EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT AND THE HUMAN PROSPECT, by David Orr

Here is what we know:

1. Despite occasional success, overall, we are losing the epic struggle to preserve the habitability of the Earth.   The overwhelming fact is that virtually all important ecological indicators are in decline. There is no political or economic movement presently underway sufficient to stop the process. On the horizon are other threats in the form of self-replicating technologies that may place humankind arid natural systems in even greater jeopardy.

2. The forces of denial in the United States are more militant and brazen than ever before. Every day millions in this country alone hear that those concerned about the environment are "wackos" or worse. People holding such opinions have been appointed to strategic positions throughout the federal government.

3. The movement to preserve a habitable planet is caught in the cross fire between fundamentalists of the corporate-dominated global economy and those of atavistic religious movements.  It is far easier to see the latter than the former, but in a longer perspective, those of perpetual economic expansion will be perceived to be at least as dangerous as those of a purely religious sort.

4. Fundamentalists of either kind require dependably loathsome enemies. For Osama bin Laden, the United States and George W. Bush admirably serve that purpose. It is no less true that the foundering presidency of Mr. Bush was revitalized by the activities of Mr. Bin Laden and subsequently by the less agreeable attributes of Saddam Hussein. Each is fulfilled and defined by an utterly vile enemy.

5. There has been a steep erosion of democracy and civil liberties.

6. In the decade of the 1990s massive amounts of wealth were transferred from the poor and middle classes to the richest. By one estimate, the financial wealth of the top one percent exceeds the combined household financial wealth of the bottom 95 percent.

7. For nearly a quarter century, government at all levels has been under constant attack by the extreme right-wing with the clear intention of eroding our capacity to forge collective solutions. The assumption is now common that markets are 'moral,' but that publicly created political solutions are not. The result is a continuation of what a Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt, once described as "a riot of individualistic materialism, under which complete freedom for the individual …turned out in practice to mean perfect freedom for the strong to wrong the weak."

8. The strategy, once revealed by Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of the Budget, David Stockman, has been to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy and increase military spending, thereby creating a severe fiscal crisis that requires cutting expenditures for health, education, mass-transit, the environment and cities.

9. Our problems are systemic in nature and will have to be solved at the system level.

10. There are yet good possibilities to avert the worst of what may lie ahead.

From the perspective of any single discipline, these facts appear to be random. In truth they are not random at all but part of a larger pattern that includes shopping malls and deforestation, glitzy suburbs and ozone holes, crowded freeways and climate change, overstocked supermarkets and soil erosion, a gross national product of $6.5 trillion and Superfund sites, technological wonders and insensate violence. These things are threads of a whole cloth. The fact that we see them as disconnected events or fail to see them at all is evidence of a failure to educate people to think broadly, perceive systems and patterns, and live as whole persons.

We still educate the young for the most part as if there were no planetary emergency. It is widely assumed that environmental problems will be solved by technology of one sort or another. Better technology can indeed help, but the crisis is not first and foremost one of technology. Rather, it is one within the minds that develop and use technology. The disordering of ecological systems and of the great biogeochemical cycles of the Earth reflects a prior disorder in the thought, perception, imagination, intellectual priorities and loyalties inherent in the industrial mind.  Ultimately, then, the ecological crisis has to do with how we think and with the institutions that purport to shape and refine the capacity to think. The ecological crisis, in other words, is a crisis of education, not one in education. Tinkering won't do.  

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Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let me suggest six principles.

First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded, students are taught that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. It just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout the curriculum.

A second principle comes from the Greek concept Paideia. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter but mastery of one's person. Subject matter is simply the tool.  Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one's own personhood. For the most part we labor under a confusion of ends and means, thinking that the goal of education is to stuff all kinds of facts, techniques, methods and information into the student's mind, regardless of how and with what effect it will be used. The Greeks knew better.

Third, I propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley: monsters of technology for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take responsibility. Whose responsibility is the Love Canal ? Chernobyl ? Ozone depletion? The Exxon Valdez oil spill? Each of these tragedies was possible because of knowledge created for which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come to be seen for what I think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our ability to use it responsibly. Some of this knowledge cannot be used responsibly, safely and to consistently good purposes.

Fourth, we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities. I grew up near Youngstown , Ohio , which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to "disinvest" in the economy of the region. In this case, MBA graduates, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks and capital mobility, have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American city with total impunity and did so on behalf of an ideology called the "bottom line." But the bottom line for society includes other costs: those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught in the business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow, destructive, economic rationality that values efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.

My fifth principle is drawn from William Blake. It has to do with the importance of "minute particulars" and the power of examples over words. Students hear about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that often spend their budgets and invest their endowments in the most irresponsible things. The lessons being taught are those of hypocrisy and ultimately despair.

Finally, I propose that the way in which learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses. Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls, isolated from what students call, without apparent irony, the "real world." Campus architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often reinforces passivity, monologue, domination and artificiality. My point is simply that students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the overt content of courses.

