Contextualizing climate change education: taking nature seriously

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that a proper response to the onset of potentially catastrophic human-induced climate change requires an understanding that is both broader and deeper than that which frequently informs current policies and that focusses on technological solutions and some behaviour modification. Such a technologically orientated response is seen as standing in danger of reinforcing what are argued to be the key underlying causes of anthropogenic climate change: immoderate anthropocentrism and conceiving nature essentially as purely a resource. A view of nature that seeks to characterize and respect nature’s intrinsic moral standing that is based on recognizing its inherent integrity, normativity and intrinsic value is developed. The genuinely receptive-responsive relationship with nature that emerges is argued to lie at the heart of the kind of environmental consciousness that can properly address climate change issues and that therefore constitutes a central concern of climate change education.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocentrism
• climate change
• environmental consciousness
• metaphysics of mastery
• nature’s moral standing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In saying this, I do not wish to be taken as passing the burden of addressing climate change onto schools. Clearly, to do this would be unfair and unrealistic. However, I do wish to make the point that education has a responsibility to enhance students’ understanding of environmental problems and to prepare them to consider, in terms appropriate to their circumstances, what would be constructive ways of responding to them.

2. I should make it clear that throughout this paper I write from within what might loosely be termed a ‘Western perspective’ – being insufficiently qualified to write from within any other.

3. For such a more developed account see, for example, Bonnett (2021). The vignette that follows is drawn from this source.

4. ‘Living’ here is used not in a purely biological sense, but rather to refer to the phenomenological/sensuous vitality of things in nature, such as the glistening of flowing water in the play of sunlight. Experience of such phenomena can enliven us—perhaps on occasion, ‘lift our spirits’, as we might say. For amplification of the character of this experience and the kind of consciousness that is involved see Bonnett (2021).

5. On the 24^th March 1987 the supertanker Exxon Valdez struck a reef in Alaska’s remote Prince William Sound. The punctured cargo holds released an estimated 10.8 million US gallons of crude oil into the water that affected some 1,300 miles of coastline, causing huge damage to wildlife.

6. Some have gone so far as to exclude the word ‘nature’ from their discussion of environmental issues, partly because of its Romantic associations (see, for example, Griffiths & Murray, 2017).

7. By ‘scientism’, I refer to a presumption that the assumptions and objectifying methods of classical experimental science afford a privileged view of reality and therefore should be applied where possible to all areas of understanding and decision-making (but see the discussion of this characterization in Affifi (2023) and Bonnett (2023)). However, a scientific response to the general tenor of the criticism implicit here might be that in its ongoing determination to attend to empirical evidence—including, as Popper puts it ‘the negative instance’ — in forming its conjectures, science is a paradigm of openness and rationality. Yet, as a social practice—for example, when akin to what Kuhn once described as paradigm-determined ‘normal science’ — this is not always the case. In addition, and more fundamentally, in its quest to explain and predict—that in turn require theorizing, abstraction and generalization, (and ever more frequently mathematization)—the scientific enterprise occludes the particularity of the individual occurring of things. Hence, the findings of science are always partial, such that on the account given in this paper, they require, at the least, to be complemented with, and sometimes to be made subservient to, other ways in which things can reveal themselves.

8. Given the posthumanist resonances throughout this paper and the considerable influence of posthumanist views on the topic of our relationship with nature, it might be useful briefly to clarify the sense in which the account presented in this paper is ‘posthuman’. Essentially, it castigates the highly rationalistic and rampantly anthropocentric modernist Humanism that arose with some versions of European Enlightenment thinking, and that for example, set human utility as the overriding goal of knowledge and sanctioned a science that was tasked with, in the words of Francis Bacon, ‘torturing nature’s secrets from her’ in the pursuit of this goal (see Bonnett, 2021, Ch. 1). While such overtly aggressive language is no longer current, I have argued that the same underlying motives of unbridled exploitation and control remain implicit in views that see nature as purely a human resource and that they hold sway in a prevailing metaphysics of mastery. However, I have also argued (Bonnett, 2004) that the nature of human consciousness requires that the radical rejection of dualistic human-nature thinking and of ideas of human separateness from nature and human exceptionalism advocated by some versions of posthumanism require nuancing. Because of the degree of self-awareness, reflectiveness, rationality, imagination, moral sensitivity, etc., of which human consciousness is capable—and therefore the quality of thoughtfulness that can inform its decisions—there is an important sense in which such consciousness has a level of understanding of, and responsibility towards, the environment that the rest of nature, as we currently believe it to be, does not. One of the things that the paper tries to illustrate is that human consciousness, while in some important respects is ‘separate’ and ‘exceptional’, can be post-Humanist in that it does not have to exercise its capabilities in an imperious and colonizing manner, and, indeed, is most richly human when it does not. These views are developed more fully in Bonnett (2004, 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Bonnett

Michael Bonnett is currently an independent scholar who has held senior teaching and research positions in the UK universities of Cambridge, London, and Bath. Formerly chair of the editorial board of the Cambridge Journal of Education, he has published widely in the field of philosophy of education giving particular attention to ideas of learning, thinking, personal authenticity and the character of the teacher-pupil relationship in education. His book Children’s Thinking: Promoting Understanding in the Primary School (1994, Cassell) explored the importance of poetic thinking for education. More recently, his focus has been on aspects of sustainability and environmental education, including developing a phenomenology of nature and ways in which human consciousness is inherently environmental. His book Retrieving Nature. Education for a Post-Humanist Age was published in 2004 by Blackwell, followed by an edited collection Moral Education and Environmental Concern published in 2014 by Routledge. His most recent book Environmental Consciousness, Nature and the Philosophy of Education. Ecologizing Education was published by Routledge in 2021.