Introduction

 

The area of critical pedagogy is large and complex and I do not intend to explain its principles here in any great depth, however, it is worth making a few comments in order to frame the development of ecopedagogy out of the critical pedagogy movement. Developed in the 1970’s and heavily influenced both by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997) and the Frankfurt school of  critical theory, critical pedagogy has since been expanded by its supporters across several continents.

 

Critical pedagogues tend to position themselves as ‘radical’ educators, signalling the assumption that “all forms of teaching, learning and knowledge point to the possibility for people not only to understand the world but also to act in the world to transform it” (Giroux, 1994, p.154). The critical pedagogue seeks to provide “the basis for people to think beyond the given, that they may engage… horizons of possibility, thus placing themselves within the context of history so as to be able not simply to be moved by history but also to change it.”(ibid. p.154). It is natural, then that the trajectory of critical pedagogy should take us straight to the questions of power (for instance over natural processes) and desire (for instance, the construction of habits of overconsumption) which frame the ecological debate about the future of the planet: Giroux again: “questions concerning teaching, learning, desire, power should always be taken up as a set of guiding narratives considering what kind of future one wants to build for future generations, what it means to create a world without injustice” (ibid. p.157). The job of critical pedagogues is to enable dialogue which has the potential to ‘emancipate’ the learner from the shackles of bourgeois ideology.

 

We will open with a problematic comment from leading critical pedagogue Peter Mclaren.

 

Living in Los Angeles is like being encysted in a surrealist hallucination. Yet as I look at the city from this café window things don’t seem that bad: Kid Frost pulsates through the airwaves; a 1964 Chevy Impala cruises the street in all its bravado lowrider beauty; the sun is shining bountifully on brown, black and white skin (albeit prematurely aging the latter); my gas tank is full and the ocean is reachable before the heat gets too heavy and the streets get too packed. I’ll take Olympic Boulevard toward Venice, searching for that glimmer of light in the eyes of strangers, seeking out that fertile space to connect, picking through that rag-and-bone shop of lost memories, and seizing that splinter of hope at the fault line of the impossible where the foundation of a new public sphere can be fashioned out of the rubble of concrete dreams. (McLaren, 1997, p. 14).

 

Mclaren’s reverie is interesting because it reveals the depth of the ‘embeddedness’ of what Nigel calls a ‘fossil fuel culture’ (Tubbs, 2005) within the structures of capitalist ideology. The sad irony is that even the ‘revolutionary’ Mclaren, consistent critic of capitalism and consumerism, fails to see past the anti-ecological ‘neo-colonialism’ (to borrow a phrase of Gadotti’s, implying a cultural assumption that the rich world has the right to overconsume fossil fuels, ignoring all the implications of this behaviour for the majority world) in his finding comfort in the full gas tank. Could it be that the ethic of consumption inculcated via the dominant (ruling class, in the classical Marxist sense) ideology finds its most persistent form in those anti-ecological desires it elicits, desires which override our ‘natural’ connectedness with the earth and those with whom we share it? Should the full gas tank not invoke feelings of guilt, self-doubt, dislocation, self-betrayal, rather than comfort and satisfaction? Despite the ‘radicalism’ of critical pedagogy, its theorists have, perhaps unsurprisingly, been complicit in the unspoken anti-environmentalism of much of the western rationalist tradition. As C.A. Bowers has forcefully stated, critical pedagogy has until relatively recently failed to take account of the ecological crisis. Indeed, the ‘promethean’ tendencies in much of the work of the founding father Paulo Freire have resulted in a destructive ‘neo-colonialist’ side to critical pedagogy[i][1]

 

 

Freire                                                                                                      

 

However, since the late 1990’s, critical pedagogues (including Mclaren) have begun to adapt. In his final completed work, Pedagogy of the Heart (2004a), and the very last piece he was writing before his death in 1997 (published in Pedagogy of Indignation (2004b)), Freire himself began to take seriously ecological concerns.

