We know that over the unimaginably long term, millions upon millions of years from now, the planet we call Earth will be as unrecognizable from today as it was hundreds of aeons ago. Humans will probably have ceased to exist as a species long before our planet’s gradual drift away from the sun makes it as cold and barren as Mars. And, many millions of years after that, the frozen barren tomb which was once our home will be consumed in flames and its dust scattered as our super nova sun burns out and collapses.

 

It is perhaps impossible to imagine what life might be like for any distant descendants we may have in even a hundred generations time, but we can and do regularly reflect on the prospects for our own children (though we are generally less good at considering those of children in other parts of the globe). We start this module on education and ecology from a basic premise that there is a global crisis now which threatens the survival of many species including, perhaps, our own in the fairly near future, and certainly over the next few hundred years. The issue of how we regard our own lives, those of our children and grandchildren, and the lives of the many other species with whom we share our planet is, first and foremost a moral one. It is absolutely certain that the upbringing, cultural development and education of our own and future generations will play a large part in determining our responses to this moral question.

 

It is difficult to theorise education and ecology in isolation. The ethical questions we raise in this module will be closely linked with many others with which we must grapple. For instance, given that we live in a world of vast and appalling suffering, where thousands die each day in wretched poverty and hunger, that tens of thousands each day suffer agonising deaths from perfectly treatable medical conditions, and that we rarely regard these people’s lives even for a moment in our busy days (this despite the fact that those whose lives are lost are the aunts and cousins of the man from whom we buy our petrol, or who one cleans our workplace after we’ve gone home), given all that, what hope is there, we might ask, that we can learn to consider the wellbeing of our own great grandchildren yet to be born? Such moral questions will be set in the context of the way in which we conceptualise our place in the world, how we relate to other humans, other species, with nature, with the cosmos. How we ought to respond to the needs of people, internationally or intergenerationally is also, of course, a political and economic matter and we will consider this angle too. First though, it would be useful to have some facts. We begin our own education in this module with Mayer Hillman’s book How We Can Save the Planet, and Mark Lynas’ Six Degrees (2008). We might have reviewed documents from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or read a passage from George Monbiot’s Heat (2006) (which I heartily recommend you read), but Hillman and Lynas will serve us just as well.

 

Hillman refers to the gap between what we know and the action we take in response to this. This is one of the central dilemmas which will come through again and again in this module. The burglar may know that what he does is wrong, he may even feel some remorse, and yet he continues to burgle. Likewise the urban SUV driver may be aware of the environmental damage she causes, and yet she continues to take her children to school in her V8 Range Rover Vogue.

 

 

·   If one were to take human action, for a moment, as not being ‘natural’, consider this quote on the impact of our behaviour: “There is no longer such a thing as a purely natural weather event.” (Hulme, in Hillman, 2004, p.14) What does this say about ‘nature’, the world we live in and largely take for granted?

 

·   On the myths surrounding our fossil-fuel reserves: “The stone age came to an end not because we had a lack of stones and an oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil.” (Yamani, in Hillman, p.18)

 

·   “The consequences of allowing the higher emission scenarios to become reality are global, irreversible and catastrophic. How can we allow this to happen given that we know what needs to be done? Our lack of action or sense of urgency is criminal and immoral and will, without doubt, be justifiably condemned by future generations.” (Hillman, 2004, p.20)

 

Watch Mayer Hillman present his case here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6155678722059303988

 

If Hillman’s prognosis were not gloomy enough, consider this from a recent book by Michael Klare (2008). According to Klare, the US Department of Energy put renewable fuels, along with ‘traditional’ sources of energy such as firewood and cowdung at just 7.7% of global energy use. Fossil fuels supply 86: and nuclear, 6%. And the Department of Energy project that fossil fuels will still constitute the same proportion of overall energy use in 2030. If they are right, global emissions of carbon dioxide will increase by 59% over the coming quarter century. The implications of the official predications of the US government are stark and simple: the very worst effects of global warming cannot be averted. 

