Hospicing The Necrophilic Civilization: Can Educational Policy Centered Around Eco-literacy Birth A Biophilic Society?

• In Event: Eco-pedagogy, place, & permaculture in the age of post-truth: how do we midwife a biophilic society?

Proposal

While a great deal of policy-work and language in development and international and comparative education has taken on the mantle of discussing sustainability, the paradigms in which we tend to operate educationally that reproduce these structures remain (Kahn 2010). This is true even as entire ecosystems are killed off within the coming years (Steffen et al. 2015). It is estimated that as many as 75% of mammalian species could go extinct within the next two centuries and that plastic could outweigh fish in our oceans by the middle of this one (Barnosky et al. 2011).

Andreotti asks “What kind of education is necessary for the genuine expansion of horizons and constellations of knowledges, affect, lived experiences, sensibilities, temporalities, rhythms, metabolic processes, and possibilities of co(existence)?” (CIES 2018). To this I add, how do we hospice a dying way of being and midwife the birth of something that doesn’t come at the cost of millions of years of evolutionary diversity? What would educational policies look like if we took the moral responsibilities to other life forms on this planet as the utmost importance?

A beginning of one answer lies within the epistemologies of eco-pedagogies. Eco-pedagogy is a synthesis of various fields. It’s conceptualizations are rooted in Freirean consciousization between the social and environmental violence and attending to the embedded links therein that are often ignored (Antunes and Gadotti 2005; Misiaszek 2011). It also borrows heavily from the hard sciences of ecology/biology and exploring the dynamic human relationships to such systems (Mollison 1988) and builds on these ideas by introducing the idea of biophilia (Margulis 1999). Lastly it adds in a spiritual element with the idea of inter-being. An idea meant to convey the notion that all things are part of a greater whole – and that the Earth and her ecosystems – is part of one vast interconnected being (Nhat Hanh 1987).

In this presentation I share some findings regarding the degree to which nature impacts humanity, including Louv introducing the idea of nature deficit disorder (2008) or to the more spiritually driven essays that beg us to reconsider what it means to be human without other-than-human beings to share a planet with (Ingerman et al. 2016). While many of us are aware that climate change exists, species are going extinct, and in general the trajectory and news for the biospheres “isn’t so good” – a major component driving the reproduction of the civilizational systems that create the degradation of our environment is the deeply held state of denial we have about the details of the actual state of existence. It isn’t possible to address a problem we don’t have the emotional or psychological energy to acknowledge, and therefore perhaps point to a potentially much more cynical policyscape than we would like to admit. It calls into question basic assumptions about what can be fixed, what “deserves” to be fixed, and what instead should be “composted”, and allowed to die such that other life may go on. Whither education in such a world?

Author

• David Epstein, University at Albany