Kritik
1NC Shell
The destruction of ocean ecologies is exponentially increasing, and we are already
close to the levels during the last mass extinction
Kahn 10
(Richard Kahn, an educator whose primary interests are in researehing the history of social movements as pedagogically
generative forces in society, and in critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater
planetary freedom, peace, and happiness. In 2007, he graduated with a PhD from UCLA with a specialization in the philosophy
and history of education. An alter-globalization activist, Kahn has been at the forefront of championing and organizing what he
terms, “total liberation politics,” that seek to advocate for nonhuman animals, the biosphere as a sacred entity, and social
justice through systemic transformation. Kahn’s writing and teaching to date have thus sought to synthesize the field of critical
pedagogy with types of ecological and vegan education in order to arrive at a radical education for sustainability that seeks
both individual and collective emancipation. Academia.edu, Critical Pedagogy,Ecoliteracy,& Planetary Crisis, 2010,
http://www.academia.edu/167226/Critical_Pedagogy_Ecoliteracy_and_Planetary_Crisis_The_Ecopedagogy_Movement, AFGA)
In 1970, the first Earth Day event helped to mark the global arrival of the environmental movement
and it is often hailed as a pedagogical and political milestone toward the production of a more
ecologically sound society. By contrast, it is not uncommon today to hear students, environmentalists, and
other informed citizens criticize Earth Day with declarations like, “Every day should be Earth Day—to give the Earth
one day a year of love and respect, while denying it the other 364 doesn’t help much at all.” While such critique can
be symptomatic of a form of paralyzing and reactionary cynicism, it should also be seen as representative of
modern environmentalism’s compelling achievement as an educational social movement to date.
Whereas the critical socioenvironmental visions of theorists such as Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, or
Murray Bookchin must have sounded like voices crying out in the wilderness in the 1950s or 1960s, in
the twenty-first century it is no longer necessary for a great many people to argue even about the
ecological burdens produced by global society. However, if recent decades have seen the rise of a
powerful popular demand for planetary sustainability, this must be placed in the alarming context of
the more rapid expansion of unsustainable economic practices throughout the world since the end of
World War II—the modern development strategies commonly denoted by the discourse of
“globalization.”In 2005, the UN-funded Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) re-leased the most
encompassing study to date about the state of the planet’s ecology. To summarize, it found that
during the last fifty years, humanity has altered (and mainly degraded) the earth’s ecosystems “more
rapidly and extensively than in any comparable time of human history” (MEA, 2005, p.2). This was done
largely on behalf of an exponential demand for primary natural resources that coincides with the social
and economic changes wrought by corporate and other transnational capitalist interests (Kovel,2007). For
instance, between 1960 and 2000, the world’s population doubled and the global economy increased
by more than sixfold. At the same time, the mining of and dependence upon large-scale industrial
energy resources like oil, coal, and natural gas followed and exceeded the trends set by the population
curve despite many years of warnings about the consequences inherent in their overuse and extraction. This, of
course, has led to a corresponding increase in the carbon emissions known to be responsible for global warming
(Gore, 2006).
Additionally, more land (e.g., forests, wetlands, prairies, savannahs) hasbeen converted for
agricultural uses over the last half-century than had takenplace during the 150 years prior combined
(MEA, 2005, p. 2). The majority of the world’s dominant farming practices (e.g., agribusiness
monocropping;slash-and-burn technique) developed during this period has debased soil quality and
furthered global desertification. However, the so-called “green revolution” has been sold as a success because
short-term food production via these methods increased by a factor of nearly three. Other land usage statistics
from this time frame show that water use doubled (nearly 70 percent of used water goes to agriculture), half of
all wetlands were developed, timber pulping and paper production tripled while 50 percent of the forests
disap-peared, and the damming of flowing waterways doubled hydropower (p. 5).Moreover, unsustainable
fishing practices contributed to grave losses of global mangroves during the second half of the twentieth
century, reducing them by approximately 35 percent. Coral reef biomes—our underwatertropical rain
forests—have likewise tolled worldwide extinction and damage rates of 20 percent each respectively
since 1960 (p. 5).This has led (and will continue to lead) to unthinkable levels of marine species
extinction. The rise of commercial fishing is now known to have eradicated some 90 percent of the
ocean’s largest fish varieties . Forty-mile-long drift nets are routinely used to trawl the ocean
bottoms, causing incalculable damage to the ocean ecosystem. Giant biomass nets, with mesh so fine
that not even baby fish can escape them, have become the industry standard in commercial fishing
and, as a result, there is expected to be no extant commercial fishery left active in the world by 2048
(Worm, et al., 2006).Further, such nets are commonly drowning and killing about 1,000 whales,dolphins,
and porpoises daily, some of the very species already nearextinction from centuries of commercial
hunting (Verrengia, 2003), and there has even been a startling move toward the reintroduction of commercial
whaling by the International Whaling Commission due to pressure from countries such as Norway, Iceland, and
Japan. The effects of corporate globalization have been equally profound on other species, as we have experienced
1,000 times the historical rate of normal background extinction, with upwards of 30 percent of all mammals
,birds, and amphibians currently threatened with permanent disappearance(MEA, 2005, p. 4). In other
words, over the span of just a few decades we are involved in a mass die-off of nonhuman animals
such as we have not witnessed for 65 million years, and worse yet, predictions for the future expect
these rates of extinction to increase tenfold (p. 5). Moreover, these figures only document the indirect
destruction of land animals and so fail to account for the ways in which capitalism has transformed family farms
and subsistence-oriented agriculture into vast, unimaginable factory farms and their corresponding
slaughterhouses—brutal and ecologically ruinous production lines, in which thousands of animals are murdered
for meat harvesting every hour per the business standard (Singer & Mason, 2006).Almost all of these trends
just summarized are escalating and most are accelerating.
LINK HERE
Ecopedagogy recognizes that our methodology in dealing with the ocean is rooted at
an emotional level, and by bringing that to the surface allows us to reconnect with
nature at a conscious level – this corrects our insulation from the environment in our
knowledge production
Antunes and Gadotti 5
(Angela Antunes is Executive Secretary of Paulo Freire Institute, Doctor of Education from the University of Sao Paulo and
author of many books. Her Ph.D. thesis for the School of Education at the University of Sao Paulo was on “Sustainability
Pedagogy”, using the Earth Charter as one of the philosophical keystone documents upon which to build that pedagogy -Moacir Gadotti is Professor at the University of Sao Paulo, the Director of the Paulo Freire Institute, and author of many widelyread and translated books, among others: Education Against Education (1979); Invitation to Read Paulo Freire (1988); History of
Pedagogical Ideas (1993); Praxis Pedagogy (1994); and Current Issues on Education (2000), The Earth Charter Initiative, “Ecopedagogy as the Appropriate Pedagogy to the Earth Charter Process,” 10/5/05, http://earthcharterinaction.org/pdfs/TEC-ENGPDF/ENG-Antunes.pdf, AFGA)
Education is connected with space and time where relationships between the human being and the
environment actually take place. They happen primarily at the emotional level, much more than at the
conscious level. Thus, they happen much more in our subconscious; we do not realize them, and many times
we do not know how they happen. So, eco-education is necessary to bring them to the conscious
level. And eco-education requires a pedagogy. As emphasized by Gaston Pineau,2 a series of references are
associated with this: the Bacherladian experience; studies on the imaginary; the trans-versatility, trans-disciplinarian, and intercultural approach; as well as constructivism and alternative pedagogy. These days, we need an eco-pedagogy and eco-
education. We need an Earth pedagogy precisely because without this pedagogy to re-educate men and women, we can no
longer speak of Earth as a home, as a burrow for the "animal-man", as Paulo Freire said. Without a proliferation of
sustainable education, Earth will be perceived as nothing more than the space for our sustenance and
for technical-technological domination, the object of our researeh, essays, and sometimes of our
contemplation. But, It will not be a living space, a space giving us "solace" and requiring from us "care".3
It is In the context of the evolution of ecology itself that eco-pedagogy appeared - and is still In its Infancy today - having been
initially called "pedagogy for sustainable development," but which has now gone beyond its Initial purpose. Eco-pedagogy is in
development either as a pedagogical movement4 or as a curriculum approach. Eco-pedagogy implies redirecting curricula to
incorporate values and principles defended by the Earth Charter. These principles should guide content, concepts, and the
preparation of didactic books. Jean Plaget taught us that curricula must reflect what is important for
students. We know this is correct, but Incomplete. Curricular contents must also be meaningful for students, and they will
be only meaningful to students If their contents are also meaningful to the health of the planet and to
a context greater than that of the Individual student.
Understood in this light, eco-pedagogy is not just another pedagogy among many other pedagogies. It not
only has meaning as an alternative global project concerned with nature preservation {Natural Ecology)
and the Impact made by human societies on the natural environment (Social Ecology), but also as a new model for
sustainable civilization from the ecological point of view (Integral Ecology), which implies making changes on economic, social, and cultural structures. Therefore, it is connected to a Utopian project -one to change current human,
social, and environmental relationships.
The role of the ballot is to decide which advocacy in the debate better allows us to
understand the oceans and ourselves, because this allow for the most unbiased and
direct production of knowledge and solutions to the issues presented by the status
quo. Our alternative is to use eco-pedagogy to radically increase our level of ecoliteracy and our closeness to the topic, both of which allow better exploration of
ourselves and the ocean.
The alternative blends the ideology of privileged institutions and the experience of
oppressed populations, a collision of political necessity and educational theory – as
such, it has the ability to generate new pedagogies in debate to deal with the root of
environmental problems and directly apply those theories to a political project
Kahn 10
(Richard Kahn, an educator whose primary interests are in researehing the history of social movements as pedagogically
generative forces in society, and in critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater
planetary freedom, peace, and happiness. In 2007, he graduated with a PhD from UCLA with a specialization in the philosophy
and history of education. An alter-globalization activist, Kahn has been at the forefront of championing and organizing what he
terms, “total liberation politics,” that seek to advocate for nonhuman animals, the biosphere as a sacred entity, and social
justice through systemic transformation. Kahn’s writing and teaching to date have thus sought to synthesize the field of critical
pedagogy with types of ecological and vegan education in order to arrive at a radical education for sustainability that seeks
both individual and collective emancipation. Academia.edu, Critical Pedagogy,Ecoliteracy,& Planetary Crisis, 2010,
http://www.academia.edu/167226/Critical_Pedagogy_Ecoliteracy_and_Planetary_Crisis_The_Ecopedagogy_Movement, AFGA)
Though nascent, the international ecopedagogy movement"' represents a profound transformation in
the radical educational and political project derived from the work of Paulo Freire known as critical
pedagogy.20 Ecopedagogy seeks to interpolate quintessentially Freirian aims of the humanization of
experience and the achievement of a just and free world with a future- oriented ecological politics that
militantly opposes the globalization of neoliberalism and imperialism, on the one hand, and attempts to foment
collective ecoliteracy and realize culturally relevant forms of knowledge grounded in normative
concepts such as sustainability, planetarity, and biophilia, on the other. In this, it attempts to produce
what Gregory Martin (2007) has theorized as a much needed "revolutionary critical pedagogy based in
hope that can bridge the politics of the academy with forms of grassroots political organizing capable
of achieving social and ecological transformation" (p. 349).
The ecopedagogy movement grew out of discussions first conducted around the time of the Rio Earth Summit in
1992. During the years leading up to the event, environmental themes became increasingly prominent in Brazilian
circles. Then, following the Summit, a strong desire emerged among movement intellectuals to support grassroots
organizations for sustainability as well as worldwide initiatives such as the Earth Charter. In 1999, the Instituto
Paulo Friere under the direction of Moacir Oadotti, along with the Earth Council and UNESCO, convened the First
International Symposium on the Earth Charter in the Perspective of Education, which was quickly followed by the
First International Forum on Ecopedagogy. These conferences led not only to the final formation of the Earth
Charter Initiative but also to key movement documents such as the Ecopedagogy Charter (Spring, 2004). Oadotti
and others in the ecopedagogy movement have remained influential in advancing the Earth Charter Initiative and
continue to mount ecopedagogy seminars, degree programs, workshops, and other learning opportunities through
an ever-growing number of international Paulo Freire institutes.31
As previously noted, scholars and activists interested in furthering either environmental literacy through
environmental education or variants of social and environmental ecoliteracy via education for
sustainable development and its many potential subfields, have a wide number of alternatives from which
to choose. However, these frameworks often ultimately derive, are centered in, or are otherwise directed
from relatively privileged institutional domains based in North America, Europe, or Australia—primary
representatives of the global north (Brandt, 1980). The ecopedagogy movement, by contrast, has coalesced
largely within Latin America over the last two decades. Due in part to its being situated in the global
south, the movement has thus provided focus and political action on the ways in which environmental
degradation results from fundamental sociocultural, political, and economic inequalities.22
As Gonzalcz-Gaudiano (2005) has emphasized, it is exactly these types of views and protocols that are
necessary for ecoliteracy in the twenty-first century, due to their being routinely left of northern
intellectual agendas in the past. However, in a manner that moves beyond Gonzalcz-Gaudiano*s
anthropocentric, social justice—oriented approach to environmental issues, the ecopedagogy
movement additionally incorporates more typically northern ecological ideas such as the intrinsic
value of all species, the need to care for and live in harmony with the planet, as well as the
emancipatory potential contained in human aesthetic experiences of nature.23
In this way, the ecopedagogy movement represents an important attempt to synthesize a key opposition within
the worldwide environmental movement, one that continues to be played out in major environmental and
economic policy meetings and debates. Further, as an oppositional movement with connections to
grassroots political groups such as Brazil's Landless Rural Workers' Movement and alternative social
institutions such as the World Social Forum, but also academic departments and divisions within the
United Nations Environment Programme, the ecopedagogy movement has begun to build the extraand intra-institutional foundations by which it can contribute meaningful ecological policy,
philosophy, and curricular frame- works toward achieving its sustainability goals. Still, the ecopedagogy
movement might not presently demand much interest from northern educational scholars—beyond those whose
specialty is in the field of interna- tional and comparative education—save for the movement's historical
relationship to the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire.
The aff’s partial solution inevitably fails and masks the root problem – a perm gives
the illusion of full solvency as soon as the plan is passed, which dooms the revolution
Kahn 10
(Richard Kahn, an educator whose primary interests are in researehing the history of social movements as pedagogically
generative forces in society, and in critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater
planetary freedom, peace, and happiness. In 2007, he graduated with a PhD from UCLA with a specialization in the philosophy
and history of education. An alter-globalization activist, Kahn has been at the forefront of championing and organizing what he
terms, “total liberation politics,” that seek to advocate for nonhuman animals, the biosphere as a sacred entity, and social
justice through systemic transformation. Kahn’s writing and teaching to date have thus sought to synthesize the field of critical
pedagogy with types of ecological and vegan education in order to arrive at a radical education for sustainability that seeks
both individual and collective emancipation. Academia.edu, Critical Pedagogy,Ecoliteracy,& Planetary Crisis, 2010,
http://www.academia.edu/167226/Critical_Pedagogy_Ecoliteracy_and_Planetary_Crisis_The_Ecopedagogy_Movement, AFGA)
Even during what amounts to a current economic downturn, transnational markets and neoliberal policies
continue to flow and evolve, and the globalization of technocapital (Best & Kellner, 2001) persists in
order to fuel yet another vast reconstruction of the information society that has developed under the
aegis of American imperialism. Over the last fifty to sixty years, then, a particularly noxious economic paradigm
has unfolded like a shock wave across the face of the earth, one that has led to an exponential increase of global
capital and startling achievements in science and technol-ogy, but which has also had devastating effects upon
ecosystems both individually and taken as a whole (Foster, 2002). According to the United Nations
Environment Programme’s GEO-3 report, a vision of continued economic growth of this kind is
consonant only with planetary extinction either great changes are made in our global lifestyle now or
irrevocable socialand ecological upheavals will grip the world by 2032 (United Nations Environment
Programme, 2002). Nor do piecemeal steps however well intended, even partially resolve problems that
have reached a universal, global and catastrophic character. If anything, partial “solutions” serve
merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep seated nature of the ecological crisis. They thereby deflect
public attention and theoretical insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of
the necessary changes.
Uniqueness
Eco-literacy
Status quo eco-literacy fails to address the dominant structure which stops us from
breaking out of anthropocentrism and anti-democracy science
Kahn 10
(Richard Kahn, an educator whose primary interests are in researehing the history of social movements as pedagogically
generative forces in society, and in critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater
planetary freedom, peace, and happiness. In 2007, he graduated with a PhD from UCLA with a specialization in the philosophy
and history of education. An alter-globalization activist, Kahn has been at the forefront of championing and organizing what he
terms, “total liberation politics,” that seek to advocate for nonhuman animals, the biosphere as a sacred entity, and social
justice through systemic transformation. Kahn’s writing and teaching to date have thus sought to synthesize the field of critical
pedagogy with types of ecological and vegan education in order to arrive at a radical education for sustainability that seeks
both individual and collective emancipation. Academia.edu, Critical Pedagogy,Ecoliteracy,& Planetary Crisis, 2010,
http://www.academia.edu/167226/Critical_Pedagogy_Ecoliteracy_and_Planetary_Crisis_The_Ecopedagogy_Movement, AFGA)
Just as there is now an ecological crisis of serious proportions, there is also a crisis in environmental
education over what must be done about it .Again, over the last half-century, the modern environmental
movement has undeniably helped to foster widespread social and cultural transformation. In part, it
has developed ideas and practices of environmental preservation and conservation, struggled to
understand and reduce the amount of pollution and toxic risks associated with industrialized
civilization, produced new modes of counterculture and morality, outlined the need for appropriate
technologies, and led to powerful legislative environmental reforms as well as a wide range of
alternative institutional initiatives. As a form of non formal popular education it has stirred many people to
become self-aware of the role they play in environmental destruction and to become more socially active in ways
that can help to create a more ecological and sustainable world. In terms of formal educational programs, federal
and state legislatures have mandated that environmental education be included as part of the public education
system’s curricular concerns. Over the last thirty-eight years, the North American Association for Environmental
Education—the world’s flagship environmental education organization—has grown from being a fledgling
professional society to its current state as the coordinator, in over fifty-five countries worldwide, of thousands of
environmental organizations toward the certification and legitimation of environmental education as a
professional researeh field. These educational programs have apparently made their case, as a comprehensive set
of studies completed in 2005 found that:
• 95% of all American adults support having environmental education programs in schools;
• 85% of all American adults believe that governmental agencies should support environmental education
programs; and that
• 80% believe that corporations should train their employees in how to solve environmental problems. (Coyle,
2005)
In many ways, then, the foundation for comprehensive and powerful forms of environmental literacy
and eco-literacy has never been more at hand throughout society. To reiterate: despite the
environmental movement’s significant pedagogical accomplishments, there have also been numerous
setbacks and a
tremendous amount of work remains to be done—perhaps more than ever before (see the still relevant
Dowie, 1996). For example, the same studies that revealed Americans’ overwhelming support for environmental
education programs reported a variety of findings which demonstrate that most Americans continue
to have an almost shameful misunderstanding of the most basic environmental ideas. Thus, it was
found that an estimated:
• 45 million Americans think the ocean is a fresh source of water ;
• 125 million Americans think that aerosol spray cans still contain stratospheric ozone-depleting
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) despite the fact that they were banned from use in 1978;
• 123 million Americans believe that disposable diapers represent the leading landfill problem when
they in fact only represent 1% of all landfill material; and
• 130 million Americans currently believe that hydropower is the country’s leading energy source
when, as a renewable form of energy, it contributes only 10%of the nations total energy supply. (Coyle,
2005)
Of course, more problematic still for educators is the burgeoning rise in social and ecological disasters that are
resulting from the mixture of unsustainable economic exploitation of nature and environmentally unsound cultural
practices.
Such ecological issues, requiring critical knowledge of the dialectical relationship between mainstream
lifestyle and the dominant social structure, require a much more radical and more complex form of
eco-literacy than is presently possessed by the population at large. In this context, while it may be unfair
to lay the blame for social and ecological calamity squarely on the environmental movement for its inability to
generate effective pedagogy on this matter, it must still be noted that the field of environmental education
has been altogether unable to provide either solutions or stop-gaps for the ecological disasters that
have continued to mount due to the mush-rooming of transnational corporate globalization over the last few
decades. In fact, despite a proliferation of programs since the 1970s, environ-mental education has tended to
become isolated as a marginal academic discipline relative to the curricular whole.
The major trend on campuses today is for environmental studies to be lodged within and controlled by natural
sciences departments, with little more than tips of the cap to the humanities, and ostensibly no input from
scholars of education (see Kahn & Nocella, Forthcoming). When such studies are housed in colleges of education
proper, however, they are rarely integrated across required programs of study in either teacher training,
educational leadership, or educational researeh. Instead, they are generally confined to specialized M.A.-level or
other certificate-based environmental education programs. These degree programs often lack rigorous
training in theoretical critique and political analysis, choosing to focus instead on the promotion of
outdoor educational experiences that all too often advance outdated, essentialized, and dichotomous
views of nature and wilderness.
As Steven Best and Anthony Nocella (2006) have argued, such views as these are typical of the first two
waves of (predominantly white, male, and middle-class) U.S. environmentalism. These views have
proven insufficient and even harmful toward the advancement of richly multiperspectival ecological
politics and environmental justice strategies (for instance, see Adamson, et al., 2002),which seek to uncover
collective social action across differences of race, class, gender, species, and other social categories. Hence, many
outdoor education programs stand in need of radical reconstruction away from an uncritical form of
environmental literacy that has remained rooted as the field standard since William Stapp (1969). Stapp is
considered the “founder” of the environmental education movement. He first stressed that the goals of environmental education were: knowledge of the natural environment, interdisciplinary exploration, and an inquirybased, student-centered curricular framework, which could be used for overcoming intractable conflict and
ideology in society.
A poster-child example for such environmental literacy is the School of Environmental Studies, known
as the “Zoo School,” in Apple Valley, Minnesota. Here high school-aged juniors and seniors attend school on the
zoo grounds, treating the institution and a nearby park as an experiential learning lab where they
conduct independent studies and weave environmental themes into their curricular work and
projects. A recent pamphlet funded and promoted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of
Environmental Education, Advancing Education Through Environmental Literacy (Arehie, 2003) lauds the school as
one “using the environment to boost academic performance, increase student motivation, and enhance environmental literacy” (p. 8). But the literacy aspects of this education, which accord with the aims put forth by
Stapp and those of the North American Association for Environmental Education, lack the strong critical and
ethical focus that is presently demanded by our unfolding planetary eco-crisis.
For example, per written accounts, the heads of the Zoo School do not have the students pose
problems into the history and nature of zoos—a highly problematical social and environmental
institution (Rothfels, 2002)— or become active in the fight against the Apple Valley zoo’s own sordid
history and policies. As regards the latter project, a worthwhile educational venture would be to have
students become involved in banning dolphins as a zoo exhibit (hardly a native species to Minnesota) and
to have them returned to either a sanctuary or non-domesticated oceanic habitat. Instead, as of 2006, one could
pay $125 to swim with the zoo’s dolphins, a practice generally condemned by marine ecologists (Rose, 1996) and
environmentalists/animal rightists (Watson, 1995) alike as both inhumane and beyond the bounds of good
environmental stewardship. Further, the Apple Valley zoo’s Wells Fargo Family Farm claims to foster
environmental literacy experiences for Zoo School students “to explain and…learn about how food
gets from farms to tables.”
Yet students could alternatively work for a critical literacy that seeks to understand how the
implosion of corporate marketing and ideology into the zoo structures its educational program. That is, while
the Zoo School presently offers relatively idealized experiences of life on a family farm, it could
instead aim for literacy into how to organize opposition to such questionable practices as the
naturalization of a corporate “family farm,” as well as in how to demand answers from responsible parties as
to why high-ranking executives of a leading corporate agribusiness like Cargill presently sit on the zoo’s board of
directors. Additionally, students could learn to read the corporate farm exhibit against the grain in order to
politically problematize why the zoo has failed to create educational encounters on the ecological benefits of a
vegan diet, when it instead at least tacitly supports as sustainable and conservationist-minded the standard
American meat-based diet and the ecologically damaging factory farming that presently supports it. Failing to
provide critical pedagogy, the Zoo School has been promoted within leading environmental education
circles as a leader because it is, in the words of the Environmental Education & Training Partnership,
“Meeting Standards Naturally” (Arehie, 2003). That is, it is motivating students in a new way to go to school
and meet or even surpass national curricular and testing standards of a kind consistent with the outcomeorientation of the No
Child Left Behind Act. As with other schools that have adopted environ-mental education as the central focus of
their programs, the Zoo School apparently shines—not because it is producing ecological mindsets and sustainable
living practices capable of transforming society in radically necessary ways—but because its students’ reading and
math scores have improved; and they have performed better in science and social studies; developed the ability to
transfer their knowledge from familiar to unfamiliar contexts; learned to “do science” and not just learn about it;
and showed a decline in the sort of overall behavior classified as a discipline problem(Glenn, 2000, p. 3). Obviously,
regardless of whatever good pedagogy is taking place at the Zoo School, this laudatory praise of its environmental
literacy program by environmental educators is little more than the present-day technocratic standards movement
in education masquerading as a noteworthy “green” improvement. Put bluntly: this is environmental literacy as a
green wash.
Worse still, though, is that here environmental literacy has not only been co-opted by corporate state forces and
morphed into a progressively-styled, touchy-feely method for achieving higher scores on standardized tests like
the ACT and SAT, but in an Orwellian turn it has come to stand in actuality for a real illiteracy about the nature of
ecological catastrophe, its causes, and possible solutions. As I will argue in this book, our current course for
social and environmental disaster (though highly complex and not easily boiled down to a few simple
causes or strategies for action) must be traced to the evolution of: an anthropocentric worldview
grounded in what the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (1993) refers to as a matrix of domination (see chapter
1);a global techno-capitalist infrastructure that relies upon market-based and functionalist versions of technoliteracy to instantiate and augment its socio-economic and cultural control (see chapters 2 and 3); an
unsustainable, reductionistic, and antidemocratic model of institutional science (see chapter4); and the
wrongful marginalization and repression of pro-ecological resistance through the claim that it
represents a “terrorist” force that is counter to the morals of a democratic society rooted in tolerance,
educational change, and civic debate (see chapter 5). By contrast, the environmental literacy standards now
showcased at places like the Zoo School as “Hall-marks of Quality” (Arehie, 2003, p. 11) are those that
consciously fail to develop the type of radical and partisan subjectivity in students, that might be
capable of deconstructing their socially and environmentally deleterious hyper-individualism or their
obviously socialized identities that tend toward state-sanctioned norms of competition, hedonism,
consumption, marketization, and forms of quasi-fascistic patriotism.
