“Amnesia of the moment” in environmental education

Abstract

Northern theories like “new materialism” and “posthumanism” are, increasingly, influential in the global productions of knowledge in environmental education (EE). In this latest discursive phase of textualising EE, the conceptual mash of “new/post” idea(lism)s is easily identified, but not critically examined, as is undertaken here via three interrelated critical case studies of key idea(l)s in the new/post. Criticism of the current normative, theoretical, methodological, and empirical mess of environmental education research (EER) must be understood within three historical and structural problems, namely; (i) the formative stages of modern EE in the 1970s, (ii) the escalating importance of theory in the 1990s transition from modern thought to postmodern thinking, (iii) the neo-liberalization of academic identity formations and post-intellectual relations in the audit culture of the corporate university of the 2000s. The first two closely related case studies of the new/post highlight the ahistorical and atheoretical mash of performatively-driven abstract theorizing in EE. Each demonstrates how earlier “founding” policy of EE, its implied pedagogical praxis, and commensurable methodological development in EER have been forgotten. The first critique focusses historically on the allegedly new idea of “agential relations” and its confused discursive claims about “action”. Forgotten is the vital matter of “ecology” and its relational “things”. The second rescues the ecofeminist notion of “embodied materialism”. Ecofeminist praxis has been deactivated by the new/post abstraction of feminist poststructural knowledge claims on “material-discursive practices”. Together, these interrelated critiques retrieve a much needed historical-critical-material frame from which new/post textualism can be conceptually reconstructed and empirically qualified in ways that reactivate the ecopolitical rationale for founding EE. If, indeed, theory is needed in ecopedagogical praxis, an alternative case exists for “bringing theory back in” via, for example, ecophenomenology, ecological anthropology, and ecohumanism. Ecopedagogical practices and their research might then (re)”turn” to a realist ontology via, for example, the “materialisms” of the “new” of “speculative realism” coupled with the “old” (sic) of “critical realism” in, strangely, “post post” claims on knowledge production. At issue in de-abstracting, re-materializing, repoliticizing, and decentering the hubristic authority of theory in new/post EER are numerous axiological commitments, epistemological issues, and methodological dilemmas concerning the onto ∼ ethics ∼ politics of (mis)representation in the global North. Underpinning the two case critiques is a third “criticism” of the postmodern means (mediums/modes) of knowledge production (forms) as they “intersectionally” perform a digitally platformed and instrumental colonization of the global North and South discourse of EER. “Other”wise, in the post-intellectual climate change of a universalizing new\post technics of “agentialism,”, we misrecognize who we are textually “becoming” and, in being so post-inscribed and newly-mediated, are distracted from what “really” practically matters in the field, and why it “materially” exists.

Keywords:

• Criticism
• praxis
• posthumanism
• new materialism
• technics
• material-discursive practices
• ecopedagogy

Acknowledgement

Ariel Salleh’s insightful comments on an earlier draft have been valuable in clarifying certain concepts and issues. For currency and depth of Salleh’s contribution beyond that included above, see www.arielsalleh.info.

Notes

1 “Criticism” is a key method of the post-Marxist “critical theory” of The Frankfurt School established in Germany in the aftermath of WW1. Prominent theorists working within a “historical-materialism” frame of inquiry and critique included Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, and Habermas. Key themes of criticism included the development of capitalism, the culture industry, psychoanalysis, philosophy of history, the mastery of nature, instrumental reason, epistemology and method, the scientization of politics, knowledge and action, and reflexivity. My second and third critiques are partially inspired by Marcuse’s (1964) formulation of “paralysis of criticism” or a “society without opposition”, but also Fay’s (1987) critique of the limits of critical social science’s account of liberation (in EER, see Payne, 1999, p. 187). More recently, Noys (2010, 2014) criticism of the “accelerationisms” of Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard and Baudrillard adds valuable insight into the status of criticism in the contemporary condition of theory, society/culture, and time/speed (see also, for example, Virilio, 2007/2010, and in EER, Payne, 2018c). On Marcuse and ecopedagogy, see Kahn, 2010. For criticism in Educational theory and “critical pedagogy” in the North, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, see the respective works of Stanley Aronowitz, Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, and Peter McLaren. In the South, see Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” and Ivan Illich’s “deschooling society”. Freire briefly mentioned Marcuse’s criticism of technology. Freire and Illich are rarely cited in the North, thus highlighting the “organic” and community-based focus of their respective criticisms of society, culture and schooling. Freire was not inspired by, or driven by theory. Springer et al.’s (2016) “radicalization of pedagogy” in Geography is one of the few contemporary theorists in the North who extensively draw on Freire and Illich. In EE, see Payne (2017) on Springer.

2 See, for example, from the 1960s Novick and Cottrell’s (1967) Our World in Peril and, more recently, Diamond (2005) on the ecological collapse of “past” and “modern” societies, and Read & Alexander’s (2019) prognosis for the “finish” of industrial civilization.

