With respect to institutional education, an assumed line of separation between ‘the masses’ and ‘the scholars’ seems to have persisted for long in popular perception, which was drawn solely on the basis of the levels of formal education that a person attains. Although one’s mastery of reductionist disciplines of knowledge may have imparted some form of legitimacy to such a system of classification; the present age, which is going to be characterized by the emergence of ‘the grand crisis of sustainability’ warrants a fresh look into the appropriacy of such a perception. It is the case for two reasons:

1. The intellectual root of ‘the crisis of sustainability’: The advancement of knowledge in segregated academic disciplines through the exercise of the reductionist mode of inquiry gives rise to an unintended seepage along the interstitial spaces of the artificial borders of these disciplines, which mount to represent the unintended consequences of the creation of artifacts that, although being meant to improve the quality of life, have unwittingly facilitated the emergence of the crisis of sustainability.

2. The scholarship of sustainability presenting an opportunity for the creation of mass ownership of ‘sustainability thinking’: The wider, non-reductionist yet robust intellectual lens that characterizes the scholarship of sustainability presents an opportunity for the creation of mass ownership of ‘sustainability thinking’, which could, in turn, empower society taking part at the level of the creation of knowledge aimed at solving the problems of unsustainability while undertaking relevant actions, at the same time, to drive positive, collective change.

In this connection, a ‘book project’ titled ‘Thinking in sustainability’ is currently in progress.