Political System
Politics have empirically proven to be ineffective – to cause change we need to first
affect educational institutions
Orr 2
(David W. Orr David is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College and a
James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont, THE NATURE OF DESIGN: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention, 2002,
Pages 73-74, http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Orr,David/Oxford%20University%20Press%20%20The%20Nature%20of%20Design%20-%20Ecology,%20Culture%20and%20Human%20Intention%20(2002).pdf, AFGA)
The third strategy, political change, has fallen into disrepute in the age of hypercapitalism. In our pursuit of fast
wealth, we allowed ourselves to be bamboozled into believing that government was the problem. As a
result, the public sector, relative to multinational corporations, has been weakened virtually everywhere. While
capitalism is triumphant, there is a deficit of political ideas and an atrophy of the sense of common
interests and community. At the very time we need robust political ideas to confront unprecedented
changes in technol- ogy, increasing concentration of wealth, rising human needs, and seri- ous
environmental threats, we find political confusion, vacillation, and mendacity. The kind of political
leadership we need has yet to appear. But the ideas necessary for a solvent future are relatively
straightforward. We must create the same kind of separation between money and politics that we once
established between church and state. And we must create the political capacity to protect the in- tegrity
of earth systems and biodiversity and thereby the legitimate interests of our descendants. This
requires, in turn, the capacity to exert farsighted public control over capital and economic power. It is
no easy thing to do, but doing it is far easier than not doing it. The success of these strategies, in turn, hinges
on whether the public is educated and equipped to comprehend such things. But at the time when we
need a larger idea of education, our proudest research universities, almost without exception, have
aspired to be- come the research and development wing of high modernism. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980
permitted universities to patent results of federally funded research (Press and Washburn 2000, 41). Combined
with the decline of defense spending, the results have been dramatic. The more prestigious institutions have
become partners, and some- times accomplices, of major corporations in return for large contribu- tions and
contracts. Many have established offices to foster and administer the commercialization of research. Corporations
increas- ingly dictate the terms of research and its subsequent use, thereby compromising the free flow of ideas
and contaminating truth at the source. Unsurprisingly, research is mostly directed to areas that hold great financial
promise, not to great human needs. There is seldom much financial profit in ideas pertaining to preservation of
biological diversity, land health, sustainable resource management, and real human improvement—precisely what
we need most. And there is virtually never quick profit in turning out merely well-educated, thoughtful, and
ecologically competent citizens.
It should be a matter of some embarrassment that the best ideas about the challenge of sustain ability and
appropriate responses to it have come disproportionately from people and organizations at the periphery of power
and influence not from those at the center. Small nonprofit organizations are often the best source of ideas we
have about the preservation of species, soil, people, places, local culture, and margins for error. It is time for
institutions of higher education to catch up. It is time to reinvent higher education by breaking down all of
those institutional and disciplinary impediments to the flow of ideas on which we might build a
durable and decent civilization.
Tech Solves
Their claim that technology can solve is false – science has never understood the
environment or possible effects on it
Orr 2
(David W. Orr David is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College and a
James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont, THE NATURE OF DESIGN: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention, 2002,
Pages 26-27, http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Orr,David/Oxford%20University%20Press%20%20The%20Nature%20of%20Design%20-%20Ecology,%20Culture%20and%20Human%20Intention%20(2002).pdf, AFGA)
Fourth, for all of our considerable scientific advances, our knowledge of the earth is still minute
relative to what we will need to know. Where are we? The short answer is that despite all of our science, no
one knows for certain. We inhabit the third planet out from a fifth- rate star located in a backwater galaxy. We are
the center of nothing obvious to our science. We do not know whether the earth is just dead matter or whether it
is, in some respects, alive. Nor do we know how forgiving the ecosphere may be to human insults. Our
knowledge of the flora and fauna of the earth and the ecological processes that link them is small
relative to all that might be known. In some areas, in fact, knowledge is in retreat because it is no
longer fashionable or profitable. Our practical knowledge of particular places is often considerably
less than that of the native peoples we displaced. As a result, the average college graduate would flunk even
a cursory test on local ecology, and stripped of technology most would quickly founder. To complicate things
further, the advance of human knowledge is inescapably ironic. Since the Enlightenment, the goal of
our science has been a more rational ordering of human affairs in which cause and effect could be
empirically determined and presumably controlled. But after a century of promiscuous chemistry, for
example, who can say how the 100,000 chemicals in common use mix in the ecosphere or how they
might be implicated in declining sperm counts, rising cancer rates, disappearing amphibians, or
behavioral disorders? And having disrupted global biogeochemical cycles, no one can say with
assurance what the larger climatic and ecological effects will be. Un- daunted by our ignorance, we rush
ahead to reengineer the fabric of life on earth. Maybe scientists will figure it all out. It is more probable, however,
that we are encountering the outer limits of social-ecological complexity in which cause and effect are widely
separated in space and time, and in a growing number of cases no one can say with certainty what causes what.
Like the sorcerer's apprentice, every answer generated by science gives rise to a dozen more questions,
and every technological solution gives rise to even more problems. Rapid technological change
intended to rationalize human life tends to expand the domain of irrationality. At the end of the
bloodiest century in history, the Enlightenment faith in human rationality seems over- stated at best. But the
design implication is not less rationality, but a more complete, humble, and ecologically solvent rationality that
works over the long term.
Who are we? Conceived in the image of God? Perhaps. But for the time being the most that can be said with
assurance is that, in an evolutionary perspective, humans are a precocious and unruly new- comer with a highly
uncertain future. Where are we? Wherever it is, it is a world full of irony and paradox, veiled in mystery. And for
those purporting to establish the human presence in the world in a manner that is ecologically sustainable and
spiritually sustaining, the ancient idea that God (or the gods) mocks human intelligence should never be far from
our thoughts.
Links
Resource Extraction
Their implication of the oceans as having value as capital perpetuates the disregard
for species as having value as living things – this is the cause of the destruction of the
oceans
McMurtry 2
(John McMurtry has a PhD from University College in London and is University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at
the University of Guelph, Just Ecological Integrity: The Ethics of Maintaining Planetary Life, ed. Peter Miller and
Laura Westra, 2002, Pages , AFGA)
Almost one hundred acres of the Earth's mantle of rainforest is cut every min- ute, while an estimated two hundred species go
extinct every day from sea and land habitat destruction, at least 1000 times the background evolutionary rate ("East and South"
1990, 12; McLaren 1996, 3). Accumulating air and atmos- pheric pollutions increasingly unleash unprecedented floods,
mudslides, and windstorms across continents, make the sunlight carcinogenic and unsafe for the world's children to play in, and
will by 2002 kill over 700,000 people a year by respiratory diseases (World Resources Institute, cited by Greenpeace 2000, 6).
Stratospheric ozone depletion by industrial pollutants simultaneously causes both the destruction of amphibian species'
capacity to reproduce, and systematic depletion of phytoplankton at the bottom of the planetary food chain. On the Earth's
surface, twenty-six billion tons of topsoil are lost to soil erosion every year across 50 percent of the world's remaining arable
land (Sandbrook 1994, D7). More than 60,000 square kilometers of land in over 100 countries becomes desert annually,
hastened by global warming caused by industrial effluents that have risen 16-fold in the past 30 years (Leslie 1996). The
world's coastal waters and coral ecosystems bearing the most biologically rich life-zones of the planet
are increasingly destroyed by pesticide and fertilizer runoffs and water- temperature and atmospheric
changes—with over three-quarters of the world's coral reefs, which host 25 percent of all fish species,
in catastrophic dieback (Smith and Hunton 1998). Dr. Tom Goreau, Director of the Global Coral Reef Alliance, reports that
oscillations of water and current temperatures from climatic warming have caused "a climate-induced
mass extinction—with one half of the coral reefs of the world experiencing catastrophic mortality in
one year alone." It is interesting to note the response of America's business leadership to such
reported effects of global warming (emphasis added), "The main problem with Kyoto, however, is that it is a
drastic solution to a problem that may not exist” (Glassman 2001). The ocean bottoms themselves are
strip-mined of fish and aquatic life across vast tracts by factory-trawlers that drag the ocean floors for
marketable fish stock, whose take has increased more than fourfold in the last four decades, and which has led to the
collapse of 16 of the world's 17 major ocean fisheries (Radford 1996,19; WRI 1998).
Above the ocean, three-quarters of all bird species are in decline, one of every four mammals is endangered, and one-third of
plant species is extinct or threatened with extinction. Water tables and freshwater sources are so depleted and polluted that the
United Nations estimates that two-thirds of the world will be short of water by 2025 (Graham 1998, 20-21). The polar
icecaps are rapidly melting—40 percent of the Arctic ice has already liquefied—and threaten coastal
communities and ecologies with the rising sea levels they cause, dragging more nutrients,
organochlorines and heavy metals into rivers, leaching waste-site and sewer toxins, bacteria and
viruses into the seas, and destroying wetlands that act as the Earth's natural water-filtering system (Earth Island Journal
1996, 13). A continent-sized hole in the stratospheric ozone layer per- sists and grows, acid and carbon loads stored in polar ice
are unlocked, and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts progressively extreme floods,
storms, droughts, and infectious diseases as global temperatures continue to rise from atmospheric gases and industrial
emissions (IPCC 2001).
Stripping of the planet's natural resources and life systems by unregulated and deregulated global
market activities will persist and increase in the future without effective intervention. Synergistic
interrelations of these simultaneously increasing loads will, in addition, compound their destructive
toll (M.l.T. Vege- tarian Support Group 1996, I). At the same time, resource-dependent countries of the South continue to be
obliged by "the Washington consensus" and International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditions to implement policies of
environmentally damaging mono-crop agriculture and overexploitation of natural resources to receive loans to pay
approximately half a billion dollars each day in com- pounding interest payments to foreign banks (George 1993). The world's
richest market also simultaneously increases its demands for consumption—with 99 percent of the materials used in the
production process ending up as waste within six weeks, and every ton of garbage, in turn, costing five tons of raw materials to
produce it, and 25 tons of natural biomass to yield these usable materials (Weizzsacker 1997).
The underlying causal structure of the mounting planetary ecocide, how- ever, remains publicly
unrecognized. Ecological and environmental analyses and positions, including the desiderata principles of the 2002 Earth
Charter, have failed to link the life-stripping phenomena they discern back to the inner logic of the global market system that
propels them. Where the problem is recognized as systemic, its cause is typically ambiguated as "growth" with no definition of
what is meant. Like "sin" and "godliness," which remain open to any interpretation, "growth" and "sustainability" have become
pro-and-con incantations rather than guides of understanding. The "growth" that business and political lobbies
demand means more aggregate sales of market commodities. But that this in- crease of market
commodity sales must lead in free market conditions to more depredations of the environment to
extract materials for and dispose of wastes of the increased commodities is a connection that is
blocked from view. As with other dominant regimes of the past, causal structures of life destruction
borne by relations of economic rule remain taboo to name (McMurtry 1999a, 1-45). A recent example is the
three-year suppression by the European Union and the World Wide Fund for Nature of its own "devastating report about the
destruction of tropical rainforests by multinational companies," and "the role of the IMF and the World Bank in forcing African
and Caribbean countries to sell their forests for cash to pay back debts [to foreign banks]" (Brown 2000, 3). This disconnection of
structural cause from effect lies at the core of the growing planetary ecological crisis. Yet it is an ideological block that is easily
seen through when it is embedded in a social order that we do not presuppose. Not long ago, we were able to understand well
that the environmental devastation of the Soviet Union was related to its model of re-engineering nature to suit central
command prescriptions. But the Soviet leadership, as market leaderships now, preferred to interpret each disaster as isolated
and resolvable, and to dismiss critics as extremists, malcontents, and unscientific.
Academic communities were no exception. They were too busy with specialist careers in well-paying institutional niches to
trace such dangerous connections. Wider-lensed critical thinkers, where they existed, were not funded. The situation is again
much the same today. Only it is the far more empowered value program of "the global free market" that is at the helm, and
unlike the Soviet Union, there is no external alternative to it or internal inhibitors of its lead- ers1 private acquisitiveness. Global
market agents profit without national or ownership constraints from the reduced costs and increased revenues of
environmental stripping. Accordingly, the technologically empowered capacities to disassemble, pollute, and waste
environments and ecosystems have vastly in- creased in their volumes, velocities, and transnational accesses, without even the
social-property and territorial limits of the Soviet system to restrain their "freedom" to do so.
The environmental crisis is therefore greater in reach in this system, although its blinkers of ruling ideology are not less
blinding. The corporate global market's organization of environmental usage is virtually excluded from funded research
investigation as a determinant of environmental depletion and destruction. It is taboo to identify because control of the mass
media and partnership control of public research funding rules out its study and exposure. We are increasingly aware of mass
media selection against information that contravenes the interests of major advertisers and the general system by which these
corpo… [next page is omitted due to the whim of google books]…
Recognition of the global cause-effect structure identified above is the primary condition to be
fulfilled if we are to respond effectively to the planetary environmental crisis. There is, however, a
profound impediment to this recognition. Besides powerful corporate interests that lie in blocking this recognition, there is
conventional presupposition of the ruling order within which one lives as the given structure of reality—'"the real world" to
which we must adapt. We see this social mind-set most virulently at work today in the public acceptance of calls for "reducing
cost burdens" of environmental laws, and of new salable rights to pollute in a for-profit corporate market of the air we breathe
itself No such scheme has demonstrably reduced pollution anywhere. Yet the U.S. has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to
limit the emission of greenhouse gases unless a market in pollution rights is the mode of regulatory control. That no
demonstration exists of the efficacy of such a regime in reducing pollution, and that it may merely provide rights to pollute and
handouts of new marketable equities to corporate polluters, are issues that are blocked from public view. For illustration of how
such a proposal can be so wrapped in circular reasoning as to be logically unintelligible in even leading environmental
textbooks, see Ander- son and Leal (1998). As for "voluntary restraints," even Senator Robert Byrd of the "coal state of West
Virginia" now acknowledges that "they won't work" ("Utilities May Be Greener than Bush" 2001, I).
For-Profit Money Sequences and Their Environmental Effects
Corporate for-profit organization of environmental resources admits of crucially different forms not
yet recognized by economic or other analysis. These different forms of for-profit use of the
environment can only be recognized from the standpoint of value, life reproduction and growth itself
In contrast to received theory, we will here adopt as our ground of value "the life-ground," whose rul- ing principle of all value is
that the more comprehensive the ranges of vital life of the organism or ecosystem is, the better. Conversely, the more reduced
the range of vital life of the organism or ecosystem is, the worse.
Although biodiversity qualifies as a sub-principle of the life-ground of value, it is blind to distinctions
of value within a species, notably the human; and it does not enable us to distinguish between the
good of different types of spe- cies either—for example, the good of cockroaches and rats as distinct from dol- phins
and humans as bearers of life-value. Here, in contrast, we begin from the premise that life systems of all kinds become better if
and only if, and to the extent that, they bear more comprehensive ranges of thought, felt being, and/or action. This is a principle
I shall return to, and develop more fully in my recent books. But it is enough here to say that this principle entails the
affirmation of… [pages omitted due to the whim of google books]… sequence is of singular importance in distinguishing
between capitalist sequences that may be consistent with or promote environmental life (e.g., small-scale farming, sewage
lagoons, self-powered transit) and other money sequences which may destroy life systems by their nature (e.g., the weapons
industry). Un- less we adopt a life-value standpoint as our ground of evaluation, we do not have the
theoretical resources to discern the global economy-environment causal interface, and the life-anddeath distinctions among its diverse types. This re- pression of distinctions among forms of capital, in
turn, leads to a radically misleading disjunction of those who are for or against "capitalism"
simpliciter. A money-capital sequence that creates the commodity of nourishing food, for example, and nourishes the
environment with new niche clearings at the same time, is very different from a money-capital sequence that produces commodities that destroy human and environmental life, waste natural and human resources, and provide no life-serving good
whatever. The military commodity's profitable production and sale is particularly apposite here because it is the most profitable
manufactured commodity on the globe, demands the lion's share of the U.S. federal budget, dominates the country's research
grant systems, and is the nation's leading polluter of the environment (McMurtry 1989). Yet does anyone know of any
environmental text that features an analysis of this economy-ecology linkage?
Science
Modern western sciences like ecology are rooted in the status quo constructs of
technicism and positivism in the unsustainable, neoliberal status quo
Kahn 10
(Richard Kahn, an educator whose primary interests are in researching the history of social movements as pedagogically
generative forces in society, and in critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater
planetary freedom, peace, and happiness. In 2007, he graduated with a PhD from UCLA with a specialization in the philosophy
and history of education. An alter-globalization activist, Kahn has been at the forefront of championing and organizing what he
terms, “total liberation politics,” that seek to advocate for nonhuman animals, the biosphere as a sacred entity, and social
justice through systemic transformation. Kahn’s writing and teaching to date have thus sought to synthesize the field of critical
pedagogy with types of ecological and vegan education in order to arrive at a radical education for sustainability that seeks
both individual and collective emancipation. Academia.edu, Critical Pedagogy,Ecoliteracy,& Planetary Crisis, 2010,
http://www.academia.edu/167226/Critical_Pedagogy_Ecoliteracy_and_Planetary_Crisis_The_Ecopedagogy_Movement, AFGA)
Of course, scientists have, can. and will certainly produce powerful analyses that contribute to the social
good. The point I seek to make here is not antiscience. But mainstream institutional science can also
be shown to be a form of culturally determined knowledge that often works with socially and
environmentally deleterious assumptions about what science is. who gets to do it, and to what ends
(Harding, 1998). In this respect, postcolonial and feminist critics of science have labeled the dominant paradigm of contemporary scientific research with the acronym W.MS, which can mean bom Western modem science and white male science
(Pomeroy in Cobeni & Loving, 2001). Thereby. WMS as an abstract, value-free set of universally falsifiable truths,
is recast as a specific sociocultural and political project that has— however unconsciously—securing the base of
hegemonic power as one of its functions.3 This includes (but is not limited to) naming WMS's complicity or coconstruction with European-American processes of imperialism (Third World Network in Harding, 1993; Harding, 1998), racism
(Gould in Harding, 1993). patriarchy (Cohn; Rose, Daniels in Wycr, ct al, 2001), and the domination of nature (Perry in Wycr, et
aL, 2001; Scott in Nader, 1996). Research scholars in environmental studies must therefore struggle to
determine the field's methods and goals so that they are positioned dialecti- cally in a critical
fibcratory relationship to WMS, if environmental studies is ever to be realized as an ecopedagogy
capable of exhibiting what Sandra Harding (1991) has called "strong reflexivity" (p. 163) in its approach to knowledge
production. Yet, too often sustainability is uncritically organized on campus such that it fundamentally accords
with scientistic types of technicism, instrumentalism, positivism, and naive empiricism . As demon- strated
by I Iyslop-Margison and Naseem (2007). all of these approaches to science have become standards within a
neoliberal educational paradigm. But, as just stated, the prevailing academic form of sustainability-asenvironmental science even more troublingly serves to root it institutionally to an unsustainable
history of political and cultural domination mat privileges "high status" (Bowers, 2001) forms of knowing (and knowers)
associated with development of Euroccntrism. Of course, the two problems are hardly separate: we cannot divorce the
enclosure of the commons from the desecra- tion of peoples and the land (LaDukc. 200~>; Bowers, 2006b). Thus environ-
mental science, or ecology* comes to be defined within a tradition of WMS through the active denial
of the status of "real science" (Harding, 1998) to dominated peoples' knowledge claims and practices.
This results in their continued cultural or political marginalization and oppression, as well as the
exacerbation of ecological crises (Bovvers, 2001. pp. 77—125; Snively & Corsiglia, 2001).
Such marginalization is blatantly exemplified by the academic organiza- tion of environmental studies
vis-a-vis indigenous peoples' traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). or what Berkes (1993) defines as
ways of being, wisdom, and cultural continuity "acquired over thousands of years of direct human
contact with the environment" (p. 1). For sure, there are some developments within Western modem science that strike
affinities with indigenous TEK perspectives (Deloria & Wildcat. 2001). It is additionally the case that there are attempts to
develop culturally relevant forms of environ- mental science that are inclusive of and useful for tribal realities, such as the
Ecological Society of America's SEEDS program, the Alaska Native Rural Systemic Initiative (Barnhardt & Kawagley. 2005), and
the science education models provided by Gregory Cajcte (1999a; 1993). Moreover, it is important to note that despite crucial
differences between WMS and TEK. there is also an historical continuity between them.
Critical scholars of WMS have in fact pointed out how its evolution as a body of ideas and practices has depended to a large
degree upon the assimi- lation (i.e., stealing) of knowledge from non-Western and indigenous tradi- tions (Harding, 1993;
Cajcte, 2000). Where Western modern science differentiates itself then is through its ongoing tendency
to either reject (or misunderstand) the cosmological and cultural conditions associated with TEK,
along with the other knowledge systems that WMS surveils. as these knowledge systems become
appropriated by WMS to serve the highly instrumental and technical ends of the global hegemony.' But
despite WMS's involvement in the politics of dehumanization. a common humanity girds
Hegemony
American hegemony represents imperialism toward nature and lays claim to
successful human civilization
Kahn 10
(Richard Kahn, an educator whose primary interests are in researehing the history of social movements as pedagogically
generative forces in society, and in critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater
planetary freedom, peace, and happiness. In 2007, he graduated with a PhD from UCLA with a specialization in the philosophy
and history of education. An alter-globalization activist, Kahn has been at the forefront of championing and organizing what he
terms, “total liberation politics,” that seek to advocate for nonhuman animals, the biosphere as a sacred entity, and social
justice through systemic transformation. Kahn’s writing and teaching to date have thus sought to synthesize the field of critical
pedagogy with types of ecological and vegan education in order to arrive at a radical education for sustainability that seeks
both individual and collective emancipation. Academia.edu, Critical Pedagogy,Ecoliteracy,& Planetary Crisis, 2010, Pages 53 –
56, http://www.academia.edu/167226/Critical_Pedagogy_Ecoliteracy_and_Planetary_Crisis_The_Ecopedagogy_Movement,
AFGA)
The genealogy of paideia leads from the rise of humanism to its resurrection during the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in the United States. During the time of the American revolution and
its wake, statesmen like Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann outlined state-funded forms of liberal education held
in common by all, in which the virtues and ideals of a new democratic republic could be informed and nourished,
so that the American experiment in democracy might outlast the lives of its founders (Cremin, 1980, pp. 136–
39).13 Then, during the modern period surrounding the two World Wars, social reconstructionists like John Dewey
(1997) and George S. Counts (1932) challenged schools and teachers to be more than agents for the reproduction
of capitalist values and status-quo ideals, instead urging them to reinsert their work within a larger civic project
bent on birthing “the most humane, the most beautiful, the most majestic civilization ever fashioned by any
people” (Counts, 1932, p. 35).
Yet, with its American iteration, the story of paideia entered a global phase and not necessarily with
entirely happy results. For American paideia, while celebrated the world over as a system of free,
democratic public education by which the lower subjected classes could move freely up the social
ladder towards the full rights demanded them as meritorious human subjects, is also at least as much
a propaganda line used to obscure an educational structure used to instantiate class distinctions
favorable to state and economic power (Tyack, 2000, pp. 19—20). Now, when America has become the
dominant world power, a vanguard producer of popular and high cultural forms, and the selfproclaimed defender of a free, democratic, human civilization, it is likewise the world's foremost polluter,
a leading unsustainable producer and consumer of market goods, and the prime imperial force behind the
complete instrumentalization and extinction of the natural world.
In some ways, via the traditions of the humanities and the globalization of the American socio-educational project,
paideia is the vehicle by which huge numbers of people have become highly literate and meaningful cultural
producers. But to grant it such success as this is also necessarily to recognize how it has left billions beyond the
realization of the same. Even if we accept the neoliberal leadership, such as articulated previously by the Bush
administration, at its word and believe that the full extension of American-led, corporate business and education
into the "less cultured" regions of the globe represents a sort of final Alexandrian attempt at mass civilization, how
are we to judge the results of this project if it comes at the cost of the irrational devastation of the
natural planet and the further social exclusion of those beyond saving? For sure, those calling today for
an ecological paideia of planetary citizenship mean something other than the neoliberal globalization
of American values. But in accounting for the present contradictions of paideia, we must recognize that one path
that bears its name potentially travels in this direction.
In his essay "The Individual and the Great Society," Herbert Marcuse (in Kellner. 2001) anticipates how a more
oppositional and sustainable paideia could be formulated. Marcuse perceived an oppressively militaristic
mindset behind modern science and technology and sought to keep it from dominating contemporary
attempts at the creation of a free, beautiful and humane society. In this way, Marcuse called for the
re-integration of science with a critical humanitas (pp. 74—7li). He hoped thereby to invigorate the
humanities with the real world questions about the domination of nature that should confront an
engaged and widely informed public sphere, as well as to inject the realm of human ethics back into
the hegemony represented by the natural sciences. For Marcuse, then, a new kind of humanity required the
technology and learning that could be produced through the development of a new science of life (Kellner. Lewis &
Pierce. 2008).14 If we desire something like earth democracy in the face of our current global military/industrial
crisis, Marcuse's thinking is therefore worthy of re-evaluation and further consideration. Still, as I have attempted
to sketch, Marcuse's invocation of paideia as httmanitas invokes historical contradictions that are not easily
dismissed. That Marcuse's deep-seated and radical critique of education is forced, in some sense, to articulate itself
around paideia and httmanitas only goes to highlight how difficult it may be to escape the constraints of the past.
The challenge facing the materialization of a free sustainable society today is not just the cosmopolitan problem of
how to allow for a multiplicity of (often competing) individual choices within a civic community or cultural
commons, nor is it simply the challenge of how to equitably confederalize myriad common subcuttural
communities into an eflecuve democratic network at the level of a worldwide human emergence.1* Under the
condi- tions of transnational capitalism, I believe that both of these will be required, but if these do not accompany
the re-integration of the whole of humankind within the larger oikosi6 of our planetary nature as a whole—if the
dichotomy separating the human cultural and natural kingdoms is not overcome—then the myth-making of
universal civilization will continue and with it the cultural action of domination, genocide, and global ecological
catastrophe as the underside of its quest for freedom.'7
In thinking about the rise of human civilization as the differentiation of culture from nature, and so
into something ideologically un-natural, Max Weber (1958) oflered this stark oracle about what he took to be
the jailhouse of a world dominated by bureaucratic power structures and the total disen- chantment with life they
breed: No one knows who will live in this cage in the fuiure, ot whether at the end of this present development
entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or if neither, mechanized
petrification embellished with a sort of self importance. For the last stage of cultural development, il might well be
truly said: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; thus nullity imagines that it has attained
a level of civilization never before achieved, (p. 182) As I write this today, highly critical of the de-politicization
of the dominant culture and the dizzying heights of power obtained by those immersed in the full glories of
transnational capitalism, I must admit that it is hard for me not to imagine that Weber's prophecy has come true
and that we have handed the Garden of Eden over to a nullity.
Queer Theory
Queer theory includes a reformulating methodology that is built upon humanism
Wuthmann 11
(Tyler T. Wuthmann is a Wesleyan University Student with an interest in feminist, queer, and anti-anthropocentric ideologies.
