Toward a phenomenology of mythopoetic participation and the cultivation of environmental consciousness in education

Abstract

Framing education ecologically and cultivating an environmental consciousness in the way Michael Bonnett has articulated poses a fresh challenge to educators to identify the latent aspects of educational philosophy and practice that are rooted in an Enlightenment ‘metaphysic of mastery’. In ‘The Significance of Myth for Environmental Education’ (2019), I explored the role that mythopoetic texts could serve to predispose educators and students for qualitatively richer imaginative and affective experiences in/with nonhuman nature. Exposure to these texts, I argued, could begin to effect a work of transformation in those who read them. Here I further develop my former work and make an intervention where Bonnett’s more recent work has touched upon my own: the relationship between myth, poetics, phenomenology, and environmental education. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s account of Western (dis)enchantment, I develop what I am calling a ‘mythopoetic participation’, and explore the relationship between a poet’s mythic & poetic encounter with the world (that awakens a desire for fullness-in/with-the-world) and the ‘artifacts’ they create. I offer a phenomenological account of how reading such texts can support environmental educators.

Keywords:

• Environmental education
• enchantment
• myth
• poetics
• phenomenology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 To be clear here, and perhaps more than I was in “The Significance of Myth” (Farrelly 2019), I differentiate “mythopoetic” and “mythopoeic” in the following manner. Mythopoetic captures the dual nature of the subject (and/or their artifact) as one that possesses both qualities that make them mythic and poetic together — that is, the subject’s own sensibilities and their artifact. Mythopoeic is used more adverbially than adjectivally (though it can also function as the latter), describing the mythic and poetic activity of the subject, their craft-making.

2 The word “artifice” is understood in contemporary language to describe trickery, cunning, craftiness. However, here I am returning to a more literal, etymological use of the term as the skillful art- or craft-making. The product is the poetic artifact. This word “artifact” is preferable, however, to “product,” due to the latter’s association with present-day production/consumer economy. The concept of artifact preserves human intention and skill (techne) — art- and craft-making — while connoting a meaningful durability, preserving an abiding and vital memory, capable of engaging deeply-human and worldly-immanent sensibilities and values across time. As will become clearer below, an artifact invites a more mindful, perhaps even delicate, human engagement or participation with it.

3 One pedagogical application of the reading of mythopoetic texts is for the classroom. There is always a risk that overly didactic engagement stifles experiential learning. Skilled educators can make judicious use of texts for in-class and out-of-doors immersive learning experiences and place-based education. The central claim of this paper is that mythopoetic texts may catalyze students’ imaginations and create epiphanic experiences that can begin a transformative process that would require cultivation over time.

4 One sees this, for example, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “Binsey Poplars felled 1879.” The neighborhood, what Hopkins calls the “scene”— is the village of Binsey, the Thames River, the aspen trees (lately felled), Hopkins himself, Hopkins’ memories of the scene/neighborhood, and future “after-comers” are all part of his history of authentic human dwelling, now forever altered, ever changing, and in some ways lost and re-found in some new future. See Hopkins, G. M. and Phillips, C. (2009) Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 142.

5 Although there is no space to explore it fully here, it is worth exploring the extent to which one or the other ecological epistemologies (scientific or phenomenological) we privilege or operate from self-consciously can accommodate the other more easily and harmoniously. Perhaps the challenge to the observer of the world is always the toggling between different modes of perceiving and being in the world. Might there be discreet disciplines or “spiritual exercises” that one in, say, a scientific mode, could practice that would allow them to enter into a more contemplative phenomenological mode of perception and consideration of the objects at hand? The experience of walking through the world more openly—vulnerable and “porous”—lends itself to simply receive all that happens to present itself to one’s immediate purview, the path before and about them, whereas a more scientific intention may necessarily require the observer to marginalize whatever does not accord with a predetermined goal or purpose of study or research in the testing of hypotheses.

