions still rising, uncomfortable uncertainties are turning into devastating certainties. Cultural denial has long delayed effective action, meaning we are now facing not just a challenge but a predicament. Conservative scenarios projecting moderate warming -and sparing humanity the worst impacts- are increasingly implausible. As educators, we have a duty to share these uncomfortable truths with our students. It is only with that knowledge that they can start to prepare for these likely scenarios, and develop the adaptive skills necessary to live (survive and hopefully thrive) in that future.  

During a public seminar at Black Mountains College, Bill McGuire compared this responsibility to a medical diagnosis: if I have an incurable illness, I want the most truthful and accurate diagnosis possible, based on the best science available. Only then can I prepare to live the best life under the circumstances. Similarly in the context of climate change, whilst knowing what’s coming doesn’t automatically translate into action -nor does it inevitably lead to “eco-paralysis” (see for example Sangervo et al. 2022 and Innocenti et al. 2023)- everyone has the right to understand the predicament we are in. Teaching adaptive skills following the ‘diagnosis’ enables learners to take preparatory action, from practical skills like growing food to socio-emotional ones such as collaboration, creativity, and conflict resolution. These adaptive skills are essential to surviving, and hopefully thriving, in a rapidly changing world.  

The second tributary: Imagination. 
What If 

Flowing down another valley is the river of imagination: seizing the space uncertainty offers to reach for futures still possible. Here we cultivate forging skills: the ability to speculate and imagine, to experiment with new ways of living, while reshaping current systems into more just, sustainable, and ecological alternatives. 

The greatest uncertainty in climate projections is not environmental conditions but how human systems respond to them. While some changes are already locked in, our actions, or inaction, will influence the exact trajectory of temperature rise, glacial melt, sea-level change, droughts, and floods in the years and centuries ahead. Our future is still largely unwritten. Within the set (challenging and likely catastrophic) parameters we still have a degree of agency to mould the uncertainties before they settle and solidify into fixed patterns and conditions. We do this by first collectively imagining futures that are worth living for and then testing and trialling our way towards these. 

Far from naive or frivolous, such imagination is essential. Modernity, the dominant social system shaping how we live and work, is a human construct, and therefore open to deconstruction and re-invention. As Andreotti (2021) and Hine (2024) show, this process is already underway; while Graeber and Wengrow (2021) remind us that humans have always experimented with different forms of social organisation. What holds us back now is not inevitability but a lack of civic imagination. Thus, alongside adapting to unavoidable change, we must seize the indeterminate space to shape the mouldable factors; pushing back against catastrophic certainties by working backwards from imagined futures, not as rigid utopias but as star-like constellations guiding our course (a metaphor borrowed from imagineers such as New Constellations). 

This requires ‘forging abilities’ that include disrupting entrenched cultural constructs -such as the inevitability of centralised control of food, water, and energy; human dominance over nature; or the myth of endless growth. They involve imagining and negotiating alternatives, and developing the practical skills to build new systems on the ground. As Andreotti describes, this also means regaining “exiled capacities” and activating “adjacent possibilities”: drawing on Indigenous knowledges, practices, and ways of being that modernity has obscured or dismissed. There is no shortage of people, ideas, and models pointing to better alternatives: realistic, and often far more life-affirming than today’s realities. 

Ultimately, the river of science (accuracy and prediction) and the river of imagination (possibility) converge into one larger flow: the future as it manifests, accompanied by the adaptive and forging skills needed to enact and navigate it. The confluence is delicate. The more we grow the stream of possibility, the more we can counter the catastrophic certainties flowing from the other side. Yet imagination untethered from facts and realities, becomes naive and idle. 

Joanna Macy captures this balance: “We must prepare ourselves for the end (of all things), whilst still fighting for a new beginning -all the while both loving and honoring what we are losing” (Boyd, 2023:199). We must step into the future knowing some efforts will be fruitless, because many catastrophic impacts are already certain, while still acting as if other futures remain possible -because the universe is a complex, mysterious entity in which everything is always becoming. 

Acceptance 

This takes us to a third set of abilities: acceptance skills. The capacities that allow us to carry on in, and despite, extremely challenging times. While some realities can be adapted to or transformed, others must simply be borne. As Andrew Boyd reminds us in his book ‘I want a better catastrophe’, these skills include caring for one another, offering compassion in moments of despair, holding fast to the values that make us human, and seeking deeper sources of meaning and well-being. Psychologists such as Viktor Frankl have shown that meaning and resilience often emerge through music, art, love, humour, awe, beauty, play, and a felt sense of belonging -to each other, to the more-than-human world, to Gaia, to the universe itself. 

Boyd points to The Serenity Prayer as a guide to open the heart to climate suffering: 

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 
the courage to change the things I can, 
and the wisdom to know the difference. 

Based on the 2 tributaries as described above, we might add a line for our times: 

Grant me the skills to prepare for the reality of what is, 
and the imagination to conceive the impossible and reach for what could be. 

This adaptation sits at the heart of BMC’s climate pedagogy; it guides the curriculum and offers a way to distinguish between timescales. Adaptation works in the short and mid-term -creating bearable futures for ourselves, our peers, and our (grand)children. But, acknowledging that it might be too late for that, imagination stretches toward the long-term, disrupting cultural narratives now and seeding alternatives that may only take root generations hence, in futures we may never see. 

And with that, perhaps the most important -and challenging- skill I hope to teach my students, is learning to act not in service of ourselves or our immediate kin, but in service of life itself. This shift lightens the hopeless burden of scrambling to secure short-term comfort, and instead expands our focus to the needs of the wider ecology and cycles that we are part of; sensing into and tending to all life, both in the present and the far future. It is like placing the first stone of a cathedral that may take centuries to complete, relinquishing ownership of the final design, yet laying it anyway while weaving the stories that will carry it into the future. Or planting a walnut tree whose fruit we will never taste, trusting that the world is better for its presence, and that someone -human or more-than-human- will one day be nourished by it.