ABSTRACT
The letter materializes how environmental and sustainability education (ESE) operates as a promise of happiness and how this can be reached by doing things: "small gestures are more important than we think," as stated in the email. The activation and responsibilization of the willing ESE student can come in many shapes. Another example is a website where reader can make “climate promises”. Throughout its quite short history, ESE has changed from being a practice based on outspoken norms for the environmentally friendly ways of living in the 1970s, to emphases of a pluralistic approach which aims to make room for different subjectivities. Guilt serves an important technology in the ESE discourse. In ESE, the making of the desirable citizen is embedded in a certain system of feelings, closely connected to a cosmopolitan system of reason, making up what counts as reasonable responses to serious problems.
