Introduction: Synthesizing a political ecology of education

Educational scholars face a challenge. Critical pedagogues acknowledge that “education, every aspect of it one can imagine, is political” (Apple & Aasen, 2003, p. 1). Yet, this understanding of education as fundamentally political is in many respects disconnected from an analysis of how the politics and economics of education affect our relation to and utilization of the environment. Various critical schools of thought in environmental education have made important inroads into the political nature of our educational relationship to the environment (e.g., DiChiro, 1987, 2006; Fien, 1993, 2000; Hursh, Henderson, & Greenwood, 2015; Kahn, 2010; Payne, 1995, 1999, 2015, Robottom, 1987; Robottom & Hart, 1995; Russell & Fawcett, 2013; Stevenson & Evans, 2011). This special issue seeks to critically engage with and advance this scholarship by synthesizing insights from political ecology with recent debates in environmental education.¹

Political ecology, as an interdisciplinary research agenda, has historically focused on the relation between the politics of knowledge, political economy, and environmental change (Biersack, 2006; Goldman, Nadasdy, & Turner, 2011; Robbins, 2004). In the introduction to this special issue, we help develop a nascent political ecology of education framework by synthesizing diverse areas of educational and political ecological scholarship.² The resulting political ecology of education perspective sheds light upon how power relations, political economic processes, and their structural arrangements mediate education—from tacit to formal learning, influencing the management of natural resources, conceptions of nature-society inter-relationships, and interactions with the natural environment.

Political ecology explores the relationships between environmental change and political, economic, and social processes (Greenberg & Park, 1994). It can be contrasted with classic ecology, which apolitically explores webs of relationships between organisms and their surroundings (Biersack & Greenberg, 2006). Political ecologists are keenly interested in the production, circulation, and application of environmental knowledge (Forsyth, 2004; Goldman et al., 2011). As Neumann (2005, p. 1) indicates in the opening to his text Making Political Ecology, “the environment and how we acquire, disseminate, and legitimate knowledge about it are highly politicized, reflective of relations of power, and contested.” Despite this clear articulation of the relations between the politics of knowledge and those of the environment, political ecology has itself traditionally lacked a framework for understanding how the reciprocal relations between political economic forces and pedagogical processes mediate resource access, control, and land use and landscape change. Our objective in this introduction is to help develop a political ecology of education framework to illuminate these interrelations, contributing to a better understanding of the ways education, particularly educational practices focused on the environment, are inherently political and fundamentally impact nature-society relations. We begin by briefly reviewing the formative debates in anthropology, geography, and agrarian studies that led to the development of political ecology as an interdisciplinary area of inquiry. Next, we sketch out some of the major thematic debates within political ecology, highlighting areas of potential synergy with environmental education. We then develop a definition for the political ecology of education by synthesizing traditional definitions of political ecology, and simultaneously integrating those definitions with the environmental education research literature. We conclude by introducing and highlighting the contributions of each of the articles in this special issue.

Before we move further, it is important to highlight that as with all research programs, political ecology has various limitations. Rather than viewing these limitations as a hindrance to cross-pollination with the field of environmental education, we see these issues as points of fruitful dialogue for the field. In a series of articles published in Progress in Human Geography a decade ago, Walker (2006) asked, “Where is the policy in political ecology?” He notes that many academic political ecologists fail to engage with some of the world's most important international research programs, including the International Panel on Climate Change. However, the field of environmental education, particularly those scholars working in spaces outside of the United States, have a rich tradition of dialogue with questions of policy, including engagement with policy-based research programs (See the Journal of Environmental Education, volume 47, issue 2). Further, as highlighted previously, political ecology has historically lacked a framework for understanding how pedagogical processes mediate relationships with the environment. Therefore, in a sense, this special issue addresses a yet identified limitation, “Where is the education in political ecology?” Given political ecology's emphasis on how power relations impact human-environment interactions, it is surprising that the field has yet to systematically engage with environmental education—a space where such lively debates about the role of power in mediating relations with the environment have taken place for the past several decades. As such, this special issue challenges environmental education scholars to ask not only how political ecology might impel us to ask new questions, but also to explore what a focus on education offers the field of political ecology.

Political ecology: A brief overview

There is no agreed upon single definition of political ecology; however, it can be broadly described as an interdisciplinary field of study that examines how power relations impact human-environmental interactions (Biserack & Greenberg, 2006). Political ecology evolved out of a long-standing interest among anthropologists and geographers in the relations between people and the environment. Environmental determinism characterized late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarly analyses of human-environment relations. This perspective posited that environmental conditions, such as climate, soil, and topography, structured human culture (Semple & Ratzel, 1911).

