The framing of ecopedagogy as/in scapes: Methodology of the issue

Wolfpedagogy as/in mountainscape

Aldo Leopold's (1949/1953/1966, p. 138) youthfully “lived” affectation for “trigger-itch” during a deer hunting expedition in the mountains bares/bears dark witness (Payne, 2014) to an impression of ecopedagogy as/in scape framing this Special Issue (SI).

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only by her and to the mountain.

Leopold's “first person singular” (Lingis, 2007) description of the firey-eyed death of a wolf appeared in a section of his famous A Sand County Almanac called “Thinking Like a Mountain.” His remorseful glance at the wolf's death stare and the reciprocity felt in that face-to-face encounter is charged with what Edward Casey (2003) referred to as the “opening moment of ethical action” (p. 188). The fleeting glance of human, defiant stare of other-than-human, and the “silence” of the mountain is one among many intercorporeal interactions between beings and things that bring to presence the idea of ecopedagogies as/in scape. The “something” Leopold belatedly “realized” is now partially accessible in the narrative methodology of, for example, ecophenomenological inquiry (Brown & Toadvine, 2003). Or, perhaps, in the ecohumanist animation of “becoming animal” (Abram, 2010). Maybe, a memorying of once “wilding” (Griffith, 2006; Mombiot, 2013). The presencing of the previously absencing of the eyes in the otherwise passing backgrounding of the mountain now extends its ecopedagogical as/in scapes potential to environmental education (EE) and its research (EER) (Payne, 2013).

Leopold's Almanac opened with twelve chapters that evocatively describe the seasonal changes in and of nature, and their effects on the precarious ecological balance of a worn out and abandoned sand farm in Wisconsin. An”other” scape, like so many hinted at in this SI! Leopold's next six chapters ecopoetically interpreted “the quality of the landscape” he experienced over a lifetime of “moving” around the United States of America. Leopold's panoramic-like invocations and evocations of those many landscapes served as a heuristic to his now fabled (Western) “land ethic”: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.

It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (p. 262, emphasis in italics mine). Seventy odd years later, we might quibble about the wording of Leopold's ethic where, for example, Fennell (2013) contemplates substituting “diversity” and “complexity” for “integrity” and “stability” in his interpretation of ecocentric environmental ethics as they, too, might be applied to the scapes of ecotourism and animals, among others represented in this SI. But, the “beauty” aesthetic-ethical impulse within Leopold's “upshot” also extended otherwise to a trenchant “political” scoping of the pedagogical role of education. “The net result is that we have more education but less soil, fewer healthy woods, and as many floods as in 1937” (p. 245). And, “On the contrary, the Ph.D. may become as callous as an undertaker to the mysteries at which he (sic) officiates” (p. 292). His concluding “conservation esthetic” included an equally scathing critique of the “trophy hunting” practices of “outdoor recreation, latest model” and its “motorized ant” possession, invasion, and appropriation of the otherwise lovely country (pp. 294–295).¹ Both otherwise critiques of education and outdoor recreation remain prescient in that expanded (eco)aesthetic∼ethic∼politic.²

Leopold's land ethic called for a thoroughly human “ecological consciousness” (p. 243) for which the accomplishment of any change in ethics demanded “an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affectations, and convictions” (p. 246). Leopold's conclusion of “building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind” remains a fundamental challenge for environmental educators and researchers.

This SI of The Journal of Environmental Education navigates a similar ecoaesthetical∼environmentally ethical∼ecopolitical “way” to Leopold's Almanac. The intellectual terrain assembled via various presences, absences, otherwises, and counterwises represented in the remainder of this SI is dedicated to formulating a “practice theory” of ecopedagogy as/in scapes. This empirically informed practice theory, however, is more conceptually eclectic, nomadically explored, and bundled together than Leopold's land ethic given the SIs other/counterwise purposes, means, and ends-in-view for EE and EER.

Reclaiming environmental education: A problem, purpose, and rationale

The framing of this SI requires extended explanation in this Introduction due to a basic problem intuited in the discourse of EE, as that problem is now confronted, and compounded by “new” theory “moves” and “turns” that belatedly address the acknowledgement of the Anthropocene (Payne, 2016), but not its Dromosphere (Payne, 2017b).

This SI is committed practically to the “grounds up” theorizing of “ecopedagogy as/in scapes” scoped by empirical research conducted by seven invited authors. Collectively, their recent studies of varied practices of EE in different settings represent diverse geographical and demographical “locations” and “scales” of cultural knowledge productions (Canaparo, 2009). The contributors' ”assembled” representations (DeLanda, 2006, 2016; Law, 2006) were selected on the basis of each researcher having completed at least three conceptual-empirical studies over the past five years.

Our individual and collective research describes and deliberates about the practical prospects of, and conceptual development processes shaping the notion of ecopedagogy as/in scapes. The limited sampling of the seven scapes does, however, make an effort in its scoping to “stretch” across different geographic scales and social demographies of the bodied-timespace, local-translocal, national-transnational, and global-planetary sources and consequences of contemporary nature-culture knowledge productions.

In these different performances of ecopedagogies as/in scapes, we seek a degree of transferrability of the underlying methodological logic developed specifically in this SI to “othered” contexts of educational inquiry and their environmental re”designs” of learning (Huebner, 1967/1987). The “logic” this assemblage is committed to receives greater attention below via four examples of “reversal thinking” (Canaparo, 2009, p. 217). In this SI role experiment (Connolly, 2013) of a reversed decolonizing methodo/logy, the aim is to destabilize the orthodox logic of deductively driven theorizing in EE and (re)turn counterlogically to an environmentally prioritized and inductive form of ecological-social and nature-culture theorizing of EE practices.

In this first fundamental reversal of logic, we are far less inclined at this stage to theoretically claim any generalizability of the SI's representations of ecopedagogy as/in scapes beyond the heuristic of its practical theory-building potential for enhanced performativity in EE. Practically and theoretically, there is an overwhelming need in the real of the Anthropocene, and its Dromosphere, and their consequences—local and planetary, and in-between—to “de” or “less” anthropocentrically ground EE and EER in, for example, the praxis work of ecopedagogy as/in scapes on limited display in this SI.

This role experiment in EE remembers the experimental formulation of EE in the 1970s as a “globally” prescient education policy and its “sustainable” development (Payne, 2016). This historical logic is lightly touched on below. Now, 50-odd years later, allegedly “new” theory that “turns” thought to the flatter ontologies of nonanthropocentrism and the other-than-human, be it speculative, materialist, realist, nonhuman, ecohuman, post- or even antihuman, animal, corporeal, temporal, spatial, and affective demand of us a very different and critical form of postmodern intellectual exchange and reconstructive practice (Dewey, 1920/1948; Sharpe, 1985; James, 2006; Hinkson et al., 2016). Part of that exchange engages a (de)logical process of de-centering, re-centering, and de/reconstruction of the still hubristic, humanist development of EE and EER. The exchanges and interactions anticipated in, during, and after this SI should be capable of responding in a more ecohumanistically reflexive, critical, constructive, and practical way to the complicity of contemporary education practices, and discourses, in the aforementioned ecological-social and nature-culture problematics highlighted in the acknowledgement of the Anthropocene/Dromosphere. We now need to position “postcritical” practical theorizations of EE and methodologies in EER (Hart, 2005).

