Record: 1
Title: Reconceptualizing environmental education: Five possibilities.
Author(s): Corcoran, Peter B.
Sievers, Eric
Source: Journal of Environmental Education; Summer94, Vol. 25 Issue 4, p4, 5p
Document Type: Article
Subject(s): ENVIRONMENTAL education
ECOLOGY -- Philosophy
CONSERVATION biology
Abstract: Describes several emerging philosophies including deep ecology and examine their potential contribution to environmental education. Fundamental compatibility between conservation biology and environmental education; Effects of bioregionalism to environmental education; Characteristics of effective environmental education; Understanding the concept of ecofeminism that transcend the parent ideologies of environmentalism and feminism; Conclusions.
Full Text Word Count: 3523
ISSN: 00958964
Accession Number: 9708122317
Persistent Link to this Article: http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=9708122317&db=afh
Cut and Paste: <A href="http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=9708122317&db=afh">Reconceptualizing environmental education: Five possibilities.</A>
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Section: VIEWPOINT
RECONCEPTUALIZING ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION: FIVE POSSIBILITIES
Contents
Deep Ecology
Conservation Biology
Bioregionalism
Ecofeminism
Socially Critical Analysis
Conclusion
REFERENCES
The chilling rain fell heavily in Crum Creek Meadow, where our class gathered; however, each time John Seed asked, no one wanted to move inside. We began with exercises designed to bring us closer to each other, to marvel at the capacities latent in each of us. Rolling and slithering on the ground, we acted out the wondrous evolutionary journey life has taken in the past few billion years. Then we each took a moment to speak for the suffering, love, and place of a particular creature in this Council of All Beings. The mingling of teardrops with raindrops was especially cathartic as we grieved for the loss of life on our planet. The rain brought a special magic to this session of Education 65: Environmental Education at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Thomas Berry has written, "There must be a mystique of the rain if we are to restore the purity of the rainfall" (1988,p. 21). This intense and moving class provided an opportunity to explore and overcome the frustration of powerlessness that often accompanies environmental concern and to imagine and implement strategies for action to restore the purity of the rainfall.
In this article we describe several emerging philosophies, including deep ecology, which inspired the Council of All Beings, and examine their potential contribution to environmental education. We define, critically analyze, and illustrate each theory with examples from our struggle to apply them at Swarthmore. The course's aim was to explore the philosophical and methodological power of environmental education to solve problems, both environmental and educational. We embedded these philosophies in our course work because of the hopeful possibilities they offered us.
We believe that North American environmental education has not embraced several philosophical perspectives that have enormous potential for strengthening theory and improving practice: deep ecology, conservation biology, bioregionalism, ecofeminism, and socially critical analysis. Our position is not simply that these ideas are better or more interesting but that, as philosophies, they offer hope of guiding environmental education in appropriate new directions. The field needs new intellectual, emotional, and spiritual energy to keep pace with the devastating urgency of environmental problems. Environmental education's task has never been more demanding; it is essential for us to reach new audiences, to broaden the definition of who is an environmental educator, and to create methods more powerful in their ability to effect change. Our hope is that environmental educators will explore these ideas and move consideration of their importance forward.
Deep Ecology
Deep ecology promotes a biocentric approach to life, placing all life at the center of meaning. It strives to view humans as integral parts of all creation but not ontologically more valuable than other life forms. This belief is developed in Christopher Manes's Green Rage (1990):
But in the vast web of life there is no first or second, higher or lower, superior and inferior. All life has made the same journey of organic evolution. Over billions of years, and those that survive, whether worm or human, are equal), if differently, evolved. Survival is the only index of development in evolutionary theory, not brain size or consciousness, so that every one of the millions of species that dwell on this planet is as evolved as Homo Sapiens. (p. 161)
Coined by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in 1973 in a paper entitled "The Shallow and the Deep: Long-Range Ecology Movements," this philosophy recognizes all natural processes as inherently and ineluctably valuable. Many authors, including U.S. Vice President Al Gore in Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (1992) have portrayed deep ecology as antihuman. In our opinion, deep ecology is no more antihuman than the Buddhist influence central to its development; it would be more appropriate to say that it does not cater to the conventional Western idea of a privileged humanity with a birthright of dominion. Because many human activities destroy life and devastate natural systems, deep ecology criticizes human society--at times, in the spirit of John Muir, "taking the side of the bears."
