Ecomodernity as a Cultural Programme: Combining Green Transition with an Educational Paradigm Shift

Abstract

This paper conceptualizes the diverse responses and solutions to the environmental and climate crisis as a battle of modernities, where a well-entrenched and efficient ‘carbon modernity’ is increasingly challenged by alternative visions of social well-being and industrial development. This ‘battle’ shows that, although the twenty-first century’s scenarios of a sustainable future may vary, the common rallying cry is most often for the mobilization of modernity’s innovative potential to get the planet out of its current predicament, and less so the idea of a return to a Spartan, pre-modern nature-utopia. There is now a plethora of concepts describing the greening of modernity, from ‘sustainable development’, ‘ecological modernization’, ‘green growth’ and ‘transformation’ to the ‘post-growth’, ‘no-growth’ or even ‘de-growth’ economy. The paper contends that it is time to put these concepts – and their accompanying practices – into dialogue with one another and imbue them with an overarching cultural objective. The suggested concept of ‘ecomodernity’ reconciles the modernity of the Enlightenment with a return to oikos – the ancient concept of the more-than-human ‘household’ or ‘natural home’ – reclaiming the discarded connection between humans and nature. The paper drafts the cultural contours of ecomodernity in terms of a pivotal paradigm shift in education, which involves redefining human identity, reimagining the balance between competition and cooperation, and supplementing knowledge with wisdom.

Keywords:

• sustainable development
• modernity
• ecological modernization
• green growth
• education
• environmental ethics

Notes on contributor

Nina Witoszek is research director at the Center for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. Before joining Oslo University, she lectured at the National University of Ireland in Galway and the European University in Florence. Her recent books include The Origins of the Regime of Goodness: Remapping the Norwegian Cultural History (2011), Civil Society in the Age of Monitory Democracy (2013) and Nordic Model 2.0: Forging a Cooperative Society in a Competitive World (forthcoming 2017).

Notes

¹For the in-depth discussion of the battle of modernities, see Midttun (2012), “The Greening of the European Electricity Industry: A Battle of Modernities”, Energy Policy, vol 48. In this article I am using the concept of modernity both in the classical, sociological sense as elaborated by Shmuel Eisenstadt's studies of ‘multiple modernities' (see argument below) – and in a more figurative and narrow sense, pointing to the sources of energy production – such as steam, coal, atom and renewables – which have had a crucial impact on the civilizational development of humanity. See Eisenstadt ( 2000)

²For illustration see http://www.google.no/search?hl=en&q=pillars+of+hercules,+plus+ultra&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=6sXuULLbK8T2sgahjIHQDQ&biw=1091&bih=470&sei=78XuUP3ZKIHZtAa4xoDwCA Accessed 15 June 2013.

³This spirited vision runs counter to the second, dark interpretation of Western modernity: one that emphasizes its imperial and genocidal expertise, bureaucratic soullessness and glorification of instrumental reason. The trouble is that fetishizing the Faustian, hubristic aspect of modernity can easily prevent us from overlooking the persuasive and mobilizing potential of myths which have created the foundations of modern science, liberal democracy and the social welfare state.

⁴Notable examples include Al Gore's documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth' (2006), the Hollywood dystopia The Day after Tomorrow (2004) and Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic literary masterpiece The Road (2006). We could also mention an influential journalistic work on the climate crisis by Elisabeth Colbert serialized in The New Yorker and published as Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man Nature and Climate Change (2006) and Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet: A Field Guide to the Future of the Earth (2013).

⁵While the UN's Agenda 21 spelled out a programme of active engagement with countries and communities, its main thrust was to inject responsibility into the world economy and initiate a global programme of cutting CO₂ emissions and imposing carbon taxes or emission quotas.

⁶See the International Seminar on ‘The Lazy Dawn of Ecomodernity,' Oslo, Litteraturhuset, 26 October 2012. See http://www.ceres21.org//events/50/26-October,-2012-The-Lazy-Dawn-of-Ecomodernity.aspx?returnurl=%7e%2fevents%2fIndividualEventPage.aspx

⁷E.g. Jaenicke and Weideber (1986), Mac-Neef (1989), Daly and Cobb (1989), Pearce, Markandya and Barier (1989), McDonough and Braungart (2002), Beck (1992), Beck et al. (1994), Hajer (1995), Christoff (1996), Dryzek ( 1997), Eckersley (1996), Von Weizsäcker (19 89), Young (2000), McDonough and Braungart (2002), Edwards (2005), Giddens (2009), Jackson (2009) and Hawken et al. (2008).

