Between Complicity and Integrity : Educators Stories in Tangled Times

What does it look like to live with integrity in the midst of complicity? When the daily tasks of eating, working, and providing for our homes are tangled up with climate change, exploitative working conditions, colonial legacies of stolen land, and more, what do we do? Based on five years of research, this book shares intimate narratives about 12 educators working at the intersection of education, environment, and social change, as they describe their understandings and experiences of integrity and complicity in today’s world. Nora Timmerman argues that these stories collectively teach us how scale matters, to stop being one person, and to act anyway. Integrity comes not from ridding oneself of complicity but from critical learning, community accountability, cultivating interdependence, and strategic experimentation to create new worlds.

"This delightful book, Between Integrity and Complicity, is an environmental educator’s manifesto on how to live well in relation to communities of others. The stories call on us to do more acting (with inevitable missteps) and less worrying. The author skillfully untangles the roots of complicity, integrity and suffering to show us the colourfully varied microcosm of ecological and social renewal, perseverance, and possibility. This book honours listening to the world in all its myriad ways―it is a found treasure."

―Leesa Fawcett, PhD, Environmental and Urban Change, Coordinator of Environmental & Sustainability Education, York University

"This book explores the existential journeys of leading environmental educators and scholars through illuminating portraits and vignettes in a thoughtfully nuanced manner. It is a timely and notable contribution to the literature."

―Greg Lowan-Trudeau, PhD, Associate Professor of Education, University of Calgary

Nora Timmerman, PhD is a teacher/scholar, parent, organizer, gardener, dancer, and desert rat who works as Associate Teaching Professor in Sustainable Communities at Northern Arizona University. She loves queer, liberatory politics and works at the intersection of activism and organizing, ecological justice, and education.