More precisely, that counterlogic of a practice theory turn to an ontologically alert and attuned postcritical EE and EER entails the de/recentered (re)framing, (re)assembling, and (re)interpreting of the always/still conventional epistemologically bound representations of EE discourses, and their narrowly prescribed performances in pedagogical enactments and methodological deliberations. The material and real (re)turns to practices described here, and there ecological ontologies, seeks to reveal, and then repair, those troubling human and other-than-human interactions, “connections,” and relations in the “new” Anthropocene/Dromosphere. In so doing, again by way of introduction to the complexity of the task undertaken in this SI, a second reversal of thinking, therefore, emphasizes the “quad” of an ontology∼axiology∼epistemology∼methodology in both practice and theory, and research and inquiry. Here, the use of the tilde (∼) signals the somewhat ambiguous and fluid recursivity, or enigmatically recyclical nature of the practical formulation and theorizing of ecopedagogy as/in scapes for EE and EER.

A limit of the SI is prematurely announced here. The problematic of overprivileging epistemology and its often instrumentally predetermined methodologies and “narrow” methods at the still Cartesian constructivist and deconstructivist, as well as postpositivist, expense of various ontologically material, bodied, real, emplaced/embedded, and “situated” everyday practices (for example, Archer, 2000; Grosz, 2004; Shaviro, 2013) is further exacerbated in representing our scaped/scoped/scaled ecopedagogies textually in the pages of the SI. That printed/page form is always a reduction and simplification of the richness and depth of the postcritical experiential and existential “lifeworld” ecologies we can only hope for in representation in postcritical EE and EER (for example, Payne, 2005).

Again, some EE history on this real “matter” is important. We in EER are well aware of the earlier critiques of “numbers” used quantitatively in measuring, predicting, determining, and evaluating the performances of EE (for example, Hart & Nolan, 1999). We are far less aware of our own immeasurably rich experiences of, for example, naturescapes, and their ecopedagogies, that when reinterpreted with certain aspects of “new” theory, do point to how we might partially access the ecology of things, their intrinsic qualities and characteristics, and relational capacities, and agencies. The above “quad” question of access to the ecological reals of historical interest and concern to environmental educators and researchers casts more shadows over the capacity of numbers and, even, words and their respective or “mixed methods” texts to adequately represent the non-Cartesian depths and breadths of human and beyond/other-than-human interactions and relations, problems and issues. Practically, there are many deep conditions and dark shades to what we assume in the very end product, or outcome, of EE known as environmental learning experiences (Rickinson et al., 2009).

After fifty odd years of EE and EER, the depth, richness, and breadth of meaning-making in ecologically recentered knowledge generations, productions, and performativities is now deemed affectively and agentially important in how those two fields interact more decisively and praxically. To be very clear, words, like numbers, can only ever be a mere, often abstract approximation, reduction, and simplification of the complexities and practices of the historical and ecological everyday, human and other-than-human worlds. Notwithstanding the deeply empathic mood created in Leopold's h(a)unting testimony of the old wolf's firey green eyes, the all-too-rarely acknowledgement of the problematic of the assumed “correlationism” of representing the being/becoming (of the ecologies of human and other-than-human things) and (human) language/knowing in contemporary “thought” is, therefore, duly acknowledged (for example, Wolfendale, 2014). Limits (sic) are acknowledged, assertively.

The insertion of eco and the decentering to a less anthropocentric posture and practice compounds the correlational problem from an overtly anthropocentric human and humanist perspective. That is, there are many things that defy interpretation, description, explanation, and representation. There is, therefore, the associated “nonrepresentational” dilemma described in, for example, Nigel Thrift's (2008) insightful account of the (larger) geographies and spatialities of feeling that significantly shape, and affect, for example, personal, political, and social performances within what I have alluded to is the practices driven theorization of an ecoaesthetical∼environmentally ethical∼ecoplitical “wayfinding” for EE and EER.

The combined “problem” of (non)correlationism and (non)representation, notwithstanding the equally vexed question of (im)materialism (Harman, 2016) is exacerbated when the other, beyond, or more-than-human is injected, infused, or simply mashed and “written into” (Western) thought. Put simply, some time ago, Connie Russell (2005) generously asked environmental educators, and postcritical researchers to consider “Who speaks for nature?” and, I add, “On what grounds, or basis?” Indeed, the ecopedagogical and scaped question grappled with constantly in this SI is the representational and nonrepresentational one of how, and in what ways, might we, first, access the objects and “realities” of our preferred ecopedagogies and, second, correspondingly or noncorrespondingly voice/speak/write, then, on behalf of a “reassembling” of nature, its environments and ecologies of beings and things, including, for example, indigenous peoples, and the Indigeneity of Country and Land?

In drawing introductory attention to some of the “limits” framing this very special SI, I have indicated how reversals of thought and counter/otherwise logics underpin our role experiment. New theory helps, as do “old” practices of ecopedagogy summarized next.

Thinking like a mountain, as difficult and seductive as that challenge might be in reframing, redesigning, and representing the logics and practices of EE and EER is inevitably, a human one; or ecohuman one as is exemplified above and in, for example, contemporary ecologically anthropological efforts to de-center the I/self as subject in perceiving the environment (Ingold, 2000, 2011), articulating “how forests think” (Kohn, 2013), or examining how globalized mushrooms exist in the Anthropocene (Tsing, 2015), among numerous other exciting examples in materialist-realist (non)representational efforts in anthropological inquiry now emerging in EE and EER.

There is, however, history on the practical-logic side of EE and EER in the role experiment undertaken in the following pages. The historical logic of EE and, in this instance, its past and present research efforts, has emphasized a practical, critical, and reflexive means through which the narrative continuity, or habitus, of the field of EE and, in this moment, the need for its redesign of (eco)pedagogies responsive to the planetary problem of the Anthropocene/Dromosphere. Although the historical/temporal centrality of the Dromosphere (Virilio, 1977/2006, 2007/2010), or accelerating “fast” timeScape “war” against (slow) timespacescape has escaped concern in EE and EER (Payne, 2017b), the “new” clarion call of the Anthropocene provides a timely cause for slower intellectual pause.

So, in this extended SI introduction about its framing (and naming), it is worth emphasizing the increasingly strange, precarious, and vulnerable ways we as ecopedagogues and researchers are now bodily (re)”positioned” in the timespacescapes of human activity (Schatzki, 2010) lived in different geo-epistemologies (Canaparo, 2009) in (re)searching EE ecopedagogies as/in scapes via EER (Hart, 2013). The contributors to this SI are finding different practical-conceptual-methodological-empirical ways to access the scape, scope, and scale of the ecopedagogy of interest and/or concern to them. Each author/researcher selectively uses different theories to interpret and explain the scoping of a preferred scape.