A number of deep ecologists engage in civil disobedience to protect the biological integrity of the earth. We believe that such actions can play a profound educational role. Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings (Seed et al., 1988) examines how personal action can broaden one's understanding of environmental issues, even clarifying one's participation in society as an emerging vehicle for affirmative change. A further exploration of political action as environmental education is found in Deep Ecology, by Bill Devall and George Sessions (1985).
We convened our Council of All Beings in the third week of environmental education class at Swarthmore and were rewarded with a deep, uniting, and forceful experience that matured into an open, trusting, and energized group dynamic lasting the rest of the semester. Students repeatedly pointed to emotional and conceptual breakthroughs, facilitated by their experiences, as integral to their emerging understandings of the environmental crisis and the promise and potential of environmental education.
Deep ecology also provides a rich counterpoint to the modern sense of place and epistemology. From the student's perspective, it highlights the difference between observing nature as a detached spectator and interacting as part of nature's dynamic community. In addition, deep ecology provides an important bridge to modern biological thought. It weaves present scientific theories of evolutionary biology and ecological relationships into a meaningful and engaging cosmology.
Instead of refuting scientific knowledge, deep ecology confronts the mechanistic scientific paradigm that allows life's annihilation concurrent to and often as a corollary of its exploration. In this endeavor, and through recognizing the beauty of unfolding a comprehensive Earth story, deep ecology aligns itself to currents of conservation biology.
Conservation Biology
Field biologists, particularly those working in areas of high rates of extinction exacerbated by anthropogenic activity, began to refer to themselves in the 1970s as conservation biologists. Their desire to arrest destructive activity, preserve biological diversity, and develop a responsible and effective approach to biotic conservation gave rise to this new field. Conservation biology, in much the same fashion as environmental education, has long been identifiable in practice, whereas the term itself has not come into use until recently. Several international conferences on conservation biology, some outstanding texts, and the founding of the Society for Conservation Biology and its attendant excellent publications cemented the presence of conservation biology in the 1980s and encouraged an energetic dialogue in the field. Moreover, the field's wide-ranging search for solutions has extended to areas traditionally in the domain of the social sciences. All this and the increasing urgency of the ecological crisis have brought conservation biology into a prominent, promising, and influential scientific position in the nineties.
From the standpoint of an environmental educator, conservation biology is particularly remarkable for its
rapid growth;
eloquence, energy, and implications;
discussion of the relevance of political and social spheres to the development of successful conservation strategies;
discussion of the relevance of personal feelings on the part of conservation biologists; and
discussion of the importance of environmental education.
There is a fundamental compatibility between conservation biology and environmental education. Conservation biologists have embraced a notion uncomfortable to the scientific community since Francis Bacon's time, namely, the explicit statement of a value judgment--a criticism of human activities on specific environments. There is an admission of desire for the modification of these activities because of the intrinsic value of biological diversity. Many conservation biologists see education's integral role in this process and follow the lead of Aldo Leopold, one of conservation biology's patron saints, in consistently advocating the need for more and better conservator education. Michael Soule commented:
Dealing with emotionally and ethically complex material often requires courage. It is natural to back away from "nonscientific" or "messy" matters, leaving such issues to journalists, ethics committees, popularists, and "nature lovers." For example, there are probably conservation biologists who would be reluctant to lecture their students on how to love nature.... This is rubbish. Everyone knows that ardor and enthusiasm are inspiring, and that love of subject matter is infectious. (1986,p. 5)
Students of our environmental education class organized a symposium entitled "Conservation Biology and Neotropical Migratory Songbird Preservation," and we were able to see the broad possibilities for environmental education in a closer connection to conservation biology.