 

In Pedagogy of the Heart, Freire makes an attempt at offering a dialectical account of the process of becoming, the “change” which signals a re-consideration of the relation of the human consciousness (he calls it “conscience”) to what he terms “the life support”. Beware – Freire’s turn of phrase does not make his meaning very accessible. For him the difference between “the world” and “the life support” is illustrated by the sentence, “For those beings who are simply in the life support, their activities… represent a mere meddling…the shift from life support to world implies technical inventions and instruments that make the intervention in the world easier” (Freire, 2004a, p. 33). The “life support” lacks the social and cultural elements of “the world”, its “technologies”, and, crucially, its history. Humans, uniquely, bridge the gap between “life support” and “world”. In a very difficult passage, which obviously owes something to the Engels essay we read in week 5, Freire seems to be describing a dialectical process which represents both the evolution of the “world” out of the “life support”, and the “change” which is the education of the human body back into the unity of life support and world, transformed such that in its entirety, it becomes meaningful, and life becomes existence (everything) for humans.

 

The life support becomes world and life becomes existence to the extent that there is an increasing solidarity between mind and hands. In other words, the change depends upon the proportion to which the human body becomes a conscient body that can capture, apprehend, and transform the world so it ceases being an empty space to be filled by contents. (ibid. p.33)

 

There is some kind of ontological echo here of the opposition to the banking model of education. Humanity’s education of (and by) the Earth is transformative of both in a kind of dialogue. We are reminded again of Engels’ coevolutionary model.

 

In the next paragraph (again, drawing on Engels), Freire speaks both of man’s “invention of the world”, that is, the historicisation of the “life support”, and of “their domination over the life support”. In a sense this dialectic is consistent with his pedagogy more generally – man, the teacher, always remains, in a sense, master over his creation, in this case “the world”, born out of the “life support”. Yet, of course, in this dialectic, master is also slave: “Many possible dreams end up not being viable due to the excess of certainty of their agents; and the capriciousness with which they pretended to mould history instead of making it with others… [H]istory… cannot be reduced to an object to be manipulated.” (ibid. pp34-5)

 

Freire remains convinced of the benefits of technology, insofar as it is within the rational control of human beings. However, he does not fully consider the dangers to the environment which technology gives rise to – technology, as a “human production” is not intrinsically “bad”. Yet, he fails to mention that under existing conditions (of production), its effects very well may be.

 

Yet, it is clear that in his final days, Freire was rethinking his position, and in doing so, opening the door for his followers to explore new ‘ecopedagogical’ routes. On the last page he wrote, on April 21^st, 1997, he says,

 

I do not believe in loving among women and men, among human beings, if we do not become capable of loving the world. Ecology has gained tremendous importance at the end of this century. It must be present in any educational practice of a radical, critical, and liberating nature. (Freire, 2004b, p.47)

 

Perhaps because many of the leading critical pedagogues work in America, that bastion of unreconstructed ‘fossil fuel culture’, change has been slow. Yet, even the USA is changing, and perhaps the election of Barack Obama will open up spaces for a more forward-looking, rather than reactive debate about a low-carbon model both of economy and education. Since the Paulo Freire Institute’s establishment of the Ecopedagogy Movement Commission, and the First International Forum on Eco-pedagogy in 2000, a new discipline has begun to emerge, which may, in time and given changing social and economic conditions become mainstream within critical pedagogy as a whole: there are early signs that this might be the case (Engel-DiMauro, 2008). For the time being, though, critical ecopedagogy is a distinct and small, but growing school of thought. Like critical pedagogy more generally, it has a ‘soft’ wing, represented, for instance by Director of the Paulo Freire Institute, Moacir Gadotti, which talks in terms of UNESCO, the Earth Charter and ‘Gaia’; and a radical wing, best exemplified by the work of writers like Kahn and Nocello, young men with links to direct action environmentalism of the kind which earned a name for itself in the 1990’s as ‘eco-terrorism’ (beware of this kind of label, it masks a multitude of ideological assumptions!).

 

 

Gadotti

 

The concept of ‘sustainability’ for Gadotti and the Paulo Freire Institute implies “an equilibrium of the human being with himself and with the planet, moreover, with the entire universe” (Gadotti, 2003, p. 2) recalling Mathews’ call for a new cosmological understanding and affiliation.

