The globally great moral challenge: ecocentric democracy, values, morals and meaning.

This response article written from 'outside' the Swedish-Danish contexts of this special issue considers how we might highlight and make additional ecocentric meaning of some of the terms most frequently used in this collection. In the first instance my focus is on 'meaning' but this is expanded to include other terms such as valuing, values, ethics and democracy. The way we value meaning demands elaboration because 'meaning-making' is pedagogically central to the ecological experience of learning, crucial to fulfilling the not always clear aims of environmental and sustainability education and their regional variations (including education for sustainable development), important for their research, and, indeed, underpins the philosophical quest more generally. Thus in this article, I introduce an ecology of the meaning of meaning, meaning levels, valuing and values, as they might inform stronger notions of democracy in critical approaches to learning, education, sustainability and development. This existentially focused introduction to 'meaning' and its 'making' is set against the politics of 'climate change' where political leaders have recently made grand declarations about the globalized moral challenge induced by human-induced climate change. How might pedagogues and researchers imagine the place of meaning and role of value in learning and in an education for sustainable development when the crisis of meaning lies at the intersections of the intensely personal and moral and the globally abstracted political? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]