In the Company of the Unknown: Cultivating Curiosity for Ecological Renewal

Abstract

This article argues that environmental education must move beyond knowledge transmission to become a transformative, psychological, and relational practice. Rooted in the One Health framework, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of human, animal, and ecological well-being, this article positions curiosity as a central catalyst for ecological and psychological integration. While this article specifically engages with the One Health framework, the same integrative principles apply equally to the closely related Planetary Health perspective, emphasizing interconnected human, ecological, and planetary well-being. Drawing from Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, ecopsychology, and educational theory, it redefines curiosity as a symbolic, ethical, and affective mode of engagement with the Other, both within the psyche and in the more-than-human world. Through boredom, dialogue, narrative, and embodied practices, curiosity creates space for inner movement, narrative reconfiguration, and a relational mode of knowing that can confront ecological crises with imagination, patience, and integrity. This article offers pedagogical strategies to cultivate this deeper form of curiosity as a foundation for lifelong ecological engagement.

1. Introduction

Environmental crises today demand more than scientific knowledge and policy solutions—they require a fundamental transformation in how we relate to the world, to ourselves, and to the Other. Climate change, biodiversity collapse, and systemic degradation of ecosystems are not merely ecological problems; they are expressions of deeper psychological, cultural, and narrative disjunctions [1,2]. As such, environmental education must not only inform—it must reimagine, re-narrate, and reintegrate our place in the world.

This paper proposes that curiosity, understood not just as a cognitive trait but as a philosophical, ethical, and psychological orientation—is central to this transformation. When environmental education fosters curiosity, it creates the conditions for engaging with the unfamiliar, rewriting entrenched narratives, and opening to the possibility of the unknown [3,4]. Drawing on insights from Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, as well as philosophy, educational theory, and cultural criticism, we explore how curiosity functions as a gateway to cognitive flexibility, symbolic imagination, and the transcendental function that mediates inner and outer worlds [5,6].

While curiosity is increasingly recognized as essential to environmental education, prior research has predominantly explored its cognitive and motivational dimensions, emphasizing curiosity’s role in enhancing ecological knowledge acquisition and pro-environmental behavior [7,8]. However, this literature typically underexplores curiosity as a deeply psychological, ethical, and symbolic practice. The originality of this paper lies precisely in filling this gap: it repositions curiosity as an integrative and transformative psychological practice grounded in Jungian, post-Jungian, and ecopsychological frameworks, connecting inner psychological transformation with ecological consciousness and action.

Curiosity, in this view, becomes a motor of individuation and a bridge between the known and the not-yet-known. It allows us to question the unconscious scripts that shape ecological apathy, denial, and disconnection, and to imagine new forms of participation in a more-than-human world [9,10]. This requires more than the transmission of facts; it calls for pedagogical environments that make space for slowness, for boredom, and for imagination—for the inner movement that precedes insight [11,12]. In a culture saturated with information and efficiency, creating a genuine space for curiosity demands patience, motivation, and a willingness to dwell in ambiguity.

We argue that the One Health framework, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health, can serve as fertile ground for this reorientation—but only if it integrates the psychological dimensions of learning, particularly those that cultivate creativity, symbolic thinking, and relational ethics [13,14]. In what follows, we explore curiosity as a force that invites learners to think beyond instrumental logic and to engage with the world not as a set of problems to solve, but as a living field of relationships to inhabit, imagine, and care for.

In addition, the emerging Planetary Health framework, which explicitly addresses global-scale environmental changes and their impacts on human health and well-being, complements and expands the One Health perspective [15]. Planetary Health emphasizes planetary boundaries, ecological tipping points, and the urgent ethical and ecological necessity of maintaining the earth’s systems within safe operating limits [16]. Integrating Planetary Health into environmental education enriches pedagogical strategies by situating curiosity within a global, systemic context, highlighting the interconnectedness of ecological crises and human health.

