The technics of environmental education

Abstract

An ambivalent, sometimes destructive, relationship between modern humanity, technology and ‘outer’ or external nature has historically attracted the critical attention of scholars and commentators from a wide variety of backgrounds. The effects of technology on postmodern ‘inner’ nature warrants similar scrutiny. This article examines how technology structures human experience and is structuring education for sustainable development. Propositions about the ‘technics of experience’ and questions for environmental education are posed so as to invite more earnest discussion about the inroads technologies and ‘vicarious’ learning experiences are making into the equally unproblematic ontological treatment of postmodern learners/subjects. Consideration must be given to the question of what users of the technological medium ‘become’—an ontological issue of crucial relevance to the ongoing aspirations and legitimacy of environmental education.

Notes

1. Intensification processes entail a heightened penetration of the cultural world into the body via an increasing array of technologies. Intensification includes the concurrent ‘collapse’ of time, place, space with the increased colonisation of the organic body and socially collective bodies by various aspects of cultural capital. Intensification processes give rise to the notions of the ‘cyborg’ and ‘technology of self’, as well as ‘glocalisation’. For example, ‘perpetual’ cosmological time then ‘cyclical’ day/night and seasonal time has been replaced by the ‘chronological’ and ‘linear’ measures of the calendar, the analogue watch with the ‘mechanical’ sweep of its hour then minute then second ‘hands’, in turn, have given way to the digital ‘dot’ or ‘point’ time of the electronic watch. Places and spaces are consequently reconceived, re‐experienced and reconstructed, invariably in more abstract and denatured ways because of the changing social construction, technological mediation and correction/regulation of mechanical time and its disciplining consequences on the human body and mind in the everyday.

2. Individuation processes entail an increasing reflexivity required of individuals to analyse and plan their own lives and conditions of experience and existence as they are brought more openly under the control of abstract forces, be they social and cultural, structural and bureaucratic. Technology is a major conduit or pathway of the processes of individualisation. ‘Designing’ or ‘inventing’ the self are useful practical characterisations of the individuating and intensifying consequences of higher technologies while the oft‐used term ‘hyperindividualism’ reflects the political and economical ‘deepening’ of this neo‐liberal project that universally privileges the sovereignty, autonomy and authority of the rational, self‐determining subject, even in its de‐centred, multiple or fragmented forms. For example, place‐based ‘community’ barter for self and social sustainability was eventually replaced by saving and depositing in the bank, whose objective/physical place and social space has more recently been dissolved by the ATM and credit card or BPay arrangements conducted electronically, increasingly in isolation from others, often at home, with ‘trusted’ but invisible expert others. Schools and universities are following the same pattern, thus providing the historical context for this case study of environmental education. Critique of this trajectory will locate the interrelated processes of abstraction, intensification and individualisation within the dominance of the commodity culture of industrial, now techno‐capitalism, much of whose life‘style’ and identity‐seeking imperatives I am concerned with in the interrogation of a ‘form of experience’ are often at odds with various versions of the ‘environment’ (Payne, 2000b).

3. See, for example Miah (2000), Kenway & Nixon (1999), Malbon (1998), Blackman (1998). With regard to virtual geographies and artificial natures, a prime concern of this essay about de‐centred postmodern subjects and natures, see the outstanding illustrative essay on shopping for nature in the mall by Jennifer Price (1995).

4. The discourse of environmental education is marked by a fairly prickly debate about the (allegedly) coercive nature of educational practices for the environment. Paradoxically, there are deafening silences about learners ‘having to do’ a range of tasks, such as ‘using’ a computer, being timetabled to do so, or even having to purchase one. Perhaps ICT are uncontroversial and politically (economically/vocational) ‘correct’, a presumption this study challenges, particularly for advocates of the ‘freedom to choose’ ‘educational’ imperative that also licenses the allegation of the coercive nature of education for the environment.