The study of cultural ecology emerged in the 1950s as a response to environmental determinism (Steward, 1955). This theoretical perspective broadly explores how culture influences groups' physical management and understanding of the environment (Kroeber, 1963). As opposed to earlier environmental determinism, the cultural ecology perspective understands culture as being influenced, but not primarily determined by material forces (Steward, 1955). Whereas cultural ecology examines the ways nature becomes influenced by cultural patterns and vice versa, political ecologists focus on the political and economic forces that impact interactions with the natural world (Biersack & Greenberg, 2006; Forsyth, 2004).³

Cultural geography also influenced the development of political ecology by investigating the role of culture in historical landscape transformations (Sauer, 1963). Analyses of Indigenous knowledge in agricultural systems, and the role of these practices in transforming the landscape served as another foundation for the emergence of political ecology. However, political ecology also emerged out of debates within cultural geography over the role of population and technology as driving forces in environmental change, and the need to account for the social relations of production and accumulation from a political economy perspective (Paulson, Gezon, & Watts, 2005, p. 22).

Interdisciplinary scholarship in political economy provided an additional foundation for the emergence of political ecology. One major theme was peasant and post-colonial studies' critical examinations of exploitation, social stratification, and the differential effect of international markets on rural marginalized communities (Wolf, 1969). Another important facet was the resurgence of the presence of Marxism within world systems theory (Wallerstein, 1974), dependency theory (Baran, 1968), and Marxist feminism (Hartman, 1981). This Marxist approach to political economy explored the linkages between power, the relations of production, access to and control over resources, and social marginalization (Paulson et al., 2005, p. 23). This work in political economy pushed scholars to realize that subsistence communities do not exist in equilibrium or isolation, but rather are part of a world system that is impacted by markets, social inequalities, and political conflicts. Through their diverse approaches to human-environmental interactions the research programs of cultural ecology, cultural geography, hazards research, and political economy provided points and counterpoints from which political ecology developed (Neumann, 2005; Paulson et al., 2005; Robbins, 2004).

Constructing a synthetic definition

In this section, we seek to build upon earlier work at the intersection of political ecology and environmental education to advance a synthetic definition of the political ecology of education (Lloro-Bidart, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2016; Meek, 2015a, b, c).⁴ We construct this definition by integrating key definitions of political ecology with foundational principles from diverse schools of critical environmental education. Each traditional definition of political ecology, described as follows, holds aspects key to understanding how the acquisition, development, and maintenance of environmental knowledge impacts understandings of nature, land management, and landscape change. Similarly, diverse areas of environmental education scholarship, including feminism, posthumanism, and land education, each offer integral perspectives on the messy relationships between education, politics, and ecology. By bringing lenses from these two fields together, scholars are afforded a framework that augments critical work in environmental education dating back to as early as the 1980s. Here, the political ecology of education explicitly explores how environmental education pedagogies, policies, and practices—in all their variety—intersect in fraught ways with gender, histories of colonialism, and political and economic currents to affect humans, other species, air, land, and water, environmental knowledge systems, and the ecosystems they inhabit.

Greenberg and Park (1994, p. 6), in their seminal article in the Journal of Political Ecology characterize political ecology as a synthesis “of political economy, with its insistence on the need to link the distribution of power with productive activity and ecological analysis with its broader vision of bio-environmental relationships.” A political ecology of education, to build on this definition, considers political economy, and its focus on the interrelations between political institutions, the political environment, and the economic system, as of primary importance. This attention to political economy makes sense, given that scholarship within the political economy of education has long been attentive to the power of funding circuits in mediating neoliberal education (Carnoy, 1985; Torres & Schugurensky, 2002). Merging the concerns of the political economy of education with more traditional political ecology offers a lens for analyzing how particular funding mandates, and the policies that promote them, either differentially enable or preclude certain pedagogical practices, and the effects of these on the diffusion of particular conceptions of nature, and productive activities.