Historically, the distinctions between One Health and Planetary Health reflect nuances in emphasis rather than fundamental philosophical differences. Both frameworks arise from systems thinking and share an underlying ethos of interconnectedness and interdependence. Acknowledging this historical context emphasizes that the boundaries separating these approaches are often pragmatic rather than conceptual, thus underscoring the importance of integrating psychological, ecological, and relational insights into unified environmental education practices.

This paper specifically employs the One Health framework due to its explicit emphasis on the intersection of psychological, ecological, and relational dimensions. However, the principles discussed throughout this paper inherently align with and are equally applicable to Planetary Health, acknowledging that both frameworks share historical roots in systemic and integrative thinking.

2. The One Health Approach and Psychological Dimensions of Environmental Education

The One Health framework—originally developed to emphasize the interdependence of human, animal, and environmental health—offers a valuable structural model for understanding ecological complexity [17]. Yet, its potential remains underrealized if it is confined to epidemiological and biomedical concerns. To meet the psychological and cultural challenges of environmental crises, One Health must expand its scope to include inner transformation and symbolic integration [18].

This means addressing the way people perceive, relate to, and imagine ecological realities—not just how they analyze or manage them. Environmental education often presupposes that increased knowledge will naturally lead to behavioral change. However, psychological research suggests otherwise. Cognitive rigidity, emotional overwhelm, and self-identity-based resistance continue to obstruct engagement with ecological concerns, even among well-informed individuals [19,20]. These barriers are not deficits in information but expressions of deeper narrative, emotional, and symbolic disjunctions—fissures in the way individuals and societies understand themselves in relation to nature.

Here, Jungian and post-Jungian psychology offer a crucial contribution. Rather than focusing solely on external behaviors, they ask how unconscious patterns, personal myths, and collective imaginations shape our responses to environmental crisis [5,21,22,23]. Curiosity becomes the antidote to the closed circuit of these habitual scripts, providing a moment of pause—an opening—for reconfiguring our inner narratives and reactivating the transcendental function: the psychological mechanism that mediates between opposites and makes transformation possible [21]. When curiosity is invited into environmental education, learners are no longer asked simply to assimilate new facts; they are challenged to re-symbolize their place in the world, to engage with the unknown, and to cultivate a more flexible and relational form of knowing [24].

From this perspective, One Health education must become not only interdisciplinary but also intrasubjective; that is, it must attend to the inner movements of the learner, speaking to the slow gestation of insight, the resistance to change, the desire for coherence, and the longing for connection [12,25]. This requires pedagogical strategies that allow curiosity to emerge in its full psychological complexity, not as idle inquisitiveness, but as a force that disrupts, reorients, and ultimately transforms.

Rather than suppressing discomfort, effective One Health education embraces it as a necessary threshold. The experience of boredom, for example—so often pathologized or avoided—can serve as fertile ground for creative insight when it is framed not as emptiness but as potential [26,27]. Similarly, emotional resistance, including denial and eco-anxiety, must not be bypassed but integrated through reflection and symbolic engagement [1,20]. These psychological movements require time, patience, and carefully designed spaces where learners feel free to explore what they do not yet understand.

Only by integrating these psychological dimensions—by making room for creativity, narrative reconfiguration, and ethical imagination—can One Health truly fulfill its transformative promise. It is not enough to understand the interconnectedness of living systems; we must also learn to feel, imagine, and participate in that interconnectedness. Curiosity is the door through which such participation begins.

This broader viewpoint further supports cultivating the psychological resilience and transformative learning necessary for navigating complexity and uncertainty in educational contexts.

3. Curiosity as a Transformative Tool in Environmental Education

Curiosity is often regarded as the engine of scientific discovery and intellectual progress. Yet, in the context of environmental education, curiosity plays a far more profound role. It acts not merely as a means of acquiring knowledge but has a transformative function—a psychological, ethical, and imaginative force that enables learners to engage with complexity, rewrite inherited narratives, and open themselves to the unfamiliar [28]. In a time of ecological collapse and psychological fragmentation, curiosity becomes a radical practice of reorientation.