When learning about each inseparate contexts, Tyler attempted to reconcile those ideas but met passivity on the issue from
queer theory professors, Wesleyan University, “Animal-Attentive Queer Theories,” Page 32, April 2011,
http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1644&context=etd_hon_theses, AFGA)
The important aspects of queer theory in this early formulation would be the interrogation of the
subject, as Monique Wittig described, and its interaction with the determining heterosexual matrix. Moreover, the insistence
that any and all paradigms of normativity were forms of oppression and violence was central to queer theory’s early formation.
For example, Eve Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet (1990) notes “it is a rather amazing fact that, of the many dimensions
along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another…precisely one, the gender of object
choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of
‘sexual orientation’” (Sedgwick 1990, 8). For queer theory, the subject no longer could stand as an individual
with innate or essential properties. As Sue-Ellen Case writes that a queer critique “constitute a kind of activism that attacks the
dominant notion of the natural” (Case 1991, 3). The subject is only formulated through its interaction and
subsequent recognition within the cultural symbolic rather than through its natural beginnings. Queer
as a term went through many different contestations between one of action, doing, and one of description, being. Lisa Duggan
argues queer theory does not reformulate queer to stand in as the newest moniker for subversive identity but rather “the
promise of new meanings, new ways of thinking and acting politically – a promise sometimes realized, sometimes not” (Duggan
1994, 11). In this sense ‘queer’ acts as a form of being and doing, however Duggan is quick to add that this utopian ideal is not
always the case. Sullivan notes that “queer is not an essential identity, it is nevertheless…a provisional political one” (Sullivan
2004, 44). For Case, queer theory works “at the site of ontology, to shift the ground of being itself, thus challenging the Platonic
parameters of Being – the borders of life and death” (Abelove 1993, 206). Queer, in this sense, is material in its theoretical
formations. This self-reflexive tendency of queer to include more and consider more is an important
aspect of the humanism within queer theories. The shifting of borders acts as a sort of renewal,
increasing the range of subjects considered in a queer parameter. However, what remains limited is
the humanist context through which certain subjects can be considered. Queer acts and queer
representations are perceived with sado-humanist terms, which leads the further proliferation of a
human contingency as the basis of theoretical engagement.
Queer theories in their multiple formations as forms of resistance act as an intersectional critique and disassembly of the
hierarchal structures that maintain social and normative privilege. Queer, with some of its roots in political activism of the early
90s, takes on a larger impulse towards a political practice, a provisional solution that theoretical work tends to have.
Furthered in theoretical terms, Janet Jakobsen argues that queer works to “complete the Foucauldian
move from human being to human undoing” and the result is queer as a verb (Jakobsen 1998, 516). Queer
theory as it was formulated within the early 1990s brought with it the activist commitments of many academic writers who
were themselves involved in political action. Michael Warner who was heavily involved in Queer Nation and ACT-UP political
actions adopted a similar vernacular when he proffered that queer is a protest against “the idea of normal behavior” (Warner
1990, 290). Either in terms of being/doing or both, queer acts as a stance against any kind of normative behavior or identity as
fixed, stable, privileged and natural. Queer theorizing and activism stands in contrast to the earlier, normative formations of gay
and lesbian identity politics while maintaining a basis of sado-humanism despite interpreting itself as against hierarchal models
of power and normativities.
Queer theory is based on a subjectivity that assumes humanism as a starting point,
which not only makes it incompatible with ecopedagogy but also means it fails to
dismantle natural binaries, and to reconcile the ideologies would require severance
Wuthmann 11
(Tyler T. Wuthmann is a Wesleyan University Student with an interest in feminist, queer, and anti-anthropocentric ideologies.
When learning about each inseparate contexts, Tyler attempted to reconcile those ideas but met passivity on the issue from
queer theory professors, Wesleyan University, “Animal-Attentive Queer Theories,” Page 39, April 2011,
http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1644&context=etd_hon_theses, AFGA)
The relationship between queer theory and the natural sciences could lie described as passively
antagonistic at best. Early queer engagement with practices that were considered within the natural,
or at least psycho-natural sciences, such as sexology, produced scathing critiques of the multiple ways in which social
categories of oppression and privilege were read onto differently pathologized bodies. The oppression and abjection of
queer 'others' were justified through scientifically based conclusions and research. Initially the scientific
research was used to understand the ways in which homosexuality was marked on the body by the subjects' essential nature.
Queer theory critiqued this kind of research by sexologists and others that produced results by discursively constructing
homosexual bodies through exaggerated and culturally-biased research methods (Terry 1995). I argue that this type of
engagement is typical of queer critiques of the research and methodologies of the natural sciences.
Feminists and critical race theorists also criticized the many ways in which the natural sciences had pathologized and
constructed understandings of racialized and female (sexualized) bodies through similar normative practices (Terr\'1995). These
attempts at a 'biologizing' sexuality, subjectivity, and difference were righdy rejected for their privilege and normative bias but
an unfortunate consequence of this early engagement with scientific research was a continuing dis- ease between queer and
feminist theories and the natural sciences.
This uneasy historical dynamic, as well as an inherited humanism within queer theories, have made any son of
engagement with animal others impossible, slight or anthropocentric. By tracing a genealogy of what I argue
are queer theory's main predecessors and influences, I hope to show the multiple disciplines, histories and writings that
contribute to formation of different queer theories as they historically have been and currently are understood. Through this
genealogy I focus on the many ways that different queer theories have inherited a discursive humanism that places at its core a
human/animal divide predicated on certain necessary {linguistic and mental) capacities of the queer subject. I switch
sometimes between queer theory and queer theories as a way of illustrating the multiplicity within
the field of and writing on 'queer theory'. While it is true that some writing on {post)humanism and
affirmative readings of science could be considered in the realm of queer theory (notably Donna Haraway's
writing stands out as the epitome of queer science studies scholarship), it is the reality that the majority of writing
fails to critique or at least problematize the implicit humanism within queer theories. This sort of
humanism has lead to the popular formation of subjectivity within queer theories to maintain the
necessary capacity of language and human-based communication as its parameters. This theory of subjectivity has
prevented a deep engagement with the lives, experiences, and suffering of animal others due to their
fundamental lack of human speech and discursive (cultural) practices. It is this humanism that fuels
the self-defeating logic within queer theories that purport to be against social norms, binaries, and
hierarchal power structures while at the same time basing their theories on an implicit sadohumanism that disavows animal others. I do not want to parallel this genealogy of the debate with the nature/culture
binary by stating that one is all nature and the other is all culture. Although this is one possible interpretation of some work in
the critiques that queer theory offers of gay and lesbian studies, it would be far too reductive. For exam pie, Judith Butler's
work on the theory of performativity has sparked interpretations of "all culture no nature' subjectivity—a discursive
subjectivity. This interpretation would hold that there is nothing that is pre-cultural in its mattering or formation. In response to
activism in the 1990s, queer theories attempted "to produce a program, and when the theory addresses the broad issue of
queerness, the program is expected to explain queer life" (Berlant, Warner 1993, 348). The theory of performatively produced
sexualities and subjects that allowed for a radical critique of naturalized institutions of sexuality such as allopathic medicine and
government institutions and programs (Duggan 1994). Freedom from earlier discourses that revolved around naturalized
sexualities furthered queer political agendas. For queer theories to come together with animal studies in
meaningful and productive ways, many queer theories must undergo a full- scale theoretical shift and
rejection of its implicit humanism in order to produce what I call animal-attentive queer theories. If
queer theories are to truly actualize the potential within a queer critique, they must reject a sadohumanist logic as self- defeating and work towards animal-attentive queer theories that do not rely on a human/animal
binary.
Race (Not Really a link)
The ontological basis for racism is born from the separation between humans and
non-human animals – the K is prior
Eckersley 98
(Robyn Eckersley is a Professor in Political Science in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne
and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She served as the Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at
the University of Oslo for the northern winter of 2010-2011, Beyond Human Racism, Page 171, May 1998,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30301627?seq=8, AFGA)
problem, although I am suggesting here that 'human racism' might possibly do better (at least descriptively - analytically they
are the same) since the critique of human racism (and the defence of its corollary, nonracist humanism) is less likely to be
misinterpreted as an attack on humanism per se. Moreover, the particular kind of prejudice that is revealed in
racism, while structurally similar to (and often linked with) the hierarchical dualisms and logic of sexism, is often directed
towards more radical forms of difference or 'otherness' (i.e. the differences between particular human races and cultures can
be much greater than the differences between men and women in any given race or culture). This* would seem to be
more relevant to a discussion of the even more radical forms of difference which may be found
between humans and nonhumans. Whatever descriptive label we might choose to replace
anthropocentrism - human chauvinism, human racism, human speciesism or perhaps even human
colonialism - the analytical point is the same. That is, the excluded groups are excluded because they
lack something that is possessed and deemed by the more powerful group to be the measure of worth
(such as reason, civilisation, moral agency, or language). As Plum wood and many other ecofeminist philosophers have pointed
out, these comparisons reveal a deep structure of mastery based on self/other dualisms 'which create
a web of incorporations and inclusions' (Plumwood 1993,143). And it is therefore a 'fatal flaw', as
Evemden (1985,10) calls it, for environmentalists to try to squeeze some of their moral constituency (say apes and some other
nuammals) into the dominant criteria, reckoning that saving some is better than saving none. Conforming to the requirements
and modes of rationality of the dominant culture has rarely served the interests of diverse minority cultures. Such a strategy is
even less likely to permit the flourishing of biological diversity.
Now it must be emphasised that there is nothing in the critique of human racism which demands that we cannot celebrate the
dignity of each and every human, the achievements of humankind, and what is special about the human race, and we may
(indeed ought) go to great lengths to help our own kind. But we ought not, as part of those celebrations of specialness,
'belongingness' and compassion for each other, thereby ignore the needs of other beings who are not like us when we have a
choice, least of all persecute them, simply because they are not of our own kind. The line between patriotism and xenophobia is
sometimes a fine one and it is likewise not always immediately obvious when the line between humanism and human racism is
crossed. This is because nowadays it is not so common to find environmental destruction justified in terms of a Promethean
model of human destiny, a hierarchy of creation or as a means of 'enlarging human empire' vis-a-vis the rest of nature. Just as
racism has become more subtle (for example, wilful blindness or indifference towards the structural disadvantage that is
suffered by some racial minorities has tended to replace the more outlandish expressions of racial superiority of the nineteenth
century), so too has human racism become more subtle. These days, many unnecessary and environmentally destructive
developments are more usually justified as neces- sary to create employment or improve human welfare in some way, in which
case critics of development are easily typecast as either indifferent or hostile to the needs of the unemployed or humans
generally. (Here the problem of invidious comparison takes a different form. We no longer persecute the other because it is not
like us. Instead, some of us arc admonished for caring for nonhuman others because they are not like us.) Thus destructive
development is justified as 'natural' and inescapable, since there are no 'viable* alternatives. It is
under circumstances such as these, when otherwise worthy humanist sentiments are made to
perform an ideological function (i.e., concealing and/or delcgitimising alternatives) that humanism is
transformed into human racism. That is, it is this refusal to make an effort to acknowledge or explore
alternatives which might possibly enable the mutual fulfilment of human and nonhuman needs that
should alert us to the prejudice of human racism.
The movement for environmental justice transcends boundaries of racism and
marginalization with its recognition that all creatures are equal as ecological actors
Bullard 99
(Robert Bullard is the Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. He is often described as the
father of environmental justice. Professor Bullard received his Ph.D. degree from Iowa State University. He is the author of seventeen books that address
sustainable development, environmental racism, urban land use, industrial facility siting, community reinvestment, housing, transportation, climate justice,
emergency response, smart growth, and regional equity, Earth First! Journal, “Environmental Justice:
An Interview with Robert Bullard,” July 1999, http://www.ejnet.org/ej/bullard.html, AFGA)
Errol Schweizer (ES): What is the environmental justice movement? Robert Bullard (RB): The environmental justice movement
has basically redefined what environmentalism is all about. It basically says that the environment is everything: where we live,
work, play, go to school, as well as the physical and natural world. And so we can't separate the physical
environment from the cultural environment. We have to talk about making sure that justice is
integrated throughout all of the stuff that we do. What the environmental justice movement is about is trying
to address all of the inequities that result from human settlement, industrial facility siting and
industrial development. What we've tried to do over the last twenty years is educate and assist groups in organizing and
mobilizing, empowering themselves to take charge of their lives, their community and their surroundings. It's more of a
concept of trying to address power imbalances, lack of political enfranchisement, and to redirect
resources so that we can create some healthy, liveable and sustainable types of models. ES: How have
environmental justice groups organized themselves? RB: For the most part, a lot of the small grassroots groups operate from a
bottom up model. They don't have boards of directors and large budgets and large staffs but they do operate with the idea that
everyone has a role and we are all equal in this together. The environmental justice groups are more egalitarian, most of them
are led by women, and its more democratic. Not to say its perfect but it does bring out the idea that power rests in all of us and
when we operate as a collective, that's when we are most powerful and we move forward as a unit, as a body and not
necessarily with a hierarchy. But I think a lot of it is when you can have an issue that can mobilize, organize and create the
catalyst that gets thousands of people at a meeting, saying this is what we want and we're not gonna back up till we get it. I
think that's where the environmental justice movement is more of a grassroots movement of ordinary people who may not see
themselves as traditional environmentalists, but are just as much concerned about the environment as someone who may be a
member of the Sierra Club or the Audubon Society. ES: How has the environmental justice movement come into conflict with
these traditional, white environmental groups? RB: There's been a lot of conflict and misunderstanding about
what the role of some of the green groups are as it relates to environmental justice and particularly
working in communities of color. And what we're saying is that its just one environment. You're
talking about planet earth, where we live, and if in fact we are going to have a global movement for
environmental justice, we have to understand what environment is and what the agendas are. A lot of
grassroots groups and communities of color are saying that we have to work in our communities and take care of educating and
empowering our people before we can talk about having other people do stuff for us. I think to a large extent a lot of grassroots
groups have come head-on with a lot of the larger groups that have not understood exactly what environmental justice is. We
are saying that environmental justice incorporates the idea that we are just as much concerned about
wetlands, birds and wilderness areas, but we're also concerned with urban habitats, where people live in
cities, about reservations, about things that are happening along the US-Mexican border, about children that
are being poisoned by lead in housing and kids playing outside in contaminated playgrounds. So we have had to struggle to get
these issues on the radar on a lot of the large environmental groups. We've made a lot of progress since 1990 when a letter was
written to them charging them with environmental racism, elitism, looking at their staff, looking at their boards and saying that
we need to talk. And there's been some talking and sharing and working together along the way. We've made progress but
there's still a lot of progress that needs to be made because to a large extent the environmental movement, the more
conservation/preservation movement, really reflects the larger society. And society is racist. And so we can't expect a lot of our
organizations not to somehow be affected by that. We're not saying that people are evil and that these organizations are
setting out to do harm, but we're saying that we have to educate ourselves and learn about each other. We have to cross those
boundaries and go on the other side of the tracks, go to the meetings downtown and learn from each other. That's what we've
been doing for the last twenty years: trying to get a handle on how we can work together in a principled way. And in 1991 we
had the first national people of color environmental leadership summit and we developed 17 principles of environmental
justice. Basically, how can we as people of color, working class people and poor people work on agendas that at the same time
may conflict with the larger agendas of the big groups. And what we're saying is that we may not agree on 100 percent of the
things but we agree on more things than we disagree on. And I think that we have to agree to work on the things we are in
agreement on and somehow work through those things where there are disagreements. ES: What kind of role has race played
in the siting of toxic facilities in this country? RB: Race is still the potent factor for predicting where Locally Unwanted Land Uses
(LULUs) go. A lot of people say its class, but race and class are intertwined. Because the society is so racist and because racism
touches every institution--employment, housing, education, facility siting, land use decisions, you can't really extract race out of
decisions that are being made by persons who are in power and the power arrangements are unequal. When we talk about the
institution of racism as it exists in environmental policy, enforcement, land use, zoning and all those things. All of that is part of
the environment and we have to make sure that our brothers and sisters who are in environmental groups understand that's
what we are saying. Environmental justice is not a social program, it's not affirmative actions, its about justice. and until we get
justice in environmental protection, justice in terms of enforcement of regulations, we will not even talk about achieving
sustainable development or sustainability issues until we talk about justice. A lot of the groups that are trying to address these
issues in the absence of dealing with race may be fooling themselves. When we talk about what's happening along
the US-Mexican border and the colonias and the maquilas and the devastation that is happening
along the border, the health conditions of children and workers and not understand that it's also
related to our consumption patterns, consumption behavior and who has the most money to consume the most.
And those are issues that may be unpopular when we sit in rooms and talk but I think that's how the environmental justice
movement is forcing these issues on the table and really getting a lot of people to think about how we can start to address the
disparities and the inequities and the privileged position that some people have only because of the skin color that they were
born in. And that's where the justice issues come into account. Now all of the issues of environmental racism and
environmental justice don't just deal with people of color. We are just as much concerned with inequities in Appalachia, for
example, where the whites are basically dumped on because of lack of economic and political clout and lack of having a voice to
say "no" and that's environmental injustice. So we're trying to work with groups across the political spectrums; democrats,
republicans, independents, on the reservations, in the barrios, in the ghettos, on the border and internationally to see that we
address these issues in a comprehensive manner. ES: Are you seeing more of a convergence between the traditional, white
environmental groups and the people of color movements? RB: We haven't seen a total convergence; what we've seen is a
better understanding of the various sides that are there, the various elements, the various components and priorities that are
there. And for a long time historically, for example, black people in the south were not even allowed to visit state parks,
because of Jim Crow and segregation. And somehow we were blamed for not having appreciation for state parks. I mean, it
wasn't our faults, we couldn't go to them! So we're finding as the more urban folks get to visit parks and wilderness areas and
are able to appreciate that these are national treasures and not just treasures for people that have money to visit them, its
everybody's. We all pay taxes. And so we are seeing more and more young people being able to take field trips to see the
beauty of nature. And more and more people who are in environmental groups are now beginning to understand that what
happens in cities also impacts their lives. So we can't just let cities buckle under and fall into this sinkhole. We have to talk about
this convergence of urban, suburban and rural and talk about the quality of life that exists and talk about the issue of urban
sprawl. Basically everybody is impacted by sprawl. People who live in cities face disinvestment, in suburbs with the trees being
knocked down, chewing up farmland. So you talk about this convergence, a lot of it is happening now, but it has to happen with
the understanding that we have to include everybody, that it has to be an inclusive movement or it won't work. ES: How can
you pose these issues to people when organizing in low income and politically disenfranchised communities, especially
communities with very little open space or access to natural areas? RB: The first line is that we have to start early. We have to
educate young people that it is their right to have access to open space, green space, parks, outdoors, as opposed to people
thinking that their supposed to be living in an area where the only park is a basketball court with no net. We have to give
people this idea that it's their right to have access to open space and green space and we have to provide funds to make sure
that we get them early on and take them on field trips, take them to a wilderness area, a refuge, a reserve, to a park-a real park
and to integrate this information into our curriculum. In your geography course, in your social studies course, or science course
make sure you integrate this into it, and have videos that you can show, but ultimately the best example that you can have is
that young people visit these places and see for themselves what nature is. If you talk about people of color, African
Americans for example, we are land-based people. Africans are land-based people. Native Americans
are land-based peoples. We have been pushed off land and we now find ourselves in cities but that
doesn't mean that the institutional memory of what the land was to us and how we are tied to the
land and how our whole existence was based on community and being tied to the land. And so I think
we've gotten away from that but the reintroduction of those concepts can be achieved if we make a
concerted effort at trying to do that. And some of that is being done if you look at the environmental
education curriculum that is integrating environmental justice into it. We're trying to do that but there is a whole lot of
resistance. Traditional environmental education is to basically do it by the numbers the way it's been done for the last 50 years
and thats not working. It's not working for our communities. ES: What is the EJ perspective on the population/border debate
within the Sierra Club? RB: (Hehehehehe) Well, you know... My position--and I can only speak for myself, is that immigration is
not the problem in terms of environmental degradation. If we talk about having no borders and addressing issues of economic
justice--we can address lots of the environmental injustices around the world. If we talk about respecting life and
respecting people and respecting communities, if we do that we can end a lot of the international
friction that results from transboundary waste trades, and imbalances created as a result of NAFTA--people call it
"ShAFTA". We can do a lot of things and I think this whole anti-immigrant wave is just another wedge that is driven between
folks that are organizing and mobilizing. I don't think it will work. This country is changing demographically and it is scaring a lot
of people. The year 2050 is supposed to be the magic year when people of color will be in the majority in this country. But at
one point in time this country was people of color, it was indigenous people. So when we talk about these issues, we have to
put them in the context of the long term. We need to address things within US borders but at the same time we cannot export
problems abroad and create problems in areas that we know do not have the capacity to handle garbage and environmental
waste and the risky technologies that are being exported and the unsustainable development policies that are being exported
abroad, most of it by our government. So I think that environmental justice folks are saying that we are going to have to work
across borders and those ties are already there and it is just a matter of making sure that we strengthen those and we expand
and keep reaching out. ES: How has the environmental justice movement attacked the mode of production, the way that things
are made, as well as the fact that things are being dumped on people. RB: Well, as a matter of fact, there was a meeting in
Detroit [recently] on clean production. And what we're saying is that clean production can be a major component in the
environmental justice movement because if we are talking about clean production, changing the way things are made and what
goes into the manufacturing of products, we can save a lot of headaches for communities that are surrounded by polluting
industries. So if we clean up the production and a lot of communities that are living on the fence lines with these facilities, a lot
of their problems can be solved immediately. So EJ and clean production go hand in hand. What we are saying is that we have
to make sure that as these new movements come along we integrate EJ into it. We've done that with the clean production
movement. ES: EF! considers itself to be the radical end of the environmental movement. What can EF!ers do to further the
vision of the environmental justice movement? RB: Well, you know, the EJ movement is an inclusive movement. What we are
saying is that everything on the spectrum as it relates to siting, pollution, industrial contamination in communities, nonsustainable development, non-sustainable patterns of production, I think everybody has a role in that. The EJ movement is an
anti-racist movement and I don't think you can get any more radical than fighting racism. Because when you talk about fighting
racism, you make a lot of enemies because racism permeates everything. I think Earth First! can really embrace a lot of the
environmental justice principles that we have and see that there are a lot of things that environmental justice groups are
advocating and trying to implement that cut cross some of the issues that you're addressing. And I'm not saying that you are
gonna get a lot people of color inundating your organization [sic] with membership but we can work together without being
members and that's where I think the collaboration, coalitions and signing onto supporting specific campaigns has really made a
difference in some of the more recent campaign victories that we've had on EJ. The fact is that the environmental justice
movement over the last ten years has really matured onto developing policies and issue statements
and working on issues ranging from housing, transportation, health to economic development,
community revitalization, you name it. I think that the mere fact that we have a number of environmental justice centers
around the country now that are working with communities--not organizing communities-- but working with, in support of and
providing technical assistance and training, we've been able to do some things that no thought we could do 10-15 years ago
and thats really making a difference when we talk about working across disciplines and geographic, racial and economic
spectrums, we're the most powerful and thats when we are the strongest.
Conservation
Our ways of “helping” the environment is rooted in anthropocentric ideas, that they
will serve use for humans in the future.
Fox 95 (Warwick Fox, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Lancashire. published
widely in environmental philosophy, “toward a transpersonal Ecology”, State University of New York
Press, 1995, http://www.sunypress.edu/p-2271-toward-a-transpersonal-ecology.aspx)
Moving on to illustrate the assumption of human self-importance in the larger scheme of things, we can see that this assumption
shows through, for example, in those prescientific views that saw humans as dwelling at the center of the
universe, as made in the image of God, and as occupying a position well above the “beasts” and just a little
lower than the angels on the Great Chain of Being. And while the development of modern science, especially the Copernican
and Darwinian revolutions, swerved to sweep these views aside – or at least those aspects that were open to
empirical refutation – it did no such thing to the human-centered assumptions that underlay these
views. Francis Bacon for example, saw science as “enlarging the bounds of Human Empire”; Descartes
likewise saw it as rendering us the “masters and possessors of nature.” Approximately three and a half centuries later,
Neil Armstrong’s moon walk – the culmination of a massive, politically directed, scientific and
technological development effort – epitomized both the literal acting out of this vision of “enlarging
the bounds of Human Empire” and the literal expression of its anthropocentric spirit: Armstrong’s moon walk
was, in his own words at the time, a “small step for him but a “giant leap for Mankind.” Back here on earth,
we find that even those philosophical, social, and political movements of modern times most
concerned with exposing discriminatory assumptions have typically confined their interests to the
human realm, that is, to issues to do with imperialism, race, socioeconomic class, and gender . When
attention is finally turned to the exploitation by humans of the nonhuman world, our arguments for
the conservation and preservation of the nonhuman world continue to betray anthropocentric
assumptions. We argue that nonhuman world should be conserved or preserved because of its use
value to humans (e.g., its scientific, recreational, or aesthetic value) rather than for its own sake or for its
use value to nonhuman beings. It cannot be emphasized enough that the vast majority of
environmental discussion – whether in the context of public meetings, newspapers, popular magazines, reports by international
conservation organizations, reports by government instrumentalities, or even reports by environmental groups – is couched with these
anthropocentric terms of reference. Thus even many of those who deal most directly with environmental
issues continue to perpetuate, however unwittingly, the arrogant assumption that we humans are central to
the cosmic drama; that, essentially, the world is made for us. John Seed, a prominent nonanthropocentric ecological activist, sums
up the situation quite simply when he writes, “the idea that humans are the crown of creation, the source of all
value, the measure of all things, is deeply embedded in our culture and consciousness.”
Sustaining biodiversity and protecting ecosystems within the capitalist system still
supports the destructive extraction of resources from the planet
McMurtry 2
(John McMurtry has a PhD from University College in London and is University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at
the University of Guelph, Just Ecological Integrity: The Ethics of Maintaining Planetary Life, ed. Peter Miller and
Laura Westra, 2002, Pages , AFGA)
On the other hand, for-profit activities may also minimally harm or enrich the environment (e.g.,
biodiverse sustenance-farming whose surplus is sold for profit), promote new biodiversification and ecosystem
possibilities by generating habitats and foods for fauna and flora (e.g., the rapidly expanding organic gardening
business), or protect the environment from pollution by the reduction or the elimination of industrial
toxic loads (e.g., solar-powered heating and tran- sit and pollution-abatement technologies). The capitalist sequence is
not necessarily life-destructive, but can in limited cases be both profitable and beneficial to the
environment. Such issues cannot arise as issues, however, within the cur- rent confusion of capital sequences.
Within the dominant mind-set, which in this way grounds magical thinking, all capitalism is simply
assumed as life-enhancing by the operations of the market's invisible hand, and the major for-profit
industries of resource extraction, manufacturing, and service delivery competitively cut their cost inputs and in- crease
their scale and velocity of operations at the systematic expense of planetary and regional environments. But here again, we see
very little said on this underlying causal structure in increasingly vast libraries of environmental and ecosystem analysis. In this
context and undeterred by effective regulatory inhibition in a global field of "free market" ideology, the dominant moneycapital sequences are propelled to an increasingly frantic pace of appropriating every life form and natural resource to maximize
profits to stockholders in evermore expanded and leveraged capital circuits. Correspondingly, the planetary environment
is ever more cumulatively overloaded and stripped by these life-blind money sequences, whose forms
and pathological consequences are not distinguished or recognized. Thomas Berry is a distinctively critical
environmental thinker because he does not delink environmental problems from for-profit corporate money sequences, but
frontally contends that "the profit of the corporation is the deficit of the Earth" (Berry 1987)—a statement that strikingly
conceives the problem at a general level, but does not distinguish which for-profit corporate activities are a "deficit of the
Earth" and which are not, and what are the principles by which we can tell the degrees of both.
