Michael P. Mueller and Deborah J. Tippins
D.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism,
Cultural Studies of Science Education Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_2, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
8 M.P. Mueller and D.J. Tippins world over. When animals and plants and mountaintops become ecologically degraded, we too become degraded. This degradation of communities and environ- ments reveals what humans are willing to accept and exchange for shared common cultural and environmental spaces. Consequently, ecological degradation can lead to injustices in schools in ways which contribute to more abstraction and death of Nature.
Ecojustice is a new term, used in this section to represent the holistic ways of knowing ourselves in relation to others (Thayer-Bacon 2003). It guides questions of how we should live in relation to, and nurture the Earth with, other people. In many ways, it is a theory of integrated relations, which is impossible to distance from humans and the more-than-human (Abram 1996). Ecojustice reminds us to seek schools where much of education happens in a way that is more fully realized through John Dewey’s classical theory of participatory democracy (Dewey 1916/1966), yet not limited to a realm of sociocultural knowledge and scientific endeavor as the best method. Therefore, this section strives to reach out to notions of understanding and democratic education as food for thought and body. Ecojustice represents an interpretation of the condition of the sciences not separate from lives, where the school’s community is enlarged and embodied within understandings of embeddedness. Relations within the community are necessary to question those ideas which make lives more threatened. In this way, ecojustice serves as a lens to understand cultural assumptions or patterns of thinking which influence the ways in which we frame ourselves in the world, such as behavior and action. Ecojustice is a holistic theory which dissolves dualisms between epistemology and ontology, or does not consider thinking and being as separate ways of encountering ourselves within Earth. It helps us to evaluate cultural assumptions and the ways we frame the world and why that matters.
Ecojustice also helps us to analyze educational experiences and the challenges and tensions between sociocultural abstractions and interpretations and the larger ecoeducational domain. Analyzing educational experiences and tensions can reduce some of the nervousness that many scholars have described as “the threat” to the world’s ecologies associated with, for example, population pressures, which inadvertently perpetuate the control of women’s bodies (Mueller 2009). When we de-emphasize the imperative of “crises” implicitly reinforced in the vast majority of environmental scholarship about social and environmental justice, it guides us to seek greater ethics. Ethics serve as the context of the third and greatest foci of ecojustice within ecoeducation theory. In brief, cultural assumptions, educational experiences, and ethics constitute ecojustice theory. These things live in relation to each other and cannot be separated, only reduced to descriptions, which helps us to understand the qualified parts of the whole ecojustice movement within schools.
Ecojustice draws on the communal activities within indigenous knowledge systems. Further, an essential aspect of ecojustice theory is the conservation of cultural and biological systems, in forms of nurturance, rather than construction, management, and validation with humanity. Cultural traditions should always be considered within the wider spectrum of ecorelations (in contrast to “correlations,” which is a statistical deduction of Earth to the mathematical sciences). Whenever possible,
9 2 Nurturing Morally Defensible Environmentalism
the conservation of civil liberties, freedom, oral narratives, species and habitats, the arts, or conviviality, should not be limited by a politics of conservative and liberal. With few exceptions, both politics generate and regenerate forms of anthropocentric tendencies and consumerism as unquestioned platforms. Hence ecojustice does not represent a neoconservative or neoliberal position within philosophy. Ecojustice does not seek to renew a philosophical romanticism, which serves as a challenge for scholars who strive to highlight the vulnerabilities within the confluence of ecojustice, place-based (science) education, and indigenous knowledge systems.
For ecojustice educators, justice is fairness among humans, nonhumans, and the Earth. Ecojustice is different from “social justice” and “environmental justice,” where only humans and animals have some defensible rights. Just because the soil is not easily defended, it does have the potential of defensible environmental rights, which may require advocates. In terms of ecojustice, responsibility for justice falls on those who live within particular communities, where justice is more fully defined by law and rights. Justice then applies to becoming more informed, reading newspapers, articles and books, and granting the same status to learning from the literacies of those who may be considered illiterate and uneducated. Because humility is a significant part of this philosophy, we must acknowledge those things we may never know and learn, and we must be willing to protect cultural and communal differences and biodiversity, as a philosophical principle of “justice embedded within social ecologies.” Dewey highlighted this transactional approach early in his work (1916/1966). He notes that subjects are learned and focused on evaluating the wider spectrum of societal problems in order to set things right. In order to do this, cultural traditions and habits are endorsed through intergenerational relations. These things help teachers and their students to evaluate the curriculum of the larger society and environment. Teachers and students share some of the responsibility for moving towards the common good, which can be interpreted as the basis for which degradation is mediated together. Justice is shared and mediated in common. When we say that we are mediated by just relations, it is to say that we ought to be compelled to do what is just. Although legal constraint is the most obvious aspect of justice in most societies there is also an underlying aspect of moral obligations. Thus, if we are not punished by the law, we are punished by the punitive opinion of other people, or the burden of bad conscience. In terms of ecojustice, there are few juries to enact judgment in the sense of moral reprisals against those who commit heinous acts of cultural and ecological violence.