Philosophically, curiosity invites us to confront limits—of thought, identity, and perception—and to reach beyond them. It is an expression of openness toward the Other: toward that which resists assimilation, control, or certainty [29]. In this way, curiosity offers a counterpoint to the instrumental logic that often governs environmental discourse. Where policy and science may seek solutions, curiosity asks questions. Where efficiency demands clarity, curiosity tolerates ambiguity. It is this willingness to dwell in uncertainty that makes curiosity essential for ecological and psychological renewal [22,30].

From a post-Jungian perspective, curiosity initiates the symbolic process of individuation. It is the drive that leads us to engage the unknown within and without, dissolving rigid ego structures and inviting encounters with the unconscious [5]. Curiosity carries the potential to activate the transcendental function, the inner capacity to reconcile opposites and allow new attitudes to emerge [5,31]. In environmental education, this means helping learners hold together conflicting feelings—hope and despair, control and surrender, and knowledge and mystery—and find meaning not in resolution, but in the deepening of relationships [32,33].

Crucially, curiosity also disrupts habitual cognitive scripts. Contemporary psychological research on memory and learning reveals that our minds tend to organize experiences into predictable “event scripts” that guide interpretation and behavior [34]. These scripts, often formed in early life or shaped by dominant cultural narratives, can reinforce anthropocentrism, climate apathy, or denial [20]. Curiosity interrupts these patterns. It introduces unpredictability and invites the learner to imagine alternative possibilities, thus making transformation possible at both the personal and collective levels.

Curiosity is not automatic. In educational settings, it must be cultivated—especially in a culture where attention is fragmented, boredom is pathologized, and uncertainty is feared [35,36]. Paradoxically, boredom itself can serve as a fertile ground for the emergence of curiosity. When the mind is allowed to drift, when stimuli are reduced, and goals are momentarily suspended, the psyche begins to wander, to question, and to imagine. These transitional spaces are essential for fostering deep learning, yet they are often excluded from fast-paced, outcome-driven pedagogies [2,37].

Motivation, too, plays a key role. Unlike externally imposed incentives, curiosity arises from within—it is self-directed, affectively charged, and sustained by a sense of meaning. Pedagogical environments that support autonomy, emotional resonance, and imaginative freedom are more likely to awaken this form of intrinsic motivation [9,36]. Learners must feel invited, not compelled, to explore. They must be given permission to wonder, to linger, and to not know.

Ultimately, curiosity in environmental education is not about accumulating data or mastering systems. It is about cultivating a different kind of relationship: with knowledge, with nature, with the Self, and with the Other. It asks educators and learners alike to shift from certainty to encounter, from control to participation, and from abstraction to lived experience. It is, at its core, a way of being-with the world—one that holds space for imagination, patience, contradiction, and transformation [22,30,35].

4. Jungian, Post-Jungian, and Ecopsychological Perspectives on Self, Other, and Environmental Engagement

Environmental collapse is not only a material phenomenon but also a psychological one. The failure to respond meaningfully to ecological crises reveals a deeper dissociation—an alienation from the natural world and from parts of the psyche that remain unconscious, denied, or projected outward. Within a Jungian framework, this fragmentation can be understood through the concept of the Shadow: the unacknowledged dimensions of the Self that, when unintegrated, are cast onto the Other—whether human, animal, or planetary [5]. In the context of environmental education, the ecological crisis reflects a collective shadow projection wherein nature becomes a screen for human fears, anxieties, and disavowed responsibility.

Individuation—the central process of psychic integration in Jungian psychology—requires a willingness to engage with these disowned aspects, to bring unconscious content into awareness, and to tolerate contradiction and transformation. In this light, ecological awareness is not simply a cognitive act but a symbolic and moral journey. To see nature as part of oneself demands not only knowledge, but also curiosity—a sustained openness to what has been repressed, ignored, or feared [31]. This is where curiosity becomes a psychological catalyst. It initiates the process of shadow integration, inviting the learner to move toward discomfort, ambiguity, and the Other.