Of course, there are numerous enactments and, therefore, access points for ecopedagogues and researchers into the embodied-global problem “experienced” intercorporeally and intersubjectively in the micro, meso, macro, and cosmo scalar timespaceScapes of different “reality interests.” Their overlapping ontological layers are enigmatically constitutive of those epistemologically developed accounts of human-environment and culture-nature conditions, interactions, and relations we teach and research for.

But, before I more assertively tackle the dominant logic and prevailing academic modes of intellectual “exchange” typical of journals such as this, the notions of ecopedagogy and scapes, connected as/in and for, require brief introductions and contextualizations. Each contributor to the SI elaborates those ingredients and dimensions.

An introduction to ecopedagogy

Leopold's wolfpedagogy as/in mountainScape exemplified “experiential learning” in that particularized micro scaled version of NatureScape. As an environmentally embedded practice, Leopold's embodied, moving, and situated ecopedagogy, and its localized medium, mode and form are a significant departure from the conventional indoor, vicarious, on-line, and abstract expert driven techno-transmissive pedagogies now dominant in the EE classroom, the laboratory, the brief field trip/site visit, the lecture theatre, the powerpoint presentation, the on-line chat room, and associated digital downloads/uploads of contemporary ‘teacher-student’ exchange within a prescriptive curriculum and evaluation model.

Not surprisingly, there is a long history of the varied practices of ecopedagogy! What follows is rudimentary. Ecopedagogy is only a “new” term aimed at making a rhetorical point. In contrast to any mistaken presumption of an epistemologically driven notion of (eco)pedagogy, the environmental sourcing of the ecopedagogy as/in scapes assembled here is found “ontologically” and grounded ecophenemenologically in its material, symbolic and interpretive practices that are, in varied historical and geographical realities and through different disciplinary perspectives, not new to “modern” educational thought. Recall, for example, Pestalozzi's inspiration of Froebel's kintergarten (children's garden) as an experiment for playful “experiential learning” (sic, pre-Dewey) in the 1800s (Wollons, 2000).

That legacy of “playful” discovery in/with nature in what we postmoderns now call “pedagogy” or “constructivist learning” persists globally in, for a most interesting contemporary development, the early childhood Nature School movement. That evolving movement of practices and thought builds on the 40-year-long “forest school” friluftsliv and bildung traditions of Northern and Central Europe. Or, to continue the general “ecoa'pedagogical point of nature serving ontologically prior to epistemology's ecopedagogical privileging of human-centered “ways of thinking/knowing,” other more contemporary examples of ecopedagogy include, again for anglo-north example, Tilden's (1957) Interpreting Our Heritage, Gatty's (1958) Nature is Your Guide, Cornell's (1979) Sharing Nature with Children, or Van Matre's (1979) Sunship Earth. There are many more examples, historical, contemporary, cross-cultural and intergenerational of ecopedagogies, where Nature assumes apriori status as an ontological starting point to ecopedagogically access various “natural” and “semi”natural, “garden,” and “open space”-type environments. Environments derived epistemologically from the otherwise real, material, and symbolic presence/absence of Nature are viewed variably in human terms as teacher, guide, parent, pedagogue, leader, or facilitator.

And well before the Rousseaus, Pestalozzis, and Froebels of nature pedagogies, there existed the so-called primordial, tribal, kinship, traditional, and premodern “educational” practices of, for example, our “first” peoples in Country, or Land, or cosmos and totem, in their “being,” “knowing,” “dwelling,” and “doing” as a cultural mode/practice that, now, is undergoing retraditionization in, for example, contemporary indigenous education (Arbon, 2008), land education (Tuck et al., 2014) and their prerequisite interest in “decolonization strategies” (Adams & Mulligan, 2003). Those ontologically “primitive” (sic) lived first ‘ecopedagogies’ (sic) have been methodologically tracked and mapped via various academically disciplined means to, for example, the origins of human civilizations, the social ecologies of the formations of tribalism, the anthropologies of ecological experience, and the collapse of civilizations and their cultural ecologies.

Now, in the “new” of education discourse and EE? Theory overwhelms innovation in ecopedagogical experimentation. Hence, for example, the addition of Scapes, scopes, and scales. With new theory, we do have belated (re)speculations about the materialism and realism of the human condition in the global acknowledgement of the Anthropocene (and Dromosphere). A macroplanetary Scape has been introduced to EE. The scopes of global warming and climate change (educations) are, suddenly, attracting great interest, often at the pedagogical expense of various other scapes and their local scopings. Thus, the limited sampling of Scapes and their scopings, and scales, in this SI.

If so, the nascent notion of ecopedagogy as/in scapes must confront the messy dilemma of how it might conceive and construct its narrative. That basic dilemma is sourced in how the longer and rarely articulated history of ecopedagogical type practices, and how they respond to the dromospherical (c)rush of new theory in the Anthropocene. This dilemma gives rise to the need for an assessment of the dominant logic of practice in EE. This logic is addressed more precisely, and emphatically, in the final section of this Introduction. For the moment, however, those needed ecopedagogical archaeologies and genealogies alluded to above, among many other movements in and of thought, and practices, are “positioned” in this introductory framing as constituting a “layering” account of the temporally spatially loaded and embedded “nature” of EE (and EER) (James, 2006). Those ontologically (and it must be said, less anthropocentric and other-than-human) oriented layers are somewhat clumsily incorporated into the educational/pedagogical dynamics of traditional ecological-social formations and nature-culture relations, then their modern versions and, now, postmodern social formations where the ontological category of Nature and the ecological is, it must be said, well in decline, if not ecocidal “death” (Merchant, 1980) or “end” (McKibben, 1990).

Indeed, beyond this historical snapshot of the idea of ecopedagogy as/in scapes and scoped scales, it is difficult to know if an ecopedagogy movement in EE exists, as proposed in the global North by Richard Kahn (2010). And, if so, in the materially rich Scaped (re)framing envisaged in this SI, has sufficient traction and “evidence” of value and utility to be taken seriously. Or, maybe, the ecopedagogical principles of pedagogia da terra (land/earth pedagogy) enunciated in the global South by Moacir Gadotti (2000) are so general as to be of insufficient practical value for EE, or are unable to provide needed theoretical-methodological insight for EER. Moreover, in formulating and performing ecopedagogy as/in scapes, there may well be affinities, and tensions, with other pedagogies (Payne, 2017a) spawned over the past 20-odd years that are better known to environmental, geography, and sustainability educators. These “radical” and alternative pedagogies in EE include “political” (Huckle, 1983), “critical” (for example, Robottom, 1987), “feminist” (Di Chiro, 1987), “oxymoronic” (Orr, 1992), “critical pedagogy” (Fien, 1993), ”decolonizing place” (Gruenewald, 2003), “land” (Tuck et al., 2014), “slow” Payne, 2014, 2015; Payne & Wattchow, 2009), ‘feral’ (Fawcett, 2009), ‘deschooled’ (Springer, Lopes de Souza, and White, 2016), and “political ecology” (Meek & Lloro-Bidart, 2017).