 

A sustainable society will be one which is “capable of satisfying the needs of today’s generations without compromising the capacity or opportunities of future generations” (ibid. p.3). This will mean moving away from a logic of “development” which is guided by an assumption that the sole means of access to welfare and happiness is via increased accumulation of material goods. Economies that are orientated towards profit and led by accumulation and the exploitation of labour are incompatible with sustainability. The problem is a global one and results in uneven development, misery and poverty for the majority world.

 

Based on this position, there is a need to re-think the orientation of critical pedagogy, we have “reached a crossroads”: Gadotti echoes Orr’s call for decision to be made between taking a “technozoic path, which places all faith in the capacity of technology to pull us out of the crisis without changing an iota of our contaminating and consumer-oriented lifestyles” and an “ecozoic path, founded on a new, healthy relationship with the planet, recognizing that we are part of a natural world, living in harmony with the universe.” (ibid., p.4)

 

Ecopedagogy will arise from a preoccupation with the meaning of daily living “linked to the space/time in which relations between the human being and the environment specifically take place” (ibid. p.4). The “eco-formation” of an individual occurs largely at the level of the sub-conscious, at the level of sensibility rather than consciousness. “We don’t learn to love Earth by reading books on this subject… Our experience is what counts.” (ibid. p.5)

 

Gadotti sees ecopedagogy being developed as a curricular approach that inscribes into education at all levels a questioning of the motivation of our actions and the ways in which they contribute to the lives of all people and the health of the planet. This curriculum should push beyond concern about the preservation of nature (natural ecology) and the impact of human societies on environments (social ecology) towards a new model of sustainable civilization (“integral ecology” – he draws away from saying “ecosocialism”) which implies a challenge to economic, social and cultural structures. For Gadotti this vision implies a global change, requiring a planetary consciousness rooted in an internationalist planetary citizenship, a “new perception of the Earth as one single community” (ibid. p.6) (this would only be a part of the kind of monistically-based ‘world-consciousness’ we saw in Mathews’ cosmology). Part of the work towards this aim, Gadotti asserts, is the recognition of the evolutionary nature of the ecosphere, which identifies all of our origins in the emergence of the first life four billion years ago and emphasises our shared heritage. This position would thus be impossible were it not for the earlier work of Darwin (think back to Week 4).

 

There is a fine line ecopedagogy must walk between, on the one hand, the condemnation of rationalism for its logic of plunder in the name of progress, and, on the other, its belief in rationality as the great achievement of mankind, and the route to “planetarity”. Gadotti warns us of the dangers of a retreat into passive religiousness and irrationalism.

 

Kahn

 

The more recent work of Richard Kahn (2005), editor of Green Theory and Praxis: the Journal of Ecopedagogy, takes us a little further from the relatively comfortable world of (even radical) curricular reform. Kahn identifies the real educators not as institutional (academic) figures at all but as direct activists such as the members of the Earth Liberation Front: “groups like the ELF and ALF are undoubtedly social educators in that they hold key knowledge about the world that few possess and they have accordingly organized a politics (and to some degree a culture) that seeks to build upon and inform that knowledge” (Kahn, 2005, p.4). Kahn, though, recognizes, in Marx’s words, that “it is essential to educate the educator himself” (Marx, 1992, p.422), otherwise, we are left with a remote ‘vanguard’ whose elitist “key knowledge” may only serve to alienate it further from the general population. Kahn aims to do this by locating the activist-educators within a theoretical tradition deriving as much from influential Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) as from Freire.  Rather than finding the origins of critical ecopedagogy in conferences or UN initiatives, for Kahn, we should look to the radicalisation of students in the 1960’s.  He cites as a forerunner of the ELF’s violent campaign of eco-sabotage, the torching of a branch of the Bank of America for a number of associated reasons following the great Santa Barbara oilslick of 1969. However, particularly significantly in the light of Mclaren’s comments above:

 