Methodology
Solvency
Alt can change policy – recognizing the substantive and formal elements of institutions
allow us to participate in the slow change of those institutions
HALL vice-chancellor @ University of Salford 2k10
Martin-historical arehaeologist; He was for a time President of the World Arehaeological Congress and General Secretary of the South African
Arehaeological Society. He moved to UCT (University of Capetown) in 1983, where he led the Centre for African Studies and later became the
Head of the Department of Arehaeology. He was the inaugural Dean of Higher Education Development between 1999 and 2002; was deputy
Vice-Chancellor at UCT for six years. Professor Hall is married with three children. His wife, Professor Brenda Cooper, is an academic specialising
in post-colonial and African literature; There Was An Ocean; Professional Inaugural Lecture at University of Salford, September 29;
http://www.salford.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/73628/There-Was-an-Ocean-final.pdf
This is also an opportunity to reprise an essay I wrote a few years ago and which was published in a collection that I edited with Marvin Krislov
and David Featherman, both then at the University of Michigan. My particular interest then was in the transformation of universities in South
Africa. This was a process that began in the mid-1980s, when liberal but legally-segregated institutions such as the University of Cape Town
began to admit black students and employ black staff in defiance of apartheid legislation. Transformation gained momentum after the first
democratic elections in 1994, and was enhanced by the Bill of Rights, which is part of the South African Constitution of 1996. And yet the
imperatives of transformation continue today, with widening inequality, extremes
of opportunity in prior schooling and the complex intersections of race and class.
Does this mean that these formal, constitutional changes have left everything staying the same?
a useful device is to draw a distinction between formal and
substantive rights. Formal rights are those established in the legislation. For
example, the constitution deals carefully with unfair discrimination and the right
to redress in terms both of race, and also other “protected” categories that will be familiar to those interested in Britain’s
equality legislation. Substantive rights are lived experience – what actually happens. Unfair
discrimination on the basis of race is still prevalent. For instance, Sabie Surtee and I established in a
To answer this question,
report completed last year that, across a large sample of corporate employers in the Western Cape, black employees fail to be promoted
through management ranks at an appropriate rate. Focus groups with black managers revealed extensive experience of discrimination (which
Xolani Ngazimbi is exploring further in her PhD dissertation). Extensive failure of substantive right of choice in sexual orientation is also
apparent. Despite being one of the first countries in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, lesbian, gay and bisexual people in South Africa
are frequently abused. Nothing
seems to have changed, yet everything is different. The legal
basis that enshrines social justice and human rights has set something in motion in
South Africa, that may take time to be realized, but which is unstoppable.
Understanding that institutions have both formal and substantive dimensions is
useful in understanding some of the antimonies of transformation. The law is evidently an
institution of society that includes both formal elements (the constitution,
whether written or unwritten, laws and procedures, courts, police and prisons)
and substantive elements, the everyday experience of legal restraint and
opportunity, justice and policing. This, then, is what Clause 9 (the “equality clause”) of the 1996 South African Bill of
Rights defines as the formal right of every person not to be discriminated against unfairly. Neither the state nor any individual may “unfairly
discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or
social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth”. And here is Ndumie Funda’s
substantive experience of unfair discrimination which led her to found Luleki Sizwe, a charity that campaigns for the end of the “corrective
rape” of lesbian women: “I founded Luleki Sizwe after the deaths of my dear friend Luleka Makiwane and my fiancée Nosizwe Nomsa Bizana
within two years of each other. Luleka was an outspoken advocate of women’s rights and gay women’s issues. She died of HIV/Aids in 2005, a
few years after she was raped by her cousin, who later said he was ‘trying to prove to her that she was a women’. My fiancée was gang-raped
by five men because of her sexuality. As a direct result of the attack, she developed cryptococcal meningitis, an infection of the brain and spinal
column, and died on 16 December 2007”. When
these formal and substantive aspects of the
institution of the law are set in motion alongside one another nothing is different,
while everything has changed.
Education, including Higher Education, is also a social institution that can be understood in
both its formal and substantive dimensions. These intersections are often
attenuated by crises, as happened in South Africa in February 2008 when a video of white students abusing black staff in a
university residence surfaced. As a consequence, the Minister of Education initiated an enquiry into the daily experience of staff and students in
all the country’s universities. The report from the commission concluded that racism was, and is, extensive to the detriment of both
perpetrators and victims. This enquiry, however, would not have been possible in the old South Africa where racism was enshrined in the law.
One way of responding to circumstances such as these is to cast the edifices of the
institution and everyday experiences of those in it, or affected by it, as
irreconcilable. The failure of constitutional provisions is inevitable, the law
invariably oppressive. Universities are bound to be reactionary and transformation
no more than rhetoric. We can call this the Manichean view on the relationship
between the formal and the substantive; irreconcilable contradiction. But another
way of responding is to see the formal and the substantive in a constant, if often
stumbling, dance together. In this view the structures and customs that, together,
constitute “institutional culture” are constantly challenged by those affected by
them, resulting in a continual process of both reaction and change. We can call
this the Recursive view, building on the sociological thought of Anthony Giddens and others. Seen in this way,
there is the possibility that activists such as Ndumie Funda will make the provisions of the Bill of
Rights meaningful for lesbian women in townships, that the Ministerial response to a nasty incident
of student racism will result in change across the Higher Education sector as a
whole.
While I respect the informed and reasoned scepticism that is a central part of university life, and which is defended by the principles of
academic freedom, I reject the Manichean view. Indeed, it
would be notably cynical to hold a leadership
position in a university while believing that institutional transformation that is
meaningful in terms of human rights and social justice is not possible. I also
believe that we should use those same researeh methods that we deploy in our
everyday lives as academics in stepping back and analysing the university itself as
our “site of practice”. Such self-analysis recognizes the recursive relationship
between modes of inquiry – knowledge-making – and the structures of the
university as an institution. It can also help us become better at what we do.
Extension
Eco-pedagogy is a methodology which recognizes that humans are constantly
evolving, and that our first priority is to be connected to and educated by the world
around us
Antunes and Gadotti 5
(Angela Antunes is Executive Secretary of Paulo Freire Institute, Doctor of Education from the University of Sao Paulo and
author of many books. Her Ph.D. thesis for the School of Education at the University of Sao Paulo was on “Sustainability
Pedagogy”, using the Earth Charter as one of the philosophical keystone documents upon which to build that pedagogy -Moacir Gadotti is Professor at the University of Sao Paulo, the Director of the Paulo Freire Institute, and author of many widelyread and translated books, among others: Education Against Education (1979); Invitation to Read Paulo Freire (1988); History of
Pedagogical Ideas (1993); Praxis Pedagogy (1994); and Current Issues on Education (2000), The Earth Charter Initiative, “Ecopedagogy as the Appropriate Pedagogy to the Earth Charter Process,” 10/5/05, http://earthcharterinaction.org/pdfs/TEC-ENGPDF/ENG-Antunes.pdf, AFGA)
Eco-pedagogy is a pedagogy centered on life: it Includes people, cultures, modus vivendi, respect for
identity, and diversity. It understands the human being in evolution, as an "incomplete, unfinished,
and non-conclusive" being, as stated by Paulo Freire - a being in continuous development, interacting with
others and the world. The prevailing pedagogy Is centered on tradition, on what Is already concluded,
on what oppresses students by the way they are tested. With eco-pedagogy educators must welcome students.
Their welcome and care are the basis for sustainability education.
The Earth Charter has contributed to the development of sustainability initiatives in schools and, principally in communities.
But, we still need to broaden the Earth Charter's recognition and acceptance around the world as a mobilizing force toward a
culture of peace and sustainability, as a way to celebrate diversity. As a call for unity, it can be used to develop the meaning of
responsibility with respect for quality of life and to become a force to fight terrorism based on a global consensus.
Faced with the possibility of planetary extermination, the Earth Charter presents alternatives based on a culture of peace and
sustainability. Sustainability does not imply only biology, economy, and ecology. Sustainability has to do with the relationship
we have with ourselves, with others, and with nature. Pedagogy should begin, above all else, by teaching how to
read the world, as Paulo Freire taught us - a world which is the universe, because the world is our first
teacher. Our first education is an emotional education, which places us before the mystery of the universe, in close contact
with it, producing In us the feeling of being a part of this sacred, living being, in continuous evolution.
The way to promote change is to act as a teacher to present problems and challenge
people to solve them. It requires lived experience of participants and the teacher. This
shows why our social location speeches are necessary and how we have fulfilled our
role of the ballot.
Grigorov 13
(Stefan Krasimirov Grigorov, Ecopedagogy: educating for a new eco-social intercultural perspective” President of
the Bulgarian Center for sustainable local development, and pedagogy,” 2013,
http://editora.unoesc.edu.br/index.php/visaoglobal/article/view/3435/1534 “Ghengis Khan)
From the perspective of pedagogy of liberation, educational activity starts from discussions of
social and political issues and actions on the immediate social reality as it is. It seeks to
discuss and analyze the emerging social problems in different communities in order to
understand their determinants and promote the organization of groups for actions capable of
transforming the social and political reality. The teacher, in this context, is an active
coordinator who organizes and ope- rates jointly with students (BRAZIL, 1997, p. 30-31).
The liberatory pedagogy has its origins in popular education movements that occurred in the late 50s and early 60s in
Brazil, when they were interrupted by the military coup of 1964, and later resumed its development in the late 70s and
early 80s. The movements of Pedagogy of Liberation and Critical Pedagogy are primarily referenced to Paulo Freire who
became known in the 1960s with his method of adult literacy different from child pedagogy. Schematically, it can be said
that Freire’s me- thod consists in three dialectical moments that are interdisciplinary intertwined:
a) a research topic which the student and the teacher are searching in the universal vocabulary of the
student and the society in which s/he lives; the words and themes of his/her biography;
b) thematization, for which they encode and decode these issues, both seek
their social significance, being aware of the world in which they live;
c) problematization (problem-posing), in which they seek to replace the magical, mainstream
concept of the world in favor of a critical view, starting from the transformation of the context in which
they live (GA- DOTTI, 2000, p. 101).
Considering that educational process is based on the context experienced by students , the approach
of Freire seems similar to constructivist theories. Howe- ver, the constructivism of Freire goes beyond research and
thematization. It shows not only that anyone can learn (Piaget), but that we all know something
and that [...] the child or young person and the adult only learn when they have a life project
where knowledge is significant for them. It is the person who learns through his own
transformative action on the world (GADOTTI, 2000, p. 101-102). In this sense, the student, in interaction
with the teacher, is not only a re- cipient of knowledge, but also a producer of knowledge through problem-solving
dialogue. The teacher should teach. He/she needs to do it. However, teaching is not just transmitting knowledge. For
Freire, problem-posing education implies unders- tanding of the challenges, conflicts, contradictions and “limit
situations” of reality and social relations in which people live, so that they are challenged to organize themselves and
address the problem. Thus, education is configured as a process of “conscientization”. The conscientization is not only
being aware of reality. The cons- cientization means not only to immerse in the reality but through critical analysis to
unveil the reasons for your situation, and to become able to take a transforma- tive action on this reality (GADOTTI,
2000, p. 103). Educational action thus consists primarily in this: to make explicit the human and
social conflicts and challenge individuals and groups to interact and take action in order to
overcome them. Pe- dagogy of liberation makes oppression and its reasons an object of
reflection for the oppressed which will result in their engagement in the fight for their
freedom. This is a participatory pedagogy to be made and remade (FREIRE, 1975).
AT Not Pragmatic
Eco-pedagogy blends the ideology of privileged institutions and the experience of
oppressed populations, a collision of political necessity and educational theory – as
such, it has the ability to generate new pedagogies to deal with the root of
environmental problems and directly apply those theories to a political project
Kahn 10
(Richard Kahn, an educator whose primary interests are in researehing the history of social movements as pedagogically
generative forces in society, and in critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater
planetary freedom, peace, and happiness. In 2007, he graduated with a PhD from UCLA with a specialization in the philosophy
and history of education. An alter-globalization activist, Kahn has been at the forefront of championing and organizing what he
terms, “total liberation politics,” that seek to advocate for nonhuman animals, the biosphere as a sacred entity, and social
justice through systemic transformation. Kahn’s writing and teaching to date have thus sought to synthesize the field of critical
pedagogy with types of ecological and vegan education in order to arrive at a radical education for sustainability that seeks
both individual and collective emancipation. Academia.edu, Critical Pedagogy,Ecoliteracy,& Planetary Crisis, 2010,
http://www.academia.edu/167226/Critical_Pedagogy_Ecoliteracy_and_Planetary_Crisis_The_Ecopedagogy_Movement, AFGA)
Though nascent, the international ecopedagogy movement"' represents a profound transformation in
the radical educational and political project derived from the work of Paulo Freire known as critical
pedagogy.20 Ecopedagogy seeks to interpolate quintessentially Freirian aims of the humanization of
experience and the achievement of a just and free world with a future- oriented ecological politics that
militantly opposes the globalization of neoliberalism and imperialism, on the one hand, and attempts to foment
collective ecoliteracy and realize culturally relevant forms of knowledge grounded in normative
concepts such as sustainability, planetarity, and biophilia, on the other. In this, it attempts to produce
what Gregory Martin (2007) has theorized as a much needed "revolutionary critical pedagogy based in
hope that can bridge the politics of the academy with forms of grassroots political organizing capable
of achieving social and ecological transformation" (p. 349).
The ecopedagogy movement grew out of discussions first conducted around the time of the Rio Earth Summit in
1992. During the years leading up to the event, environmental themes became increasingly prominent in Brazilian
circles. Then, following the Summit, a strong desire emerged among movement intellectuals to support grassroots
organizations for sustainability as well as worldwide initiatives such as the Earth Charter. In 1999, the Instituto
Paulo Friere under the direction of Moacir Oadotti, along with the Earth Council and UNESCO, convened the First
International Symposium on the Earth Charter in the Perspective of Education, which was quickly followed by the
First International Forum on Ecopedagogy. These conferences led not only to the final formation of the Earth
Charter Initiative but also to key movement documents such as the Ecopedagogy Charter (Spring, 2004). Oadotti
and others in the ecopedagogy movement have remained influential in advancing the Earth Charter Initiative and
continue to mount ecopedagogy seminars, degree programs, workshops, and other learning opportunities through
an ever-growing number of international Paulo Freire institutes.31
As previously noted, scholars and activists interested in furthering either environmental literacy through
environmental education or variants of social and environmental ecoliteracy via education for
sustainable development and its many potential subfields, have a wide number of alternatives from which
to choose. However, these frameworks often ultimately derive, are centered in, or are otherwise directed
from relatively privileged institutional domains based in North America, Europe, or Australia—primary
representatives of the global north (Brandt, 1980). The ecopedagogy movement, by contrast, has coalesced
largely within Latin America over the last two decades. Due in part to its being situated in the global
south, the movement has thus provided focus and political action on the ways in which environmental
degradation results from fundamental sociocultural, political, and economic inequalities.22
As Gonzalcz-Gaudiano (2005) has emphasized, it is exactly these types of views and protocols that are
necessary for ecoliteracy in the twenty-first century, due to their being routinely left of northern
intellectual agendas in the past. However, in a manner that moves beyond Gonzalcz-Gaudiano*s
anthropocentric, social justice—oriented approach to environmental issues, the ecopedagogy
movement additionally incorporates more typically northern ecological ideas such as the intrinsic
value of all species, the need to care for and live in harmony with the planet, as well as the
emancipatory potential contained in human aesthetic experiences of nature.23
In this way, the ecopedagogy movement represents an important attempt to synthesize a key opposition within
the worldwide environmental movement, one that continues to be played out in major environmental and
economic policy meetings and debates. Further, as an oppositional movement with connections to
grassroots political groups such as Brazil's Landless Rural Workers' Movement and alternative social
institutions such as the World Social Forum, but also academic departments and divisions within the
United Nations Environment Programme, the ecopedagogy movement has begun to build the extraand intra-institutional foundations by which it can contribute meaningful ecological policy,
philosophy, and curricular frame- works toward achieving its sustainability goals. Still, the ecopedagogy
movement might not presently demand much interest from northern educational scholars—beyond those whose
specialty is in the field of interna- tional and comparative education—save for the movement's historical
relationship to the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire.
Eco-pedagogy is action oriented and proponents have been successful in spreading
awareness and support
Antunes and Gadotti 5
(Angela Antunes is Executive Secretary of Paulo Freire Institute, Doctor of Education from the University of Sao Paulo and
author of many books. Her Ph.D. thesis for the School of Education at the University of Sao Paulo was on “Sustainability
Pedagogy”, using the Earth Charter as one of the philosophical keystone documents upon which to build that pedagogy -Moacir Gadotti is Professor at the University of Sao Paulo, the Director of the Paulo Freire Institute, and author of many widelyread and translated books, among others: Education Against Education (1979); Invitation to Read Paulo Freire (1988); History of
Pedagogical Ideas (1993); Praxis Pedagogy (1994); and Current Issues on Education (2000), The Earth Charter Initiative, “Ecopedagogy as the Appropriate Pedagogy to the Earth Charter Process,” 10/5/05, http://earthcharterinaction.org/pdfs/TEC-ENGPDF/ENG-Antunes.pdf, AFGA)
Eco-pedagogy is a fitting pedagogy for these times of paradigmatic reconstruction, fitting to a culture of sustainability and
peace, and, therefore, adequate for the Earth Charter process. It has been gradually growing, benefiting from much
Input originated in recent decades, principally inside the ecologic movement. It is based upon a
philosophical paradigm supported by Paulo Freire, Fritjof Capra, Leonardo Boff, Sebastiao Salgado,
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, and Milton Santos; arising from education and offering an ensemble of
interdependent knowl- edge and values. Among them, we would like to mention the following: educate to think globally;
educate feelings; teach about the Earth's identity as essential to the human condition; shape the planetary conscience; educate
for understanding; and educate for simplicity, care, and peacefulness. In the midst of that, we consider the Earth Charter
not only a code for planetary ethics - it Is also a call for action. In this sense, we would like to mention some of
the real examples where the Earth Charter was used as an instrument for real action.6
With the support of the Paulo Freire Institute, Sao Paulo City (2001-2004) used the Earth Charter to
train education managers for the Unified Educational Centers dedicated to developing educational, cultural,
sport, and leisure activities. Education leaders were trained on the principles of the culture of peace and sustainability so that
they can incorporate them in their educational projects and in their decision-making. The Earth Charter was submitted as an
educational project during this process. Training education, in the fullest meaning of the words, is a very fertile field to promote
the principles and values of the Earth Charter.
The preparation of social studies teachers Is another strategy to practice the principles and values of
the Earth Charter. Some examples include: the "Youth Peace Project," which took place in three cities
of the state of Sao Paulo and included 225 social studies teachers; the "Citizen School Project," which
used the "reading of the world" methodology of Paulo Freire and addressed co-existence principles
based on the Earth Charter's values for developing the Political-Pedagogical Project of the schools8;
the "MOVE-Brazil" adult education project which pur- pose is to teach literacy to forty thousand
young people and adults in six Brazilian states within three years, and Includes the Earth Charter as a
reference for education; the "Budget for Participating Child"; and, "Exercising Citizenship from
Childhood," which involved all children of elementary education in the Sao Paulo city network schools
of five hundred educational units, promoting child and youth participation and a direct participa- tion
In priorities for education and for the city. The Paulo Freire Institute was responsible for the direct
education of 2,500 teachers and ten thousand children involved in the project. The Earth Charter was one of
the documents used as a basis for reflecting on education and on the city, and It also guided the education of children. The
project to develop as many as five hundred people as social leaders was Included in the Participating Budget for the city of
Guarulhos, a municipality which also used the Earth Charter as a reference. Based upon the Earth Charter, social and
environmental issues related to the city were discussed as well as priorities for the budget, which included the direct participation of the population.
AT Western Ideology
Eco-pedagogy doesn’t assume western, capitalist ideologies that glorify progress and
disregard other cultures
Bowers 3
(C. A. Bowers holds a Ph. D. from the University of California in educational studies (with an emphasis on education
and social thought), has taught at the University of Oregon and Portland State University, and was granted
emeritus status in 1998. Currently Courtesy Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon,
“TOWARD AN ECO-JUSTICE PEDAGOGY,” 2003, http://www.cabowers.net/pdf/anecojusticepedagogy2003.pdf,
AGFA)
an eco-justice pedagogy is centered on understanding relationships within the larger households we
call community and the natural environment. It differs from what is advocated by critical pedagogy
theorists in that it avoids the formulaic educational reforms dictated by the root metaphors that coevolved with the Industrial Revolution-including the goal of emancipating students, regardless of their
cultural group, from all traditions. An eco-justice pedagogy should be based on the recognition that while many
traditions change too slowly, and others should not have been constituted in the first place, still others represent hard won
achievements. Other traditions provide the basis of living less commoditized lives-and thus do not
contribute to degrading the environment in ways that threaten the health of marginalized groups,
including future generations. In being based on the root metaphor of an ecology, an eco-justice
pedagogy involves the recognition that reflection needs to be centered on how the cultural and
environmental patterns connect, and on the double binds that arise when changes are assumed to
represent a linear form of progress.
Root Cause Cap
Not only does eco-pedagogy address the issues of capitalism in its quest for natural
integration, but it builds a discipline to counter capitalism and unites scholars into a
counter-hegemonic bloc to stop cooption. Also, resistance risks coption unless rooted
in lived experience – this means only our approach can solve
McLaren 13
(Peter McLaren is a Distinguished Fellow in Critical Studies. He earned his doctorate in 1984, and served the following year as Special Lecturer
where he specialized in teaching language arts in urban schools. Professor McLaren moved to the United States in 1985 to help create The
Center for Education and Cultural Studies at Miami University of Ohio where he served as Director. Professor McLaren is a dual CanadianAmerican citizen, having become a US citizen in 2000. Professor McLaren is the author and editor of nearly 50 books and his writings have been
translated into over 20 languages. Five of his books have won the Critic's Choice Award of the American Educational Studies Association,
Socialist Studies, Vol. 9 Issue 1, Seeds of Resistance:
Towards a Revolutionary Critical Ecopedagogy, Spring 2013, http://www.socialiststudies.com/index.php/sss/article/view/314/278, AFGA)
Despite the long-standing threat of capitalism to planetary survival and the more ¶ recent intensification of that threat through
transnational forms of asset capitalism, ¶ environmental questions were largely undiscussed in recent decades. In the 1980s and
¶ 1990s, as a result of the unrelenting onslaught of consumer culture and progressive ¶ education’s
overweening emphasis on identity politics as a solution to creating a more ¶ vibrant and critical public
sphere, issues of environmental sustainablity maintained but a ¶ lifeless presence, including within
critical pedagogy. Now, in the early 2000s, motivated ¶ by the sustainability crisis and emboldened by the courageous
activities of various ¶ planetary social movements, ecopedagogues have arrived on the scene and not only ¶
developed a powerful argument about how to respond to the crises of sustainability, but ¶ also offer a
very timely and important contribution to critical pedagogy and community ¶ action at a time of
resource shortages, climate change, economic instability and ¶ ecological breakdown.
Richard Kahn (2010) emphasizes that pedagogy has evolved consciously to ¶ become ecopedagogy as a
planetary universal state of community-based emancipator¶ education. Critical educators are joining a
politically reinvigorated youth, who are ¶ beginning to refuse the cult of individualism as an antidote to their loss of a sense of
self. ¶ They no longer accept being situated as impersonal agents in a rationalized society that is ¶ highly competitive and
achievement and psychotherapeutically-oriented. And while they ¶ are taught to concentrate on their personal status and wellbeing, they know that they and ¶ their loved ones are not assured of protection from misery and oblivion. ¶ The 2011 student
mobilization in Chile, the activism of Nigerian youth at the ¶ Niger Delta crude oil flow station, the clench-fist protests against
the ruling ¶ establishments of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the resistance to the austerity measures by ¶ the youth in Portugal,
Spain, and especially Greece, the South African public students ¶ who struggle to secure basic teaching amenities, such as
libraries, in their schools, the ¶ Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States –- all of these are part of a growing ¶ culture
of contestation. Of course, ‘Occupy’ means something else to indigenous peoples ¶ who have long fought imperial occupation.
Nonetheless, the Occupy movement was ¶ courageous insofar as it put questions of inequality and ecologically sustainability on
the ¶ map for European/settler populations.
Many of these movements self-consciously resist capitalism’s transnational reach, ¶ while insisting that
concerns with capitalism and ecology are all of one piece, entangled. ¶ For instance, youth in these movements
examine how their food is produced in terms of ¶ sustainable water and land use, critique the harsh treatment of small-scale
farmers, raise ¶ the alarm around climate change while outlining the negative implications of global ¶ warming for food
production and sound the charge against the exploitation of women ¶ and immigrant workers in food production and
agricultural distribution. Capitalism, as ¶ Jason Moore (2011) has articulated, is understood increasingly a a “world-
ecology” that ¶ connects the accumulation of capital to the exploitation of nature and working class ¶
peoples, in a toxic and unholy alliance. New social movements, led by the world’s youth, ¶ are increasingly insisting
upon this connection. ¶
Towards Revolutionary Critical Ecopedagogy ¶
I am using the term revolutionary critical ecopedagogy in a special sense as a ¶ reconfiguring force of socialism. I specify this
because the term “revolution”has become ¶ domesticated in consumer culture and I don’t want to replicate the hegemonic, if ¶
ludicrous, conception of this insurgent process in such a away that confuses it with some ¶ new ‘revolutionary’ version of a
laundry detergent. Some would argue that ecopedagogy ¶ is already revolutionary and critical and should simply be denoted as
“ecopedagogy.” But ¶ the term revolutionary critical pedagogy draws attention to my conception of ¶
ecopedagogy as denoting a transformation of capitalism to a democratic socialist ¶ alternative, that is,
a tranformation of institutions of power on behalf of social justice. In¶ this view, any state that fails to provide
food, home, education, shelter and medical ¶ assistance to its populace is considered “unnatural” and should not be left to die
out but ¶ should be overturned and a new regime replanted in the soil of the old. At the same time, ¶ this socialist
challenge is at once an ecological challenge. In the words of John Bellamy ¶ Foster (2009, p. 34): ¶
The socialist goal of transcending the alienation of humanity is impossible ¶ to achieve to any
considerable extent unless it coexists with the goal of ¶ transcending the alienation of nature.
Likewise, the ecological goal of ¶ transcending natural alienation is impossible to attain without
addressing ¶ social alienation. Socialism is ecological, ecologism is socialist or neither ¶ can truly exist.