And, not coincidentally or surprising, Michael Bonnett's (2004, 2004, 2013) normatively informed philosophical pedagogy of EE aimed at a “retrieving of nature” as a “non”anthropocentric form of “dwelling” but, inevitably, a rehumanized form of self-arising/human flourishing. Bonnett, a philosopher whose discipline I comment about later in the extended discussion of dominant logics, rightly appreciated how such ecopedagogical experiments place stringent demands on further theoretical and empirical research. We hope this SI partially achieves that expectation.

More precisely, in the absence of relevant curriculum praxis, empirical insight, methodological experimentation, representationally diverse evidence, and academic support, tensions will persist within the presencing of ecopedagogical practices and their otherwise, counterwise and anarchic reversals in various Scapes and their geo-epistemologies-ontologies. However, mindful of the proliferation of mainly anthropocentrically radical pedagogies in EE, we can be far more certain about how conventional anthropocentrically assumed and driven education theory and pedagogical practice, particularly in the North/West, has historically not been an innocent bystander in the increasingly precarious ecological-social condition in which we now anxiously find our planetary selves.

This ontological insecurity and existential anxiety is why EE was formalized in the 1970s, as a “global” role experiment in Education, via a series of United Nations Conferences (Palmer, 1998). Moreover, those historically, contemporary, and comparative perspectives and disciplines contributing to the formalization of EE nearly 50 years ago culminate, yet again, in critical reflections about the sources of the (post)modern ecologically problematic human and planetary condition. We cannot (e)Scape the fact that education, and even EE and EER, has been discursively complicit, at least, in reconstituting a highly orthodox range of institutional and set intellectual/academic “ways of thinking/knowing” that, serially, pay lip service to the materialisms of practices, the realisms of the ecological, and the messiness of de/recentering fluxes of anthropocentrism, less anthropocentrism, nonanthropocentrism, biocentrism, weak ecocentrism, and strong ecocentrism. Leopold understood this. Ecopedagogy is part of a needed practical and intellectual redesign. But, it needs practical scaping and scoping well ‘beyond’ the formatively messy ideas of ecopedagogy indicated previously.

An introduction to scapes

The use of the complementary term “Scape” and its empirical “scoping” undertaken in at least three studies by authors contributing to this SI is a key tactic in revealing ecopedagogies in practices. Without incorporating the scopes of Scapes into the notion of ecopedagogy, there is no “non” or “less anthropocentric,” or “weak” even “moderate” “ecocentric” position, standpoint, or ecological project assembled here. If not scaped and scoped, there is nothing “special” about this Special Issue. Lost is its otherwise and reversal logics, in the ways it counterwise advances an (environmental) education of the critical relationships innerwise between persons and their outerthings.

The scoping of various Scapes in any ecopedagogy serve many purposes. For introductory purposes, three only are suggested. First, the inner affectivities and agencies of the beings and things found in a scape. Second, their ecologies that, from our sampling of Scapes in Figure 1, aim to connect and selectively “re”assemble “movement” found in the indigeneity of “food,” its human and other-than-human embededdness in “space-time,” as floating on “rivers,” and submerged in “reefs,” and carried by domesticated and feral “animals,” and “simulations” of travelling in re”turning” this roughly assembled ecology to their ontological basis in movements of bodied/thingly timespace processes and performativities. Third, the ecology of ecopedagogies as/in scapes is also generative of revealing their “larger” scale interactions as “locations of knowledge.” Locations are, indeed, over and through the performative scopings of our bodies, times, and spaces both generative and reflective of environment-human, ecological-social, other/than/human-human, local-global, and nature-culture or planetary-personal “intra-actions and interactions,” as deeply problematic as they now are in the Anthropocene/Dromosophere. Clearly, complexity enters here in the scoping of Scapes and their interactions and intersections, locations and scales, as each contributor to this SI draws our attention.

Figure 1. The framing of ecopedagogy as/in scapes.

The astute reader will note the third reversal thinking about each of the preceding conceptual couplings. But note, well in advance, how one concept is not collapsed into the other, or conflated and subsequently hybridized or ‘mashed’ with the other. In any ecopedagogy as/in scapes the question probed counterintuitively and practically in this SI becomes the extent to which one of the conceptual couplings is emphasized over and even against the other. Here, the locus of inquiry shifts inexorably to the Scapes, and their scoping, to “first” Nature's derivative environments where the “natural” tends to dominate in variously “en”culturated or “em”placed bodied environments. To clarify, cityScapes, by and large, are largely devoid of Nature, even though parks, gardens, and zoos located there aim to “memorialize” first Nature while allowing visitors the fleeting opportunity to intercorporeally “re”member their bodies, at least. RuralScapes and their “farming” scopes presence a slightly more natural “representation” of people, land, and animals notwithstanding the still heavy footprints of pioneering/expeditionary imperialisms, settler colonialisms, and agro-industrial extraction mechanisms. Declared wildernessscapes are a human effort to legally protect, preserve, experience, and remember remnants of once authentic Nature, even if a National Park is, indeed, a sociocultural construction to which many humans in the city/suburbanScapes regularly (e)Scape (for example, Cronon, 1995; Payne, 2014). Time and space underpin the above examples. As do their flux with bodies and things.

Conceptualized in this ontologically oriented ‘first’ manner to the ‘natural’ and Nature as a primordial sourcing of beings and things, their ecologies and scales, the Scapes and their scopings ”affording” the epistemologies of ecopedagogy aim to provide another point of departure from “civilized,” enculturated, domesticated, schooled/disciplined pedagogies. One relevant example to consider in light of the demand to scope Scapes is the now popular notion of “place” and many of its proposed pedagogies in EE, and other curriculum fields. Not unlike the recolonized notion of “sustainability,” the once very promising ‘theory’ of place pedagogy, or critical place pedagogy, has largely been emptied out of meaning by the myriad ways similarly related terms like sustainability have also been co-opted, or recolonized and reinhabited, by vested interests that often contradict the original inspiration and conceptualization. For example, almost everywhere and everything is now a “place,” even the politically inspired branding of car registration/number plates in the State of Australia I “inhabit.” “Victoria—The Place to Be.” Later, “Victoria—The Garden State.” Now, “Victoria—The Education State.”

Notwithstanding the widespread trivialization and bureaucratization of the otherwise important notions of place and education, the term is now overused, and its practices that materially might be relevant to the equally hollowed out notion of sustainability suffer from the double whammy of recolonization and reimperialization by those vested interests. Acknowledgement of this “new” postsustainable reality is found in the now symbolically renamed policy quest for environmental/ecological sustainability. Will practices change? Unlikely! More specifically, contributors to this SI are wary about the prospects of place pedagogy and a number of gaps and flaws they see in that “theory.” Scapes properly scoped and scaled provide an alternative, but in doing so might still draw on the best of critical pedagogy, place pedagogy, and anarchic pedagogy, as some of our contributors to this SI do, yet shifting those always vulnerable discourses to a sharper, less anthropocentric ontology of ecological-social praxis of those things that matter environmentally.

