Land-Based Environmental Education as a Climate Change Resilience: A Learning Experience from a Cross-Cultural Community Garden

Land-based learning is an integral part of environmental education, particularly for cross-cultural climate change resilience. It typically uses a cross-cultural and environmentally focused approach to education by recognizing the deep physical, mental, and spiritual connection to the land. Land-based environmental education provides the opportunity to learn that each culture is unique, and it can build community connectedness and revitalize cross-cultural knowledge, languages, and practices. This chapter focuses on how land-based environmental learning is useful for developing cross-cultural community-led climate change resilience, particularly for children and youth. Focusing on a relational approach in a cross-cultural community garden setting, the authors wanted to learn from each other how their land-based environmental education had become an opportunity to build community-led climate change resilience, celebrating different cultures, nations, ages, knowledge systems, and practices. To achieve their goal, they first situated themselves as to whom they were as researchers, where they came from, for whom they were doing this research, and how they were responsible for the land on which they lived and the people they lived with. Their positionality helped them understand cross-cultural land-based environmental education as an inter-cultural and intergenerational space to overcome climate change challenges and celebrate successes as resilience.