With contributions from authors and activists such as Richard Kahn, Tina Evans, ¶ David Greenwood, Samuel Fassbinder,
Antonia Darder, Sandy Grande and Donna ¶ Houston (to name just a few) the field of critical, revolutionary ecopedagogy is now
on a ¶ potent trajectory. Bringing their contributions into conversation with the efforts of ¶ Vandana Shiva, Joan Martinez-Alier,
Joel Kovel, Jason W. Moore and John Bellamy ¶ Foster has cultivated a landscape of important transnational planetary
ecopedagogy ¶ rooted in worldwide activism. We are now witnessing a profound demonstration of an ¶ efficient
integration of the social, educational and ecological justice movements. In ¶ opposition to capitalist
discipline, as it contributes to the ongoing crisis, ecopedagogic ¶ practices can be organized into a sort
of “ecological discipline” (Fassbinder 2008), binding ¶ people to the defense of diversities both
ecosystemic and social against capital’s ¶ manipulation of them as people-commodities.
In this sense, recent books such as Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary ¶ Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement (Kahn
2010), Occupy Education (Evans 2012) and ¶ Greening the Academy (Fassbinder, Nocella and Kahn 2012) very much constitute a
¶ critical revolutionary pedagogy of convergence and integration bound together by ¶ ecological discipline. The work of
European sustainability scholars and activists is ¶ brought into dialogue with powerful emergent voices from las Americas.
These ¶ approaches interrogate the rust-splotched and steampunk metropolises and tumbleweed ¶
hinterlands of neo-liberal capitalism and work towards a vision of what a world outside of ¶ the
menacing disciplines of neo-liberal capitalism might look like. ¶ For instance, Tina Evans’ (2012) work is built
upon in-depth theories about the ¶ nature and purposes of sustainability. Yet, Evans is acutely aware that the politics
of ¶ sustainability is not a pitch-perfect love story and can easily be co-opted by the guardians ¶ of the
state. These guardians make empty promises to manage the crisis in the interests of ¶ the so-called
public good, but really in the interests of private greed. Thus, discourses of ¶ sustainability can be hijacked by the
very interests that Evans is out to unmask. As Josee¶ Johnston points out, for example, in “Who Cares About The Commons?”,
“sustainability ¶ has come to imply sustainable profits as much as ‘saving the earth’” (p. 1). Indeed, as ¶ Kahn (2012) argues in
his introduction to Greening the Academy, the academy itself is ¶ managing sustainability for private greed in exactly this way –
and this despite the fact ¶ that its own knowledge workers document the catastrophic conditions ecological ¶ conditions that we
have created and that we now face.
Understanding how such hijacking takes place and how the imperial instinct ¶ remains alive and well
even among some progressive educators is a major task. Evans ¶ answer is to anchor ‘sustainability’ in
place-based theory and action, rooted in multiple ¶ contexts of practical lived experience – experience
that has been inestimably impacted by ¶ neo-liberal capitalist globalization and sustained opposition
to it. In this context, the ¶ starting point for a meaningful understanding of sustainablity is the
sufferings of the ¶ planetary oppressed.
In developing this theory and practice, the decolonial school may be of brilliant ¶ assistance.
Decolonial scholars have charted out the conflictual terrain known as the ¶ ‘coloniality of power' (patrón
de poder colonial), and 'the Eurocentric pattern of ¶ colonial/capitalist power' (el eurocentramiento del patrón
colonial/capitalista de poder). ¶ Ramón Grosfoguel, Anibal Quijano, Linda Smith, Enrique Dussel, Sandy Grande and ¶ others call
for what Kahn refers to as a ‘revitalized ecology of body/mind/spirit’, alongside ¶ an emphasis on ‘planetarity’ in the praxis of
ecopedagogical struggles, struggles which ¶ seek to achieve specific, cumulative goals. Thus, for instance, Grosfoguel, Quijano, ¶
Dussel, and other ‘decolonial’ thinkers emphasize the ‘global ecology’ of capitalism, as a ¶ series of dependent hierarchies
implicating specific forms of spirituality, epistemology, ¶ juriprudence and governance, patriarchy and imperialism. As Richard
Kahn (2012) ¶ argues, this affinity betweeen Evans’ work and the decolonial school suggests possibilities ¶
for the development of a ‘counterhegemonic bloc of ideological alliance’ among ¶ environmental
educators, indigenous scholars, non-academic knowledge workers, and ¶ political activists of various
and sundry stripe – or what Kahn in his own path-breaking ¶ work has called ‘the ecopedagogy movement’.
AT Critical Pedagogy Bad
They misunderstand the contribution of critical pedagogy to ecopedagogy – dominant
critical theories only help break down the perception that there is no alt, but do not
inform our fundamental ideology
Misiaszek 10
Greg William Misiaszek has a Doctorate of Philosophy, Education, Social Sciences and Comparative
Education and is an assistant professor at BMU, August 2010, “Ecopedagogy through Comparative
Education and Freirean Pedagogy Lenses,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, volume 8 no. 1,
http://www.jceps.com/PDFs/08-1-17.pdf, AFGA)
It can be argued that ecopedagogy’s roots are from popular education traditions of Latin America
stemming from Freirean pedagogy - defined in its function to construct knowledges by dialectically
determining the politics of knowledge development which often is line with and seldom questioned
dominant ideologies. However, the claim of invention for the field is a problematic one because there
have been countless cultures, in all parts of the world that have learned and taught others of socioenvironmental links. What ecopedagogy allows for, the pedagogy that Kahn develops in his book, is
how to learn and teach these links in an increasingly globalized-from-above society in which negative
effects of environmental devastation is being felt by those far away who benefit1
. The pedagogy that Kahn constructs is one that allows teachers and students to deconstruct structures of present
society which cause devastation and views the oppressor/oppressed relationships between humans, non-human
beings, and all else which is the planet.
The field of comparative education, defined by its interdisciplinary and comparative nature, offers tools to
construct ecopedagogies and associated research. Ecopedagogy develops out of pedagogies that compare
and contrast how the environment/nature is constructed through a society’s education (formal, nonformal, informal, public pedagogy, etc.), critically analyzes the politics of oppressive systems, and dialectically
develops praxis which counters the dominant knowledges which are deemed as socially and environmentally
unjust. Comparative approaches critically question the reasons and costs, within social and environmental
frameworks, to construct learning for effective praxis to emerge toward effective and sustaining solutions for
decreasing/ending environmental devastation. Freirean pedagogy, in addition to allowing for horizontal
dialogue to develop knowledge of both teachers and students for critically questioning what is seen as “truths”
through oppressive education, it gives the needed hope and love which helps to break fatalistic thought
that society is non-transformative and there is no alternative to environmental devastation’s path.
Impacts
AT Sustainable
Research is funded and directed by corporations and the media is directed to ignore
inconvenient information – don’t trust the basis of their claims that capitalism is
sustainable
McMurtry 2
(John McMurtry has a PhD from University College in London and is University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at
the University of Guelph, Just Ecological Integrity: The Ethics of Maintaining Planetary Life, ed. Peter Miller and
Laura Westra, 2002, Pages , AFGA)
Academic communities were no exception. They were too busy with specialist careers in well-paying
institutional niches to trace such dangerous connections. Wider-lensed critical thinkers, where they
existed, were not funded. The situation is again much the same today. Only it is the far more empowered value program
of "the global free market" that is at the helm, and unlike the Soviet Union, there is no external alternative to it or internal
inhibitors of its lead- ers1 private acquisitiveness. Global market agents profit without national or ownership constraints from
the reduced costs and increased revenues of environmental stripping. Accordingly, the technologically empowered capacities
to disassemble, pollute, and waste environments and ecosystems have vastly in- creased in their volumes, velocities, and
transnational accesses, without even the social-property and territorial limits of the Soviet system to restrain their "freedom" to
do so.
The environmental crisis is therefore greater in reach in this system, although its blinkers of ruling ideology are not less
blinding. The corporate global market's organization of environmental usage is virtually excluded from
funded research investigation as a determinant of environmental depletion and destruction. It is
taboo to identify because control of the mass media and partnership control of public research
funding rules out its study and exposure. We are increasingly aware of mass media selection against
information that contravenes the interests of major advertisers and the general system by which these
corpo… [next page is omitted due to the whim of google books]…
Recognition of the global cause-effect structure identified above is the primary condition to be
fulfilled if we are to respond effectively to the planetary environmental crisis. There is, however, a
profound impediment to this recognition. Besides powerful corporate interests that lie in blocking this recognition, there is
conventional presupposition of the ruling order within which one lives as the given structure of reality—'"the real world" to
which we must adapt. We see this social mind-set most virulently at work today in the public acceptance of calls for "reducing
cost burdens" of environmental laws, and of new salable rights to pollute in a for-profit corporate market of the air we breathe
itself No such scheme has demonstrably reduced pollution anywhere. Yet the U.S. has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to
limit the emission of greenhouse gases unless a market in pollution rights is the mode of regulatory control. That no
demonstration exists of the efficacy of such a regime in reducing pollution, and that it may merely
provide rights to pollute and handouts of new marketable equities to corporate polluters, are issues
that are blocked from public view. For illustration of how such a proposal can be so wrapped in circular reasoning as to
be logically unintelligible in even leading environmental textbooks, see Ander- son and Leal (1998). As for "voluntary restraints,"
even Senator Robert Byrd of the "coal state of West Virginia" now acknowledges that "they won't work" ("Utilities May Be
Greener than Bush" 2001, I).
Framework
AT Narratives Bad
Our narrative is not rooted in western egocentrism - we redefine the self as part of a
greater biological system
Bowers 3
(C. A. Bowers holds a Ph. D. from the University of California in educational studies (with an emphasis on education
and social thought), has taught at the University of Oregon and Portland State University, and was granted
emeritus status in 1998. Currently Courtesy Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon,
“TOWARD AN ECO-JUSTICE PEDAGOGY,” 2003, http://www.cabowers.net/pdf/anecojusticepedagogy2003.pdf,
AGFA)
As feminists discovered, changing the root metaphor of patriarchy was a long and difficult process-one that is still underway.
The beginnings of a shift in root metaphors is now taking place within the environmental sciences, among a few heads of
corporations who are beginning to realize that production processes must mirror the design patterns found in nature, and
among theologians who are attempting to find scriptural authority for an environmental ethic. Ecology, the emerging root
metaphor, can be traced back to the Greek word "oikos" which referred to the maintenance of relationships within the family
household. Without going into the history of how the original analog was transformed into the scientific study of relationships
within natural systems, I want to point out several reasons this metaphor can be expanded in ways that clarifies and legitimates
an eco-justice pedagogy. The use of ecology as a root metaphor (which means it should guide the
conceptualization of the widest possible range of cultural practices) foregrounds the relational and
interdependent nature of our existence as cultural and biological beings. This includes our
participation in a highly complex web of symbolic relationships deeply rooted in the past. We could
neither think nor communicate if we were isolated from the language systems that sustain the
patterns of cultural life, and which are the basis for their gradual transformation. Our participation in
the even more complex web of interacting systems that constitute the natural world involves a more
basic form of dependency. The oxygen we breath, the sources of nourishment, and even the
autopoietic networks that interact at the genetic level to create the living system we know as our
biological self, are interconnected across many scales of life producing systems. These cultural and
biological processes lead to biographically distinct expressions of individualization- which we consider
our self-concept, and conceptual and moral proclivities. These processes, which Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela refer to as the "structural coupling of autopoietic systems"(1987, pp. 75-80), can also be understood as
ecological systems-which serves as the root metaphor that foregrounds relationships, continuities, non-linear patterns of
change, and a basic design principle of Nature that favors diversity.
An educational process based on this root metaphor must recognize that living systems involve both
the replication (conservation) of patterns of organization as well as changes introduced by internal
and external perturbations. It also needs to recognize the importance of diverse cultural systems that
develop in response to the differences in natural systems. Some cultures failed to adapt to changes in
natural systems (or introduced environmentally destructive changes) and thus reduced their own
chances of survival. Other cultures, however, have become repositories of knowledge of local plants,
animals, and natural cycles that affect their sources of food, water, and other cultural necessities. In
effect, this root metaphor foregrounds the different forms of interdependencies, as well as the need
to exercise critical thought in ways that strengthen the ability of natural and cultural systems to
renew themselves in ways that do not compromise the prospects of future generations . When based on
the root metaphor of an ecology, an eco-justice pedagogy has three main foci:
1. Environmental Racism and Class Discrimination. The disproportionate impact of toxic chemicals on
the health of economically and ethnically marginalized groups is part of a cycle that encompasses
more than the political process that determines where toxic waste sites and industries are to be
located. In addition to class and racial biases, the cycle includes the phenomenal growth in the last fifty years in the use of
synthetic chemicals (estimated at over 80,000), and a level of personal consumption based on rising rates of resource extraction
and manufacturing-all of which have created monumental waste disposal problems. In short, the consumer/technology
dependent lifestyle in the West, which is now being promoted in "undeveloped" regions of the world,
increases the impact of contaminated environments on those groups least able to protect themselves.
Education
Framework doesn’t increase our education at all – the fact that this is the nexus of
their argument proves a flaw in their methodology
Their refusal to discuss the k decreases everybody’s education, because neither of us
learn anything new about it
Our methodology maximizes our understanding of the environment by recognizing the
biological connection we have to it –we are key to topic education
Discussion from a policymaker’s perspective forces us to accept the assumptions of
policymakers, while real critical thought and education come from questioning politics
from a distance
Smith 97
(Steve Smith, Review of International Studies, “Power and truth; a reply to William Wallace,” October 1997, Volume 23 Issue 4,
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=33516&jid=RIS&volumeId=23&issueId=04&aid=33515&bodyId=&membershi
pNumber=&societyETOCSession=, AFGA)
Wallace writes as if access to policy-makers constitutes some kind of neutral activity, an intellectual
marketplace as it were, where academic ideas compete for the attention of policy-makers. Above all, it seems
to be a place where policy-makers can choose ideas to help them "struggle with the dilemmas of power"; a place where
academics can discharge their responsibility to the state. I frankly think this is a fundamentally flawed
view of the relationship between policy-makers and academics. The marketplace may be the right analogy, but
in it the consumer is (the) sovereign. Specifically 1 think that there are two main weaknesses in this charac- terization of the
academic/policy-making relationship.
First, it implies that policy-makers are listening to the ideas of academics. In my view they are not
listening for new ideas, but instead are looking for those approaches that support their
preconceptions and. ultimately, their values. William Wallace's old academic stamping-ground of foreign policy analysis is
full of examples of the psychological processes at work in decision-ma king which function to select those ideas that support
preconceptions and values. Thus, any academic who does not share the view of the world of the policy-maker will have a very
hard lime trying to be heard. Like Ken Booth I can attest to a lack of listening to ideas thai did not reflect the immediate policy
agenda of the then government. I. too, have been listened to in stony silence, in both the UK and the USA. by civil servants as I
dared to suggest policy alternatives that were different to the official government line. Note also that almost all the
empirical (yes. empirical) evidence suggests that once in government, policy-makers do not change
their implicit theories about the world, but instead keep going with their existing stock of ideas. To be heard, to be
listened lo. then, involves either saying what policy-makers want to hear so as to support their existing policy commitments and
values, or saying something that is incrementally different, but which still fits in with their fundamental picture of the world. Can
one seriously imagine Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan listening to ideas of the world that conflicted with their underlying
values?
Second. Wallace surely exaggerates the amount of influence that academics have on policy. In my view there is little evidence
that much policy-relevant material, be it Op-Ed pieces in the quality daily papers, or seminars within the walls of govern- ment,
has much influence on policy-making. it is easy to mistake speaking about the policy agenda for being listened
to, let alone taken seriously. Politicians do not want to listen to ideas per sc. They rarely have the
time, and tend to have to respond to the day's newspaper headlines. The advice they need is
overwhelmingly empirical, but of course this axiomalically has to reflect implicit theory. Thus, those
who provide the empirical information arc doing so on the basis of a hidden set of theoretical
assumptions, a set that accords with the implicit world-view of the policy-maker. In my view, if academics have failed to be
involved in the policy process it has more to do with a failure to communicate to the public than with a failure to communicate
to governments; despite all the changes of the post-Cold War world, our view of policy relevance has remained surprisingly
narrow. In summary. I think that access is restricted to those academics whose work suits the interests of policy-makers, and I
do not think that this is a matter of surprise, nor is it a criticism of policy-makers. it is. however, a criticism of Wallace's view
that all responsible academics should be offering their advice to the policy-making community. I am genuinely not convinced
that this is something that academics should do as part of their responsibility to the slate. If they do decide to offer policy advice
then they should be aware that their reception will be directly related to the degree of fit between their underlying world-view
and the values and policies of the government. Their influence will therefore be determined by the closeness of the fit between
their values and those held by the policy-makers, and I am not at all sure what this has to do with scholarship.
5. Problem-solving theory
This leads directly to a related point, which is that those academics who do get involved in talking
truth to power must accept that in so doing they must adopt the agenda of those to whom they are
talking. They will be involved in problem-solving, and thereby must accept the 'givens* of the policy
debate. Policy-makers see certain things as givens; therefore if you write about them in order to
influence the policy debate, you tend to have to write as if they are given as well. For academics such
"givens" arc rarely seen as such. This has extremely important political and intellectual consequences since it questions the very
notion of talking "truth" to power. It is more a case of accepting the policy agenda of those to whom one is talking and then
giving them a series of alternative ways of proceeding. I see no connection between this and speaking 'truth to power". I can
also admit the tendency to make what one says acceptable to those "listening", so as to ensure thai one is indeed "listened to".
But more importantly, why should academics take the policy agenda of governments as the starting point?
Why do we privilege that starting point rather than the needs and wants of the have-nots in our
society or in the global political system? Indeed, maybe speaking 'truth to power* is itself a very political act. albeit in
the name of academic neutrality, an act that supports the existing division of resources in the world. This situation is made all
the worse once the possibility arises of getting funding from policy-making bodies, however much the individual academic wants
to maintain the independence of his or her research. In my view, academics need a critical distance from which to
look at the activities of governments. Perhaps the greatest form of isolation and self-righteousness is
to accept the policy-makers* view of the world as the starling point, so that the academic sees the
world as the policy-maker sees it. Where would questions of gender, famine, and racism fit into that
world-view? Yet aren't these every bit as "political' and 'international' as the traditional agenda? This seems to me to take us
very far indeed from the idea of "speaking truth to power'; the danger must be of telling the powerful what they want to hear
and of working within their world-view. Of course, academics spend much time trying to avoid these dangers, and Wallace
himself cannot be accused of simply adopting the agenda of the powerful, but surely he would admit that these dangers are
profound and very difficult to avoid, especially if one wants to have influence and prestige within the policy-making community. My objection is really to those who pretend that any of this has anything to do with truth and academic objectivity.
6. Wallace's view of theory
Wallace has a very restricted view of theory and the purposes it serves. He sees theory as explanatory, which of course fits in
with his concern that academics relate to ihe policy agenda; after all. explanatory theory is problem-solving theory. it is
naturalistic and. like problem-solving theory, takes the existing social order as given. Neither problem-solving theory nor
naturalist theory has a theory of or an interest in history, and neither sees theory as concerned either with understanding the
world or with emancipation. I am not saying that Wallace has to adopt these views of theory, only that a lot follows from his
commitment to theory as explanation. In my view, theory cannot be explanatory in the way that Wallace posits. It is not a
tool to help policy-makers, nor is it to be judged by how "useful" it is. Theorists should instead
question the common sense of the policy debate, and interrogate what passes as the accepted view, to
show both how these are not "obvious" and how the commonsensical always reflects the interests of the powerful in society.
Wallace's view reflects a specific and political view of the nature of theory, one derived from his prior commitment to the kind
of relationship he wants to see between theory and policy.
7. The academic division of labour: theory and empirical research When Wallace gave the after-dinner talk on which his article is
based, there was a very marked emotional reaction to il. much of it in strong support of his main argument. it interests me just
why this was the case. I think that it had a lot to do with a seeming evolution of a kind of intellectual food chain, with theorists
being perceived, and maybe some actually seeing themselves, as superior to empirical researchers. As mentioned above. I
understand this reaction, but it seems to me to be very important both that the profession tolerates diversity and accepts a
division of labour, and that we critique the notion of two separate spheres of activity, theory and empirical research. For
reasons advanced above. I see no way in which any seemingly empirical work can avoid having implicit
theoretical structures and assumptions. It is a choice of whether theoretical assumptions are implicit
or explicit. Similarly, I see International Relations theory as intimately linked to practice. Moreover. I
emphatically disagree with Wallace's characterization of theorists as uninterested in empirical questions. I can think of no
theorist who is not interested in empirical questions. Theorists work with empirical material in specific ways, often to show how
commonsense interpretations are the reflections of political power, and often have a significant influence on 'common sense'
by reformulating seemingly natural assumptions (think of the influence of Thomas Schelling on US deterrence policy). Thus, to
present theorists as uninterested in empirical work seems perverse. The passage in Wallace's article that deals with this |pp.
314—17) is surely barking up the wrong tree; I do not recognize the discipline he is referring to, especially when he lists the
literature needs of students in Eastern Europe. The list he presents covers many of the topics that are central to the work of
many of the theorists he criticizes. Specifically, many of those who "follow Parisian intellectual fashions' are particularly
interested in empirical analysis. Surely, no one could accuse Foucaull of a lack of interest in detailed historical investigations.
8. The theory-policy relationship
In my view, Wallace misrepresents the relationship between theory and policy. He always talks of it as if these were two
separate activities which he would like to see joined in a particular way. I disagree profoundly with this picture. I see policy
and theory as inexorably intertwined. It is not a case of theory and practice, or even theory or
practice, but rather of the theory/practice linkage. They are not separate activities, just as it is
mistaken to think of theory and practice as separate spheres of activity: theory is already implicated
in practice, and practice is unavoidably theoretical. Thus Wallace's view of how to link theory and practice is
revealed as one specific political view of the nature of the social world. For Wallace, theories are there to help deal with policy
dilemmas. I think this is not the primary task of theory, though it may be of interest to those who want to influence the policy
debate. Theories are not separate from the empirical world they seem to report on for Wallace: they constitute that world.
Indeed, in the social world, they may not only be centrally implicated in constructing the very world that Wallace sees as that
which is to be explained by our theories: they may actually determine the very social furniture that policy-makers lake as their
"givens", or as the fixed starling points that those tasked with political responsibility have to deal with.
Conclusion
In summary, I think that Wallace fundamentally misrepresents the relationship between theory and practice. His article works
very effectively, but only because of its internal logical and political structure. By his setting up of two alternatives (co- option or
scholasticism) the logical structure of the article performs a disciplining function by placing anyone outside of his logic of the
policy-theory relationship in a predefined position of being self-righteous, self-indulgent, opposed to empirical work, too
detached from the world of practice and too fond of theory. Note also the very revealing way in which those defined as having
to "struggle with the dilemmas of power' are policy-makers: there are massive normative and ethical assumptions at work here,
ones that undermine his very notion of theory as explanatory and reveal his political project. The trouble is that Wallace's
logical structure is a textual construction and is therefore never subjected to any self-critical analysis in the article. My worry is
that his prescriptions would make academic International Relations a servant of the stale, responding to today's headlines.
Agreeing with Wallace means that academics will run the risk of having to work within the agenda of the policy community, of
being unable to stand back and examine the moral, ethical and political implications of that choice. Giving policy advice is not
the problem: the problem is if those who give it are unaware of the extent to which they are standing on the policy conveyorbelt of the slate. it means problem-solving, it means taking the "givens" of policy-makers as the starling points of analysis. it
means walking the thin line between influence and filling the values of policy- makers. Clearly the discipline wants and needs to
give advice on policy, but to whom? Is doing so for policy-makers a requirement for academics in discharging their responsibility
to the stale? My worry is thai policy advice all loo often means talking to governments: unfortunately, they may not be the right
people to talk to if one's concern is really with 'those who have to struggle with the dilemmas of power'. And. crucially, are
policy-makers listening to ideas or are they searching for an intellectual justification for their existing values?
Ultimately. Wallace's picture worries me because he has a very restricted view of politics and its relationship to academia.
Politics for Wallace is a far more limited activity than I think it is. and thai is why 1 find no academic activity more political or
ethical than showing the cpislemological assumptions of International Relations theory. For me it is not so much a question of
speaking truth to power as of showing how various versions of the power/truth relationship operate between civil society and
the slate. In thai relationship it may well be that those who espouse a restrictive view of theory are the ones who are hiding
behind walls, preaching sermons of self-righteousness, and ultimately acting as the disciplines of the disci- pline. For all of us
interested in international relations. Wallace has raised important questions concerning our responsibilities and our selfawareness. I hope that this reply has shown why the picture is not quite as simple as his beguiling argument suggests and why.
ultimately, it may be impossible for "truth to speak to power' in the liberal way that he suggests. After all. if 'truth' itself
only gets meaning from the regimes of truth within which it operates, then how can it speak to power
when it is itself a construction of those same power relationships? How do we know that it is truth
rather than power that we speak when we are speaking to policy-makers? Surely the task of
academics is to show how these very relationships between truth and power, and between the
empirical and the theoretical, operate. That, rather than the search for influence within the policy-
making community, is the ultimate ethical and political engagement with the civil society in which we
work and to which we are responsible.
Education outweighs – you can’t funxtion in the world only on portable skills
Switch Side
Switch Side debate is grotesque and causes a spectator mindset and ignores morality
and oppression
Spanos 4
(William V. Spanos is a highly acclaimed author, World War II Veteran, POW at Dresden, distinguished professor of
English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton and well known in the competitive world of high
school and intercollegiate academic debate, Cross-ex by Joseph Miller, 2004, pg. 467)
Dear Joe Miller, Yes, the statement about the American debate circuit you refer to was made by me, though
some years ago. I strongly believed then –and still do, even though a certain uneasiness about “objectivity”
has crept into the “philosophy of debate” — that debate in both the high schools and colleges in this country
is assumed to take place nowhere, even though the issues that are debated are profoundly historical, which
means that positions are always represented from the perspective of power, and a matter of life and death. I
find it grotesque that in the debate world, it doesn’t matter which position you take on an
issue — say, the United States’ unilateral wars of preemption — as long as you “score points”. The
world we live in is a world entirely dominated by an “exceptionalist” America which has
perennially claimed that it has been chosen by God or History to fulfill his/its “errand in the wilderness.”
