Cosmopolitical encounters in environmental education: Becoming-ecological in the intertidal zones of Bundjalung National Park

Abstract

This paper develops a cosmopolitical approach to multi-species inquiry in environmental education and its associated research. Drawing on Isabelle Stengers’ concepts of “etho-ecology” and an “ecology of practices”, the paper explores ethical and political questions of what it means to think-with nonhuman animals as sentient creatures who participate (often unwillingly) in environmental science studies. The author argues that ecology as a scientific practice cannot be disentangled from a process of becoming-ecological in the field, including the affective concerns and ethico-esthetic values produced through encounters amongst people, nonhuman animals, technologies, and their associated milieus. This conceptual work is extended through etho-ecological accounts of a three-day field excursion with environmental science students and their lecturers in the intertidal zones of Bundjalung National Park in NSW, Australia.

Keywords:

• Ecology of practices
• cosmopolitics
• environmental education
• Stengers
• posthumanism