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If our crisis is first and foremost a crisis of mind and perception, the time has come for a fundamental reconsideration of how we might encourage what Edith Cobb has called "an acute sensory response to the natural world." Here is one idea.

I suggest that at all levels of learning, kindergarten through PhD, some part of the curriculum be given to the study of natural systems roughly in the manner in which we experience them. It is an old idea, going back at least as far as the belief that nature has something to teach us. The idea is simply that we take our senses seriously throughout education at all levels, and that doing so requires immersion in particular components of the natural world - a river, a mountain, a farm, a wetland, a forest, a particular animal, a lake, an island - before students are introduced to more advanced levels of disciplinary knowledge.

For example, a course on a nearby river might require students to live on the river for a time, swim in it, canoe it, watch it in its various seasons, study its wildlife and aquatic animals, listen to it, and talk to people who live along it. A river becomes, as biologist Carl McDaniel phrased it, "a microcosm of the world" and a doorway to wider knowledge. Each student might research a particular aspect of the river, say, its folklore, social history, evolution, art, chemistry, ecology, literature or the politics and law that govern its use. Collectively, a picture of the river might begin to emerge that would be more than the sum of the individual projects. I am not proposing just a weekend field trip but a longer period of time to allow the senses to soak in the experience as sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and feel until something like profound respect, or more, begins to take root.

What I am proposing, more broadly, is rather like a courtship between mind and nature, or perhaps an awakening. I believe that we should introduce students to the mysteries of specific places and things before giving them access to the power inherent in abstract knowledge. I am proposing that we aim to fit the values and loyalties of students to specific places before we equip them to change the world. I propose that we give students a stronger reason to want to know while making them more trustworthy in the use of knowledge. I am proposing that we make them accountable in small things before giving them the keys to creation.

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"Is it possible," E. O. Wilson asked, "that humanity will love life enough to save it?" And if we do love life enough to save it, what is required of us? On one level the answer is obvious.  We need to transform how and how rapidly we use the Earth’s endowment of land, minerals, water, air, wildlife and fuels: an efficiency revolution that buys us some time. Beyond efficiency, we need another revolution that transforms our ideas of what it means to live decently and how little is actually necessary for a decent life: a sufficiency revolution. The first revolution is mostly about technology and economics. The second revolution is about the combination of reverence for life - biophilia - and purely rational calculation by which we will want to both be efficient and live sufficiently. It is about finding our rightful place on Earth and in the community of life, and it is about citizenship, duties, obligations and celebration.

There are two formidable barriers standing in our way.

The first is the problem of denial. We have not yet faced up to the magnitude of the trap we have created for ourselves. We face a series of dilemmas that can be avoided only through wisdom and a higher, more comprehensive level of rationality than we have yet shown. Better technology would certainly help; however, our crisis is not fundamentally one of technology but one of mind, will and spirit. Denial must be met by something like a worldwide ecological "perestroika," predicated on the admission of failure: the failure of economics, which became disconnected from life; the failure of our politics, which lost sight of the moral roots of our commonwealth; the failure of our science, which lost sight of the essential wholeness of things; and the failure of all of us as moral beings, who allowed these things to happen because we did not love deeply and intelligently enough. The biophilia revolution must come as an ecological enlightenment that sweeps out the modern superstition that we are knowledgeable enough and good enough to manage the Earth and to direct evolution.

The second barrier standing in the way of this revolution is one of imagination. It is easier, perhaps, to overcome denial than it is to envision a biophilia-centered world and believe ourselves capable of creating it. We could get an immediate and overwhelming worldwide consensus today on the proposition "Is the world in serious trouble?" But we are not within a light-year of agreement on what to do about it. Confronted by the future, the mind has a tendency to wallow. For this reason we can diagnose our plight with laser precision while proposing to shape the future with a sledgehammer. Fictional utopias, almost without exception, are utterly dull and unconvincing. And the efforts to create utopias of either right or left have been monumental failures, leaving people profoundly discouraged about their ability to shape the world in accord with their highest values.

Part of our difficulty in confronting the future is that we think of utopia on too grand a scale. We are not very good at comprehending things on the scale of whole societies, much less that of the planet. Nor have we been very good at solving the problems utopias are supposed to solve without imposing simplistic formulas that ride roughshod over natural and cultural diversity. Except for some anarchists, utopianism is almost synonymous with homogenization. Another part of the problem is the modern mind's desire for drama, excitement and sexual sizzle, which explains why we do not have many bestselling novels about Amish society, arguably the closest thing to a sustainable society we know. How do we fulfill the need for meaning and variety while discarding some of our most cherished fantasies of domination? How do we cause the change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections and convictions, without which all else is moot? When we think of revolution, our first impulse is to think of some grand political, economic or technological change, some way to fix quickly what ails us. What ails us, however, is closer to home, and I suggest we bring it there.

Courtesy of “Adbusters: Journal of the Mental Environment”, Mar/Apr 2003.  Adapted from the essays "Walking North on a Southbound Train" (2003) and "Educating for the Environment" (I996), by David Orr, and from his book Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (I994, Island Press).