The Environment/Society Disconnect: An Overview of a Concept Tetrad of Environment

Abstract

In the Western world, a paradigm exists that sees environment treated as one extreme of an adversarial binary, balanced in opposition to society. This paradigm, which I call the environment/society disconnect, infiltrates the secondary school system, leading to serious deficiencies in how students understand the social dimensions of environmental problems. The environment/society disconnect has been imagined and re-imagined by various philosophers, ethicists, historians, ecofeminists, and environmental educators. This essay contends that there are four interconnecting, overlapping, and reinforcing views of environment that maintain the environment/society disconnect. Together these views form a concept tetrad of environment. The concept tetrad of environment provides educators with a neat, if general, typology to explain the historical and cultural roots of our thinking on environment.

Keywords:

• concept tetrad of environment
• environment/society disconnect
• paradigms
• views of nature

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks must go to Lisa Manning and Alicia Barry for advice on the manuscript, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful critique.

Notes

This essay only briefly outlines the more recent evolution of the concept of an Environment/Society Disconnect. For a comprehensive narrative on the evolution of this concept I suggest Jamieson's A Companion to Environmental Philosophy (2001), and for primary source material, Wall's eclectic Green History (1994).

Descartes gets a lot of “bad press” by proponents of ecocentrism (see, for instance, Capra, 1982; Merchant, 1982), as well as those engaged in post-positivistic and critical research (see Guba, 1990). While the Cartesian concept of environment adopts Descartes’ name, it is of course simplistic to argue that he is wholly responsible for this viewpoint. Rather, in many ways, Descartes has become the personification of some 7,000 years of thinking about humans’ place in environment. Indeed, there is inherent in Descartes’ work an undercurrent of Judeo-Christian faith (White, in Yencken, Fien, & Sykes, 2000). One of the first literal separations of humans from their environment in the sense made popular by Descartes may be seen in the first book of the Bible ( The Living Bible, 1971): “Multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; you are masters of the fish and birds and all the animals” (Gen. 1:28). From an educational perspective, Descartes is particularly important because he has set a concrete framework for scientific inquiry and his ideas have helped maintain a type of scientism that penetrates contemporary secondary schools.

The relationship between human beings and the great apes has continued to be of interest to scientists and the general public alike. In the 1960s, Washoe, the African chimpanzee, proved that great apes had the ability to communicate with sign language (Fouts, 1997). In 2005 the journal Nature published the results of the Chimpanzee Genome project which found that humans and chimpanzees share 96% of DNA (The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, 2005). As this article was being written Spain became the first country to support the Declaration of Great Apes, which demands “the extension of the community of equals to include all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans” (GAP, 2008).

Anthropomorphic notions of environment are engrained in many of us, of course, by our exposure to children's animal books. When the host of the television show Jennifer Byrnes Presents: Animal Tales asks a panel of prominent children's book authors, “Do we have a higher expectation of behaviour from animals? Do we actually think that in their creatureliness, they are more moral? Worthier than us?” author Jackie French replies: “For me animals are neither good nor bad. They're actually a counterpoint to humanity, that by having the animal there, you have got a viewpoint that it is different, and that is a way of actually looking at the human rather than actually looking at the animal” (ABC, 2008).

See, for instance, Hicks (1994, 2004).