Following this reflection, I would like to dedicate this paper to a new friend, ecologist and environmental educator, Rick Lindroth. At the time of the final editing of this paper, Rick delivered his last lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on September 23, 2022. In his reflections on nearly 40 years of ecological field and laboratory work at the university, he strove to embody a scientific and spiritual holism in his own work that included cultivating something like a mythopoetic perception — into which he invited his students and colleagues as well. For example, Rick acknowledged his conscious awareness of how the etymology of his surname, Lindroth (lit. Linden tree root), served as an abiding inspiration for his ecological work. When I asked him how he maintained this mythic and poetic sensibiity even as he conducted scientific research, he acknowledged that although he possessed some natural disposition for it, he admitted to having to mostly nurture and cultivate it self-consciously over time. One can find his work here: https://entomology.wisc.edu/directory/rick-lindroth/.

6 It may be fitting to note, however, that Taylor is not exercising nostalgia. He does not espouse eschewing modernity and returning to a pre-modern past, as if one could. For, he says, “history cannot be separated from the situation it has brought about” (Taylor 2007, 776). Rather, he seems to suggest that, sociologically and historically, a human desire for fullness remains bedrock, ineffaceable and durable, and that whatever our Western secular-modern futures might look like, there will exist a “fragility” between those who would find meaning through what is immanent vs. what is transcendent, whether they be religious or non-religious. However “buffered” or “porous” we happen to be(come), Taylor suggests that “much of our [pre-modern] past which our modern narratives tell us is firmly behind us cannot thus simply be abandoned,” and that “much of our deep past cannot simply be laid aside, not just because of our ‘weakness’, but because there is something genuinely important and valuable in it (770-771). This would suggest, as I hope to show, that there remains something in mythic and poetic sensibilities that capture or retain elements of perceiving, being, longing that cannot be effaced or simply laid aside. See also Taylor’s concluding chapter, “Against Fragmentation,” in The Ethics of Authenticity (1991, 109-121).

7 If it is not clear already, this paper is meant to extend or apply an element of Taylor’s work to explore the extent to which it is possible to (re)enchant ourselves as de-facto buffered selves. This, I think, is provocative as we hope to identify those conditions under which people find it difficult to experience deep connection and attachments with the nonhuman world. If (re)enchantment is possible, on this account, then it would follow that the nonhuman world will become more wondrous or, I venture to say, “magical.”

8 Here Taylor is drawing from Earl Wasserman’s work, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassical and Romantic Poets (1959), pp. 10-12. Wasserman takes the phrase “subtler language” from Shelley. Below, I will draw more from Wasserman’s work as I develop a phenomenology of reading poetry for environmental education.

9 As will become more clear throughout the rest of this paper, hope for the fulfillment of desire for greater fullness is ineluctably bound up in the sustained flourishing of the nonhuman world. Yet, in the face of environmental degradation, cultivating a hope against despair in the face of dire ecological prospects exhibits a different dimension of hope that exists in tension with the native hope for fullness. Increasingly more literature has appeared in Environmental Education concerned with cultivating hope in the face of environmental crisis. See Chawla (2020). Childhood nature connection and constructive hope: A review of research on connecting with nature and coping with environmental loss. People and Nature, 2(3), 619–642. There, Chawla extensively reviews the literature on cultivating hope in the face environmental fears (see esp. 629-635).

