How holistic science invites us to experience ourselves as part of a living world?
Holistic awareness can be difficult to define, yet it is deeply familiar once experienced. In this episode of Green Minds, host Esther Vallado speaks with Sebastian Burch, educator and holistic science practitioner, about this often-overlooked eco-competence and why it deserves a place of its own within a sustainability competence framework. Their conversation explores how holistic awareness weaves together intuition, emotion, reason, and embodied experience — helping us make sense of the world not as detached observers, but as participants within it.
Sebastian describes holistic awareness as the meeting point between the inner and outer worlds. It is not only about understanding systems or analysing problems, but about cultivating a form of consciousness that perceives meaning, relationships, and stories. Drawing on his studies at Schumacher College, he reflects on how conventional science, while powerful, often reaches its limits when it treats life as mechanical or inert. Holistic awareness, by contrast, reconnects us with an “animate” understanding of the world — one grounded in wisdom rather than data alone.
A powerful personal story illustrates this competence in action. Sebastian shares an experience from his life as a shepherd, accompanying a beloved goat in her final moments. Guided by intuition rather than theory, he acted in a way that brought peace, connection, and meaning to the situation. For him, this moment revealed what holistic awareness truly is: an embodied, relational way of knowing that cannot be measured, yet is unmistakably real.
The episode also explores how holistic awareness relates to existing sustainability competences. Sebastian argues that skills such as systems thinking, problem framing, and futures literacy often emerge from holistic awareness, but do not fully capture it. While these tools rely mainly on rational processes, holistic awareness integrates emotional engagement, values, imagination, and judgment. It allows us to perceive nested “wholes” — from cells to ecosystems to the planet — and to understand ourselves within these living hierarchies.
In reflecting on his roles as educator, translator, land steward, volunteer, and parent, Sebastian explains how holistic awareness helped him release the pressure to unify his life into a single story. Instead, he learned to honour multiple identities and parallel narratives, each meaningful in its own way. This acceptance, he suggests, is itself a form of holistic self-awareness.
From an educational perspective, the conversation highlights the importance of engaging head, hands, and heart. Whether through communal work, classroom activities, or informal moments of play and connection, holistic learning emerges when thinking, feeling, and doing are integrated. Measuring this competence, however, remains a challenge. Rather than outcomes or indicators, Sebastian proposes looking for signs of “spontaneous agency”: people acting authentically, creatively, and responsibly within their communities and places.
The episode closes with a hopeful reflection on ecoliteracy as a response to today’s ecological and social crises. Cultivating holistic awareness, Sebastian argues, helps us move beyond disconnection, superficial narratives, and passive observation. It invites us to re-inhabit Earth as our shared home — both a physical planet and a living story — and to act with care, wisdom, and responsibility toward future generations.
In this podcast you can listen to:
- What holistic awareness means, and why it goes beyond knowledge and rational understanding.
- How intuition, emotion, and embodied experience contribute to sustainability learning.
- Why holistic awareness is distinct from — yet foundational to — competences like systems thinking and futures literacy.
- How educators can engage head, hands, and heart to nurture this competence in learners.
- Why measuring holistic awareness is challenging, and how authenticity, storytelling, and spontaneous agency offer meaningful clues. thinking in students by empowering them to ask questions, make decisions, and explore actively.
We close with a reminder that holistic awareness is not about doing everything or being a “superhero,” but about living meaningful stories in connection with people, place, and planet.
Stay tuned and discover our other podcasts on eco-competences!