Directing attention to the intersection of politics in daily life, Stott and Sullivan's (2000, p. 4) work adds an important definitional aspect, which is the need to identify “the political circumstances that forced people into activities which caused environmental degradation in the absence of alternative possibilities…”. The goal of such an analysis is “illustrating the political dimensions of environmental narratives and in deconstructing particular narratives to suggest that accepted ideas of degradation and deterioration may not be simple linear trends that tend to predominate” (Stott & Sullivan, 2000, p. 5). In the context of education, analyses in this vein might explore how development programs promote special types of knowledge and associated agricultural practices, which ultimately result in environmental degradation, at the expense of other forms of environmental knowledge that might promote sustainability. These concerns are closely related to the importance Stott and Sullivan place on the “reframing of accepted environmental narratives.” Redirecting this lens toward education enables an analysis of how education can provide communities with skills in critical readings of landscapes, empowering them to question histories of landscape change, and their role within those narratives (Gruenewald, 2003b).

Place has long been a thematic area of focused scholarship in political ecology, as in environmental education, and serves as a touchstone in developing a definition of the political ecology of education. Place is multivocal within political ecology; whereas for some it is inherently local, for others it is not local, and not global, but rather, “the grounded site of local-global articulation” (Biersack, 2006, p. 16). Similarly, for education scholars, the basic insight that places are powerfully pedagogical has led to a burgeoning scholarship in outdoor, environmental, and ecological education (Gruenewald & Smith, 2014; Orr, 1992, 1994; Sobel, 1996; Thomashow, 2002). Environmental educators are increasingly taking a critical approach to understanding place (Scully, 2012; Swayze, 2009; Tuck, McKenzie, & McCoy, 2014). Gruenewald (2003b) has helped advance a critical pedagogy of place, which is characterized by both decolonization and reinhabitation. Although there have been critiques of critical place-based education (Bowers, 2008), it has proved an enduring concept to think with (Grande, 2015; Stevenson, 2008). Interweaving these interdisciplinary discussions, we can say that within an emerging political ecology of education places are inherently relational and contested sites of marginalization and emancipation. They are “never simply local, sealed off from an outside beyond” (Moore, 1998, p. 347), but are rather relationally connected to each other, as well as hegemonic and subaltern worldviews.

Interwoven strands of feminist, new materialist, and posthumanist scholarship provide another natural bridge for advancing a political ecology of education. As Biersack (2006, p. 5) notes, “today's political ecologists critique the nature/culture dualism and focus upon the reciprocal impacts of nature and culture,” a viewpoint influenced by ecofeminist and posthumanist scholarship, as well as the more recent “more-than-human” turn in the social sciences.⁵ In education, ecofeminist, feminist posthumanist and feminist new materialist scholars have provided fertile ground for developing political ecologies of education that reframe dominant environmental narratives, particularly those that shape relationships with landscapes and other species (Lloro-Bidart, 2016; Malone, 2016; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Nxumalo, 2015; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015, 2016). Pacini-Ketchabaw and Nxumalo (2015), for example, characterize the entangled raccoon-human relations at an early childcare center as unsettling colonial nature/culture binaries and opening up “new kind[s] of relational pedagogies” (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Nxumalo, 2015, p. 165) that explore how diverse human communities are affected by and entangled with other species. Synthesizing these perspectives with political ecology provides fruitful ground for challenging narratives about degradation (e.g., Stott & Sullivan, 2000), as children's roles within these narratives are not viewed as moving from degraded (i.e., unidealized contact with “degraded” nature like raccoons) to a romantic, nostalgic nature that the Nature-Deficit Disorder (NDD) thesis promotes, but instead are conceptualized as “shared bodies,” where each, as a member of the collective, learns to get along in a “challenging environment” (Malone, 2016, p. 16). Challenging the notion that only humans possess agency, animals, and landscapes themselves become part of knowledge-making that becomes nested with wider political frameworks and the politics of daily life.

Last, we highlight the importance of interdependence among political institutions, and how these relations structure the environment. Hempel (1996, p. 150), in a sweeping study of environmental governance, defines political ecology as “the study of interdependence among political units and of interrelationships between political units and their environment.” Political institutions are understood broadly in this context as entities of the state, which include both public universities and research centers. Hempel's definition intersects in important ways with the concept of co-production (Jasanoff, 2004), which analyzes how institutions of science and technology mediate understandings of nature, and how the politics of knowledge order society and the environment. Co-production focuses on the relation between scientific methods and instruments that reconfigure nature, and other social devices, such as laws, financial incentives, and interest groups that reorder society. Applied to education, Hempel's perspective encourages a close examination of the reciprocal relations between educational units, the political entities that sustain them financially and ideologically, and how particular forms of knowledge surrounding the environment are co-produced.