That claim is powerful because American economic and military power lies behind it. And any alternative
position in such a world is virtually powerless. Given this inexorable historical reality, to assume, as
the protocols of debate do, that all positions are equal is to efface the imbalances of power
that are the fundamental condition of history and to annul the Moral authority inhering in
the position of the oppressed. This is why I have said that the appropriation of my interested work on
education and empire to this transcendental debate world constitute a travesty of my intentions. My
scholarship is not “disinterested.” It is militant and intended to ameliorate as much as possible the pain and
suffering of those who have been oppressed by the “democratic” institutions that have power precisely by
way of showing that their language if “truth,” far from being “disinterested” or “objective” as it is always
claimed, is informed by the will to power over all manner of “others.” This is also why I told my interlocutor
that he and those in the debate world who felt like him should call into question the traditional “objective”
debate protocols and the instrumentalist language they privilege in favor of a concept of debate and of
language in which life and death mattered. I am very much aware that the arrogant neocons who
now saturate the government of the Bush administration — judges, pentagon planners, state
department officials, etc. learned their “disinterested” argumentative skills in the high school
and college debate societies and that, accordingly, they have become masters at disarming the
just causes of the oppressed. This kind leadership will reproduce itself (along with the invisible
oppression it perpetrates) as long as the training ground and the debate protocols from which it emerges
remains in tact. A revolution in the debate world must occur. It must force that unworldly
world down into the historical arena where positions make a difference. To invoke the late
Edward Said, only such a revolution will be capable of “deterring democracy” (in Noam
Chomsky’s ironic phrase), of instigating the secular critical consciousness that is, in my mind, the sine qua
non for avoiding the immanent global disaster towards which the blind arrogance of Bush
Administration and his neocon policy makers is leading.
Ground
Methodologies are debatable – criteria can be based on ability to compare the value
of knowledge and the ability to change perceptions
Bleiker 2k
(Roland Bleiker Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland , Popular Dissent, Human Agency and
Global Politics, March 2 2000, Page 48, AFGA)
Prediction is a problematic assessment tool even if a theory is able to anticipate future events.
Important theories, such as realist interpretations of international politics, may well predict certain events only
because their theoretical premises have become so objectivised that they have started to shape
decision makers and political dynamics. Dissent, in this case, is the process that reshapes these
entrenched perceptions and the ensuing political practices. Describing, explaining and prescribing may be less
unproblematic processes of evaluation, but only at first sight. If one abandons the notion of Truth, the idea that an event can be
apprehended as part of a natural order, authentically and scientifically, as something that exists independently of the meaning
we have given it - if one abandons this separation of object and subject, then the process of judging a particular approach to
describing and explaining an event becomes a very muddled affair. There is no longer an objective measuring device that can
set the standard to evaluate whether or not a particular insight into an event, such as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, is true or
false. The very nature of a past event becomes indeterminate insofar as its identification is dependent upon ever-changing
forms of linguistic expressions that imbue the event with meaning.56 The inability to determine objective meanings
is also the reason why various critical international relations scholars stress that there can be no
ultimate way of assessing human agency. Roxanne Doty, for instance, believes that the agent-structure
debate 'encounters an aporia, i.e., a self-engendered paradox beyond which it cannot press'. This is to
say that the debate is fundamentally undecidable, and that theorists who engage in it 'can claim no
scientific, objective grounds for determining whether the force of agency or that of structure is
operative at any single instant F Hollis and Smith pursue a similar line of argument. They emphasise that there are
always two stories to tell - neither of which is likely ever to have the last word - an inside story and an
outside story, one about agents and another about structures, one epistemological and the other ontological,
one about under- standing and one about explaining international relations.58 The value of an insight cannot be
evaluated in relation to a set of objectively existing criteria. But this does not mean that all insights have the
same value. Not every perception is equally perceptive. Not every thought is equally thoughtful. Not every action is equally
justifiable. How, then, can one judge? Determining the value of a particular insight or action is always a
process of negotiating knowledge, of deciding where its rotating axes should be placed and how its
outer boundaries should be drawn. The actual act of judging can thus be made in reference to the
very process of negotiating knowledge. The contribution of the present approach to understanding transversal
dissent could, for instance, be evaluated by its ability to demonstrate that a rethinking of the agency
problematique has revealed different insights into global politics. The key question then revolves around
whether or not a particular international event, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, appears in a new light once it is being scrutinised
by an approach that pays attention to factors that had hitherto been ignored. Expressed in other words, know- ledge
about agency can be evaluated by its ability to orient and reorient our perceptions of events and the
political actions that issue from them. The lyrical world, once more, offers valuable insight. Rene Char:
Predictability/Limits
The idea of predictability misunderstands the functioning of human agency and real
politics – unpredictability is therefore essential to education and portable skills
Bleiker 2k
(Roland Bleiker Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland , Popular Dissent, Human Agency and
Global Politics, March 2 2000, Page 48, AFGA)
Prediction, in particular, is a highly problematic standard to evaluate the adequacy of theoretical
propositions. Indeed, most international relations theories do not fare well when judged by such a measuring device.
Consider, once more, the case of East Germany. None of the influential contributions to international theory was able to
anticipate, let alone predict, the momentous transformations that took place when the Berlin Wall crumbled and the Soviet-led
alliance system fell apart. If existing theories revealed anything, it was how closely they were intertwined with the Cold War and
ensuing perceptions of world politics. 'An empire collapsed/ Jean Elshtain points out, 'and many, if not most, practitioners of
international relations were entirely unprepared. It seems that precisely when theories of interna- tional politics should have
best served us, they failed rather strikingly, overtaken, as it were, by politics itself.'53 For Elshtain this crucial fail- ure demands
a rethinking of what theory is and does. 'If 1989 taught us nothing else/ she stresses, 'it should have taught us humility.'54 For
others, such as Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, the inability of international theory to anticipate the collapse of the Cold War
system calls for a more specific, but equally fundamental, rethinking of the agency problematique'.55 This book is devoted to
the latter task - and reassessing questions of evaluation is an integral part of it. The very notion of prediction does, by
its own logic, annihilate human agency. To assert that international relations is a domain of political
dynamics whose future should be predictable through a con- vincing set of theoretical propositions is
to assume that the course of global politics is to a certain extent predetermined. From such a vantagepoint there is no more room for interference and human agency, no more possibility for politics to
overtake theory. A predictive approach thus runs the risk of ending up in a form of inquiry that
imposes a static image upon a far more complex set of transversal political practices. The point of a
theoretical inquiry, however, is not to ignore the constantly changing domain of international relations.
Rather, the main objective must consist of facilitating an understanding of transversal struggles that
can grapple with those moments when people walk through walls precisely when nobody expects
them to do so.
Unpredictability is key for effective understanding of politics
Bleiker 2k
(Roland Bleiker Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland , Popular Dissent, Human Agency and
Global Politics, March 2 2000, Page 48, AFGA)
This article draws on the notion of the sublime to challenge prevailing understandings of the
international. The sublime helps us reflect on the impact of, and responses to, dramatic political events. The
magnitude of such events is often so overwhelming that it defies our capacity for rational
understanding, thus triggering a range of powerful emotions. Our habits of knowing and conducting
politics are fundamentally dislocated. This sudden uprooting can provide us with key insights into the
contingent nature of representation. The very ambivalence that issues from sublime events opens up opportunities for
reflecting upon fundamental moral and political issues at stake. But all too often the experience of dislocation w
rought by the sublime is countered immediately with heroic and masculine understandings of the
political, which seek to mobilise the unleashed energy for projects of mastery and control. The sublime
appears to invite its own dissolution as whole nations attempt to obliterate the conditions of possibility of ambivalent
experiences. The instincts of mastery and control often take over, but it need not be the case. We emphasise an alternative
reaction to the sublime, one that e x p l o res diff e rent moral possibilities in the face of disorientation and the loss of control.
In contrast to seeking reassurance in the bright lights of the conscious, these possibilities involve an
exploration into the deeper capacities and orientations contained at a subliminal level. We then take the
analysis one step further, stressing that we do not necessarily need dramatic political events to disrupt entrenched political
habits and generate our ability to wonder about the world. We can acquire the same type of insight into questions
of representation and contingency by engaging more everyday practices of politics. The subliminal, here ,
relates to the unconscious dimensions of our existence, dimensions that a re touched and influenced by aesthetic sources, such
as literature, art and music. Aesthetic knowledge is often dismissed as relativistic and as i n a p p ropriate to
politics. We argue, in contrast, that the subliminal, and the aesthetic means of accessing it, can be
employed as important sourc e s for articulating moral values at a time when global politics is incre a s
i n g l y characterised by ambiguity and clashing intere s t s . The article begins by outlining the relevance of the
sublime to the international, drawing attention to the key roles played by the odd mixture of pain and pleasure, fear and
delight. We then present the main philosophical reasons given for these reactions to the sublime, pointing out that an
awareness of them offers crucial insight into the nature of political representation. The second part of the article employs these
insights, but reorients them away from the heroic notion of the sublime to an exploration of subliminal knowledge, focusing in
particular on the role of awe and wonder as antidotes to conventional responses to fear. D r a m a t i c international events,
such as wars or terrorist acts, do not happen spontaneously and without reason. They are the product of decades of everyday
practice, of a gradual build-up and consolidation of particular ways of knowing and acting. We argue that cultivating a sense of
the subliminal, drawn from day-to-day life, can increase awareness of these largely inaudible yet crucial and highly
consequential political pro c e s s e s . In order to engage the multiple dimensions of the sublime we theorise its relevance from
a variety of vantage points. We contemplate the possibility of being directly affected by acts of terror as well as the far more
frequent experience of witnessing such events from a safe distance. We examine individual reactions and policy responses to
terror. These and various other positions are generated by different experiences and shaped by
different motives and imperatives. We move back and forth between them, knowing full well that we
transgress certain scholarly conventions that distinguish carefully among different levels of analysis.
We do so because we want to capture the multifarious and dislocating nature of the sublime. We also
do so because we believe that at a time of rapid globalisation, the boundaries between direct witness and spectator are
increasingly blurred. The very nature of 9/11, for instance, was intrinsically linked to the fact that it was televised
instantaneously around the world, thus affecting even those people who were not directly threatened by the event. The key
objective of terrorism is, indeed, not to destroy physical targets. In the age of telecommunication, terrorism is, as W.J.T.
Mitchell stresses, ‘a war of words and images carried by the mass media, a form of psychological warfare whose aim is the
demoralization of the enemy’.2
They overlimit - multiple levels of understanding are needed to understand world
politics and implement effective policy
Bleiker 1 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies, 30(3), p. 519)JM
Hope for a better world will, indeed, remain slim if we put all our efforts into searching for a mimetic
understanding of the international. Issues of global war and Third World poverty are far too serious and urgent to
be left to only one form of inquiry, especially if this mode of thought suppresses important faculties
and fails to understand and engage the crucial problem of representation. We need to employ the full register of
human perception and intelligence to understand the phenomena of world politics and to address the dilemmas that emanate
from them. One of the key challenges, thus, consists of legitimising a greater variety of approaches and insights to world politics.
Aesthetics is an important and necessary addition to our interpretative repertoire. It helps us understand why the
emergence, meaning and significance of a political event can be appreciated only once we scrutinise the
representational practices that have constituted the very nature of this event.
Cede the Political
Non unique - Status quo eco-literacy fails to address the dominant political structure
which stops us from breaking out of anthropocentrism and anti-democracy science
Kahn 10
(Richard Kahn, an educator whose primary interests are in researehing the history of social movements as pedagogically
generative forces in society, and in critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater
planetary freedom, peace, and happiness. In 2007, he graduated with a PhD from UCLA with a specialization in the philosophy
and history of education. An alter-globalization activist, Kahn has been at the forefront of championing and organizing what he
terms, “total liberation politics,” that seek to advocate for nonhuman animals, the biosphere as a sacred entity, and social
justice through systemic transformation. Kahn’s writing and teaching to date have thus sought to synthesize the field of critical
pedagogy with types of ecological and vegan education in order to arrive at a radical education for sustainability that seeks
both individual and collective emancipation. Academia.edu, Critical Pedagogy,Ecoliteracy,& Planetary Crisis, 2010,
http://www.academia.edu/167226/Critical_Pedagogy_Ecoliteracy_and_Planetary_Crisis_The_Ecopedagogy_Movement, AFGA)
Just as there is now an ecological crisis of serious proportions, there is also a crisis in environmental
education over what must be done about it .Again, over the last half-century, the modern environmental
movement has undeniably helped to foster widespread social and cultural transformation. In part, it
has developed ideas and practices of environmental preservation and conservation, struggled to
understand and reduce the amount of pollution and toxic risks associated with industrialized
civilization, produced new modes of counterculture and morality, outlined the need for appropriate
technologies, and led to powerful legislative environmental reforms as well as a wide range of
alternative institutional initiatives. As a form of non formal popular education it has stirred many people to
become self-aware of the role they play in environmental destruction and to become more socially active in ways
that can help to create a more ecological and sustainable world. In terms of formal educational programs, federal
and state legislatures have mandated that environmental education be included as part of the public education
system’s curricular concerns. Over the last thirty-eight years, the North American Association for Environmental
Education—the world’s flagship environmental education organization—has grown from being a fledgling
professional society to its current state as the coordinator, in over fifty-five countries worldwide, of thousands of
environmental organizations toward the certification and legitimation of environmental education as a
professional researeh field. These educational programs have apparently made their case, as a comprehensive set
of studies completed in 2005 found that:
• 95% of all American adults support having environmental education programs in schools;
• 85% of all American adults believe that governmental agencies should support environmental education
programs; and that
• 80% believe that corporations should train their employees in how to solve environmental problems. (Coyle,
2005)
In many ways, then, the foundation for comprehensive and powerful forms of environmental literacy
and eco-literacy has never been more at hand throughout society. To reiterate: despite the
environmental movement’s significant pedagogical accomplishments, there have also been numerous
setbacks and a
tremendous amount of work remains to be done—perhaps more than ever before (see the still relevant
Dowie, 1996). For example, the same studies that revealed Americans’ overwhelming support for environmental
education programs reported a variety of findings which demonstrate that most Americans continue
to have an almost shameful misunderstanding of the most basic environmental ideas. Thus, it was
found that an estimated:
• 45 million Americans think the ocean is a fresh source of water ;
• 125 million Americans think that aerosol spray cans still contain stratospheric ozone-depleting
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) despite the fact that they were banned from use in 1978;
• 123 million Americans believe that disposable diapers represent the leading landfill problem when
they in fact only represent 1% of all landfill material; and
• 130 million Americans currently believe that hydropower is the country’s leading energy source
when, as a renewable form of energy, it contributes only 10%of the nations total energy supply. (Coyle,
2005)
Of course, more problematic still for educators is the burgeoning rise in social and ecological disasters that are
resulting from the mixture of unsustainable economic exploitation of nature and environmentally unsound cultural
practices.
Such ecological issues, requiring critical knowledge of the dialectical relationship between mainstream
lifestyle and the dominant social structure, require a much more radical and more complex form of
eco-literacy than is presently possessed by the population at large. In this context, while it may be unfair
to lay the blame for social and ecological calamity squarely on the environmental movement for its inability to
generate effective pedagogy on this matter, it must still be noted that the field of environmental education
has been altogether unable to provide either solutions or stop-gaps for the ecological disasters that
have continued to mount due to the mush-rooming of transnational corporate globalization over the last few
decades. In fact, despite a proliferation of programs since the 1970s, environ-mental education has tended to
become isolated as a marginal academic discipline relative to the curricular whole.
The major trend on campuses today is for environmental studies to be lodged within and controlled by natural
sciences departments, with little more than tips of the cap to the humanities, and ostensibly no input from
scholars of education (see Kahn & Nocella, Forthcoming). When such studies are housed in colleges of education
proper, however, they are rarely integrated across required programs of study in either teacher training,
educational leadership, or educational researeh. Instead, they are generally confined to specialized M.A.-level or
other certificate-based environmental education programs. These degree programs often lack rigorous
training in theoretical critique and political analysis, choosing to focus instead on the promotion of
outdoor educational experiences that all too often advance outdated, essentialized, and dichotomous
views of nature and wilderness.
As Steven Best and Anthony Nocella (2006) have argued, such views as these are typical of the first two
waves of (predominantly white, male, and middle-class) U.S. environmentalism. These views have
proven insufficient and even harmful toward the advancement of richly multiperspectival ecological
politics and environmental justice strategies (for instance, see Adamson, et al., 2002),which seek to uncover
collective social action across differences of race, class, gender, species, and other social categories. Hence, many
outdoor education programs stand in need of radical reconstruction away from an uncritical form of
environmental literacy that has remained rooted as the field standard since William Stapp (1969). Stapp is
considered the “founder” of the environmental education movement. He first stressed that the goals of environmental education were: knowledge of the natural environment, interdisciplinary exploration, and an inquirybased, student-centered curricular framework, which could be used for overcoming intractable conflict and
ideology in society.
A poster-child example for such environmental literacy is the School of Environmental Studies, known
as the “Zoo School,” in Apple Valley, Minnesota. Here high school-aged juniors and seniors attend school on the
zoo grounds, treating the institution and a nearby park as an experiential learning lab where they
conduct independent studies and weave environmental themes into their curricular work and
projects. A recent pamphlet funded and promoted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of
Environmental Education, Advancing Education Through Environmental Literacy (Arehie, 2003) lauds the school as
one “using the environment to boost academic performance, increase student motivation, and enhance environmental literacy” (p. 8). But the literacy aspects of this education, which accord with the aims put forth by
Stapp and those of the North American Association for Environmental Education, lack the strong critical and
ethical focus that is presently demanded by our unfolding planetary eco-crisis.
For example, per written accounts, the heads of the Zoo School do not have the students pose
problems into the history and nature of zoos—a highly problematical social and environmental
institution (Rothfels, 2002)— or become active in the fight against the Apple Valley zoo’s own sordid
history and policies. As regards the latter project, a worthwhile educational venture would be to have
students become involved in banning dolphins as a zoo exhibit (hardly a native species to Minnesota) and
to have them returned to either a sanctuary or non-domesticated oceanic habitat. Instead, as of 2006, one could
pay $125 to swim with the zoo’s dolphins, a practice generally condemned by marine ecologists (Rose, 1996) and
environmentalists/animal rightists (Watson, 1995) alike as both inhumane and beyond the bounds of good
environmental stewardship. Further, the Apple Valley zoo’s Wells Fargo Family Farm claims to foster
environmental literacy experiences for Zoo School students “to explain and…learn about how food
gets from farms to tables.”
Yet students could alternatively work for a critical literacy that seeks to understand how the
implosion of corporate marketing and ideology into the zoo structures its educational program. That is, while
the Zoo School presently offers relatively idealized experiences of life on a family farm, it could
instead aim for literacy into how to organize opposition to such questionable practices as the
naturalization of a corporate “family farm,” as well as in how to demand answers from responsible parties as
to why high-ranking executives of a leading corporate agribusiness like Cargill presently sit on the zoo’s board of
directors. Additionally, students could learn to read the corporate farm exhibit against the grain in order to
politically problematize why the zoo has failed to create educational encounters on the ecological benefits of a
vegan diet, when it instead at least tacitly supports as sustainable and conservationist-minded the standard
American meat-based diet and the ecologically damaging factory farming that presently supports it. Failing to
provide critical pedagogy, the Zoo School has been promoted within leading environmental education
circles as a leader because it is, in the words of the Environmental Education & Training Partnership,
“Meeting Standards Naturally” (Arehie, 2003). That is, it is motivating students in a new way to go to school
and meet or even surpass national curricular and testing standards of a kind consistent with the outcomeorientation of the No
Child Left Behind Act. As with other schools that have adopted environ-mental education as the central focus of
their programs, the Zoo School apparently shines—not because it is producing ecological mindsets and sustainable
living practices capable of transforming society in radically necessary ways—but because its students’ reading and
math scores have improved; and they have performed better in science and social studies; developed the ability to
transfer their knowledge from familiar to unfamiliar contexts; learned to “do science” and not just learn about it;
and showed a decline in the sort of overall behavior classified as a discipline problem(Glenn, 2000, p. 3). Obviously,
regardless of whatever good pedagogy is taking place at the Zoo School, this laudatory praise of its environmental
literacy program by environmental educators is little more than the present-day technocratic standards movement
in education masquerading as a noteworthy “green” improvement. Put bluntly: this is environmental literacy as a
green wash.
Worse still, though, is that here environmental literacy has not only been co-opted by corporate state forces and
morphed into a progressively-styled, touchy-feely method for achieving higher scores on standardized tests like
the ACT and SAT, but in an Orwellian turn it has come to stand in actuality for a real illiteracy about the nature of
ecological catastrophe, its causes, and possible solutions. As I will argue in this book, our current course for
social and environmental disaster (though highly complex and not easily boiled down to a few simple
causes or strategies for action) must be traced to the evolution of: an anthropocentric worldview
grounded in what the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (1993) refers to as a matrix of domination (see chapter
1);a global techno-capitalist infrastructure that relies upon market-based and functionalist versions of technoliteracy to instantiate and augment its socio-economic and cultural control (see chapters 2 and 3); an
unsustainable, reductionistic, and antidemocratic model of institutional science (see chapter4); and the
wrongful marginalization and repression of pro-ecological resistance through the claim that it
represents a “terrorist” force that is counter to the morals of a democratic society rooted in tolerance,
educational change, and civic debate (see chapter 5). By contrast, the environmental literacy standards now
showcased at places like the Zoo School as “Hall-marks of Quality” (Arehie, 2003, p. 11) are those that
consciously fail to develop the type of radical and partisan subjectivity in students, that might be
capable of deconstructing their socially and environmentally deleterious hyper-individualism or their
obviously socialized identities that tend toward state-sanctioned norms of competition, hedonism,
consumption, marketization, and forms of quasi-fascistic patriotism.
Turn - reducing debate to the hypothetical separates us from real world politics
Mitchell 98
(Gordon R. Mitchell is an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Argumentation & Advocacy, Pedagogical
Possibilities for Argumentative Agency in Academic Debate, 1998, Vol. 35 Issue 2, p41-60, AFGA)
While an isolated academic space that affords students an opportunity to learn in a protected environment has significant
pedagogical value (see e.g. Coverstone 1995, p. 8-9), the notion of the academic debate tournament as a sterile
laboratory carries with it some disturbing implications, when the metaphor is extended to its limit. To
the extent that the academic space begins to take on characteristics of a laboratory, the barriers
demarcating such a space from other spheres of deliberation beyond the school grow taller and less
permeable. When such barriers reach insurmountable dimensions, argumentation in the academic
setting unfolds on a purely simulated plane, with students practicing critical thinking and advocacy
skills in strictly hypothetical thought-spaces. Although they may research and track public argument
as it unfolds outside the confines of the laboratory for research purposes, in this approach, students witness
argumentation beyond the walls of the academy as spectators, with little or no apparent recourse to directly
participate or alter the course of events (see Mitchell 1995; 1998).
The sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture is highlighted during episodes of
alienation in which debaters cheer news of human suffering or misfortune. Instead of focusing on the
visceral negative responses to news accounts of human death and misery, debaters overcome with
the competitive zeal of contest round competition show a tendency to concentrate on the meanings
that such evidence might hold for the strength of their academic debate arguments. For example, news
reports of mass starvation might tidy up the "uniqueness of a disadvantage" or bolster the "inherency of an affirmative case" (in
the technical parlance of debate-speak). Murchland categorizes cultivation of this "spectator" mentality as one of the most
politically debilitating failures of contemporary education: "Educational institutions have failed even more grievously to provide
the kind of civic forums we need. In fact, one could easily conclude that the principle purposes of our schools is to deprive
successor generations of their civic voice, to turn them into mute and uncomprehending spectators in the drama of political
life" (1991, p. 8).
Complete reliance on the laboratory metaphor to guide pedagogical practice can result in the
unfortunate foreclosure of crucial learning opportunities. These opportunities, which will be discussed in
more detail in the later sections of this piece, center around the process of argumentative engagement with
wider public spheres of deliberation. In the strictly preparatory model of argument pedagogy, such
direct engagement is an activity that is appropriately pursued following the completion of academic
debate training (see e.g. Coverstone 1995, p. 8). Preparatory study of argumentation, undertaken in the confines of the
academic laboratory, is conducted on the plane of simulation and is designed to pave the way for eventual application of critical
thinking and oral advocacy skills in "realworld" contexts.
Such a preparatory pedagogy has a tendency to defer reflection and theorization on the political
dynamics of academic debate itself. For example, many textbooks introduce students to the importance of
argumentation as the basis for citizenship in the opening chapter, move on to discussion of specific skills in the intervening
chapters, and never return to the obvious broader question of how specific skills can be utilized to support efforts of
participatory citizenship and democratic empowerment. Insofar as the argumentation curriculum does not
forthrightly thematize the connection between skill-based learning and democratic empowerment,
the prospect that students will fully develop strong senses of transformative political agency grows
increasingly remote.
Agency
Restricting debate to the hypothetical restricts our ability to interact with
contemporary politics and denies us agency to effect change in reality
Mitchell 98
(Gordon R. Mitchell is an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Argumentation & Advocacy, Pedagogical
Possibilities for Argumentative Agency in Academic Debate, 1998, Vol. 35 Issue 2, p41-60, AFGA)
For those schooled in the tradition of argumentation and debate, faith in the tensile strength of
critical thinking and oral expression as pillars of democratic decision-making is almost second nature,
a natural outgrowth of disciplinary training. This faith, inscribed in the American Forensic
Association's Credo, reproduced in scores of argumentation textbooks, and rehearsed over and over again in introductory
argumentation courses, grounds the act of argumentation pedagogy in a progressive political vision that
swells the enthusiasm of teachers and students alike, while ostensibly locating the study of
argumentation in a zone of relevance that lends a distinctive sense of meaning and significance to
academic work in this area.
Demographic surveys of debaters suggest that indeed, the practice of debate has significant value for
participants. Some studies confirm debate's potential as a tool to develop critical thinking and
communication skills. For example, Semlak and Shields find that "students with debate experience
were significantly better at employing the three communication skills (analysis, delivery, and
organization) utilized in this study than students without the experience" (1977, p. 194). In a similar vein,
Colbert and Biggers write that "the conclusion seems fairly simple, debate training is an excellent way of improving many
communication skills" (1985, p. 237). Finally, Keefe, Harte and Norton provide strong corroboration for these observations with
their assessment that "many researchers over the past four decades have come to the same general conclusions. Critical
thinking ability is significantly improved by courses in argumentation and debate and by debate
experience" (1982, pp. 33-34; see also Snider 1993).
Other studies document the professional success of debaters after graduation. For example, 15% of persons in Keele and
Matlon's survey of former debaters went on to become "top-ranking executives" (Keele and Matlon 1984). This finding is
consistent with the results of Center's survey, which suggests that participation in forensics is an employee attribute desired
strongly by businesses, especially law firms (Center 1982, p. 5). While these survey data bode well for debate students
preparing to test the waters of the corporate job market, such data shed little light on the degree to which
argumentation skills learned in debate actually translate into practical tools of democratic
empowerment. Regardless of whether or not survey data is ever generated to definitively answer this
question, it is likely that faith in debate as an inherently democratic craft will persist.
Committed to affirming and stoking the progressive energies produced by this faith in argumentation, but also interested in
problematizing the assumptions that undergird prevailing approaches to argumentation pedagogy for heuristic purposes, in this
essay I make a double gesture. On the one hand, I underscore the importance of grounding the practice of
academic argumentation to notions of democratic empowerment. On the other hand, I challenge the
notion that such a grounding maneuver can be accomplished with faith alone. Moving beyond the
characterization of argumentative acumen as a skill to be acquired exclusively through classroom or
tournament training, I propose a notion of argumentative agency that brings questions of purpose to
the center of pedagogical practice: For what purpose are argumentation skills used? Where can they
be employed most powerfully (for better or worse)? What can be learned from efforts to bring
argumentation skills to bear in concrete rhetorical situations outside of tournament contest rounds? In
a three part discussion, I advance an analysis that contextualizes these questions and proposes reflective ideas that invite
response in the ongoing conversation about the meaning and purpose of contemporary academic debate. After sketching the
characteristics of some commonly advanced views on the nature of the connection between argumentation pedagogy and
democratic empowerment (in part one), I explain how argumentative agency can serve as a conceptual bridge linking academic
practice to empowerment (in part two), and then discuss specific strategies for making the pursuit of argumentative agency a
guiding principle for work within academic settings (in part three).