Again, by way of illustration. The contemporary use of place as pedagogy is anthropocentrically oriented to Culture and its memory and memorialization (for example, Trigg, 2012). Critical versions of place are concerned primarily with social justice. It is difficult to find empirical studies of place pedagogies that demonstrate how the interests of Nature, even as a fading memory, are really served in and materially enhanced by, those anthropocentrically oriented and textualized place pedagogies. Nature, and its values are either assumed, evaded, or uncritically anthropormorphized as some version of the ‘good’ and, even, subjugated and reified, often statically despite the dromospherical acceleration and intensifications of global mobilities and social/personal liquidities.

Ignored in most place pedagogy theory and its alleged practices is, for example, the material artefacts and symbolisms of “nonplace” (Auge, 1995) and “unplace” (Trigg, 2012) among numerous displacements also not addressed pedagogically in EE and empirically in EER (for example, Nakagawa & Payne, 2014, Payne, 2015, Tuck et al., 2014). Moreover, “place” devoid of inner, social, and outer natures, their interactions and agential relations, and their anthropocentrically driven pedagogies ignore the real, material, dark underbellies of, for example, various long-standing toxic dumpings in classed neighborhoodScapes including, for example, child abuse in a community by the Church, while claiming (textually) to reinhabit those decolonized but still materially bodied toxic communities. Or, we might ask, whose “place” is the slowly warming deep/cold ocean waters that follow the large-scale “movements” of El Nino and La Nina? Scapes and scopings invites, or suggests, or invokes, at least that experimental formulation of an adequate and appropriate ecopedagogical response.

Language-rhetoricScapes, as indicated earlier, have the abstracted propensity to get in the way of both practical and narrative progress in EE and EER if not adequately and critically scoped for what is accessed, presenced/absenced and non/represented. Bob Stevenson's (2011) meta review of the Australian EE literature, 1990–2000, concluded that many environmental educators were motivated to enter the field well before the popularization of the term “place.” They anguished about the losses of proximal “place” to which they were often “attached.” The same can be said about the extensive significant life experience (SLE) literature stretching back to Thomas Tanner's (1980) classic study of environmental activists. Tanner's study coincided with the early impetus of EE and what it, too, might actively do for various environments and “places” whose significance was derived from Nature (and its memory), even if that was idealized or romanticized.

We could rename that significance of experience as ecopedagogical in “nature” as/in different Scapes. Tanner sampled environmentalists to reveal a wide range of material/real “ecopedagogical” sources of their “Scaped” activism, including experiences of natural areas, local habitat destruction, family camping trips, raising animals, exposure to toxic pollution, and even an innate affinity for/with Nature. The term place was not used then. He also found inspiring teachers, and powerful books, among many other resources that have since been consistently researched (for example, Chawla, 1998) and remain relevant to the idea and practices of ecopedagogy as/in those (in)significantScapes (Payne, 1999b). Much of the current place pedagogy literature in EE ignores these literature bases for, at the very least, how they might conceptually, materially, and practically (re)inform place pedagogy, awareness, responsiveness, immersion, attachment, and many other words used to qualify the ambiguities of place processes within the human, cultural, and environmental/geographical/spatial affectivities of experience. At least, the capacity of EE to historically build effective/affective bodies of knowledge is compromised.

In linguistically obscuring or textually evading these material histories (of the present) in EE and EER, once again, this eco and environmental “lack” of scoping Scapes (and places, or experiences) points to a persistent problem we need to fess up to, reiterating the problem of logic will be addressed shortly in bringing this long introduction to a conclusion. That problem is the academic authority of (certain/selective, contemporary, popular) theory in “suffocating” the practical logics of EE and EER. This lack is most conspicuous in the absence, or invisibility, of empirically driven support about how “new” pedagogy, such as place or land, informs a material “good” or real “gain” for Nature beyond or before the cultural benefits of the anthropocentric decolonizing logic and reinhabiting lens are claimed textually.

There can be no doubt that the desired move to “less” and “non”anthropocentrisms, and “beyond” human imaginaries of ecocentrism be they ecopedagogically weak, moderate, or strong is linguistically easy, and textually straightforward. Practically, and empirically in research, it is far more difficult, complex, and onerous. Naming the Scape and scale, like mountain(range), is not difficult. Accessing and scoping its critical depth and richness is. We scope seven scapes only, noting that the obvious candidate of landscape (Schama, 1995) has already attracted some pedagogical attention in EE and EER over the past decade or so. Importantly, for the purposes here in Schama's extensive scoping of memory, he conceptually distinguishes “Landscape'”and “Manscape” (as the historical tension of Nature/Culture) with the former memorialization and “remembering” grounded ontologically in wood, water, rock, and their intersections. His parallel account of the overlays of manscapes include, for example, the German national Socialism (Nazi) cult of primeval forests, and the play of Christian and pagan myth, among others that depicted the arts and crafts bases of key social and ecological constructions of geo-culturally variable, and associated epistemologies of civilized landscapes.

But, given the preceding discussion of ecopedagogy, Scapes, and scopes, the term landscape overgeneralizes and homogenizes the different environments, geographies, demographies, and ecologies of the locations, locales, and scales of affective meaning-making and associated productions of knowledge that practically matter most to environmental educators and researchers. For example, a brief scoping of the landScape, or place, I “inhabit” reveals what I know and don't know about kangaroos and their history living in my backyard (Payne, 2013).

Help! Writing from the same geo-cultural onto-epistemology in which I am “positioned” and “live” (colonially/imperially), Don Watson's (2014) The Bush is “at once magisterial in scope and alive with telling, wry detail. The Bush lets us see our landscape and its inhabitants afresh, examining what we have made, what we have destroyed, and what we have become in the process.” Watson's historical-ecological-cultural scoping of landscapes can, of course, be extended in many varied environmental, social and temporal-spatial scalar ways. For example, James Boyce's (2011) 1835 critically scoped how the precolonial lands, flora and fauna, and indigenous peoples surrounding Melbourne (now the capital city of the State of Victoria) succumbed to the anglo-imperial legal and governance methods of frontier, settler, and pastoral colonialisms.

Another example of the numerous ways landscapes can be scoped. Jim Poulter's (no date) retold and written in close consultation with Wurundjeri Elders, has identified eight traditional seasons in the Melbourne area, each of which has a predominant seasonal activity. SeasonScapes on Country are also needed to make additional historical and cultural sense of how colonial/imperial landscapes are conceived, constructed and ecopedagogically practiced. Previous attempts to define Aboriginal seasons in the Melbourne area have been unduly influenced by the standardized European concepts of four seasons, each occupying a fixed three-month period. The Wurundjeri, however, worked on a 13-month lunar cycle with each season relating not only to the prevailing weather and how the subtle seasonal changes shaped the various cycles of flora and fauna growth, as well as the particular human activities associated with each season.