Justice implies something that is right to do, and wrong not to do, but also something which can be defensibly claimed from us to have moral rights. We should not be held responsive to the generosity of others who have insufficiently claimed to have developed a moralist ecology. A question of what these ecologies should provide for humans is not exempt from moral theory. Hopefully, this section will open the mind to some possibilities for defending ecological rights in ecojustice theory, beyond some human acquired debts to natural systems for which Nature is due. The “acquired debt” stance within environmental philosophy is a taken-for-granted sup- position that may need more conversation before these characteristics of ecojustice become convincing. Consider, for example, how “ruthless” Nature might be judged
10 M.P. Mueller and D.J. Tippins by those who survived the legacy of Katrina, or those who escape the many apparently destructive forces of Earth. The act of defending Nature’s rights based on our obligations to Nature as embedded beings is a contradiction of reproductive and survival ethics. Ecojustice enlarges the conversation; however, there are many things that we grant charity, empathy, and generosity whereas do not extend rights to Earth’s nonhuman entities and physical environments. Ecojustice requires that for Nature to have rights, the larger society must accept that Nature has rights that can be defended beyond the utility of humans. It is anticipated that ecojustice theory will eventually convince such that the claim will go from “Nature ought to have rights” to “the indispensability of Nature’s necessity for rights and ecojustice.” Ultimately this morally defensible environmentalism will be the consequence of our generosity, or the “violence” that the Earth will wage on humankind through climate, pestilence, and famine.
References
Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human
world. New York: Vintage Books.
Dewey, J. (1916/1966). Democracy and education. New York: Macmillan.
Mueller, M. P. (2009). Educational reflections on the “ecological crisis”: Ecojustice, environmen- talism, and sustainability. Science & Education, 18(8), 1031–1056.
11 We live in a world of immense power, beauty, and wisdom. Every living and nonliving entity that occupies this planet, including humans, participates in an infinitely complex set of shifting, communicating relationships that create everything, making life pos- sible. And while humans may desire to understand it all, there is no possible way to ever fully uncover or control all the resulting mysteries that circulate here. This is the meaning of the sacred.
So why start here, with these thoughts about the sacred when this is a book about science education? We take this position, that humans cannot completely or finally understand or control these life processes, recognizing that it may ruffle some feathers in a book of this nature. While not applying to all scientists, science itself has a long history of engaging in the pursuit of knowledge grounded in this very assumption that we can know and thus control the forces that make life possible. We begin from the recognition that in order to know anything, humans must use language to represent it, or more broadly stated, a symbolic system, which imme- diately puts us at a distance from what it is we seek to know. Further, as we will describe in more detail later, all our “languaging” engages a process of differentiation that is actually very creative of something other than what we assume we are merely re-presenting. And yet sometimes, all too often in fact, we forget that. We get lost in our hubris as “creatures of reason.” To believe that we are outside it and can thus unpack it all, or to believe we should even try, is a dangerous undertaking certain to fail, to cause much damage both within human communities and within the larger systems of life that we depend upon.
Chapter 3
EcoJustice Education for Science Educators
* Rebecca A. Martusewicz, John Lupinacci, and Gary SchnakenbergD.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism,
Cultural Studies of Science Education Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_3, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
* Though we have life, it is beyond us.
Wendell Berry
R.A. Martusewicz and G. Schnakenberg
Eastern Michigan University, 517 Fairview Circle, Ypsilanti, MI 48197 J. Lupinacci
12 R.A. Martusewicz et al. We offer a framework for thinking about science education that takes these problems seriously. How do we accept the sacred, what is fundamentally “unknow- able,” while we teach about the systems we care so deeply about? While the aims of scientific investigation – validity, replicability, predictability, measurability, for example – lead to important insights into specific phenomena, they are incomplete ways of knowing by virtue of being embedded in a specific cultural (and thus sym- bolic/language) system. These ways of knowing have a history linked to particular interests and power structures that may be unrecognized by those who take them for granted. They can thus take on a life of their own, and are clearly influencing what we define as a strong education. In this chapter, we introduce an analytic framework for considering the effects of some of these issues, especially for teachers entering the field of science education. Below, we introduce the major strands of an ecojustice framework and then move to provide examples of how K-12 teachers in a variety of settings are beginning to use this framework in their classrooms and communities.
Introduction to the EcoJustice Framework
The first important piece of this framework entails a definition of “ecology” that goes beyond the limited view established in the late nineteenth century that positioned “science” as the primary framework to be used in “protecting” and managing the environment as a separate object of study. This view or position disregards the etymology of the word ecology, which when traced back to the Greek “oikos,” means home or household. Thus, rather than asserting a view that positions the environment as outside of or separate from human communities, we begin from the understanding that all human communities are nested and participate in complex communities of life – ecosystems – that we depend upon for our very lives. So, how is it that we come to think and behave in ways that disregard this essential embed- deness, and even interfere with this critical interdependence?
In this essay, we introduce three major goals of an ecojustice framework: (1) to engage an analysis of the linguistically rooted patterns of belief and behavior in western industrial cultures that have led to a logic of domination leading to social violence and ecological degradation; (2) to offer an alternative way of knowing that recognizes humans as just one part of a vast system of communication among all life forms that creates wisdom, beauty, and the sacred; and (3) to identify and revi- talize the existing cultural and ecological “commons” that offer ways of living more sustainably in our own culture, as well as in diverse cultures across the world.
Emphasizing “ecology” to mean the complex network of diverse living relation- ships creating the community within which we live, ecojustice perspectives under- stand issues pertaining to social justice to be inseparable from and even embedded in questions regarding ecological well-being. This perspective also recognizes the essential relationship among biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity. As Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine (2000) point out, there still exists across the planet at least 5,000 different languages that correspond to different cultural systems and also to specific bioregions where they originated. Thus, there is an important
13 3 EcoJustice Education for Science Educators
relationship among linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity that creates differ- ent maps or ways of seeing and behaving relative to the natural world as well as toward other humans. As English is spread worldwide as the dominant language of western economic systems, for example, diverse languages are being lost. As lan- guages are lost, so too are important knowledges and practices of local bioregions, knowledge used for hundreds of years to cultivate the land and to protect water- sheds and the diverse species within them. Utilized by the interests of powerful minorities, western science has had a role in this destructive process.