LIMITS OF PURELY PREPARATORY PEDAGOGY
In the process of explaining their teaching approach, argumentation scholars sometimes invoke a
bifurcation that separates academic study of argumentation from applied practice in public argument.
This explanation typically begins with an elucidation of the democratic and emancipatory potential of
debate as a process of decisionmaking, and then proceeds to an explanation of academic study as an
essential preparatory step on the way to achievement of such emancipatory potential. This route of
explanation is consistent with the American Forensic Association Credo, which declares that the purpose of forensic education
is to "prepare students through classrooms, forums, and competition for participation in their world through the power of
expression" (qtd. in Freeley 1996, p. 122). Writing from this posture to defend the value of National Debate Tournament (NDT)
policy competition, Edward Panetta posits that NDT debate "will prepare students to be societal leaders ..." (1990, p. 76,
emphasis added). Similarly, Austin Freeley suggests that academic debate "provides preparation for effective participation in a
democratic society" and "offers preparation for leadership" (1997, p. 21, emphasis added).
What are the entailments of such a preparatory framework for argumentation pedagogy, and how do
such entailments manifest themselves in teaching practice ? On the surface, the rhetoric of
preparation seems innocuous and consistent with other unremarkable idioms employed to describe
education (college prep courses and prep school spring to mind). However, by framing argumentation pedagogy
as preparation for student empowerment, educators may actually constrain the emancipatory
potential of the debate enterprise. In this vein, approaches that are purely oriented toward
preparation place students and teachers squarely in the proverbial pedagogical bullpen, a peripheral
space marked off from the field of social action. In what follows, I pursue this tentative hypothesis by interrogating
the framework of preparatory pedagogy on three levels, considering how it can position sites of academic inquiry vis-a-vis
broader public spheres of deliberation, how it can flatten and defer consideration of complex issues of argumentative
engagement and how it can invite unwitting co-option of argumentative skills.
As two prominent teachers of argumentation point out, "Many scholars and educators term academic debate a
laboratory for testing and developing approaches to argumentation" (Hill and Leeman 1997, p. 6). This
explanation of academic debate squares with descriptions of the study of argumentation that highlight debate training as
preparation for citizenship. As a safe space that permits the controlled "testing" of approaches to argumentation, the academic
laboratory, on this account, constitutes a training ground for "future" citizens and leaders to hone their critical thinking and
advocacy skills.
While an isolated academic space that affords students an opportunity to learn in a protected environment has significant
pedagogical value (see e.g. Coverstone 1995, p. 8-9), the notion of the academic debate tournament as a sterile
laboratory carries with it some disturbing implications, when the metaphor is extended to its limit. To
the extent that the academic space begins to take on characteristics of a laboratory, the barriers
demarcating such a space from other spheres of deliberation beyond the school grow taller and less
permeable. When such barriers reach insurmountable dimensions, argumentation in the academic
setting unfolds on a purely simulated plane, with students practicing critical thinking and advocacy
skills in strictly hypothetical thought-spaces. Although they may research and track public argument
as it unfolds outside the confines of the laboratory for research purposes, in this approach, students witness
argumentation beyond the walls of the academy as spectators, with little or no apparent recourse to directly
participate or alter the course of events (see Mitchell 1995; 1998).
The sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture is highlighted during episodes of
alienation in which debaters cheer news of human suffering or misfortune. Instead of focusing on the
visceral negative responses to news accounts of human death and misery, debaters overcome with
the competitive zeal of contest round competition show a tendency to concentrate on the meanings
that such evidence might hold for the strength of their academic debate arguments. For example, news
reports of mass starvation might tidy up the "uniqueness of a disadvantage" or bolster the "inherency of an affirmative case" (in
the technical parlance of debate-speak). Murchland categorizes cultivation of this "spectator" mentality as one of the most
politically debilitating failures of contemporary education: "Educational institutions have failed even more grievously to provide
the kind of civic forums we need. In fact, one could easily conclude that the principle purposes of our schools is to deprive
successor generations of their civic voice, to turn them into mute and uncomprehending spectators in the drama of political
life" (1991, p. 8).
Complete reliance on the laboratory metaphor to guide pedagogical practice can result in the
unfortunate foreclosure of crucial learning opportunities. These opportunities, which will be discussed in
more detail in the later sections of this piece, center around the process of argumentative engagement with
wider public spheres of deliberation. In the strictly preparatory model of argument pedagogy, such
direct engagement is an activity that is appropriately pursued following the completion of academic
debate training (see e.g. Coverstone 1995, p. 8). Preparatory study of argumentation, undertaken in the confines of the
academic laboratory, is conducted on the plane of simulation and is designed to pave the way for eventual application of critical
thinking and oral advocacy skills in "realworld" contexts.
Such a preparatory pedagogy has a tendency to defer reflection and theorization on the political
dynamics of academic debate itself. For example, many textbooks introduce students to the importance of
argumentation as the basis for citizenship in the opening chapter, move on to discussion of specific skills in the intervening
chapters, and never return to the obvious broader question of how specific skills can be utilized to support efforts of
participatory citizenship and democratic empowerment. Insofar as the argumentation curriculum does not
forthrightly thematize the connection between skill-based learning and democratic empowerment,
the prospect that students will fully develop strong senses of transformative political agency grows
increasingly remote.
The undercultivation of student agency in the academic field of argumentation is a particularly
pressing problem, since social theorists such as Foucault, Habermas and Touraine have proposed that
information and communication have emerged as significant media of domination and exploitation in
contemporary society. These scholars argue, in different ways, that new and particularly insidious means of social control
have developed in recent times. These methods of control are insidious in the sense that they suffuse apparently open public
spheres and structure opportunities for dialogue in subtle and often nefarious ways. Who has authority to speak in public
forums? How does socioeconomic status determine access to information and close off spaces for public deliberation? Who
determines what issues are placed on the agenda for public discussion? It is impossible to seriously consider these questions
and still hew closely to the idea that a single, monolithic, essentialized "public sphere" even exists. Instead, multiple public
spheres exist in diverse cultural and political milieux, and communicative practices work to transform and reweave
continuously the normative fabric that holds them together. Some public spaces are vibrant and full of emancipatory potential,
while others are colonized by restrictive institutional logics. Argumentation skills can be practiced in both contexts, but how can
the utilization of such skills transform positively the nature of the public spaces where dialogue takes place?
For students and teachers of argumentation, the heightened salience of this question should signal the danger that critical
thinking and oral advocacy skills alone may not be sufficient for citizens to assert their voices in public deliberation.
Institutional interests bent on shutting down dialogue and discussion may recruit new graduates
skilled in argumentation and deploy them in information campaigns designed to neutralize public
competence and short-circuit democratic decision-making (one variant of Habermas' "colonization of the
lifeworld" thesis; see Habermas 1981, p. 376-373). Habermas sees the emergent capacity of capitalist institutions to sustain
themselves by manufacturing legitimacy through strategic communication as a development that profoundly transforms the
Marxist political dynamic.
By colonizing terms and spaces of public dialogue with instrumental, strategically-motivated reasoning, institutions are said by
Habermas to have engineered a "refeudalization" of the public sphere. In this distorted space for public discussion,
corporations and the state forge a monopoly on argumentation and subvert critical deliberation by
members of an enlightened, debating public. This colonization thesis supplements the traditional Marxist
problematic of class exploitation by highlighting a new axis of domination, the way in which capitalist systems rely upon the
strategic management of discourse as a mode of legitimation and exploitation. Indeed, the implicit bridge
that connects argumentation skills to democratic empowerment in many argumentation textbooks crosses perilous waters,
since institutions facing "legitimation crises" (see Habermas 1975) rely increasingly on recruitment and deployment of
argumentative talent to manufacture public loyalty.
ARGUMENTATIVE AGENCY
In basic terms the notion of argumentative agency involves the capacity to contextualize and employ
the skills and strategies of argumentative discourse in fields of social action, especially wider spheres
of public deliberation. Pursuit of argumentative agency charges academic work with democratic
energy by linking teachers and students with civic organizations, social movements, citizens and other
actors engaged in live public controversies beyond the schoolyard walls . As a bridging concept, argumentative
agency links decontextualized argumentation skills such as research, listening, analysis, refutation and presentation, to the
broader political telos of democratic empowerment. Argumentative agency fills gaps left in purely simulation-
based models of argumentation by focusing pedagogical energies on strategies for utilizing
argumentation as a driver of progressive social change. Moving beyond an exclusively skill-oriented curriculum,
teachers and students pursuing argumentative agency seek to put argumentative tools to the test by employing them in
situations beyond the space of the classroom. This approach draws from the work of Kincheloe (1991), who suggests that
through "critical constructivist action research," students and teachers cultivate their own senses of
agency and work to transform the world around them.
The sense of argumentative agency produced through action research is different in kind from those
skills that are honed through academic simulation exercises such as policy debate tournaments.
Encounters with broader public spheres beyond the realm of the academy can deliver unique
pedagogical possibilities and opportunities. By anchoring their work in public spaces, students and
teachers can use their talents to change the trajectory of events, while events are still unfolding.
These experiences have the potential to trigger significant shifts in political awareness on the part of
participants. Academic debaters nourished on an exclusive diet of competitive contest round experience often come to see
politics like a picturesque landscape whirring by through the window of a speeding train. They study this political landscape in
great detail, rarely (if ever) entertaining the idea of stopping the train and exiting to alter the course of unfolding events. The
resulting spectator mentality deflects attention away from roads that could carry their arguments to wider spheres of public
argumentation. However, on the occasions when students and teachers set aside this spectator mentality by directly engaging
broader public audiences, key aspects of the political landscape change, because the point of reference for experiencing the
landscape shifts fundamentally.
AT Run on Neg
Critical thought as a criticism is just another argument which garners a defensive and
unproductive response
Tannen, PhD in Linguistics, 98
(Deborah, The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words, 1998, retrieved from
http://occupytampa.org/files/wcom/tannen/Argument%20Culture_%20Moving%20from%20Debate%20to%20Dialogue,%20Th
e%20-%20Tannen,%20Deborah.pdf, AFGA)
Approaching situations like warriors in battle leads to the assumption that intellectual inquiry, too, is
a game of attack, counterattack, and self-defense. In this spirit, critical thinking is synonymous with
criticizing. In many classrooms, students are encouraged to read someone’s life work, then rip it to shreds. Though criticism is
one form of critical thinking—and an essential one—so are integrating ideas from disparate fields and examining the context
out of which ideas grew. Opposition does not lead to the whole truth when we ask only “What’s wrong
with this?” and never “What can we use from this in building a new theory, a new understanding?”
There are many ways that unrelenting criticism is destructive in itself. In innumerable small dramas mirroring what happened to
Robert Gallo (but on a much more modest scale), our most creative thinkers can waste time and effort
responding to critics motivated less by a genuine concern about weaknesses in their work than by a
desire to find something to attack. All of society loses when creative people are discouraged from
their pursuits by unfair criticism. (This is particularly likely to happen since, as Kay Red field Jamison shows in her book
Touched with Fire, many of those who are unusually creative are also unusually sensitive; their sensitivity often drives their
creativity.) If the criticism is unwarranted, many will say, you are free to argue against it, to defend yourself. But there are
problems with this, too. Not only does self-defense take time and draw oʃ energy that would better be
spent on new creative work, but any move to defend yourself makes you appear, well, defensive. For
example, when an author wrote a letter to the editor protesting a review he considered unfair, the reviewer (who is typically
given the last word) turned the very fact that the author defended himself into a weapon with which to attack again. The
reviewer’s response began, “I haven’t much time to waste on the kind of writer who squanders his talent drafting angry letters
to reviewers.”
"Do it on the neg" marginalizes our argument by placing it in the context of orthodox
ideology
Bleiker 1 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies, 30(3), p. 523)
A second and related shortcoming of early postmodern contributions is their focus on
criticising/deconstructing the shortcomings of dominant Realist and Liberal approaches to international
political theory. While essential at a time when there was little space for alternative knowledge, this process
of critique has nevertheless limited the potential of postmodern contributions. Discourses of power
politics and their framing of political practice cannot overcome all existing theoretical and practical
dilemmas. By articulating critique in relation to arguments advanced by orthodox approaches to IR,
the impact of critical voices remains confined within the larger discursive boundaries that were
established through the initial framing of these debates.
AT Run on Aff
"Run it as an advantage” pigeon-holes our args.
Bleiker 1 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies, 30(3), p. 523)
My suggestion is, thus, to ‘forget IR theory’, to see beyond a narrowly defined academic discipline and to
refuse tying future possibilities to established forms of life.57 Instead of seeking nostalgic comfort and
security in the familiar interpretation of long gone epochs, even if they are characterised by violence and
insecurity, conscious forgetting opens up possibilities for a dialogical understanding of our present and
past. Rather than further entrenching current security dilemmas by engaging with the orthodox
discourse that continuously gives meaning to them, forgetting tries to escape the vicious circle by which
these social practices serve to legitimise and objectivise the very discourses that have given rise to
them.
“Do it on the aff” compromises our arguments.
Herring 6 (Eric, Reader in International Politics at the University of Bristol,
[http://mil.sagepub.com/content/35/1/105.full.pdf] AD: 7/9/10)
Insider activism (that is, intellectual and policy work within mainstream institutions) risks co-option
and deradicalisation. For some, being an activist scholar necessarily involves being an anti-military, antistate, anti-capitalist outsider opposing British-backed US foreign policy, but there is no consensus on this.21
The risks of co-option and deradicalisation needs to be considered in relation to context, strategy and
tactics as well as theorised understandings of the underlying characteristics of those mainstream
institutions. To insist on or assume pacifism, anarchism, socialism and opposition to all aspects of British
and US foreign policy misses what may turn out to be the ambiguous, contingent, factionalised and
therefore potentially progressive aspects of the military, the state, capitalism and the foreign policies of
Britain and the United States.
Debate Key
Successful Ecopedagogy must access a varied set of activities in order to shift
sociopolitical standings
Kahn 10
(Richard Kahn, an educator whose primary interests are in researehing the history of social movements as pedagogically
generative forces in society, and in critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater
planetary freedom, peace, and happiness. In 2007, he graduated with a PhD from UCLA with a specialization in the philosophy
and history of education. An alter-globalization activist, Kahn has been at the forefront of championing and organizing what he
terms, “total liberation politics,” that seek to advocate for nonhuman animals, the biosphere as a sacred entity, and social
justice through systemic transformation. Kahn’s writing and teaching to date have thus sought to synthesize the field of critical
pedagogy with types of ecological and vegan education in order to arrive at a radical education for sustainability that seeks
both individual and collective emancipation. Academia.edu, Critical Pedagogy,Ecoliteracy,& Planetary Crisis, 2010,
http://www.academia.edu/167226/Critical_Pedagogy_Ecoliteracy_and_Planetary_Crisis_The_Ecopedagogy_Movement, AFGA)
Marcuse offers a theory of education as a political methodology that is “more than discussion, more
than teaching and learning and writing” (Kellner, 2005a, p. 85). He feels that unless and until
education “goes beyond the classroom, until and unless it goes beyond the college, the school, the
university, it will remain powerless. Education today must involve the mind and the body, reason and
imagination, intellectual and the instinctual needs, because our entire existence has become the
subject/object of politics, of social engineering” (p. 85). As a result, though a critical ecopedagogy is
concerned with politicizing and problematizing the organizational milieu in which standardized
ecoliteracy now occurs (or fails to occur), the manner in which ecopedagogy is first and foremost a
sociopolitical movement that acts pedagogically throughout all of its varied oppositional political and
cultural activities is illuminated via Marcuse’s influence.
Answers
Exclusionary
Critical pedagogy sacrifices communal connections and moralities are sacrificed to an
individualist critical perspective
Bowers 3
(C. A. Bowers holds a Ph. D. from the University of California in educational studies (with an emphasis on education
and social thought), has taught at the University of Oregon and Portland State University, and was granted
emeritus status in 1998. Currently Courtesy Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon,
“TOWARD AN ECO-JUSTICE PEDAGOGY,” 2003, http://www.cabowers.net/pdf/anecojusticepedagogy2003.pdf,
AGFA)
The third root metaphor they share with the modernizing/industrial traditions of the West frames the individual as
the basic social unit. Following the lead of Freire, the importance of dialogue and participatory decision making have
become more prominent in the writings of critical pedagogy theorists. While they give lip service to dialogue,
anyone who disagrees with them is branded as an enemy. That their thinking is based on the
assumption that represents the individual as the basic social unit can be seen in the way they view
emancipation as the outcome of critical reflection. While critical reflection may be further stimulated through
group interaction, and thus be participatory, the last stage in the process comes down to the subjective
judgment of the individual- even if the decision is to go along with the consensus of the group. Teacher
directed participatory critical reflection is also problematic for reasons that go beyond the ability and inclination of most
teachers to even identify, and put in historical perspective, the traditions essential to morally coherent communities as well as
the traditions that degrade the environment and undermine community. Social groups, even those with a
revolutionary agenda, rely upon a number of traditions: in their shared patterns of
metacommunication and use of root metaphors that are basic to the ideology that guides analysis and
the resulting prescriptions for social change. As critical pedagogy theorists represent all forms of
authority as oppressive, and emancipation as a goal that cannot be limited in any way without
limiting the subjective authority of the individual to rename the world, there is no basis in their
thinking for recognizing forms of moral reciprocity not dependent upon the judgment of the
individual. The perspective of individuals, who have been socialized to view themselves as
autonomous, is the source of final authority. These autonomous individuals, like the individual
described by Sale, experience themselves as free from the constraints of community norms and
responsibility.
The nature of critical discourse excludes marginalized groups
Bowers 3
(C. A. Bowers holds a Ph. D. from the University of California in educational studies (with an emphasis on education
and social thought), has taught at the University of Oregon and Portland State University, and was granted
emeritus status in 1998. Currently Courtesy Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon,
“TOWARD AN ECO-JUSTICE PEDAGOGY,” 2003, http://www.cabowers.net/pdf/anecojusticepedagogy2003.pdf,
AGFA)
The root metaphors of progress, anthropocentrism, and subjectively centered individualism, along with the supporting
assumption that language is a conduit in a sender/receiver model of communication, are fundamental to what Alvin Gouldner
calls the "culture of critical discourse. Gouldner"s explication of the grammar of this form of discourse is not democratic by
virtue of the forms of knowledge that it excludes-which happen to be the same forms of knowledge that critical pedagogy
theorists reject. According to Gouldner, the grammar governing critical discourse includes (1) justifying all assertions; (2) the
mode of justification cannot invoke traditional forms of authority; (3) participants are free to reach their own conclusions based
on the arguments and evidence produced (1979, p. 28). In effect, the grammar of critical discourse advantages
groups who possess an elaborated speech code and the power to dictate the rules governing what
constitute legitimate speech. As Gouldner put it, the culture of critical speech forbids reliance upon
the speaker's person, authority, or status in society to justify his claims. As a result CCD de-authorizes all
speech grounded in traditional societal authority, while it authorizes itself, the elaborated speech variant of the culture of
critical discourse, as the standard of all'serious'speech, p. 29
These traditional sources of authority include mythopoetic narratives that may be the foundation of a
cultural group's moral codes, intergenerational knowledge that carries forward an understanding of the limits and
possibilities of the bioregion, wisdom of elders and mentors, and forms of knowledge that come from direct experience of
negotiating relationships in everyday life. All of these forms of knowledge may not meet the still evolving western standards of
social justice. There are, however, many examples that reflect a deeper understanding of the interdependencies within human
communities-and between humans and natural systems. The key point here is that the rules governing critical inquiry
are elitist in that they do not allow for the voices of cultural groups that do not assume that change,
especially theoretically based change, is always progressive in nature. As Freire and his North American
followers should know, many of the indigenous cultures that rely upon the different forms of knowledge listed above also
practice a form of decision making based on consensus-which was the model of democracy that influenced the organization of
the American political system.
Solvency
Humans do not intentionally damage the environment – it is an unintended result of
sustaining ourselves caused by an inherent flaw in our perception abilities
Orr 2
(David W. Orr David is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College and a
James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont, THE NATURE OF DESIGN: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention, 2002,
Pages 13-14, http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Orr,David/Oxford%20University%20Press%20%20The%20Nature%20of%20Design%20-%20Ecology,%20Culture%20and%20Human%20Intention%20(2002).pdf, AFGA)
Whatever their particular causes, environmental problems all share one fundamental trait: with rare
exceptions they are unintended, unforeseen, and sometimes ironic side effects of actions arising from
other intentions.1 We intend one thing and sooner or later get some- thing very different. We
intended merely to be prosperous and healthy but have inadvertently triggered a mass extinction of
other species, spread pollution throughout the world, and triggered climatic change—all of which
undermines our prosperity and health. Environ- mental problems, then, are mostly the result of a
miscalibration between human intentions and ecological results, which is to say that they are a kind
of design failure.
The possibility that ecological problems are design failures is perhaps bad news because it may signal
inherent flaws in our perceptual and mental abilities . On the other hand, it may be good news. If our
problems are, to a great extent, the result of design failures, the obvi- ous solution is better design, by which 1
mean a closer fit between human intentions and the ecological systems where the results of our intentions are
ultimately played out.
Ecological destruction is inevitable – current civilization is unsustainable and even
prehistoric humans were destructive
Orr 2
(David W. Orr David is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College and a
James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont, THE NATURE OF DESIGN: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention, 2002,
Pages 13-14, http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Orr,David/Oxford%20University%20Press%20%20The%20Nature%20of%20Design%20-%20Ecology,%20Culture%20and%20Human%20Intention%20(2002).pdf, AFGA)
The perennial problem of human ecology is how different cul- tures provision themselves with food,
shelter, energy, and the means of livelihood by extracting energy and materials from their surroundings (Smil 1994). Ecological design describes the ensemble of tech- nologies and strategies by which societies use
the natural world to construct culture and meet their needs. Because the natural world is continually
modified by human actions, culture and ecology are shift- ing parts of an equation that can never be
solved. Nor can there be one correct design strategy. Hunter-gatherers lived on current solar income.
Feudal barons extracted wealth from sunlight by exploiting serfs who farmed the land. We provision
ourselves by mining ancient sunlight stored as fossil fuels. The choice is not whether or not human societies
have a design strategy, but whether that strategy works eco- logically and can be sustained within the regenerative
capacity of the particular ecosystem. The problem of ecological design has become more difficult as the
human population has grown and technology has multiplied. It is now the overriding problem of our time,
affecting virtually all other issues on the human agenda. How and how intelli- gently we weave the human
presence into the natural world will reduce or intensify other problems having to do with ethnic conflicts,
economics, hunger, political stability, health, and human happiness. At the most basic level, humans need
2,200—3,000 calories per day, depending on body size and activity level. Early hunter-gatherers used
little more energy than they required for food. The invention of agriculture increased the efficiency
with which we captured sunlight permitting the growth of cities (Smil 1991, 1994). Despite their dif-
ferences, neither hunter-gatherers nor farmers showed much ecologi- cal foresight. Hunter-gatherers
drove many species to extinction, and early farmers left behind a legacy of deforestation, soil erosion,
and land degradation. In other words, we have always modified our envi- ronments to one degree or
another, but the level of ecological damage has increased with the level of civilization and with the scale and kind
of technology.
The average citizen of the United States now uses some 186,000 calories of energy each day, most of it derived
from oil and coal (Mc- Kibben 1998). Our food and materials come to us via a system that spans the world and
whose consequences are mostly concealed from us. On average food is said to have traveled more than 1,300
miles from where it was grown or produced to where it is eaten (Meadows 1998). In such a system, there is no
conceivable way that we can know the human or ecological consequences of eating. Nor can we know
the full cost of virtually anything that we purchase or discard. We do know, however, that the level of
environmental destruction has risen with the volume of stuff consumed and with the distance it is transported. By
one count we waste more than 1 million pounds of materials per person per year. For every 100 pounds of
product, we create 3,200 pounds of waste (Hawken 1997, 44). Measured as an "ecological footprint" (i.e., the land
required to grow our food, process our organic wastes, sequester our carbon dioxide, and provide our material
needs), the average North American requires some 5 hectares of arable land per person per year
(Wackernagel and Rees 1996). But at the current population level, the world has only 1.2 hectares of
useable land per person. Extending our lifestyle to every- one would require the equivalent of two additional earths!
Looking ahead, we face an imminent collision between a growing population with rising material expectations and ecological
capacity. At some time in the next century, given present trends, the human population will reach or exceed 10
billion, perhaps as many as 15-20 percent of the species on earth will have disappeared forever, and
the effects of climatic change will be fully apparent. This much and more is virtually certain. Feeding,
housing, clothing, and educating another 4-6 billion people and providing employment for an additional 2-4 billion without
wrecking the planet in the process will be a consider- able challenge. Given our inability to meet basic needs of one-
third of the present population, there are good reasons to doubt that we will be able to do better with
the far larger population now in prospect.
Human nature and impossible structural changes impede solvency
Orr 2
(David W. Orr David is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College and a
James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont, THE NATURE OF DESIGN: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention, 2002,
Pages 22-23, http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Orr,David/Oxford%20University%20Press%20%20The%20Nature%20of%20Design%20-%20Ecology,%20Culture%20and%20Human%20Intention%20(2002).pdf, AFGA)
The greatest impediment to an ecological design revolution is not, however, technological or scientific, but
rather human. If intention is the first signal of design, as McDonough puts it, we must reckon with the
fact that human intentions have been warped in recent history by violence and the systematic
cultivation of greed, self- preoccupation, and mass consumerism. A real design revolution will have to
transform human intentions and the larger political, economic, and institutional structure that permitted
ecological degradation in the first place. A second impediment to an ecological design revolution is simply
the scale of change required in the next few decades. All nations, but starting with the wealthiest, will
have to:
• Improve energy efficiency by a factor of 5-10
• Rapidly develop renewable sources of energy
• Reduce the amount of materials per unit of output by a factor of 5-10
• Preserve biological diversity now being lost everywhere
• Restore degraded ecosystems
• Redesign transportation systems and urban areas
• Institute sustainable practices of agriculture and forestry
• Reduce population growth and eventually total population levels
• Redistribute resources fairly within and between generations
• Develop more accurate indicators of prosperity, well- being, health, and security.
To avoid catastrophe, all of these steps must be well under way within the next few decades. Given
the scale and extent of the changes required, this is a transition for which there is no historical
precedent. The century ahead will test, not just our ingenuity, but our foresight, wisdom, and sense of humanity
as well.