These traditional definitions and thematic foci provide important elements toward building a political ecology of education. To quickly summarize, these are the importance of political economy (Greenberg & Park, 1994), the relations between political circumstances and environmental degradation (Stott & Sullivan, 2000), place as relational and an arena of both marginalization and emancipation (Biersack, 2006; Gruenewald, 2003a); human-nature relationships as reciprocal, wherein human and nonhuman bodies collectively enact agency (Biersack, 2006), and the interconnections among political institutions (Hempel, 1996). Building upon these various aspects, we describe a political ecology of education herein as one attuned to how the distribution of power and resources among interconnected political and cultural entities in interrelated places mediates pedagogical processes—from tacit to formal learning—and related knowledge systems, affecting how gendered bodies of multiple species struggle over access and control to natural resources, interact with the cultural landscape, and conceive of nature-society relationships. Recognizing that this definition is not all encompassing, we invite others to similarly develop political ecologies of education attuned to multiple axes of difference, including, but not limited to ethnicity, race, ability, and sexuality.

Thematic bridges between political ecology and environmental education

Political ecology is characterized by a multitude of overlapping research areas.⁶ In this section, we focus on four thematic trends within political ecology that, we believe, have the most potential for cross-disciplinary pollination with environmental education given the objective of interdisciplinarity: (1) degradation and marginalization; (2) conservation and control; (3) scale; (4) gender and posthumanism. We now present the overarching argument of each of these foci, briefly illustrate exemplary research within each thematic area, and highlight potential synergies with environmental education, which we believe will help inform areas of emerging research.

Degradation and marginalization

The degradation and marginalization thesis holds that development interventions and increasing integration into regional and global markets are frequently responsible for the transition from sustainable resource management to overexploitation of natural resources (Robbins, 2004).⁷ Political ecologists have analyzed various formsof environmental degradation, including soil erosion, deforestation, desertification, biodiversity loss, water pollution, and climate change (Adger, Benjaminsen, Brown, & Svarstad, 2001; Blaikie, 1995; Bohle, Downing, & Watts, 1994; Hammer, 2004; Rocheleau, Ross, Morrobel, Malaret, & Hernandez, 2001). One reason degradation has been an important focus of political ecology research is that marginalized communities who rely on natural resources for their direct subsistence are the first to experience the negative effects of environmental change (Gray & Moseley, 2005; Mustafa, 2005; Pelling, 2003; Simon & Dooling, 2013). Political ecologists have also focused on degradation as a critique of apolitical ecology, which sees anthropogenic interaction with the environment as inherently destructive due to ignorance, selfishness, and overpopulation (Robbins, 2004, p. 90). In the context of an emergent political ecology of education, this area of focus provides fruitful ground for problematizing and re-imagining curricula and policy that posit human beings on the one hand as incapable of managing natural resources without enclosure and privatization and on the other as “masters” of ecosystems, forests, and other nonhuman nature. As environmental education scholars working in various international contexts have shown, educational policy documents and curricular frameworks and materials have problematically perpetuated both of the narratives described above, suggesting that new critical lenses are needed (e.g., Chambers, 2008; Fien, 1993, 2000; Gough, 1999; Lloro-Bidart, 2015a; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015; Timmerman & Ostertag, 2011).

Conservation and control

Environmental conservation is another thematic area of research that connects political ecology and environmental education. One larger argument of the political ecology of conservation is that in an effort to preserve what conservationists perceive as “nature,” environmental conservation policies prohibit access of local communities to their landscapes and natural resources (Brosius & Russell, 2003; Dove, 2006; West, Igoe, & Brockington, 2006). Bound up in environmental conservation are imposed ideas of wilderness as devoid of people, a social construct that political ecologists have widely critiqued, showing how time and again communities are responsible for the production and maintenance of what conservationists see as “nature” (Cronon, 1996; Kay & Simmons, 2002; Nyrgen, 2004; Slater, 2002).

