David A. Greenwood

Environmental education in a neoliberal climate

This introduction to a special issue of Environmental Education Research explores how environmental education is shaped by the political, cultural, and economic logic of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, we suggest, has become the dominant social imaginary, making particular ways of thinking and acting possible while simultaneously discouraging the possibility and pursuit of others. Consequently, neoliberal ideals promoting economic growth and using markets to solve environmental and economic problems constrain how we conceptualize and implement environmental education. However, while neoliberalism is a dominant social imaginary, there is not one form of neoliberalism, but patterns of neoliberalization that differ by place and time. In addition, while neoliberal policies and discourses are often portrayed as inevitable, the collection shows how these exist as an outcome of ongoing political projects in which particular neoliberalized social and economic structures are put in place. Together, the editorial and contributions to the special issue problematize and contest neoliberalism and neoliberalization, while also promoting alternative social imaginaries that privilege the environment and community over neoliberal conceptions of economic growth and hyper-individualism.

Culture, Environment, and Education in the Anthropocene

This chapter suggests iconic language that may help to bridge cultural and ecological approaches to education in our times. First, human beings live in and have created through their ecological impact a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. The changes that the human species are bringing to our earth are dramatic from many scientific perspectives. Second, for decades scientists have understood that our ecological impacts are a function of a growth-without-limits paradigm, and that impact is the product of increasing population and increasing levels of affluence. If unqualified economic growth is problematic, the iconic expression IPAT should remind us that our economic paradigm comes with consequences. Third, students of culture need to uncover how the story of economic growth is rooted in a longer history of colonization. Fourth, when connecting economic development to the exploitation of land and people, Aboriginal experience should be acknowledged to better understand the living legacy of colonization. A cultural-studies approach to education that is responsive to the Anthropocene, that recovers a sense of the relationship between economics and ecological impact, and that interrupts the colonial mindset, is an approach that will seek to decolonize and reinhabit self, relationship, place, and planet.

What is Outside of Outdoor Education? Becoming Responsive to Other Places

In this essay review of Wattchow and Browns (2011) A Pedagogy of Place: Outdoor Education for a Changing World, the meaning of outdoor education is explored in relation to parallel traditions such as environmental and place-based education. I examine the relative usefulness of adjectival educations related to the environment, and suggest the need for greater dialogue and understanding between like traditions, with an emphasis on the correspondences between nature (land)/culture, local/global, indoors/outdoors.

Mitigation and Adaptation: Critical Perspectives toward Digital Technologies in Place-Conscious Environmental Education.

This paper explores the tension for educators between the proliferation of mobile, digital technologies, and the widely held belief that environmental learning is best nurtured through place-based approaches that emphasize direct experience. We begin by offering a general critique of technology in culture and education, emphasizing what is at stake in the new era of digital tools and climate crisis. Building an analogy to the problem of climate change, the second part of the paper takes an “adaptation and mitigation” stance toward technology in environmental learning, and offers critical conceptual guidelines for policy and practice. Invoking language that describes the worldwide response to the climate crisis is a reminder of how the everyday devices we rely on are embedded in political, economic, and ecological webs of contention. Ultimately, we hope that describing some promising adaptations of these tools and their limitations will enable learners to better understand the relation between people, place, and planet, as well as the relation of people to their tools.

Mushrooms and sweetgrass: A biotic harvest of culture and place-based learning

ABSTRACT What can two books do? This critical review essay explores Tsings (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, and Kimmerers (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. The benefits of environmental learning through deep reading are examined. Each of these books works to solidify and expand commitments to particular environmental and cultural themes, most notably the combined power of natural history and cultural study, and the tensions between our hyper-mobile, immigrant global culture and the desire many of us have to stay put long enough to truly belong.

Telling Our Own Stories

The early nineteenth century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously wrote, “The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what no body yet has thought about that which everyone sees.” This aphorism aptly describes how our eyes might be opened wider to the many ways that everyday social and ecological relationships can be revealed, clarified, and potentially transformed through geographic thinking, specifically through diverse enactments of an activist critical geography.