The globally great moral challenge: ecocentric democracy, values, morals and meaning

Abstract

This response article written from ‘outside’ the Swedish–Danish contexts of this special issue considers how we might highlight and make additional ecocentric meaning of some of the terms most frequently used in this collection. In the first instance my focus is on ‘meaning’ but this is expanded to include other terms such as valuing, values, ethics and democracy. The way we value meaning demands elaboration because ‘meaning‐making’ is pedagogically central to the ecological experience of learning, crucial to fulfilling the not always clear aims of environmental and sustainability education and their regional variations (including education for sustainable development), important for their research, and, indeed, underpins the philosophical quest more generally. Thus in this article, I introduce an ecology of the meaning of meaning, meaning levels, valuing and values, as they might inform stronger notions of democracy in critical approaches to learning, education, sustainability and development. This existentially focused introduction to ‘meaning’ and its ‘making’ is set against the politics of ‘climate change’ where political leaders have recently made grand declarations about the globalized moral challenge induced by human‐induced climate change. How might pedagogues and researchers imagine the place of meaning and role of value in learning and in an education for sustainable development when the crisis of meaning lies at the intersections of the intensely personal and moral and the globally abstracted political?

Keywords:

• meaning
• values
• democracy
• ecocentrism
• education

Notes

1. Jay Griffiths’ (2006) ‘wild’ is very different to Rolston’s. Meeker, Woods, and Lucas’ (1973) questioning of the presence of ‘Red, White, and Black in National Parks’ (in the USA) starts with: ‘National Parks were created as an expression of deeply rooted but poorly understood values in American culture and the traditions of western culture’. An important caution is, therefore, offered in relation to the relativism that is an unavoidable condition of the pluralism and values hierarchies confronting any notion of democracy in education. Broadly, a key issue (in western societies, but particularly the USA, Canada, some parts of Europe, Australia and New Zealand) is the values‐oriented debate about nature being ‘real’ or/and a ‘social construction’ (Soper 1995; Soule and Lease 1995). Nature and nurture, scientific and social/personal values and facts might be at odds with each other. Beyond this tension, to some extent the socially constructed nature of ‘nature’ in the affluent and new‐world west lies in the slippage and equation of that term with ‘wilderness’ (which many/some [white] people ‘know’, through experience of National Parks, etc.) and conjures or replicates pristine or primordial nature. Cronon (1995), a North American, lucidly argued that ‘wilderness’ is really only a reflection or mirror of our frustrated desire for the natural. Beck (1995), from a European perspective, argued against the (middle‐class) ‘escape to nature’ via the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. See Garrard’s (2004) ecocriticism for an indicator of different types of conception and Dryzek’s (1997) environmental discourses, noting Arbon’s (2008) indigenous view that sits alongside other commentaries and critiques emanating out of ideological and colonial vantage points.

There are, therefore, good reasons to debate, value or critique those versions of ‘natures’, the ‘wild’ and so on (and the relations they imply) according to their cultural origins, geographies and conditions of availability, including indigenous or gendered insight. But the realities of relativism and pluralism should not offset the almost universal quest for meaning, as undertaken by Rolston, or Griffiths, within positioned contexts and circumstances and, therefore, the embracing of notions like the meaning of value and value of meaning, as is recommended here in pursuing stronger notions of democracy, agency, action competence – all of which the authors in this special issue are concerned.