These important questions about defining and accessing nature parallel some strands of critical research in outdoor environmental education. More than two decades ago, Russell and Ankenman (1996) demonstrated how ecotourism operates as a kind of environmental education deeply dependent on the commodification of nature as ecotourists learn about ecosystems or animals they encounter. More recently, Fletcher (2015, this volume) unpacks the ways in which ecotourism is imbricated with neoliberal and ethical ideologies, as the protected areas that serve as ecotourist spaces encourage visitors to both pay to conserve and adopt [seemingly] ethically responsible attitudes toward the environment that do not necessarily take into consideration the needs of local people. Such critical perspectives on ecotourism as a form of environmental education counter prevailing discourses in the field that tend to focus more explicitly on measurable impacts, such as attitudinal and behavioral changes (e.g., Ballantyne & Packer, 2011; Dunkley, 2016; Hughes, Packer, & Ballantyne, 2011; Orams & Hill, 1998; Rome & Romero, 1998), rather than the wider historical and political dynamics that shape these kinds of spaces and who has access to the nature contained within them.

Scale

Scale is another core theme in political ecology, and is increasingly attended to in environmental education research.⁸ Since (Blaikie's, 1989) hierarchical and discrete description of scale as rural, local, regional, national, and international, political ecologists have developed more nuanced understandings of scale (Zimmerer & Basset, 2003). Here, scale is not ontologically given, but rather (1) socially constructed, (2) fluid, and (3) relational (Brown & Purcell, 2005, p. 609). As a result, in political ecology “attention to multiple scales has been “de rigueur” for more than two decades (Zimmerer, 1994, p. 117). Scale is integral to many political ecology analyses because it illuminates how particular landscapes are produced, and differentially rendered legible or illegible, by national and international policies (Gezon, 2005; Swyngedouw & Heynen, 2003; Vazquez-Leon & Liverman, 2004; Velásquez-Runk et al., 2010; Walker, 2003; Zimmerer, 2000). Attention to scale in educational scholarship provides important points of convergence with political ecology. Nespor (2004, p. 309), for example, offers an understanding of educational scales, as the “spatial and temporal orders generated as pupils and teachers move and are moved through educational systems”; this conception of scale tracks political ecologists' analyses of scale as socially constructed, fluid, and relational. Similarly, environmental education scholar (McKenzie's, 2012) analysis of how scalar politics structure the United Nations' Education for Sustainable Development initiatives has important implications for interesting local and global ecologies, as does (González-Gaudiano's, 2016) more recent exploration of education for sustainable development in Latin America.⁹ (Meek's, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c) work with the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST) demonstrates how scale provides a zone of convergence for political ecology and environmental education. The MST has helped advance national public education policies that provide crucial access to local and regional political economic resources, funding interconnected vocational high school, university, and graduate programs that focus on sustainable agriculture.

Feminism and posthumanism

One of the most recent thematic trends shared by both political ecology and environmental education is the emergence and subsequent growth of diverse feminist and posthumanist perspectives, including new materialisms, animal ethics, feminism/ecofeminism, speculative realism, and semiotics. Although geographers have “done” feminist and posthumanist political ecology for the past several decades (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, & Wangari, 1996; Wolch & Emel, 1998), such thinking has more recently begun to transform the field. Feminist and posthumanist perspectives have clear differences; however, both (1) challenge social (and ecological) inequalities, including the complex ways in which inequalities are entangled and mediated by material and immaterial power relations (Biersack, 2006); (2) focus on relational ways of knowing, sometimes including nonhuman action and lived experience (Lorimer & Srinivasan, 2013); and (3) take up poststructural thinking by challenging who can be an agent of knowledge and legitimate subject of inquiry (Fawcett, 2013; Russell, 2005). These perspectives have influenced strands of environmental education research (see Fawcett (2013), Gough (2013), and Spannring (2016) for recent reviews of the extant literature); yet most educational studies scholarship has yet to consider nonhuman action and lived experience and has thus far not conceptualized the environment as an agent of knowledge. With these three thematic trends in mind, we suggest that extensive natural overlap occurs between political ecology and environmental education, warranting the articulation of a synthetic framework—the political ecology of education.

Emerging approaches to a political ecology of education

The five articles that comprise this special issue approach the construction of a political ecology of education from disparate and interrelated vantages. Similar to calls in political ecology to move beyond agrarian communities in the Global South (McCarthy, 2002), the articles in this special issue focus on emerging political ecologies in diverse contexts, including Brazil, Canada, Australia, and the United States, emphasizing the importance of examining how educational policies, economic systems, and pedagogies transform rural and urban environments.

