Liam Phelan is a senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He has a long-standing engagement at the nexus of climate change, finance, human rights, and ecological sustainability and, before joining the academy, worked with civil society organizations in advocacy roles. His primary research interest is sustainability and how to achieve it. Recently, he has been focusing on governance of the Earth system as a complex adaptive system—comprising human-social and ecological elements— and its key characteristics, including thresholds, nonlinear change, and capacity for surprise. In particular, he examines the relationship between the Earth system and the global economy as a subsystem of the Earth system, and ways towards bringing the global economy into alignment with the Earth system. He engages in critical research and in his teaching aims to equip and encourage students to participate consciously, actively, and effectively in wider society as highly functioning citizens. Phelan is particularly interested in connections between education, social justice, and sustainability.