 

In the face of bleak prospects, Mark Lynas (2008) manages to remain slightly more hopeful that we can still avert the worst climate catastrophe. He spells out the degree by degree effects of the inevitable and the still avoidable global warming. No mater what we do, we cannot now avoid a one degree rise in global temperature, meaning that “the Alpine glaciers, the Nebraskan grazing lands and the resplendent coral reefs are already condemned by events which lie in the past” (Lynas, 2008, p.246). However, we do have a brief period wherein it might still be possible to hold levels of global warming within the one to two degree range, if our behaviour changes radically within the next decade. Future carbon emissions are not possible to predict because they depend upon the decisions made by each one of us, and of the hundreds of millions like us many times every day.

 

Scientists find biological feedback mechanisms very hard to calculate, but as Lynas makes plain, many more of these effects would come into play above the two degree tipping point when the collapse of the Amazon rain forest would reduce carbon absorption to such a point that another 1% degree rise would be inevitable, causing the release of carbon and methane from the thawing Siberian permafrost, driving up more warming and possibly pushing us towards the worst case – a rise in global temperatures of six degrees or more. (Lynas, 2008, p.252) To understand what this would mean, one has to look at comparable ‘greenhouse events’ from the past, such as that which marked the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago, a cataclysm of unimaginable proportions which killed off 95% of all species on the planet, and left just one large land vertebrate. It took 50 million years before pre-extinction levels of biodiversity returned: 20 times the span on humans’ habitation of the Earth. The massive spike in global temperatures which caused this event took a staggeringly short 10,000 to occur. The worst estimates of manmade global warming suggest we could manage such a rise in 100 years. The so called Anthropocene Mass Extinction has already begun, with many species which were plentiful a hundred years ago now hanging on by a thread. Lynas offers the example of our nearest cousins the chimpanzees, gorillas and orang utangs: so few survive that more humans are born each day than the entire global population of all the other great apes combined.

 

The scale of the task ahead of us, in our own lifetimes, is terrifying.

 

In the face of this, why should we even bother to try to consider the role of education. There will certainly be those who argue that it is too late to focus our efforts at school-age children. Rather, it is those with power and influence now who must be re-educated by popular movement and popular votes to take action immediately, and, it will be argued, if they don’t, they must be moved aside.

 

David Orr’s influential book Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment and the Human Prospect, was originally published in 1994. In the light of the environmental damage we are wreaking on our planet, Orr takes us straight to the role of education and educators. Is it part of the problem, or part of the solution?

 

Here are some quotations from the passage in your reading pack:

 

·   “This [ecological mismanagement] is not the result of ignorant people. Rather, it is largely the results of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs.” (Orr, 2004, p.7) The analogy is made by Orr to the educated architects of the Nazi Final Solution, their education had “emphasised theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience.” (Wiesel, quoted in Orr, 2004, p.8).

 

·   “The only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any period of time could not read, or like the Amish do not make a fetish of reading… This is not an argument for ignorance but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival – the issues now looming so large before us in the twenty first century. It is not education, but education of a certain kind that will save us.” (ibib. p.8) There is a clear parallel here with the project which Rousseau proposes at the beginning of Emile. Not ignorance, but something like a return to nature may be required. We will explore through this module whether any such feat might be achieved and will contrast educational visions which in their own ways aim towards this goal.

 

·   Orr (ibid. p8) proposes that Francis Bacon’s alignment of knowledge with power foreshadows the relationship between knowledge and government through education which has “wrought so much mischief”; that Galileo’s separation of the intellect foreshadowed the dominance of the analytic mind; and that Descartes’ epistemology separated self and object. Together, these three laid the foundation for the six myths which underpin the destructive education we now accept.

 

The myths:

 

1)     Ignorance is a solvable problem. Rather, says Orr, the advance of knowledge has always carried with it the advance of ignorance.