3 An earlier JEE SI provided a (Northern) synthesis of a political ecology of education (Meek & Lloro-Bidart, 2017). Instead, Barad and Braidotti, and the frequently cited Haraway or Deleuze & Guattari are favourites in the new/post of EER. Rarely are those authors’ theories critiqued. The structures they speak to socially and/or ecologically are not explained. Their practical relevance to any of the preceding ecologies of EE is not questioned. Their imported texts are authoritative and inscriptive in the new/post moment. Prior to the new, it was the post of “thinking theory” with the textual power of Butler, Foucault, even Spivak to be mentioned later, and Derrida in educational research in the global North (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). None are acknowledged environmental or ecological theorists.

4 The always prescient Aldo Leopold (1949/1966, pp. 291–295), well known in the global North, particularly the U.S.A, emphasized the ecopedagogical imperative of “promoting perception” where “our reaction to it” (the outdoors) depended not on the quality of what he (sic) saw, but on the quality of the mental eye with which he saw it”. However, for the historical, critical, ecological purposes here, Leopold was acutely aware that “the PhD (in ecology) may become as callous as an undertaker to the mysteries at which he officiates”.

5 In terms of this SIs global North-South production of knowledge, Northern analogies for Earth like “Sunship” or “Spaceship”, and Hardin’s “lifeboat ethics”, notoriously fail to differentiate between the rich and the poor, or haves and have nots, as to who inhabits, or is saved, or not, when the carrying capacity of the (rescue) ship or boat is extremely limited.

6 For historical, empirical, conceptual, and comparative purposes, I briefly note how the ecopolitical critique of patriarchy has variations. The social ecologist, Murray Bookchin (1982) observed how (patriarchal) cultures expressed the “hierarchically” driven oppressions of women and nature for which their “dissolution” was a particular “political” priority. Bookchin’s “synthetic environment” (Bookchin, 1962/2018, published under the pseudonym Lewis Herber) was a historical-materialist critique of the toxifications of human-environment intra/inter actions and relations created industrially and structurally by chemicals, pesticides and herbicides, medicines, additives, food processing and packaging. Rachel Carson’s (1962) classic Silent Spring focussed mainly on herbicides and pesticides. Bookchin’s “ecological society” (Bookchin, 1980), early “ecoanarchism” (Bookchin, 1971)/later “Communalism” (Bookchin, 2007), and method of “dialectical naturalism” (Bookchin, 1990) combine in “social ecology” as a “partner” like critique with early ecofeminism’s critique of the patriarchal assumptions of deep ecology “theory”. While Bookchin did not focus sharply on the question of essentialism, ecofeminist social ecologist Chaia Heller (1999) did in her powerful and persuasive Ecology of Everyday Life.

7 Julie Stephens (1990) poststructural type feminist counter-representation of third world women is an example of Salleh’s (1990) critique of the non-reflexive “discourse determinism” of poststructuralism’s collusion with the “master project” of patriarchy and, subsequently, the politics of representation of ecofeminism.

8 I will not detail the (materialist/relational) ecofeminism literature in EE/EER excluded from the field’s new/post discourse, such as Di Chiro, (1987) and Payne (1994, 1997). Like Salleh, and to a large extent, Val Plumwood’s (1993) better known ecofeminist views outside Australia, those bodies/voices have not been included in the new/post of EER, even by Australian academics. Re-presencing how those contributions anticipated the treatment of “essentialism” in the new conceptions of “discursive-material practices” in EER is instructive, but beyond the immediate purposes. Why? The stakes are massive. In a nutshell, over the past decade, the excessive hubrism, rhetoric, and claims of “posts”, including structuralism, nature and now human within the “new” of materialisms lays bare the old debates about nature/nurture or Nature/social (de)constructionism. Two “seminal” texts published over two decades ago, for example, laid the “foundation”, conceptually and philosophically, about the contested and changing nature of Nature (Soper, 1995; Soule & Lease, 1995). Very rarely are those seminal “texts” referenced in the ahistorical and atheoretical new/post EER amnesia of the moment.

9 Some versions of posthuman theory endorse the role of technology, noting Braidotti’s “ambivalence” about it, while most transhuman theory valorizes the role of technologies.

10 Undoubtedly, there are other strong candidates, such as the sociology of the environment or environmental sociology, cultural geography, ecological psychology, each of which demonstrate enduring commitments to the empirical qualification of theoretical and methodological development.

11 Graham Harman’s (2016) “social theory” interpretation of his broader philosophical engagement of “object oriented” philosophy within the umbrella of “speculative realism” contrasts nine axioms of his “immaterialism” and “new materialisms”. Suffice to say, even footnoting these debates highlights the atheoretical nature, and ahistorical nature, of the rise of performative abstractionism in EER.

12 Out of respect for “theorists” (Dreamers, narrators, wayfarers…) of Indigineity, I leave it to others in Indigenous/Aboriginal/First Peoples Studies to bring to presence, co-presence, and representation those historical cosmologies and ways of being/becoming (but see also, for an “Australian” example of ecopedagogy as/in foodScapes, Ma Rhea (2018).

13 Frances Barraclough’s English translation concedes the impossibility of representing the “nature” of Arguedas’ creation of terms fusing Quechuan and Spanish languages.

14 There is, unfortunately, disturbing anecdotal evidence (global North) about how academic critics of new and post theories in EER are being censored, or vilified, or intimidated, or excluded from various forums, spaces, workplace settings and edited publications.