AI and Ecological Humanities: Linking Sustainability, Environment, and AI-Enhanced Learning

Abstract

This paper offers a theoretical and conceptual examination of the emerging convergence between artificial intelligence (AI), the environmental humanities, and sustainability-oriented pedagogy. Positioned at the intersection of ecopedagogy, environmental intelligence theory, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals' education agenda, the paper argues that AI-enhanced learning can either deepen or diminish the ecological and ethical sensibilities that the humanities are uniquely positioned to cultivate, depending on how it is pedagogically framed. Drawing on Freirean and ecopedagogical theory, Leonelli's concept of environmental intelligence, UNESCO's cross-cutting sustainability competencies, and recent empirical case-study evidence on AI in sustainability education, the paper develops an original five-stage conceptual model, the Encounter–Interrogate–Reconnect–Reconstruct–Act (EIRRA) framework, for integrating AI into ecological humanities teaching in ways that preserve critical, place-based, and narrative modes of ecological understanding. The paper also foregrounds a central paradox largely absent from mainstream AI-in-education discourse: that the computational infrastructure underlying generative AI carries a measurable carbon and resource cost, meaning that AI-enhanced sustainability education risks reproducing the very extractive logics it seeks to critique unless this tension is made an explicit object of study. The paper concludes that ecological humanities education in the AI era must move beyond treating AI as a neutral productivity tool and instead treat it as a contested socio-technical and sociology-ecological artifact worthy of sustained humanistic scrutiny.