Other Indigenous groups in Australia lived by five, six, or seven seasons in lived Country. And to bring the scoping of the landScape to the present, Charles Massy's (2017) historical, cultural and indigenous study of farmScapes in the nearby Australian Alps tracks the creeping chemicalization of modern agro-industrial techniques grounding the widespread intersections of land (ecocide) and human (genocide) “health.” Glyphosates (an “advanced weedkiller” called Roundup) is condemned by Massy, like Rachel Carson's (1962) classic about the continuous insecticidal poisoning of the whole human environment concluding seasonally as a Silent Spring, for its farmscoped application to the land, mountain, and riverScapes surrounding Melbourne. Meanwhile, the kangaroos in my backyard are dying out, from heat, from fires, from habitat loss.

This sort of “additional” scoping has (partially) informed and reflected my ecopedagogical practices of, for example, “slow vagabonding” (Payne, 2014) and autoethnographically felt and embodied interspecies and ecological “relations” with the mobs of kangaroos that inhabit my 30-year-long effort to rewild (Greer, 2014) our “bush block” wedged into, or by, a National Park, all “placed” in the amnesiac present/future through the terra nullius dispossession of the past/passed Jaara Jarra Country and Dja Dja Warrung language group. And before them, and us? (Payne, 2013).

Scapes, their scales, and their scopes are vitally connected over timespace in ways that often defy or elude conventional pedagogical interest or academic concern and effort. We can only signal and partially respond to that absence in this SI. Here, the detailed telling and different scoping of various Scapes outlined above, aims heuristically to historically, ontologically move, and epistemologically turn our ecopedagogies other/counterwise and critical ecopedagogies elsewhere within and beyond the contemporary humanScapes we typically ascribe to in the ahistorical now, and its associated dromospherical amnesia in the present.

Thus, in different ways, each author/researcher's contribution to this SI grounded in three conceptual-empirical studies of practiced will, enigmatically, sit or fit somewhat ambiguously, at times, on the historical continuum and “in between” and “on the edges” flows and fluxes of Nature and Culture, ontology and epistemology, ecocentrism and anthropocentrism, beyond human and human, body and mind, practice and theory, and lifeworld and text. Yet, another reversal thinking in the methodological framing of the SI is signalled, a fourth so far in this Introduction. Each formulation of an empirically qualified ecopedagogy as/in scapes seeks, therefore, to partially and contingently (e)Scape the tendency to conflate, singularize, reduce, simplify, totalize, and homogenize discourse/practice through the epistemological erasure of the materially (and historically/symbolically) real, and variable differences/othernesses of EE practices and theorizations. That is, the framing aspires to a methodology of ecological holism (see Figure 1), within limits already expressed, beyond the (methodological) individualisms of most single and co-authored contributions to regular issues of journals.

Seven Scapes are scoped by the contributing authors. In all, about 30 conceptual-empirical studies of practices are reassembled in the framing of this ecologically socially wayfinding experiment into ecopedagogies as/in different Scapes. In the final part of this SI, a materially informed and empirically qualified partial ‘meta’ theorization of a formative ecopedagogy as/in scapes is offered heuristically.

A note on the dominant logic of theory (and practice) in EE and EER: An intellectual (e)scape

In the initial framing of the SI, assumptions about the logical role of the relationship of theory and practice in EE and EER required deliberation and, here, clarification. Historically, the fields of EE and EER aimed to provide a constructive, critical, interdisciplinary, experiential and, it must be said again, environmentally driven response to the local-planetary, inter-generational, and cross-cultural practical problems and associated social issues, including education, in which we find ourselves, then, in the 1970s, and now, in the 2010s.

One special issue warranting attention in the experimental processes of practical theorizing is the changing nature of scholarly effort, modes of intellectual exchange, and the influence that problem ‘resolutions’ have on the ways academics conceive and practice their work. Postmodernity and postmodernism have intensified and individualized academic work via our techno/cyber/digitally mediated and corporately audited modes of intellectual exchange and its/their increasingly “abstracted” and disembodied non-face-to-face social relations (James, 2006). Physical, material encounters and everyday real environments are disembodied, or decontextualized, or displaced (or non- and unplaced). Impact ratings, among other measures, have abstracted EER and its commitments to a once-promising environmentally decentered alternative to mainstream human-centered education. The processes of abstraction, however, remain deeply snared in the orthodox logics of anthropocentric and technocentric education.

EE and its research, now, it seems, have only partially (e)Scaped the four-decade long disciplinary “hold” of, for example, applied science type models of curriculum development, and behaviorist type pedagogies for teaching and learning about and, sometimes in or with the environment. Those old, but persistent, logics inordinately privilege the assumption in EE that the provision of (right) knowledge taught by experts, will be properly learned and lead linear-like to the (right) attitudinal and belief changes, (right) values clarifications, that inexorably conclude in the (right) pro-environmental behaviors (KAB models) (for critique, see Robottom & Hart, 1993). Excised from this positivist inspired, hyper-rationalistic, propositional, cause-effect logic, and its decontextualized and disembodied practice is the crucial ecological-historical role of human experience, environmental relations, and their habits, affects, norms and traditions, individual and collective agencies, and critical accounts of their enabling and constraining structures (family, schools, neighborhoods, the everyday social, economic, institutional, and organizational).

Beyond the uncritically established authority of the KAB model, in general terms, it is difficult to not conclude now that the early promise of EE in the 1970s, and its reconstructive potentials and powers of the alternative radical, critical-materialist/realist pedagogies and research methodologies developed in the 1980s and 1990s has diminished, or been diluted, or been jeopardized by the dominant positivist and empiricist logics of the ‘old’ that still serve to reconstitute the “new” of the field.

Broad critiques of neoliberal approaches to EE (for example, Hursh et al., 2015) offer a helpful diagnosis as to why such positivist models perpetuate the problem they sought to “fix.” But neoliberalism in theory and practices is an easy, and overused, negative target in the absence of positive and progressive alternatives such as that represented in and by this SI. Despite the value of such critiques, such deconstructions tend to mask the problem this SI commenced with; the need for a reclaiming and redesigning of EE and, by implication, EER. This is not easy. Put bluntly, our contemporary forms of postmodern intellectual exchange and their preferred academic logics and practices have escaped serious “postcritical” treatment and regenerative “reflexivities” about our “positionings” in EE and its relationship to EER, or the reverse (for example, Hart, 2005, 2013).

One powerful consequence of ignoring Hart's warning about misunderstanding who and what we are is, for example, the uncritical “retraditionalization” by academics of certain “old” practices like KAB and logics and methodologies (theory-practice gaps) that, effectively, trump the environment as material and real source of the field's genesis. We continue to forget, for example, David Orr's (1992) reminder 15 years after EE was formulated, or 25 years ago, that the terms “environmental (and conservation) education” are oxymoronic! In practice, theory, and methodology!