10 Notice how both Bonnett and Ward use the language of “primordial” experience. Taylor’s emphasis on the Romantic turn in history shifted the poetics from the mimesis of nature to the “creative” and “original” expression of the individual’s phenomenological experience of the world. As Taylor elaborates in A Secular Age, there have been historical periods when the mimetic and the originalist-creative blurred in their transition from pre-modern to modern contexts. Since we are mythically-sensitive beings, and our desire to make meaning is foundational to what or how we are, then we might expect (and I think we do find) different mythopoetic artifacts that use different rhetorics. For example, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Victorian poetry will express a mythic resonance whose locution may have been more easily accessed by a contemporary Victorian, yet his writing remains “implicitly” mythic and a “unique site of intelligibility” for any who would read him who would care to. Or consider Victorian (and Edwardian) Kenneth Grahame’s chapter, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” in his The Wind in the Willows: Grahame invokes the figure of Pan from “explicit myth.” Pan mysteriously resides at the center of the forest, comforting and protecting one character’s fears while enchanting and awakening longing in another. Similarly, C.S. Lewis’ mid-20th century poem, “The Future of Forestry” is a socio-cultural, ecological, and implicitly-mythic critique of the explicit myth of “progress” that results in deforestation and the paving over of the land with “contraceptive Tarmac” (and the once-porous self and society), creating impenetrable buffers to physical contact with earth (cf. “Nor can foot feel, being shod,” in Hopkins’ poem, “God’s Grandeur,” 128). Through the invocation of the “explicit" myths of the dryad, whom Lewis identifies with the tree (“birchgirl”) and “goblins” (along with evolutionary myth), Lewis draws on his own mythic sensibilities that are, at times, at odds with other mythic imaginaries. On this account, what counts for “explicit myth” may include scientific narratives or narratives of progress that we tell ourselves and give meaning, hope, and orientation to our experiences for fullness.

11 Though space does not permit a fuller treatment here, an ecological aesthetics must be accounted for on this model. “Nature” as such has been conceived and experienced differently by different generations of human beings, Western or non-Western. (See William Cronon’s (1996) chapter, “The Trouble with Wilderness” in (1996) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature). We are undoubtedly influenced in our Western heritage by, for example, the Romantics, though a Romantic sensibility which may have primed us to look, for example, for the sublime in nature, need not exclude (nor did it) the development of an ecological framework that accounts for aesthetics and ethics. For the timeless text that helped create this sea change, see Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949). Leopold, clearly a Romantic and poetic soul, was also a scientist (a field biologist considered the father of wildlife ecology) and argued that we ought to expand our conception of the “biotic community” to include the nonhuman with the human. Leopold’s “land ethic” as such, was not a radical human de-centering project, but a more inclusive vision. “The land ethic,” he wrote, “simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land”, and that it “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conquerer of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such. In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conquerer role is eventually self-defeating” (204). Leopold was one of the earliest to challenge our aesthetic sensibilities to be more broad-minded and inclusive of biodiverse ecosystems that we would be quick to write off because they didn’t fit certain (overly Romantic) conceptions of beauty. In this way, Leopold reworked the Romantic sensibility, incorporating the ecological aspect. He named the precedent for his land ethic in the person of John Muir, whom Leopold cites as heralding “the birth year of things natural, wild, and free.” See, as an example, John Muir’s 1897 essay, “Linnaeus,” for a Romantic-Scientific mythopoetic sensibility that Muir was attempting to communicate to his readers.

12 The world cannot love us back in the same way another human could. The nonhuman world outside the self is always “given,” and in a sense it is (self-)offered in incredible vulnerability to human subjects whose perception and “face-to-face" return gaze can (but may not) be transformed by the act of reading.

13 Perhaps it is obvious, but this example from Falke illustrates the added layer of reading in community, and the opportunity to expand one’s personal perception of the world through a communal perceiving and reflecting that the poetic artifact invites the readers to enact altogether. This has obvious implications for formal and informal educational contexts.

14 Perhaps those educating in such a mythopoetic pedagogy would self-consciously see themselves as cultivating “systemic wisdom” (Bonnett 2009) or, as Pierre Hadot has called it, a philosophy as a way of life (Hadot 1995). Perhaps it would necessarily include a kind of “school” that would include regular, communal habituation through immersive experiences in the world (Liefländer, et al. 2013), and a regular diet reading and submitting to a holistic (re)habilitation of both mythopoetic texts, dialogue, and embodied practices that would influence and shape perception, affections, and ethics. For this remediation may quite literally require re-mediations: mythopoetic artifacts to help us make meaning of our longing for fullness-in/with-the-world as we learn new ways of perceiving and being in a world in which our flourishing is imbricated in the world’s sustained flourishing.