ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that storytelling to teach sustainability needs to consider time as a two-way continuum rather than as an inexorable conveyor belt to the future. While much sustainability literature and popular media stories on sustainability themes tend to focus on the present and the future, much can be learned from studying dramatised past experiences with climate change, migration, drought, and other environmental and social challenges to learn how communities of the time dealt with them, whether poorly or well. The chapter recommends that courses in sustainability should include relevant historical fiction in their required reading lists and provide for a range of classroom tasks and independent assignments that tackle the sustainability issues contained in stories set in the past. It illustrates how, among all literary genres, historical fiction has a particularly useful contribution to make to the teaching of sustainability using a transformative pedagogical and learning style.