A double reversal of thinking about postmodern intellectual exchange is, therefore, “logically” needed now to challenge this uncritical anthropocentric inversion of Education as priority and authority while usurping Environment and subjugating (remnant) Nature. This is an identity issue, maybe crisis for the field. This counter-logical double reversal outlined throughout this introductory framing of the (special) issue effectively, (re)turns the critical praxis of EE and EER to targeting the many problems of the authority, or hegemony, of the postmodern postpositivist logics, stealths, economics, and policies and practices of Education, including those promulgated in and by the corporate university and its neoliberalized forms of intellectual exchange and dissemination. Beyond this suffocation of a critical logic, numerous reversals to the ‘new’ language needs of EE (e.g., Le Grange, 2013) have already been flagged above as part of an ecopedagogical experiment and alternative (re)search framings and programs. This double reversal antilogical framing serves to practically counter and theoretically contest how EE and EER attend to the dromospherical excesses and anthropogenically ecocidal consequences of where environmental educators' practices are, hopefully, (re)positioned.

How so? There are numerous explanations. Many are not immediately relevant to the purpose and rationale of this SI, but are to the problem this SI started with. Two only explanations are offered. The first warrants a “memorying” in (re)framing the concepts and practices of ecopedagogy selectively pursued here, and in full light of the most recent enthusiasms for ‘new’ theory for different versions of nonanthropocentric ontologies and epistemologies, axiologies, and methodologies. Their implications still need to be worked through practically in terms of bridging another theory-practice divide, beyond that assembled specially in this SI that, counter/otherwise, theorizes selectively out of various empirical studies of practices to inductively identify and abductively assemble various absences and presences from the “grounds up.”

First, the logical role and practical place of theory. Theory uptake, including deconstruction, and its developments in EE and EER mostly follows the traditional academically legitimizing logic of being deductively and reductively and instrumentally applied to practices and their description, interpretation, or explanation. Now, we see more of this very same logic being downloaded digitally in the thoroughly postmodern of, even, globally online EE courses, and their (re)sourcing via the cyberscapes of, invariably, wealthy western universities competing for massive online enrollments, and fee-paying courses. In other words, “imported” and abstracted theory in the global Dromosphere still inordinately authorizes and legitimizes, or inscribes, and governs, the practiceScapes of the field.

Some examples might flesh out this point. In spite of all of this new “high” theory, rarely mentioned in EE and EER is how the notion of pedagogy has epistemologically (and methodologically) remained doggedly anthropocentric and scientistic/positivist in its logic (i.e., KAB models supported “interactively” by, for example, chat rooms). Moreover, that turbocharged digitalised and colonizing logic is uncritically reconstituted in “new” forms and practices. Increasingly celebrated and “imagined,” are the still transmissive and “banking” (“saved” on desktops, in hard drives and clouds) “technopedagogies” now designed into the digitalization of knowledge production and on-line dissemination, their technics of postmodern intellectual exchange (sic), that then are often uncritically practiced as downloading/uploading and applied willy-nilly to different contextScapes (environments, bodies, peoples, classes, histories, geographies, cultural-ecologies, or geo-epistemologies) (see Payne, 2003/2006).

This techno-designed “new” cyberpedagogy as “old” theory and, for example, expert/abstract knowledge-driven reconstituted KAB practices is likely to reproduce and individuate the historical problem and logic of instrumentalized practice. The globalized/universalized disembodiments, disembedding, and decontextualizing of the experiences of Scapes, places, peoples and nature/environment scales are vulnerable to these postmodern reductive and simplified intersectionalities of old and new logics of practice. If so, once again, the logical hold of these overly rationalistic, ahistorical epistemologies and their methodologies endorses the mechanically dualistic Cartesian (ontology) and values-hierarchical polarities of technology over ecology, abstraction over real, digital over experience, cognition over affect, stasis over movement, theory over practice, classScape over fieldScape, posthuman over human, and so on.

This hegemonic logic (and practice) of abstracting (techno)epistemologies over/against ontology in EE has been consistently reconstituted since the first early warning signs of a theory-practice and practice-theory gaps in EE were expressed in the 1980s. And, this theory-practice gap, as well as other dualisms whose alleged deconstructions are often textually rehearsed in the discourse of EE and EER, such as indoor over outdoor, knowing over doing, and even softwareScapes over forestScapes mirrors the related parallel rise of the closely related field of environmental ethics in the 1980s.

A second example comes from the field of philosophy and its impact, or not, on EE theory and practice, including EER. Again, I emphasize this gap in outlining the problematic of the overly authoritative role of theory in EE in how our field is conceptually informed, and practically shaped, from the “outside” down of the ‘inside’ interests. A key example in EE is the role of (philosophical) environmental ethics in pedagogically advancing a practical environmental (and social) ethic in various educationscapes.

Editorializing after the first 10 years, then 15, of the interdisciplinary journal Environmental Ethics, its founding Editor Eugene Hargrove (1989b, 1993) lamented the lack of impact of the philosophical theorizing of environmental ethics in practical affairs and policy, including education. In the first decade of the publication of Environmental Ethics commencing in 1979, coinciding with the post-UN formalization of EE mentioned earlier, then “new” philosophies of nature, theories of human and “non”human values, including rights, duties, virtues, aesthetics, and intrinsic worth were widely canvassed. They were assiduously debated in full view of the not new ideas of anthropocentrism and “non”anthropocentric issues and interests (see Keller, 2010, for a comprehensive retrospective account). Deep ecology, social ecology, ecofeminism, and animal rights “turns” in the 1980s and 90s attracted much attention. So, too, did the environmental ethicists of that time open for inspection the academic quest for ontology/ies of nature underlying the various dominant epistemological approaches to environmental ethics (Hargrove, 1989a; see also Toadvine, 2009). And, by implication, in, about, and for EE and EER.

Nearly 40 years later, reiterating the “new” interest and “turns” to, for example, materialisms and realisms, and (re)search for their nonanthropocentric ontologies founded in matter, things, entities, objects and stuff, and their ecologies, we are, again like the 1970s, potentially at an exciting time in EE and EER. But, this exciting time might quickly evaporate into yet another textual form of intellectual self-paralysis, and loss of the critical will, if the critical and materialist lessons of history are ecopedagogically ignored, or eScaped, or just linguistically rehearsed as ahistorically “new.” In 2030, will we still be debating the impact factor and journal ratings of digitalized/cyber KAB models downloaded and uploaded in EE? In EER, will we find ourselves, still, (re)grappling with the digitalized logics and techno-practices of the once grounded ontology-epistemology tension first outlined in EER in Robottom & Hart's (1993) attempts to engage the methodological debates that were then, and still are, confounding the field. In another 20 years, will we find ourselves lamenting the lack of practical impact of so/self-called new theory?