Whereas 1969’s spill both radicalized students into taking direct action against anti-ecological capitalism and galvanized a national environmental movement in the mainstream, 2005’s [deadly and mysterious] oil slick passed by relatively unnoticed. One might argue that in the present age of mega-spectacle, nothing short of global warming as fictively pictured in the absurd movie The Day After Tomorrow has enough emotional punch to break through the anaesthetized sensibilities of the seemingly oblivious masses. (Kahn, 2005, p.10)

 

Kahn theorises public passivity in terms of Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance”. This is an inversion of the concept of tolerance, employed by the ruling elite (and propagandized through popular media) to quell dissent and apply limits on efforts to curtail their power – “it amounts to a perversion of tolerance that works to repress instead of liberate” (ibid., p.11). What we need now are acts of “revolutionary intolerance”. As popular culture becomes ever more dominated by media spectacle and technological means of mass anaesthetization develop at a faster and faster rates, “eco-radicals must work harder still to distinguish the ways in which their culture represents a positive realization of anti-oppressive norms based on ideals of… the subjectification of nature and is not just a nihilistic disapproval of a society that they may rightly deem irredeemable” (ibid., p13). This last comment is clearly an attack on the anarcho-primitivist tendencies evident in some ecological direct action networks. The radical ecological politics we need are born of these acts of “intolerance” which are both positive and liberatory. The job of the ecological educator is to act, and act now. However, “of course, eco-radicals will also have to learn, grow and ultimately teach, the values and practices that unfold a new sensibility towards life that emerges from the attempt to liberate and reconcile with the earth” (ibid. p.17).

 

Kahn suggests that it is the commitment which theorists like Mclaren and Houston have to Freire (see below) which has hampered the development of their ecological consciousness. Yet, Marcuse, he says,

 

differs from Freire in a key respect in that he… began with the primacy of the political sphere through which he derived the necessity of education – politics as education – whereas Freire’s work starts with education and works towards the goal of political action, thereby producing a politics of education or theory of education as politics. (ibid. p.20)

 

Freire’s work therefore fits comfortably with the world of the educational professional and focuses on educational institutions as sites for the development of critical consciousness, whereas, for Kahn education must go beyond the school, college or university, for unless it does so, it will remain powerless (ibid., p.20):

 

in turning earth warriors into leading pedagogues (who though… nevertheless stand in need of their own education as educators), the Marcusian spirit has moved far afield from most contemporary educational discourse, even in ecological and environmental education… because present versions of academic ecoliteracy are themselves seriously, and perhaps gravely, depoliticized. (ibid., pp. 22-3)

 

Mclaren & Houston

 

Finally, let’s end where we started with Peter Mclaren. By 2005, Mclaren was admitting that the ‘vanguard’ educational theorists of the west had unsurprisingly ‘sidestepped’ the environmental crisis because, unlike those in the majority world, their comfortable academic lifestyle was not threatened by it. The gas tank was still full, the Chevy Impalas could still cruise. Mclaren, then, flags his intention as being the marrying of the relatively new field of ecomarxist/ecosocialist scholarship with revolutionary critical pedagogy. In contrast with Bowers’ (2006, 2006) notion of ecojustice, Mclaren and Houston (2005) return to the dialectical tradition we saw developed by Engels. They want an education within a ‘dialectics of justice’ (Mclaren & Houston, 2005, p.169). The two sides of this opposition or dialectic are environmental justice – the question of the unequal distribution of harmful environments between people – and ecological justice – the justice of the relationship between humans and the rest of the world. Mclaren and Houston aim to “map out what a dialectics of environmental and ecological justice might look like for critical and revolutionary educators by examining how justice toward those exploited under the capitalist class system is increasingly shaped by environmental concerns” (ibid., pp. 169-70). They provide examples which they intend to illustrate how it is increasingly difficult to separate questions of ecological justice from more familiar questions of economic and social justice. Fundamentally what this means is a drawing out of the complex web of relations between (1) local, place-based environmental injustices, and (2) historical injustices arising out of the circuits of capitalist social, political and ultimately economic relations. The exploration of this web of relations at whatever level is appropriate for the learner will constitute in practice, the basis for a revolutionary ecosocialist critical pedagogy.