The first three articles in the special issue explore the decolonization of environmental education. Thompsett and Meyerhoff focus on how decolonizing forms of study can support linkages between “Free Universities,” which refer to collective study groups that both oppose state-centered forms of education and offer alternative modes of instruction, and indigenous movements. Moore's piece examines the linkages between agroecological knowledge and decolonization in a Haitian agrarian social movement. Decolonial agroecological education is emancipatory for Moore; it's a broader project of politicizing how peasants learn about and transform nature into a site of political struggle. Stahelin draws upon a Gramscian political ecology framework to analyze how strategies of social change are embedded in a state-driven critical environmental education in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Stahelin's objective is to inform conversations between land education and critical place-based education by highlighting the importance of space in shaping students' understandings and relations to territory.

The last two articles in the special issue offer critiques of nature-culture dichotomies that posit some forms of nature as inherently more desirable than others. While Fletcher hones in on EE's role in promoting the ontological separateness of nature and culture through its embrace of interaction with “natural spaces,” Bellino and Adams focus on how nature/culture dichotomies marginalize the experiences of youth in urban communities by constructing their neighborhoods and environments as devoid of nature. Each offers unique alternatives to dominant practices in EE—Fletcher argues for changes that resonate with critical strands of postructural and posthumanist EE, while also drawing on political ecology's emphasis on material power relations, and Bellino and Adams work to actually develop critical urban pedagogical strategies nested within the critical pedagogical projects that emerged out of the Global South.

Decolonization

Thompsett and Meyerhoff's article advances the nascent political ecology of education framework by taking a more-than-humanist approach, which incorporates human and other-than-human actors—such as land, animals, plants, and provokes meaningful engagement with Indigenous cosmologies. Rather than “education,” they focus on how “modes of study,” which are open ended, enable translating between free universities and Indigenous movements, drawing attention to the shared disruption of both traditional systems of education, and the settler-colonial capitalist state. Their article highlights two free universities: Experimental Community Education of the Twin Cities (or EXCO) and Brisbane Free University (BFU). EXCO has offered courses on “Dakota Decolonization: Solidarity Education for Allies” and “Unsettling Minnesota,” which create bridges between Indigenous movements and people positioned in normal universities, by appropriating funds, classroom space-times, and academic labor. Similarly, Brisbane Free University has been an accomplice to Indigenous movements, providing learning opportunities about Indigenous revisionist histories and politics, space for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academics and activists to present their work and organize public discussions.

Moore's article is the second to explore the politics, ecology, and pedagogies of decolonization. Social movements around the world are mobilizing around agroecology, which involves the design of agricultural systems around ecological principles. For these movements, agroecological knowledge and practice are explicitly political. Pedagogies that advance agroecology simultaneously valorize peasant experiential knowledge systems, and challenge assumption of Western science as the singular locus of knowledge production. The article focuses on the politics and pedagogies of the Peasants' Movement of Papaye (MPP), one of Haiti's largest rural social movements. The MPP employs a Freirean horizontal pedagogy, where knowledge is transferred from farmer-to-farmer. The MPP's pedagogies are grounded in a political ecology of education as they seek to politicize environmental concerns and train peasants to critically understand and transform them. Decolonization is also about being, and as peasants learn they engage in “world-making,”’ bringing into existence material and ideological relations that will serve as fertile ground to develop a more sustainable future. Through an analysis of three central themes in MPP's pedagogy—social process methodology, decentralization, and the “good agroecologist” model, the article demonstrates that agroecological education can intervene in peasant movement's web of knowledge and material practices.

Synthesizing perspectives from critical education, Marxist political economy, and human geography, Stahelin advances the concept of critical territorial consciousness. This is a particular type of place-based consciousness that enables us to analyze how social class and other subaltern identities are dialectically interlinked and historically embedded in given territories. The article explores the formation of critical territorial consciousness within the Elos da Cidadania (Rings of Citizenship) program. This urban environmental education initiative comes out of a Brazilian tradition that sees environmental education as having critical, transformative, and emancipatory potential. Stahelin's analysis illustrates that the Elos da Cidadania helps to develop students' critical territorial consciousness as a tactic of long-term mobilization and a political strategy of epistemological representation and recognition (what Gramsci would term a “War of Position”). The concept of critical territorial consciousness advances the PEoE framework, by articulating a mechanism for how critical environmental identities and territories are dialectically forged out of emancipatory pedagogies, grounded in history, memory, and social struggle.