⁸An interesting example here can be The Arne Næss Chair in Global Justice and the Environment established at the University of Oslo, Norway, in 2007 to promote a dialogue between environmentally minded academics, businesses, ‘cultural creatives’ and politicians. It has proven to be hard to mobilize these actors into common actions for a comprehensive paradigm shift. Entrenched in their well-established, green niches, the engaged parties tend to ‘do their own thing.’ See http://www.sum.uio.no/english/research/projects/arne-ness-chair/

⁹Out of some 450,000 and 80,000 hits from a Google search on ‘eco-efficiency' and ‘ecological modernization’, respectively, the terms seem to be used mainly by economists and writers of handbooks for corporate governance. It looks like the green transition was hijacked by technocrats before the humanists could even say yes or no.

¹⁰In positing modernity as a ‘cultural programme’, Eisenstadt follows the classical sociological analyses of Marx and Durkheim and, to an extent, Max Weber.

¹¹The Chinese and Ghanaian researchers have jointly embraced this conclusion at the International Seminar ‘The Lazy Dawn of Ecomodernity,' Oslo, Litteraturhuset, 26 October 2012. http://www.ceres21.org//events/50/26-October,-2012-The-Lazy-Dawn-of-Ecomodernity.aspx?returnurl=%7e%2fevents%2fIndividualEventPage.aspx

¹²See Sessions and Devall (1985) and Schumacher (1993). The concept of corporate social responsibility goes back to the corporate philanthropy of Joseph Rowntree, who provided housing and education to the poor in the area of his chocolate factories in the eighteenth century. On its history and trajectory see John Elkington (1997) and Taylor (2009).

¹³ http://www.foei.org/about-foei/mission-and-vision/ Accessed 14 October 2014.

¹⁴ https://www.facebook.com/CommunitiesUnitedAgainstProp23/info Accessed 2 November 2014.

¹⁵The campaign took place during my research stay at Stanford University, and one often heard this slogan in local cafes and seen it in the streets of San Francisco.

¹⁶ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Portland_Weird Accessed 2 November 2014.

¹⁷There has been an interesting contrast between the humanities and the social sciences in the descriptions of human predicament. For a long time, most sociologists and economists have resorted to the rhetoric of ‘social change'. Ethnographers, anthropologists and ‘traditional’ historians on the other hand, have focused on a conservative, tradition-preserving aspect of human cultures (though anthropologists have occasionally spoken about cultural diffusion). Interestingly, it is the postmodern historians in the Foucauldian vein that have highlighted disruption and discontinuity as part of our cultural predicament.

¹⁸Although Rawls has convincingly argued for equality in the enjoyment of freedom and affirmative action for the least advantaged among us, he seems to have had little effect outside the academic echo chamber.

¹⁹The concept of human needs has been emphasized by is the growing body of empirical research sponsored by the UN, the National Academy of Sciences, the World Bank and other agencies as well as the so called Survival Indicators. See for example World Bank (2010).

²⁰Corning himself admits that he has been inspired by social democratic systems which have shaped the social well-being in Scandinavian countries (Corning, 2014, pp. 18–28).

²¹ http://wisdomresearch.org/Themes/basic/Arete/projects.aspx#sthash.ytXngRrI.dpuf

²² http://wisdomresearch.org/Themes/basic/Arete/projects.aspx#sthash.ytXngRrI.dpuf

²³Almost every tradition has its ‘tricksters' –  smart survivors who climb to the top through their inventiveness, staying attuned to nature, and empathy with the weak. The Norwegian Askeladden, the Russian ‘Holy Fool’, the French Guignol, the English Robin Hood, or the North American coyote are all smart underdogs who succeed because they embody a wise codex of action.

²⁴See Kjetil B. Alstadheim, ‘Oljemassasjen’ (Oil Massage), which reports on the Norwegian Prime Minister’s rhetoric of the ‘oil fairy tale’. Dagens Naeringsliv 6 March 2011, p. 12.

²⁵Existing evidence largely indicates that people are at times selfish, competitive and unjust and in other situations altruistic, cooperative and fair. More importantly, cross-cultural studies show that our sense of fairness and unfairness is also shaped by the social and environmental circumstances in which we live.

²⁶Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) was a charismatic Swiss pedagogue and educational reformer who revolutionized the nineteenth century education. He insisted on training the mind, together with physical dexterity, efficiency and encouraging mutual helpfulness. He also attempted to cultivate ‘the powers of attention, observation, and memory, which must precede the art of judgment and must be well established before the latter is exercised'. See Green, J. A. (1905) The Educational Ideas of Pestalozzi . W.B. Clive. A propos: Some of Pestalozzi's inspiration figures in Jack Mezirow's idea of ‘transformative sustainability' (see Mezirow and Associates, 2000, p. 7).