 

Understanding the material and ideological production of nature (and indeed environmental crisis) as a social and historical process highlights how our ideas of what matters in nature is never fixed, uniform, or stable. What an ecosocialist project illuminates is precisely how the present state of nature is neither inevitable nor desirable – that ecologically and socially just alternatives exist. (ibid. p.173)

 

In some ways, Mclaren’s project echoes what we are currently doing, that is, attempting to understand relations between humans and nature both historically, and at the contemporary “society-nature interface” (ibid., p.173) “ – since such relations operate in both discursive (the ideological production of nature) and material (the economic exploitation of nature) fields” (emphases added) (ibid., p.173); we have also added the ontological or cosmological field.

 

As we saw with Engels, Mclaren wants to connect the exploitation of nature, with the alienation and exploitation of workers under a class system: the mutually transformative or coevolutionary relationship between humans and nature means that the economic power of some (the ruling class) over others (the working class) is played out in the appearance of power over nature.  The job for teachers, then, is to build schools as sites of democratization, to build the capacity to challenge ecological and environmental injustices in a spirit of popular activism and socialist militancy (ibid. p.176). What might this mean in practical terms? The development of themes which would allow pupils to explore the relationship between ecological injustices in their locality with powerful economic forces, and the position of the various players, workers and bosses within this dynamic? Mclaren and Houston offer some possible questions to raise “ecosocialist issues” amongst students:

 

how are the natural and the human united in their specific histories as students…? How have students been assimilated – as a class, as an ethnic and as a gendered group into the instrumental evolution of an urban environment subject to the globalization of capital? How have their subjectivities been commodified and capitalized? (ibid., p. 179)

 

Clearly, Mclaren and Houston have in mind a set of possible curricular opportunities in order to raise these questions, to take in well known national as well as local environmental catastrophes; in addition, the history of environmental protests and their contemporary forms as direct activism might be studied (ibid., pp.179-81).

 

[G]reen revolutionary pedagogy ought not diminish its radical and transformative intent, but rather provide a map for how we might resist the current zeitgeist of “Hummer” pedagogy and its adherents who insist on teaching U.S. citizens that civilization is tantamount to free access to capitalist investment and the creation of a habitus most congenial to the ascendant bourgeoisie whose robust faith in the market is only superseded by their faith in the apparent endless capacity of the earth’s ecosystems to support U.S. global hegemony and the kill ration of its military technology. (ibid., p.182)

 

 

Bowers, C. (2005) ‘How the Ideas of Paulo Freire Contribute to the Cultural Roots of the Ecological Crisis’ in Bowers, C. & Apffel-Marglin, F. (Eds.), Rethinking Freire: Globalization and the Environmental Crisis, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

Bowers, C. (2006) ‘Silences and Double Binds: Why the Theoris of John Dewey and Paulo Freire Cannot Contribute to Revitalizing the Commons’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 17 (3) 71-87

Freire, P. (2004a) Pedagogy of the Heart, New York: Continuum

Freire, P. (2004b) Pedagogy of Indignation, Boulder CO: Paradigm

Gadotti, M. (2003) Pedagogy of the Earth and Culture of Sustainability, paper presented at the international conference ‘Lifelong citizenship learning, participatory democracy and social change: Local and global perspectives’, Toronto, 17-19 October, 2003

Giroux, H. (1994) Disturbing Pleasures  London, Routledge

Kahn, R. (2005) ‘From Herbert Marcuse to the Earth Liberation Front:

     Considerations for Revolutionary Ecopedagogy’, Green Theory and Praxis: A Journal of Ecological Politics, 1, http://greentheoryandpraxis.csufresno.edu/pdfs/kahn.pdf

Marx, K. (1992) Early Writings, London: Penguin

McLaren, P. (1997) Revolutionary Multiculturalism, Colorado, Westview

Mclaren, P. & Houston, D. (2005) ‘Revolutionary Ecologies: Ecosocialism and Critical Pedagogy’ in McLaren, P. Capitalists & Conquerors: A Critical pedagogy against Empire, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield

Tubbs, N. (2005) ‘Fossil Fuel Culture’, Parallax, 11 (4) , pp. 104-115