Critiques of nature-culture dichotomies

Fletcher's article invokes a political ecology lens to critique (Louv's, 2005) Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD) thesis, which presupposes that the modern lack of connection with nature is responsible for a variety of social problems, especially a lack of environmental awareness and care. This approach, Fletcher highlights, has been embraced by the field of environmental education as it advocates that when people interact with “natural” spaces, they develop a sense of connection to the nonhuman world or what Fletcher calls a “connection with nature” (CWN). He demonstrates that the application of the NDD thesis in environmental education is contradictory and flawed, first because it promotes reconnection with “nature,” but also frames “nature” as ontologically separate from human consciousness and society, and second because conservation practice itself creates a material and spatial barrier from nature that environmental education actually reinforces through ecotourism and outdoor education in protected areas. Fletcher refers to the latter as the “fortress model” of conservation because it mostly aims to keep global Southerners out of these spaces, while promoting access and connection for global Northerners. Through neoliberal environmental education strategies like ecotourism adventures, where payments for the opportunity to reconnect with nature are viewed as inherently good for their contributions to local conservation efforts in the global South, global Northerners contribute to a globalized material nature-culture division. To conclude, Fletcher draws on research in political ecology and environmental education to propose two major shifts in environmental education: (1) that it dispense with the term “nature” altogether and instead embrace terms like “socionatures” or “assemblages,” both of which seek to overcome the nature/culture divide that NDD and CDD presuppose, and (2) that it focus more pointedly on material power relations that shape the politics of nature and the field of environmental education itself (e.g., neoliberalism, capitalism).

Like Fletcher, Bellino and Adams offer a critical assessment of the NDD thesis, focusing on how it, along with “green” approaches, frames a narrow agenda for environmental education that marginalizes the experiences of youth in urban environments. After reviewing what they call “dominant approaches to environmental education,” such as emphases on individual behavior changes in lieu of collective or community-based decision making and a focus on urban environments as either devoid of nature or possessing a contaminated nature, Bellino and Adams develop a critical urban environmental pedagogy (CUEP) that centers urban youths' lived experiences and environments and challenges neoliberal ideologies. Their CUEP, which they craft by drawing on five years of teaching, curriculum development, and participatory research in New York city urban schools, has three main components: (1) a grounding in critical social theory so that students have the tools to understand structural forces shaping neighborhoods; (2) a provision of sustained opportunities for youth to unpack their identities and social positions; and (3) an embrace of political ecological analyses so that youth have supportive spaces to investigate who benefits and who is harmed by dominant ideologies. Here, they specifically highlight the use of photovoice methodologies as both a pedagogical tool to enable students to explore the effects of gentrification on their surrounding communities and as a research methodology to explore their own praxis. To conclude, Bellino and Adams draw out tensions in their praxis (e.g., they mostly worked with academically advantaged youth, who initially resisted engaging in critical pedagogy) and explore future possibilities (e.g., the transformative potential of CUEP in varied urban contexts as a resistance to dominant neoliberal ideologies).

Notes

1. See Lotz-Sisitka, Fien, and Ketlhoilwe (2013) for a recent review of some of these strands.

2. This special issue builds upon earlier empirical and theoretical work at the intersection of environmental education, and political ecology (see Lloro-Bidart, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2016; Meek, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c).

3. Biersack (2006), for example, uses the term “second nature” to refer to the material world (i.e., “first” nature) that has been subjected to human activity. Such a nature is “humanly produced (through conceptualizations as well as activity) and that therefore partakes, but without being entirely, of the human” (Biersack, 2006, p. 14, italics in original). Conceptualizing nature in this fashion delineates the sociobiophysical from the merely biophysical, thereby avoiding reductive accounts of nature and culture interaction (Carolan, 2006).

4. This definitional work is broader and more theoretically engaged than previous work, as it seeks to integrate foundational concerns from feminist, posthumanist, and land education scholarship.

5. See the Journal of Environmental Education, Volume 48 Issue 1, “Gender in Environmental Education,” for this discussion in environmental education.

6. See Zimmerer and Basset (2003); Robbins (2004), and Biersack and Greenberg (2006) for overviews of these diverse thematic areas.

7. See the special issue of the Journal of Environmental Education, Volume 47, Issue 2, “The Politics of Policy in Education for Sustainable Development,” for this discussion in environmental education.

8. For entry into the geographic literature on the politics of scale see: Jonas, 1994; Marston, 2000;Smith, 1992; Swyngedouw, 1997a, 1997b.

9. Also see the compilation of articles in the Journal of Environmental Education's special issue, “The Politics and Policy in Education for Sustainable Development, Volume 47, Issue 2.