To counter/otherwise, the experimental reversals of the logic of practices are deeply embedded in the conceptual framing of this SI, reiterating the limitation that only seven Scapes of uneven scales are scoped in the thirty odd studies utilized for the empirical/practical purposes of establishing some credibility and legitimization of a (re)nascent ecopedagogy as/in scapes. The four “sides” of Figure 1 – coupled as “ontological realism” with “ecological holism,” intersecting with “epistemological abstraction” (or epistemological realism/idealism) and “axiological interests” (or affectivities) aims to illustrate this struggle and tension in reframing, reclaiming, and redesigning the particular practices and processes of ecopedagogy as/in scapes as an “old” potential within the postorthodox “new” of ecopedagogies as/in scapes.

The note here about the prevailing dominant logic of the history, theory, and practice of EE and EER is not to overly criticize each and deconstruct all. Instead, each has a reconstructively dialectical and dialogical responsibility to the other (for example, Dewey, 1920/1948) in reassembling how EE and EER potentially “interact” in redesigns and then reposition themselves in the quadratic overlaps of ontology∼axiology∼epistemology∼methodology in EER methodologies and ‘applied’ triadic of ecoaesthetics∼environmental ethics∼ecopolitics in EE pedagogies (for example, Payne, 1995, 1999a, 2014, 2015).

Leopold “memories” us part of the modern way that now needs to incorporate the postmodernity and postmodernism of the Anthropocene/Dromosphere, both theoretically “new” and practically “old”. This reassembling of past, present and future is a detraditionalizing and retraditionalizing experiment, as a re-emergent “practice theorization” or “theory of practice” in the reconstructively double reversal logic of EE, in this instance materialized via ecopedagogy as/in scapes.

How does this SI seek to advance this “new” logic? The experientially reconstructive logic of reversal thinkings in our academic positioning and postmodern forms of abstracted intellectual exchange invites further consideration of the extent the authoritative role and “values hierarchical thinking” typically associated with how the “old” and “new” deductively and/or inductively/abductively “work” in terms of negating, or deconstructing, and reconstructing the dualisms listed here.

Here, in this postcritical intellectualscape, and, perhaps “new” theory context, ecopedagogy as/in scapes is revisited via our contributing authors, some of whom were initially unfamiliar with the term ecopedagogy, or scape, or both. Some lean more to Nature; some more to Culture; some more to human, some more to other than human, some more to practice; some more to theory, some to Indigineity, some to species, some to simulations. Irrespective, for the most part of this eclectic assemblage, there is a wariness about “forcing” intersections in any assemblage, as distinct from the more interesting identifications of various convergences and divergences, even collisions and collusions, but not conflations, in the formulations represented in this SI. Indeed, assemblages and their bundlings, presences and absences, are methodologically and substantively “messy” (Law, 2004).

Our reversal logical aim here for praxis, therefore, in empirically driven theorizations of various practical ecopedagogies as/in scapes is, for the most part, to inductively and abductively indicate a historically aware but updated, less anthropocentric alternative to the orthodox logics of both conventional and critical pedagogy, even if our respective formulations criss-cross between nonanthropocentric and “weak” forms of ecocentrism in the otherwise still deeply humanly driven and humanist enterprise called Education. “New” theory selectively updating the “old” is, therefore important in making dialogical sense of this double reversal logic.

This retraditionalizing SI, therefore, partially seeks a re”turn” and reclaiming of the old historical roots of both EE and (Western/anglo) environmental ethics but, as we see via the contributions to the SI, incorporates “new” dimensions of environmental aesthetics and ecopolitics, and directly relevant “new” theory. The environmental design of the social design of EE promoted in and by the notion of ecopedagogy as/in scapes partially reverses the anthropocentrism of Education while deconstructing the excessive hubris of its humanist and technicist manifestations, mindsets, and habits. If so, this modest experimental and experiential ecopedagogy as/in scapes has the potential to generate radical changes and role experiments about the “nature” of learning, teaching, curriculum, policy, and research. Each is an element of a different form of postmodern intellectual exchange that can be anticipated.

In so doing, at that practical level of how we are positioned in this SI, and it repositions us reflexively via the framing of the SI, each contributor to the SI was asked to address how, and in what ways, his/her ecopedagogy as/in/for scapes advances the field of EE. Hopefully, the critical alternative envisaged by the logic of the SI emerges, again, through being attentive in our “agencies” (body/movementScapes and mind/intellectualScapes) to the history and logic outlined above as an (e)Scape from the hegemonic logics of instrumentalized pedagogical practices in EE and EER. In addition, each author's empirically qualified and partially theorized contribution to ecopedagogy as/in scapes concludes with a “What next?” recommendation. Finally, in the concluding article of this SI, a very limited “meta”theorization of ecopedagogy as/in scapes, as indicated in Figure 1, is offered heuristically in an experimentally generative manner.

EE is now approaching its 50th year, post the UN conferences of the 1970s. The time for practicality is materially and realistically “right” when the dance of “new/old” theory once again confronts the troubled “nature” of Western thought and education in the Anthropocene/Dromosophere. It is, potentially with cautions and limits expressed here, an exciting reconstructive body∼time∼spacetime for postcritical EE and EER.

Notes

1. More recently, for example, Hansen's (2013) sociocultural history of mountaineering in Europe highlights its roots in the Enlightenment's ascendancy of Western science and culture, imperialism, and patriarchal masculinity while simultaneously shaping the Romantics representation of nature. The cinematic essay, Mountain, directed by Jen Peedom (2017), co-written with Robert McFarlane, narrated by Willem Dafoe, and scored musically by Richard Tognetti focuses enigmatically, if not paradoxically, on the allure of mountains, their magic and power, and the acceleration and intensification of “extreme” adventure recreation sports, their technological mastery and intensified consumption/commodification of nature that the deep time other of wild and ungovernable mountains remains (largely) indifferent to. Peedom/McFarlane probe, “How has it come to this? The mountains as a stage—set for a pumped-up poker-game of high stakes and high returns, all driven by big brands and online views.”

2. More readily available is Leopold (1949/1989). In that special commemorative edition, Part I is renamed “The Delights and Dilemmas of a Sand County Almanac.” Part II is renamed “Sketches Here and There” (changed from “The Quality of the Landscape”). Part III “A Taste for Country” is replaced by “The Upshot” (Part IV in the 1949/1953/1963 version) while its sequence of chapters is reversed, commencing with “Conservation Esthetic” and concluding with “The Land Ethic.” Does this reversal suggest that aesthetics precedes ethics and politics? This is a matter of interest in this SI. The 1949/1953/1966 version I refer to throughout the SI is an enlarged version of A Sand County Almanac that was in draft form when Leopold died in 1948 of a heart attack while helping neighbors fight a grass fire. His son, Luna, prepared for publication another group of Leopold's previously unpublished essays that, subsequently, appeared in 1953 under the title Round River and are combined in the 1949/53/66 version I reference. Irrespective of how Leopold's works are (re)presented, their original contribution is “classic” for numerous reasons, one of which is because it is the integration, or ecology, of (eco)aesthetics, land/environmental ethics, and (eco)politics.