2)     With enough knowledge and technology, we can manage planet Earth. Orr argues that the complexity of the earth can never be managed – what might be managed though is us, human desires, ecologies, politics and communities, but our attention is caught by the things which would have us avoid these hard decisions, whilst, in fact, “it makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.” (ibid. p.9)

3)     Knowledge and by implication human goodness is increasing. In truth, some kinds of knowledge are increasing whilst other kinds are being lost. In addition to knowledge in certain (academic) areas, we are also losing vernacular knowledge, knowledge that people have of place. This kind of knowledge has no value in the academic marketplace which simply records it as “folk culture”. In the confusion of data with knowledge, we overlook the reality that learning of itself does not make us better people. “Ultimately it may be knowledge of the good that is most threatened by all our other advances.” (ibid. p.10) This recalls ‘the Cave’ and Plato’s point that the acquisition of knowledge (of the shadows) inhibits real thinking. “All things considered, it is possible that we are becoming more ignorant of the things we must know to live well and sustainably on the earth” says Orr (ibid., pp.10-11). Perhaps I myself am a possessor and promulgator of the wrong kinds of knowledge. Those people who have Orr’s ‘right’ kinds of knowledge by and large don’t write books, for perhaps book knowledge is of itself, the wrong kind.

4)     “We can adequately restore what we have dismantled.” (ibid., p.11) This is actually a rather forced way of representing Orr’s critique of a subject or discipline-orientated education as a myth. As a consequence of educational fragmentation, students lack an integrated understanding of the unity of things. In effect, the abstractions which we draw in education do not extend to take account of the effects of “biotic impoverishment”: “As a result of incomplete education, we have fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are” (ibid., p.11) because our concepts of value don’t stretch to include natural wealth.

5)     “The purpose of education is to give students upward mobility and success.” (ibid., p.11) Again, this is a critique formulated in terms of a myth. Orr’s critique here is of the measure of success in contemporary society and the energy expended in education to appear to be preparing children for it. Very much like Rousseau, his idea is that success is synonymous with uselessness and perhaps falseness: “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind.” (ibid., p12)

6)     Finally, he criticises the cultural arrogance which would fuel the myth that “our culture” is the pinnacle of human achievement. He probably means capitalism, which he describes as having failed because it “destroyed morality”. Orr’s is a moral rather than an economic or political critique. Capitalism, he says, breeds fecklessness, violence, and inequality and destroys what is loving and life-affirming. Again, there are echoes of (the pre-capitalist) Rousseau here.

 

Orr’s outline of the ways in which we should rethink education:

 

1)     “all education is environmental education” (ibid. p.12) though this is not always apparent in contemporary society, because of exclusion, omission and misrepresentation. “By what is included or excluded, students are taught that they are a part of or apart from the natural world.”

2)     “The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter but mastery of one’s person.” (ibid., p13)  Such a formulation is essential to any theory which would wish to see individual humans in a different relationship with nature and society. Again, this returns to the idea that knowledge in and of itself is neither useful nor positive. Linked strongly with this is the point that:

3)     “knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world”. (ibid., p.13) Environmental disasters occur as a result of the application of knowledge for which no-one is held responsible. “Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our ability to use it responsibly.” (ibid., p13)

4)     “we cannot say we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities.” (ibid., p13) Again, knowledge is inseparable from its usage under current cultural conditions

5)     Because the system as it currently exists is hypocritical in its separation of academic and theoretical ideals from reality, we need teachers and administrators who act as role models of integrity, care and thoughtfulness; institutions capable of embodying ideals in all of their operations.

6)     Restrictive pedagogical practices are evident in both the teaching of lessons and the organisation of space. The ‘hidden curriculum’ of subservience and consent are reinforced in numerous ways.

 

References:

 

 

Hillman, M. (2004) How We Can Save the Planet, London: Penguin

Klare, M. (2008) Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: How Scarce Energy Is Creating a New World Order, Oxford: Oneworld Publications

Lynas, M (2008) Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, London: Harper Perennial

Monbiot, G. (2006) Heat: how to stop the planet burning London : Allen Lane

Orr, D. (2004) Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment and the Human Prospect, London: Island Press