Conservation biology has tremendous potential to inform the practice and v vocabulary of environmental education. Conservation biology endeavors to reveal ecology as an indispensable story. Environmental educators can learn and tell the stories of neotropical butterfly migrations, bat life history, songbird brood parasitism, and logging's effects on forest health, not as dessicated scientific facts but as components of the vibrant rush of the real earth story.
Conservation biology also offers environmental educators a palpable and solid basis for expressing the interrelatedness of the natural world. Many conservation biologists are developing a macroscopic scientific view of nature. They not only are examining how ecosystems function and how each organism or element fits into the mosaic of life, but they also are acknowledging the social and economic contexts of this information. Because of conservation biology's interest in and affirmation of environmental education, closer ties between environmental educators and conservation biologists should be forged. We hope that environmental educators will initiate these contacts.
Bioregionalism
Bioregionalist thinking draws attention to immediate physical and cultural environments, to the riches and limitations of any given place. It guides us to acknowledge and live by the capacities of natural systems of which we are a part. In a section of Home! A Bioregional Reader entitled "What is Bioregionalism?" the editors explained:
Bioregionalism calls for human society to be more closely related to nature (hence, bio), and to be more conscious of its locale, or region, of life-place (therefore, region). For humans who exhibit the most extreme alienation from nature imaginable, and who--in North America especially--are uniquely unattached to particular places, bioregionalism is essentially a recognition that, today, we flounder without an adequate overall philosophy of life to guide our action toward a sane alternative. It is a proposal to ground human cultures within natural systems, to get to know one's place intimately in order to fit human communities to the Earth, not distort the Earth to our demands. (Andruss, et al., 1990, p. 2)
Regrasping interdependence and reinvolving the spirit of reverence for place creates conditions in which education can look back to cultures that lived in harmony with places in the past, and can look forward to the hopeful possibility that we will learn to live, as we must, in harmony within the natural systems upon which we depend. Any discussion of North American bioregionalism must credit Native Americans as inspiration for living fully and well within the limits of a place. Correspondingly, any bioregional education would be greatly informed by contemporary views of the Native Americans of any particular bioregion.
Much in the tradition of nature study and environmental education confirms the ties of the individual and the community to place. The study of natural history and nature appreciation in the spirit of Rachel Carson creates the sense of place (and "sense of wonder") necessary to the connectedness that underscores a bioregional perspective. Environmental studies of the natural and human-made systems of which students are a part provide essential knowledge and understanding of that place. Bioregionalism invites us to go further. Gary Snyder wrote:
Bioregional awareness touches us in specific ways. It is not enough to just "love nature" or to want to "be in harmony with Gaia." Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place, and it must be grounded in information and experience. (Andruss et al., 1990, p. 18)
Bioregionalism brings to environmental education a profound respect for place, respect for the community in that place, understanding of interdependence, and help in rejecting anthropocentric and atomistic education that alienates us from our environment and from each other. In an insightful afterword to Elements of a Post-Liberal Education entitled "Implications of Bioregionalism for a Radical Theory of Education," Bowers captured the significance of bioregionalism for education:
. . . modern interpretations of alienation involve foregrounding the individual by putting out of focus the background (place or context). For the bioregionalist both are integral to each other.
Yet there is more to the bioregionalist position that has direct implications for thinking about the purpose of education, as well as for rethinking certain prejudices that have long held a privileged position in educational circles. A knowledge of place and a concern with rootedness is not the expression of a nostalgic desire to return to the simplicity of a more primitive past. The bioregionalists are really concerned with the problem of empowerment. (1987,pp. 163-164)
Swarthmore environmental education students initiated a bioregionally inspired curriculum at Woodrock, an at-risk youth agency in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. Looking at the systems underlying neighborhood life, they had students investigate the source of their drinking water in the heavily polluted Schuylkill River, the destination of their toilet water, and the origins of their Snickers bars. In so doing they vivified that which alienated them; they became more aware by linking their actual connections with the dynamic cycles of the earth and re-imagined their place in this context.