Reclaiming a Sacred Cosmology: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the Perennial Philosophy, and Sustainability Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The question posed by the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education volume 11, “where is the place for religion in environmental education?” is rephrased in this essay to become, “where is the place for a religious view of the order of nature in environmental education?” Relying on the writings of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a proponent of the perennial philosophy and an eminent scholar of Islam and comparative religion, I use this paper to explore the notion of a religious order of nature and, in extension, sacred cosmology as an alternative worldview on the pathway toward sustainability. I maintain that environmental education, in particular, and environmental studies, more generally, bear responsibility to re-introduce, on a cultural level and global scale, lost dimensions of a religious-spiritual knowledge of nature. This includes reclaiming environmental ethics embedded in timeless metaphysical, epistemological, and ontological understandings of the cosmos, and validating non-scientific ways of knowing. To ensure true and lasting progress toward sustainability, it seems vital to address the global crisis of unsustainability more seriously as a crisis of worldview, and to strengthen a consequent transformation of perception. Providing alternative world-views which hold promise for sustainability, with environmental education charting the path toward a paradigm shift, is particularly critical in the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, which so far is mostly silent on the deepest dimensions of unsustainability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".