Post-Jungian thinkers extend this insight by examining the societal, political, and symbolic dimensions of this alienation. Andrew Samuels [32] introduces the notion of the political psyche, arguing that the environmental crisis stems from a collective inability to integrate otherness at all levels. Projection onto environmentalists, the denial of ecological limits, and fantasies of technological mastery all signal a refusal to accept interdependence and vulnerability. Environmental education that neglects the unconscious dimensions of these resistances remains ineffective, no matter how factual or urgent its content may be.

Lucy Huskinson [33] deepens the discussion by asserting that the Self is inherently Other to the ego. From this standpoint, engaging with nature is also a form of engaging with the psyche’s own strangeness. For her, the built environment—our cities, technologies, and institutions—often reflects the psyche’s inner state. Fragmented and disconnected landscapes mirror psychological dissociation, while integrated, symbolically rich environments foster psychological wholeness. A post-Jungian approach to ecological learning would thus include esthetic, symbolic, and mythopoetic elements—not as decoration, but as essential components of psychological integration and ecological imagination.

Ecopsychology draws from and expands these ideas by emphasizing the ontological connection between psyche and nature. James Hillman [22] critiques the modern psyche’s loss of the anima mundi, or world soul—the symbolic, ensouled vision of the earth that once permeated myth, religion, and art. He argues that this loss is not only an ecological failure but a psychological wound. To restore our relationship with the environment, we must reanimate the world imaginatively, allowing nature to speak through images, stories, and dreams.

Theodore Roszak [37] furthers this by proposing the concept of the ecological unconscious—the deep strata of the psyche that remain attuned to the rhythms and needs of the natural world. For Roszak, ecological alienation leads to neurosis because the psyche cannot thrive when cut off from its earthly roots. Environmental education that bypasses this inner connection risks becoming another layer of abstraction. What is needed instead is a pedagogical process that reconnects learners to the symbolic and emotional life of nature through curiosity, narrative, and embodied experience.

These insights converge on a crucial point: transformation does not occur through information alone. It happens when learners encounter the Other—within and without—and are willing to remain present with the discomfort, ambiguity, and wonder that such encounters provoke. Curiosity, in this context, is not about mastery but relationship. It is the inner movement that leads us to reimagine what it means to live ethically and responsively in a shared, interdependent world.

To apply these insights pedagogically, educators can turn to methods such as symbolic engagement, active imagination, and storytelling—not only as tools for transmitting knowledge, but as practices that evoke and deepen the learner’s inner response to ecological realities [9]. Such approaches do not resolve the ecological crisis directly, but they cultivate the psychological capacity to face it with integrity, creativity, and a sense of connectedness that endures beyond facts.

5. Curiosity and the Other in One Health Teaching

Curiosity, when approached as a relational and ethical force, becomes central to the task of environmental education. Within the One Health framework—which emphasizes the interconnected health of humans, animals, and ecosystems—curiosity is more than a cognitive tool. It is a practice of reaching toward the Other, a gesture of openness that destabilizes assumptions, invites difference, and reorients the learner toward a more participatory engagement with the living world [28,29].

In a world marked by ecological fragmentation and human exceptionalism, curiosity serves as a psychological bridge to re-establish relationships with what has been marginalized or objectified. Jungian psychology affirms that the Other is not only external but also internal—represented by unconscious contents, the Shadow, or archetypes yet to be integrated [20]. In this context, the encounter with non-human beings, ecosystems, or alternate worldviews mirrors the encounter with unconscious dimensions of the Self. Teaching that fosters curiosity toward the Other becomes a symbolic process of integration, echoing the individuation path of psychic development [31].

