Long-term impacts of two secondary school environmental studies programs on environmental behaviour: the shadows of patriarchy and neoliberalism

Abstract

A survey of alumni of two longstanding interdisciplinary secondary school environmental studies programs revealed that the vast majority of alumni reported being engaged in pro-environmental behaviours, which they attributed to participation in the programs five to twenty-three years prior. That finding in itself is worth sharing. Digging deeper, however, revealed that most reported behaviours were in the private rather than public sphere. Women alumni reported engaging in more household and marketplace-oriented behaviours. Further, a small number of men from the rural school expressed hostility towards environmental concerns using aggressively sexist and homophobic discourse. A feminist analysis takes into account structural forces such as patriarchy and neoliberalism to interpret the findings and illuminates gendered dimensions of pro- and anti-environmental behaviours.

Keywords:

• pro-environmental behaviours
• longitudinal study
• feminist analysis
• gender
• masculinities
• neoliberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We are not assuming cis-normativity when we use terms like woman, man, girl, boy, male, and female, and our intent certainly is not to reify the gender binary. Indeed, we share Miller’s (2019) concerns about how such categorizations are exclusionary and problematic. In this study, we used participants’ self-identification, which in this instance were on the binary.

2 Pseudonyms are used for the names of the schools.

3 We used four dropdown boxes for gender (female, male, transgender, prefer not to say) when we designed the survey item a few years ago but that seems to us now to be far too limited. Were we to revise the item now, we would strive to be more inclusive by using a simple constructed response (i.e. “Please indicate your gender: _______”), perhaps with a list of examples if we thought such prompts would add clarity for the anticipated audience (i.e. “Please indicate your gender (e.g. woman, man, nonbinary, agender, transgender, genderfluid, etc.): _______”).

4 Our friend Justin Dillon googled “trees are faggots” while one of us presented our initial findings at the AERA conference in spring 2019 and found a 4chan thread on the topic that indicated that the phrase may be part of far right discourse. Another hit we found in our own later Google search would undoubtedly inflame the trolls: the work of Canadian artist Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (2018) who produced an audio walking guide, Trees Are Fags. On his website, he explains that the guide “explores the history and aesthetics of gay sex cruising in city parks, making a number of arguments about the links between gay men and trees, unpacking the etymology of the word faggot, proposing the bassoon as the voice of arboreal homosexuality, and asking the listener to tune into the temporal modes of arboreal life” (see http://www.nemerofsky.ca/trees). Ramsay’s work would amble well alongside recent playful attempts to queer environmental education (Adsit-Morris and Gough 2017; Bazzul and Santavicca 2017).

5 We are grateful to Joe Henderson and Jay Kennedy for pointing us towards helpful literature on masculinities and environment.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.