Education for Environmental Values and the Spectre of Eco-Fascism

• In Event: Environmental Education and the Eco-Fascism Problem

Abstract

According to Sandell et al. (2011, pp. 130-131), how we interpret and evaluate various environmental situations are of ‘vital importance’ not just to ‘the future development of society’ but to how we conceive of, and practice, an education for these times. Historically, suspicions of ecofascistic tendencies have plagued various justifications of ‘ecopedagogy’, particularly when they memorialize inspirations from Deep Ecology, bioregionalism and Romanticism as endorsements of the ecophenomenological. Such ‘currents’ in environmental education—albeit much less frequent in practice than in their discursive instantiations (Benavides Lahnstein & Peñaloza, 2022) —risk a tell-tale obfuscation; their haecceity rendered little more than ungeneralisable academic experiments that have seldom been tested against the realities of mass education: aspirational ecopedagogical ‘aura’ be damned (Snir, 2021)! Their apparent popularity among members of the ‘chattering classes’ of so-called radical left and aspirant members of the intelligentsia of green movements enthralled to particular versions of ecologism (Pepper, 1996) or connectedness to place (Ardoin, 2006) is further cause for denunciation; their ‘privilege’ (be it of proposal or proponent) quickly exposed by close readings of their indexing: to constructs, conditions and ‘turns’ (Peterson, 2021) simply out of reach to everyday educators (Di Paolantonio, 2021).

That education has a clear socialization function has become an emerging arena for further skirmishes in the so-called ‘culture wars’. Confrontations are quick to flare up from recognizing that values work as building blocks of culture, are central to personal belief systems, offer codes and predictors of behaviour, and provide goals for educational processes and outcomes. Thus resistance across the political spectrum (conceptual, ideological and civil) is inevitable, particularly to unqualified calls for education to be for social justice, ecological sustainability, intergenerational equity and civic participation (Wenden, 2004). However, even recent ‘recommendations’ summarizing intellectual resources in the Global North about ecophenomenological praxis in environmental education (e.g. Payne, 2022) continue to avoid engaging questions of shared and democratic bases for affinity through education. Thus the looming spectre of ecofascism: it too easily haunts positions and practices when minority positions seek to replace majoritarian ends-in-view, or are turbocharged by survivalist and apocalyptic impulses in these cataclysmic times. In the final analysis, both suggest salvation/enlightenment is simply available to the few, not the many; a logic of an economy of ideas built too quickly around notions and acts of correcting and cleansing?

Historically, radical environmentalism has been argued to oppose ecofascism by emphasising class-based considerations, particularly in understanding the intersections of environmental injustices nested as these are within the broader project of ‘emanicipation writ large’ (Eckersley, 1992, p. 53). Thus for environmental education to effectively and ethically partner with ‘critical social science’, such lines of analysis would suggest it is neither sufficient nor ethical to retreat into narrating partial histories, even if one is to call out anti-rational or anti-scientific fascisms as part of the narrative of (post)critical education. Rather, it requires working towards a dialectical and dialogical form of educational praxis, one that has the potential to release the learner from whatever the best intentions, shortcomings, commitments or truths of the (eco)educator are.

Author

• Alan D. Reid, Monash University
  Presenting Author