Lucy Huskinson’s insight that the Self is “other to the ego” [33] reinforces this point. Curiosity is not simply directed outward, toward facts or phenomena, but inwards, toward unacknowledged potential and contradictions. When educational spaces are structured around dialogue, ambiguity, and openness rather than mastery and control, curiosity can function as a transcendental mediator—an initiator of new syntheses that allow previously incompatible perspectives to coexist in creative tension [22,32].

Eco-phenomenological thinkers have also emphasized this point. David Abram [35] shows that direct, sensory engagement with the more-than-human world dissolves boundaries between observer and observed. Curiosity, in this embodied sense, is not a mode of domination but of receptivity. It requires slowness, attentiveness, and humility—qualities often absent from fast-paced, data-driven educational settings. This relational curiosity moves from the acquisitive mode of “knowing about” to a participatory mode of being-with.

Vinciane Despret [29] highlights this shift in her studies of interspecies communication, showing that curiosity can be mutual—constructed between beings, rather than imposed unilaterally. In One Health teaching, this has profound implications. Rather than treating non-human life as a backdrop or resource, education can become an encounter space where the animal, the plant, or the ecosystem participates in shaping meaning. This dialogical stance also applies to diverse human worldviews, particularly those from Indigenous and non-Western traditions, which emphasize relationality, humility, and coexistence [9].

Curiosity, understood in this way, becomes not only a cognitive state but an ethical stance—a commitment to staying with the unknown rather than resolving it too quickly. It resists premature closure and encourages learners to question the scripts that dictate human superiority, speed, and certainty. This process can be uncomfortable. It often requires effort, patience, and the willingness to sit with ambiguity. However, it also creates space for transformation—not just of knowledge, but of the knower.

For One Health to realize its integrative potential, curiosity must be cultivated as an epistemic and relational practice. This includes pedagogical strategies that make room for the not-yet-known: open questions, contemplative pauses, narrative exploration, and embodied engagement. It also requires an emotional container that can hold uncertainty, frustration, and wonder. Rather than aiming for control, educators can foster an atmosphere of willingness to be affected—where knowledge emerges not through certainty, but through an attentive relationship with the Other.

6. Curiosity as a Relational and Transformative Practice in One Health Education

Curiosity is often celebrated as a cognitive trait, but when understood more deeply—as a relational and transformative mode of being—it becomes foundational to ecological and psychological renewal. Within the One Health framework, curiosity should not be reduced to a tool for acquiring knowledge; rather, it must be cultivated as an ethical, affective, and embodied way of engaging with the unknown. This shift from epistemic accumulation to existential openness has profound implications for how education is structured, experienced, and valued.

In Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, transformation occurs not by mastering the known, but by confronting what is foreign to the ego—what is repressed, rejected, or unconscious [5,31]. Curiosity initiates this movement. It creates the psychic space in which the unfamiliar can be approached, not as a threat to be eliminated, but as a necessary interlocutor in the process of individuation. To cultivate curiosity is to allow the Self to expand—to tolerate ambiguity, difference, and contradiction. Within One Health education, this means making space for psychic and ecological multiplicity: for encounters with other species, other forms of knowledge, and other aspects of ourselves.

Such encounters often demand effort, discomfort, and patience. The unknown rarely reveals itself on demand. As Hillman [22] reminds us, psychological transformation is not linear—it requires lingering, uncertainty, and symbolic thinking. In this regard, boredom, often seen as a failure of attention, may be reinterpreted as a threshold. When no external stimuli direct us, curiosity may arise organically, leading us to reengage the world with a new perception. Paradoxically, then, curiosity requires slowness. In a culture of immediacy and efficiency, creating educational spaces that protect unstructured time is a radical pedagogical act.

Relational curiosity also implies openness to multiple epistemologies. Educational systems that privilege rationalism and linear problem-solving often restrict imagination and reduce complex ecological realities to solvable puzzles. In contrast, a transformative approach to curiosity welcomes Indigenous cosmologies, symbolic practices, and poetic modes of knowing alongside empirical science [29,35,37]. It affirms that knowledge is not always extractive or goal-oriented—it can be co-created, experiential, and affective.

