Environmental education in Aotearoa New Zealand: reconfiguring possum–child mortal relations

ABSTRACT

In Aotearoa New Zealand children learn about biodiversity loss and protection through a bicultural environmental education (EE) program. Connected with Predator Free NZ, a nationwide restoration project, the program teaches children about killing possums, rats, and stoats. Children’s involvement in possum killing has a long, troubling history in Aotearoa and EE is now working to transform attitudes from ‘hating possums’ into respecting all animals. This paper analysis the recent shift in rhetoric, with a focus on the discord between animal rights scholars and EE and by addressing the histories of Aotearoa, possums, and EE. With the help of Donna Haraway, Rangimārie Rose Pere, and other indigenous scholars, the troubles obscuring the move into interspecies respect are made visible. Militarized discourse, war games, individualism, Restoration, nature-culture divide, and human exceptionalism, are all emphasized as barriers. This paper also draws attention to a major concern with possum-child worlds and EE research in that children’s voice is seriously lacking. It is then argued that children’s stories must be present in future EE research, and that the pathway toward respecting possums is one and the same, located in indigenous, interspecies, children’s, and ecofeminist stories. Positions that emphasize interconnected ecologies between people, place, and animals.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental feminism
• environmental education
• indigenous ecologies
• interspecies justice
• species endangerment
• human–animal relations

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For a detailed account of the term Pākehā, see Fitzpatrick (2017).

2 For a detailed inventory of children’s involvement in games, hunts, and culls, see Souther (2016).