Uniqueness
Squo solves – if policy fails, new ideologies will compete until the problem is solved
Bailey and Wilson 9
(Ian Bailey, Geoff A Wilson at the School of Geography, University of Plymouth, “Theorising transitional pathways
in response to climate change: technocentrism, ecocentrism, and the carbon economy,” 6 August 2009,
Environment and Planning, Volume 41, pages 2324 – 2341, AFGA)
The relationship between ideas and policy change has been investigated from various¶ disciplinary vantage
points (see Dryzck, 1997; Hall, 1993; Jordan et al, 2003; Oliver and¶ Pemberton, 2004; Richardson, 2000; Sabatier,
1999), but has produced general agreement¶ about the difficulties of making causal connections
between ideas, ideologies, and policy¶ choices because of the complex interactions between ideas,
interests, actors, and institu-¶ tional processes in public policy making (Bailey, 2007; Howlett and
Lindquist, 2004;¶ Richardson and Watts, 1986). Nevertheless, the mechanisms by which ideas and ideologies
insinuate themselves and interact with other dimensions of decision making¶ remain critical to understanding
policy change (Oliver and Pemberton, 2004).¶ Of these numerous theorisations. Hall's (1993) classic model of
paradigm shifts¶ nevertheless remains one of the most influential. Hall suggested three main orders of¶ policy
change: (i) alterations to the calibration of existing instruments (first-order¶ change); (ii) the adoption of new
instruments (second-order change); and (iii) goal¶ alteration (third-order change). Third-order change. Hall
argued, entails a strategic¶ shift in both the intellectual framework of policy development and.
potentially, the¶ attitudes and ideological beliefs of wider society. This may affect not only policy
goals¶ and instruments, but also policy makers' perceptions of core social and political values.¶ For this
reason, Hall (1993), Carter (2004), and Jordan et al (2003) equated third-order¶ changes to paradigm shifts that
extend change beyond the ordinary policy agenda,¶ in extreme cases to revolutionise the basis and practice of
public policy.
Hall contended that such transitions may occur when a once-stable policy para-¶ digm ceases to provide
adequate solutions to a key policy problem. Policy makers are¶ likely first to address the problem by
adjusting existing instruments [incremental first-¶ order change (Dryzek, 1997)]. If these fail to reassert
paradigm stability by solving the¶ problem, new instruments may be deployed (second-order change);
however, mounting¶ evidence of policy failure may trigger an increasingly open political contest
between¶ competing ideas, the possible displacement of the old paradigm, and the institutional-¶
isation of victorious ideas as a new paradigm. Oliver and Pemberton (2004) argued,¶ however, that Hall's
model failed to capture the capacity of paradigms to defend and¶ reinvent themselves and maintained that
paradigm change is a more iterative, evolu-¶ tionary, and uncertain process. Defence of established paradigms may
include, for¶ instance, partial integration of new ideas without the wholesale rejection of old¶ ones and punctuated
evolution of the paradigm to maintain its broad appeal (Richardson ¶ and Watts, 1986). Although Oliver and
Pemberton conceded that exogenous shocks may¶ force decision makers and society at large to confront the
inadequacies of the prevailing¶ paradigm, their basic contention remained that policy and social change involves a ¶
complex interplay of institutions, actors, interests, policy legacies, and policy styles (also ¶ Richardson, 2000).
Perm
A permutation is the only solution - ecocentrism inevitably separates humans from
nature – we can still solve by recognizing a guardian role
Brown 95
(Charles S. Brown, Professor of Philosophy at Emporia State University,“Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism: the
quest for a new worldview,” The Midwest Quarterly, Volume 36 Issue 2, Winter
1995,http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/suic/AcademicJournalsDetailsPage/DocumentToolsPortletWindow?jsid=79fdd051
43034f2df6ec36b00c195145&action=2&catId=&documentId=GALE%7CA16285431&userGroupName=stignatiushs
&zid=d938c46da9e95a437b50d615699c4f6c, AFGA)
In examining the anti-anthropocentrism of deep ecology from the perspective of the feminist critique and from
Skolimowski's critique, I am led to conclude that some form of anthropocentrism is still a viable option. Any
articulation of anthropocentrism must, however, guard against being biased by some conception of
human nature which is needlessly based on some particular historical or social experience. The
insistence by deep ecologists that humans transcend anthropocentrism may be a noble but impossible
goal. By addressing their moral imperative only to the human community, deep ecologists are
implicitly recognizing that human beings have a unique place in the cosmos; human beings alone are
capable of good and evil. When the deep ecologists ask us to recognize inherent values in nature, they
explicitly demand that we refrain from seeing humanity as the sole source and creators of value but
they implicitly see humanity as standing alone in possessing the power to recognize value beyond the
immediate interests of our species. The challenge for ecological thinking today is to conceptualize
humanity's place in the cosmos in a way that recognizes humanity's unique potential for cultivating such values
as well as thwarting them, without separating humankind from nature in a way that alienates humans
from nature. This potentiality gives humanity a responsibility not shared by other species . As
Skolimowski correctly observes, this human tendency, expressed by deep ecologists, to take responsibility for the
whole of our ecosphere is itself an expression of our anthropocentrism just as is the sense of human justice which
guides the deep ecologists. Perhaps it is the case that anthropocentrism in any form, like human beings
themselves, contains the promise of moral greatness and the peril of moral depravity. A benign form of
anthropocentrism must begin with the recognition that the potentiality for good and evil lies in
human nature itself and cannot be cured simply by adopting a different conceptual system.
Methodology Bad
Equal values to life freeze all decision making and make saving any lives impossible
Brown 95
(Charles S. Brown, Professor of Philosophy at Emporia State University,“Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism: the
quest for a new worldview,” The Midwest Quarterly, Volume 36 Issue 2, Winter
1995,http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/suic/AcademicJournalsDetailsPage/DocumentToolsPortletWindow?jsid=79fdd051
43034f2df6ec36b00c195145&action=2&catId=&documentId=GALE%7CA16285431&userGroupName=stignatiushs
&zid=d938c46da9e95a437b50d615699c4f6c, AFGA)
Deep ecologists regularly urge us to replace our anthropocentrism with an ecocentrism which
advocates egalitarian attitudes toward all entities and forms in nature. In this suggestion, too, there is
both promise and peril. Its promise lies in the hope that we will be able to see ourselves as enjoying a
solidarity with nature. This is an expression of the wholistic motif present in all forms of ecological
thinking. The radical egalitarianism of ecocentrism will, however, collapse into nihilism if no
distinctions of value are made. To claim that everything has an equal and intrinsic value to everything
else is to value nothing above anything else. Due to my place in the evolutionary-ecological system I
cannot value the life of a child in a ghetto tenement and the lives of a family of rats equally. To do so
would be to abdicate all value and leave me unable to act. It is a part of the predicament of every
species to act from its self interest and to choose to spare the life of any innocent person over the
lives of a family of rats in an expression of this evolutionary imperative.
Ecocentrism allows for the sanctioning of human genocide
Brown 95
(Charles S. Brown, Professor of Philosophy at Emporia State University,“Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism: the
quest for a new worldview,” The Midwest Quarterly, Volume 36 Issue 2, Winter
1995,http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/suic/AcademicJournalsDetailsPage/DocumentToolsPortletWindow?jsid=79fdd051
43034f2df6ec36b00c195145&action=2&catId=&documentId=GALE%7CA16285431&userGroupName=stignatiushs
&zid=d938c46da9e95a437b50d615699c4f6c, AFGA)
There is a concern among ecologically minded thinkers that ecocentrism may itself be used as an
ideology of domination. It is widely believed that the current level of human interference with the
ecosphere cannot be justified and needs to be reduced. It has been argued that some forms of
ecocentrism lead to the rejection of individual rights and interests for the good of the whole
ecosphere. It is not an unreasonable concern to suspect that such a worldview could possibly sanction
efforts to quickly reduce human population to ecologically manageable levels. In spite of these
totalitarian dangers the ecocentric model is useful as a foil in the critique of the anthropocentric model.
I can only suggest without argument that the development of truly benign forms of anthropocentrism
will be consistent with benign forms of ecocentrism. Ecological thinking will remain with us and like all
other forms of thinking it is human thinking. If such thinking is to be guided by the sense of justice it
can only be the human sense of justice which serves as its beacon.
Critical Pedagogy Bad
The utopianism of critical pedagogy risks dogmatism, violence, and totalitarianism
Gur-Ze’ev 98
(Ilan Gur-Ze’ev teaches about critical pedagogy at the university of Hafia, EDUCATIONAL THEORY, Volume 48 no. 4,
Fall 1998, https://www.academia.edu/196017/Toward_a_Nonreperssive_Critical_Pedagogy, AFGA)
It seems to me that the thinkers of both the first generation of the Frankfurt School, such as
Adomo and Horkheimer. and of its second generation, such as Juergen Habermas and Karl Otto
Apel. acknowledged the danger of this kind of education. They understood the difference between
negation of social conditions alien to ideals of solidarity, understanding, and transcendence and the positive
utopia of “love”. The later was a false promise in effect produced a kind of “dialogue” reproducing the
inner logic of existing power relations; it prevented transcendence and struggle for autonomy of the
individual. Such an education blocks the possibility of counter-education, which is conditioned by an
alternative critique. Counter-education as a starting point for a non-repressive critique does not rush into
easy optimism, positive utopianism, and “love” of the kind that Freire promised. Within the
framework of such a positive utopia, education constitutes itself either on the self-evidence of the
group or on that of the leader-educator. That is why this kind of Critical Pedagogy is immanently
endangered by overflowing into verbalism, dogmatism, or violence. Since Freire is careful to exclude the
third option, his Critical Pedagogy is practically realized within the horizons of verbalism and
dogmatism, which constantly threaten the project with unreflective acceptance of the false
consciousness and knowledge of the repressed groups, who are unprepared for reflection on the
dialogical process in which they are involved. Freire challenges this threat not within radical
philosophical education but within political half-conservatism.
There are also important emancipatory elements in the anti-elitism of Freire’s and his followers’ Critical Pedagogy.
The fall into the perils of violence is not inevitable in this project, even if it is immanent to the system. This version
of Critical Pedagogy is of much value for groups and classes in the Third World and for marginalized and controlled
groups in the Western world. To a certain degree, this pedagogy even incubates potential refusal of and resistance
to the inner logic of capitalism and current technological progress, but because of its central problems it will
never develop into anything more than a futile revolt standing on precarious foundations for countertotalitarianism.
Freirian critical pedagogy ignores the relationship of power structures to knowledge,
and implicates a violent rejection of power in order to return value to the being
Gur-Ze’ev 98
(Ilan Gur-Ze’ev teaches about critical pedagogy at the university of Hafia, EDUCATIONAL THEORY, Volume 48 no. 4,
Fall 1998, https://www.academia.edu/196017/Toward_a_Nonreperssive_Critical_Pedagogy, AFGA)
Freire’s Critical Pedagogy is foundationalist and positivist, in contrast to his explicit negation of this
orientation. It is a synthesis between dogmatic idealism and vulgar collectivism meant to sound the
authentic voice of the collective, within which the dialogue is supposed to become aware of itself and of the
world. The educational links of this synthesis contain a tension between its mystic-terroristic and its
reflective-emancipatory dimensions. In Freire’s attitude towards Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the terroristic
potential contained in the mystic conception of the emancipated “group”, “people”, or “class” knowledge is
revealed within the concept of a dialogue. Freire introduces Che Guevara as an ideal model for anti-violent
dialogue between partners in the desirable praxis. Che Guevara used a structurally similar rhetoric to
that of Ernst Juenger and National Socialist ideologues on the creative power of war, blood, and sweat in
the constitution of anew man, the real “proletar” in South America. Freire gives this as an example of the
liberation of the oppressed within the framework of new “love” relations which allow to speak the silenced
“voice”. His uncritical understanding of power/knowledge relations draws him to observe the decolonization process in Africa and elsewhere (undoubtedly a progressive development in itself) as suitable
contexts for national realization of Critical Pedagogy.
This is not mere naivity but are adjustment of the terroristic element of his Critical Pedagogy revealed
earlier in his understanding of “Che” as an educator in his alliance with the national systematic
oppression of “liberated” Third World countries. I do not claim that there is no need to support local
struggles for democracy, equality, and developmenting such countries or that it is impossible for them to be
regarded as inferior or undemocratic in principle. My claim does not refer even to a specific country, since it is
possible that in some cases a Third World country will develop a flourishing democracy. However, for historical
reasons, such as Western imperialism, local power structures, cultural traditions, and conceptual apparatuses,
Western-style democracy is not likely to be realized in most of them. My argument refers to Freire’s failure in
the crucial theoretical and political element of the concept of dialogue and the relation between
knowledge and power, consciousness and violence, as presented by Hegel, Marx, Adorno, and Foucault.
That is why his emancipatory Eros sides implicitly with the anti-critical tradition of dogmatic revolutionary
Christianity and voluntaristic revolutionary models of the anarchists, National Socialism, and South America’s
guerrillas. These are contrasted with the explicit devotion of his Critical Pedagogy to dialogue, non-functionalist
Critical Thinking, as well as spiritual maturity. Like the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory, Freire’s project is also
indebted to the negation of present reality. However, from the totality of reality and its power games
it attempts to expropriate knowledge of repressive groups as possessing special validity ; from the
totality governed by power to save a certain “authentic will” and consciousness which are devoted to an erotic
praxis. Within Critical Pedagogy they are supposed to be freed from the dynamics and internal logic of
reality implicitly, in the name of the superiority of the essence of being. In contrast to the Critical Theory’s
concept of love, this kind of love is immanently violent, even in the sense of political terror and the control of
collective and individual consciousness. Its interest in dialogue is not erotic and transcendent but is what Plato
called “popular Eros” (Plato 1927, 344), as manifested by Alcibiades, the great disciple and lover of Socrates. It is
not surprising that Alcibiades became a traitor to his fatherland and even to those with whom he sided. Alcibiades’
political acts of betrayal are but a manifestation of his treachery against “the heavenly Eros,” flaunting the earthly
superiority of “the popular Eros” and rejecting the struggle for spiritual maturity and transcendence. Freire acts as
if he were Alcibiades, finding himself a Socrates who agrees to teach him “the truth”. As in the case of
Alcibiades, this “popular Eros” functions as an impetus to a political power game, seeking its expansion
through philosophical education and entrance into a dialogue that promises warm and easy love, after
being disappointed in transforming “heavenly Eros” into a positive political power/knowledge alternative
My argument about Freire’s project is that non-critical and automatic preference for the self-evident
knowledge of the oppressed to that of the oppressors is dangerous. The self-evidence of “the people”
or a social or cultural group, even when developed to reflectivity by a grand leader-educator, is not
without a terroristic potential. On the one hand, the idea is that the educational leader is responsible for the
success of the project, while by the same token he (not she) has to be a total lover and be totally loved. This is
within the framework of a praxis whose starting point is the self-evidence of the group and earthly politics. This
opens the gate to totalitarianism as earthly heaven. These poles, with violence as their secret connection, are
manifested in other poles in the system, as personified in the identification of Freire with Che Guevara or Fidel
Castro and his own acceptance by his followers as a guru who encourages the groups and creates the horizon of
their dialogues.
Critical Pedagogy equates constant change with progress, and in the process continues
capitalist ideals and ignores complex traditions in cultures
Bowers 3
(C. A. Bowers holds a Ph. D. from the University of California in educational studies (with an emphasis on education
and social thought), has taught at the University of Oregon and Portland State University, and was granted
emeritus status in 1998. Currently Courtesy Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon,
“TOWARD AN ECO-JUSTICE PEDAGOGY,” 2003, http://www.cabowers.net/pdf/anecojusticepedagogy2003.pdf,
AGFA)
The criticisms of capitalism that runs through the writings of critical pedagogy theorists, while basically correct, fails to consider
the deep conceptual patterns that underlie the industrial mode of production and the messianic vision that it rests upon. Had
they carried their analysis to this deeper level, and avoided the mistake of labeling the industrial mode of production and the
incessant search for new markets as an expression of conservatism, they might have recognized the double bind of basing their
prescriptions for emancipation on the same root metaphors that now serve as the conceptual underpinnings of economic
globalization and a world monoculture. For example, the root metaphor (meta-schema) that represents change
as moving in a linear, progressive direction is as fundamental to the current promoters of economic
globalization as it is to the thinking of critical pedagogy theorists. Indeed, this assumption provides
the moral legitimacy for their arguments that changes in the very fabric of cultural life should be
guided by the critical reflection and moral insights of a cultural group's youngest members. It also
provides legitimacy to a totalizing way of thinking that represents_all_customs (traditions) as
oppressive and the source of injustice. In effect, the critical reflection of youth is to be the basis of
final judgment, but this does not involve any form of accountability to the older or future generations.
To recall Freire's warning, unless each generation renames the world the fullest expression of humanity will not be realized.
And each generation of critical thinking youth, according to the root metaphor the critical pedagogy
thinkers take-for-granted, will represent a progressive step beyond the previous generation of critical
thinkers. The assumption that equates change with progress, which is held by most Western thinkers as well as by elites in
other cultures who have been educated in Western universities, leads to viewing the loss of intergenerational
knowledge and networks of mutual aid as a necessary part of becoming modern. But this Western
assumption is increasingly being criticized by non-establishment intellectuals in Third World countries. The
majority of the world's population, according to Gerald Berthoud, is being urged to accept the modern idea that "everything
that can be made must be made, and then sold" and that this view of everyday reality is being "unshakably structured by the
omnipotence of technoscientific truth and the laws of the market." (1992, p. 71) The social disorganization that results
from displacing local traditions with the context- free traditions of a technologically ordered and
consumer dependent lifestyle is highlighted in Berthoud's observation that what must be
universalized though development is a cultural complex centered around the notion that human life,
if it is to be fully lived, cannot be constrained by limits of any kind. To produce such a result in traditional
societies, for whom the supposedly primordial principle of boundless expansion in technological and economic domains is
generally alien, presupposes overcoming symbolic and moral 'obstacles', that is, ridding these societies of various inhibiting
ideas and practices such as myths, ceremonies, rituals, mutual aid, networks of solidarity, and the like. The conceptual
schema that organizes thought in ways that view all forms of change as progressive, which the critical
pedagogy theorists share with the proponents of economic and technological development, leads to a
totally distorted view of tradition. And this distorted understanding leads, in turn, to not recognizing
the complex nature of traditions within different cultures, and to not understanding that tradition is
simply another word for cultural patterns that have been handed down over three to four generations. These
patterns range from technologies that enable us to print books, grow and prepare food, to being judged by a jury of peers.
These patterns, within our own culture as well as in non-Western cultures, may have been wrongly constituted in the first place,
they may benefit certain groups over others and they may change too slowly; but there are also traditions that we rely
upon that can be lost before people are aware of the implications. The traditions of privacy that
computers are now undermining are an example of the latter. The key point here is that the root
metaphor that equates change with progress frames the thinking of critical pedagogy theorists in a
way that fails to reconcile the authority they place in the critical reflection of students with cultural
traditions that are sources of individualized empowerment, community self-sufficiency, and social
justice. Students may not be fully understood, appreciate, or even recognize these traditions when their experience is largely
shaped by the media, teachers, and their peer group. A double bind created by the taken-for-granted status that the root
metaphor has in the thinking of critical pedagogy theorists is that they are part of a anti-tradition tradition of thinking that goes
back hundreds of years-and is an example of a tradition that needs to be reconstituted in light of the ecological crisis and the
loss of cultural diversity.
Critical pedagogy has abandoned applicability – proved by the lack of empirical use
Gur-Ze’ev 5
(Ilan Gur-Ze’ev teaches about critical pedagogy at the university of Hafia, “Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy and
Diaspora Today:Toward a New Critical Language in Education,” Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today,ed. Ilan
Gur-Ze’ev, 2005, https://www.academia.edu/195758/Critical_Theory_and_Critical_Pedagogy_Today__Toward_a_New_Critical_language_in_Education, AFGA)
In itself this is nothing to regret or to be sorry for. What is regrettable, however, is that so much of Critical
Pedagogy has become dogmatic, and sometimes anti-intellectual, while on the other hand losing its
relevance for the people it conceived as victims to be emancipated. Why is this regrettable? Because the
erotic telos of Critical Pedagogy insists on poetic, religiously anti-dogmatic, worthy Life as a manifestation of Love,
not of fear or of heated critique. Because it symbolizes the quest for freedom and refusal of meaningless suffering
in face of the loss of naïve intimacy with the world and with the truth of Being, and because, sometimes, it actually
enhances equality and resists oppression; even if actually it normally promotes new forms of oppression and
enhances new ways for self-forgetfulness . In detaching itself from the rich works of Adorno, Benjamin,
Horkheimer, and the other thinkers of Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy in its different versions has
abandoned its attunement to Life itself in so many respects. Currently next to no attempts are being
made to confront Critical Pedagogy with reality in actual, enduring, pedagogical engagements. No
wonder then that next to no attempts are being made to articulate an educational framework for
critical teachers training either, and certainly no ongoing practice of teachers training at schools. Important
exceptions here are the theoretical and practical contributions of Kenneth Zeichner, 7 Daniel Liston, and Andreas
Gruschka.
All this, in face of deceptive calls from the various symbols, strivings, and technologies of globalizing
capitalism, and alongside the actuality of anti-reflective and ethnocentric-oriented construction of
collective identities of many of the oppressed groups that are so enthusiastically idolized by many
disciples of Critical Pedagogy. These are but fragmentary examples of the detachment of current Critical
Pedagogies from the wholeness, depths, abysses, dangers, and richness of Life. Critical Pedagogy contributed more
than its fair share in an ongoing attempt to be relevant to political challenges, especially for marginalized and
oppressed groups. This is an attempt of vital importance, especially when it is conducted in the wider context of
the current crisis in the stance of humanistic-oriented knowledge and its dynamics (as in the work of Burbules,
Critical pedagogy and its related disciplines have become detached from the lives of
oppressed peoples
Gur-Ze’ev 5
(Ilan Gur-Ze’ev teaches about critical pedagogy at the university of Hafia, “Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy and
Diaspora Today:Toward a New Critical Language in Education,” Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today,ed. Ilan
Gur-Ze’ev, 2005, https://www.academia.edu/195758/Critical_Theory_and_Critical_Pedagogy_Today__Toward_a_New_Critical_language_in_Education, AFGA)
Present-day Critical Pedagogy faces, as the authors of this collection manifest, challenges of different
kinds, and it responds to these challenges in various, different, and at times conflicting, ways. Among
these challenges the contributors to this collection note globalizing capitalism, the introduction of
new technologies in communication, the change in the stance and function of knowledge, the dramatic
shift in the structure of society, and the transformation of relations between work, finance, and the
state in the era of the MacWorld. Old conceptions of class-struggle and traditional emancipatory sensitivities,
vocabularies, and practices are deconstructed, consumed, reified and neutralized in the present historical
moment, while marginalization, suffering, injustice, and structural blocking from cultural and political capital
become ever more sophisticated and harsh for ever more people around the globe. Under these circumstances
normalizing education becomes a vital element of the oppression, not solely as part of the direct and
indirect violence inflicted on the poor, the homeless, minority races, ethnicities, cultures, and other
Others. It becomes at the same time an almost omnipotent de-humanizing power by the minorities, the
oppressed, and the marginalized against their own Others, against their oppressive powers and against free spirit,
thinking, and Life. Critical Pedagogy, in its different versions, has usually failed to meet this challenge of
emancipatory pedagogy, becoming part and parcel of normalizing education.
Its identification with the marginalized and the oppressed, and its commitment to a positive Utopia,
allowed it to sharpen its critique and become instrumental in many academic radical circles.
Committed to its various positive Utopias in the fields of feminist, multi-cultural, race, class, post-colonial,
and queer struggles, the different versions of Critical Pedagogy have more than once become dogmatic,
ethnocentrist, and violent. Concurrently, they have become increasingly popular in ever widening
academic circles, and decreasingly relevant to the victims it is committed to emancipate. What is to be
done, for that which the different versions of Critical Pedagogy treat to be seriously re-approached? For a genuine
rejection of injustice and the nearness to truth as Love and as violence, as affluence and as scarcity/ fright, as the
presence of Eros and the presence of Tanathus , not to be abandoned in favor of fashionable, domesticating radical
rhetoric? The various critical attempts to respond to this challenge are the alpha and the omega of this collection.
It is the challenge which the authors of this collected works committed themselves to take up, while dialogically
relating to each others elaborations and suggestions. I shall not try here to outline each of these attempts, or to
evaluate them. Let the texts present themselves to their readers. It may be of value, however, to try and offer
some remarks, in light of my own philosophy, as a gateway to the possible birth of a response to the present
challenges critical education is faced with when true to itself. I limit myself to six aspects of this manifold and rich
challenge, from the perspectives of Diasporic Philosophy and counter-education
AT Critical Pedagogy Doesn’t Apply
All offshoots of critical pedagogy are utopian and allow the violence of individual
power to proliferate
Gur-Ze’ev 98
(Ilan Gur-Ze’ev teaches about critical pedagogy at the university of Hafia, EDUCATIONAL THEORY, Volume 48 no. 4,
Fall 1998, https://www.academia.edu/196017/Toward_a_Nonreperssive_Critical_Pedagogy, AFGA)
“Critical Pedagogy” has many versions today, as does “critical theory”. With important differences
between critical theories and the variety of “critical pedagogies”, identifying the problems of current
Critical Pedagogies becomes problematic, and the development of a positive utopian alternative
Critical Pedagogy becomes impossible. For all their differences, all current versions of Critical
Pedagogy function as part and parcel of normalizing education and its violence. In this article I suggest an
alternative critical education as counter-education. Within counter-education no room exists for a positive Utopia,
and it does not promise collective emancipation under present circumstances, but counter-education suggests
possibilities for identifying, criticizing, and resisting violent practices of normalization, control, and reproduction
practices in a system which uses human beings as its agents and victims. Counter-education opens possibilities for
refusing to abandon human potential to become other than directed by the system and the realm of self-evidence.
It enables a chance - which is to be struggled for again and again - to challenge normalizing education in all its
version, including Critical Pedagogy. As I shall show, positive utopianism is the main weakness of current
critical pedagogies that challenge the present philosophical, cultural, and social reality. Philosophical
negativism, I argue, is a pre-condition for the development of a non-repressive Critical Pedagogy, which is
essentially different from normalizing education. Current versions of Critical Pedagogy lack this negative
dimension; all are united by a commitment to positive utopianism, even when explicitly denying it.
With all their differences, today’s versions of Critical Pedagogy are all based of weak, controlled, and
marginalized collectives for their common optimistic view of the possibilities of changing reality and
securing unaothoritative emancipation, love and happiness: they forget that the violence of selfevidence and power are the main obstacles to the human’s transcendence and realization of her/his
potential autonomy. The possibility and the nature of a non-repressive pedagogy is at the heart of my project.
Here I suggest an initial step: to explore the exact relation between the philosophical framework and the social
tasks of Critical Pedagogy. I begin by concentrating on the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School as a historical and
conceptual framework for developing anon-repressive Critical Pedagogy. I hope thereby to encourage a countereducation to hegemonic education and to oppose the dogmas and illusions of the hegemonic versions of Critical
Pedagogy.