This integrative vision of curiosity aligns with the One Health principle of interdependence. Just as ecosystems are sustained by complex webs of interaction, so too is psychological growth nourished by dialogical encounters. Curiosity becomes the connective tissue—a psychological ecology—linking inner and outer worlds, human and non-human, the Self, and society. When learners are encouraged to remain curious not only about concepts but about their own resistance, their affective responses, and their habitual assumptions, education becomes a site of deep transformation [30].

In this way, curiosity resists the dualism of knower and known. It does not seek domination or closure, but participation. It is not merely a prelude to knowledge, but an attitude toward life—a stance of receptivity that bridges science, imagination, and ethics. Within One Health education, this means honoring the slow, relational, and sometimes chaotic nature of learning. It means valuing questions over answers, presence over performance, and relationship over resolution.

Additionally, incorporating educators’ perspectives is crucial for grounding these theoretical insights in actionable strategies. Educators often express concerns about balancing curriculum demands with transformative educational methods, highlighting the tension between system-level expectations and individual student engagement [38,39]. Addressing educators’ needs for professional development, institutional support, and community engagement can facilitate the meaningful integration of curiosity-based practices, thereby aligning pedagogical ideals more closely with educators’ lived realities.

7. Pedagogical Strategies for Fostering Transformative Curiosity

To cultivate curiosity as a transformative and relational force in environmental education, we must move beyond traditional models that emphasize fact-based instruction and standardized outcomes. Pedagogy, in this expanded sense, becomes the art of creating spaces where not knowing is welcomed, where questions are generative, and where learners can reimagine their relationship to the Self, society, and the more-than-human world.

A key strategy is to protect unstructured time—to allow boredom, slowness, and reflective drift to become part of the learning process. In a culture saturated with stimulation and optimization, boredom may appear counterproductive. Yet, as Hillman [22] and Roszak et al. [37] suggest, these quiet interludes are where the psyche can reorient itself, imagination stirs, and symbolic thinking reawakens. Boredom, when held without judgment, becomes a liminal space—a threshold through which curiosity may reemerge not as distraction, but as meaning-seeking.

Experiential and embodied learning—especially in ecological or natural settings—anchors curiosity in direct perception and lived experience. Fieldwork, sensory exercises, and contemplative walks invite learners to slow down and attune to complexity. This aligns with Abram’s [35] call for a phenomenology of nature: a learning that is relational, participatory, and embedded. Such practices not only reconnect learners with the ecological world but also with their own interior rhythms, fostering patience, presence, and ethical responsiveness.

Dialogical and Socratic inquiry also play a vital role. By emphasizing open-ended questions, dialectical tension, and reflective exploration, these methods activate the transcendental function [5,31]. Rather than resolving contradictions, dialogue contains them, allowing insight to arise organically from the tension between perspectives. In environmental education, this creates a space for learners to explore their inner conflicts regarding ecological engagement without pressure to arrive at predetermined conclusions.

Storytelling and narrative pedagogy offer another powerful pathway. Archetypal and mythic narratives stimulate symbolic imagination and offer frames through which ecological and psychological meaning can be explored. Introducing myths, folktales, and speculative fiction into environmental education allows learners to engage with ecological realities through metaphor and image, activating the deeper layers of the psyche often untouched by data or statistics [22,30]. Narrative immersion also supports identity work, enabling students to reposition themselves within wider ecological and ethical stories.

Artistic expression—through drawing, writing, performance, or ritual—further deepens curiosity as a mode of symbolic exploration. Artistic practice accesses preverbal and unconscious material, allowing learners to process environmental concerns in ways that bypass defensiveness or overload. As Amabile [2] notes, creativity and intrinsic motivation are mutually reinforcing: when learners feel free to express without fear of judgment, their curiosity becomes more resilient and internally driven.

Cross-disciplinary collaboration is another key element of this. Encouraging learners to engage with insights from ecology, depth psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and the arts fosters what Perry [28] calls “epistemic humility”—an openness to other ways of knowing. This dismantles the supremacy of any one discipline and instead mirrors the integrative spirit of One Health. Such pluralism fosters curiosity, not only as an intellectual virtue but as a cultural and relational practice.

Finally, contemplative practices—such as mindfulness, eco-meditation, or deep listening—anchor curiosity in embodied awareness. These practices slow the cognitive process, foster emotional regulation, and attune learners to subtle shifts within and around them. They also help develop the inner stability necessary to engage with ecological uncertainty without becoming overwhelmed [6]. In this way, curiosity becomes not merely a desire for novelty, but a sustained practice of encounter, patience, and ethical witnessing.

Together, these strategies cultivate an ecology of curiosity—one that honors the inner life of the learner, the symbolic life of the world, and their interdependence. Thus, they support a mode of environmental education that is not only intellectually rigorous but psychologically nourishing, ethically engaged, and capable of fostering lifelong transformation.

For instance, Monroe et al. [40] systematically reviewed effective climate change education strategies and identified active, experiential learning, dialog-based interactions, and interdisciplinary community collaborations as crucial. Educational programs employing these strategies have successfully enhanced participants’ psychological engagement, curiosity, and openness to ecological complexity, underscoring the potential of curiosity-driven pedagogies for transformative ecological awareness and action. However, implementing these approaches in real-world educational contexts faces significant practical challenges. Resource limitations, rigid curriculum requirements, standardized assessment pressures, and time constraints frequently impede the integration of reflective, curiosity-driven practices [40,41]. Additionally, institutional barriers, including resistance to interdisciplinary approaches and limited training for educators in psychological or relational pedagogies, further complicate effective implementation [42]. Acknowledging and addressing these structural constraints explicitly through future research and policy discussions is essential to ensuring the feasibility and lasting impact of curiosity-centered education.

8. Conclusions: Curiosity as a Catalyst for Ecological and Psychological Integration

In the context of One Health education, curiosity must be reframed, not as a peripheral learning trait but as a central catalyst for ecological and psychological transformation. When cultivated as a relational, ethical, and imaginative practice, curiosity enables learners to engage with complexity, remain open to ambiguity, and participate meaningfully in a shared planetary future.

Integrating curiosity into pedagogical design supports cognitive flexibility, emotional resilience, and symbolic thinking—capacities essential for confronting ecological uncertainty without paralysis. Through experiential, dialogical, and contemplative strategies, education can foster conditions in which curiosity thrives, not as entertainment, but as a disciplined practice of attention and ethical response.

The shift from transmissive to transformative education aligns with a broader need to reorient how we relate to knowledge, nature, and the unknown. In this reorientation lies the potential for renewal and the development of a more integrated ecological consciousness, rooted not in fear or obligation, but in motivation, creativity, and a willingness to stay present with what is yet to be understood.

As environmental and psychological challenges intensify, fostering curiosity may be among the most sustainable pedagogical commitments we can make—one that prepares individuals and communities to engage not only with the world as it is, but with the world as it could become.

Yet, the path from theoretical aspiration to practical reality is fraught with institutional, resource-based, and systemic challenges. Recognizing and navigating these barriers is essential. Educational institutions must support teachers through targeted professional development, curricular flexibility, and policy reforms that prioritize psychological depth and relational approaches alongside traditional ecological content. Only by bridging this gap between theory and practice can the transformative potential of curiosity-driven education truly flourish, enabling educators and learners alike to effectively respond to ecological and psychological complexities.

While both One Health and planetary health frameworks share foundational principles of interconnectedness and integration, maintaining separate educational strategies may inadvertently reinforce conceptual divides. Recognizing these frameworks as complementary rather than distinct, future educational approaches should strive toward a unified and integrated pedagogical model, transcending artificial distinctions and further enhancing the coherence and effectiveness of ecological and psychological education.