Teaching Environmental Literacy: Across Campus and Across the Curriculum

Final Thoughts

Final Thoughts Eduardo S. Brondizio Anthropology When compared to the array of civic and educational challenges in front of U.S. students today—immigration and economic crisis, evolutionism vs. creationism, marriage and family, religion and government—one may rightfully question whether an emphasis on environmental literacy is indeed appropriate for centers of higher education. What makes teaching environmental literacy relevant in the midst of economic and ideological divides that are currently shaping the world in general and the United States in particular? The answer, one may argue, is that environmental literacy serves as a means to engage students and the community in general in discussing and learning about the economic, ecological, geopolitical , ideological, civic, cultural, and historical interconnections of our changing world. As we learn to accept the facts and implications of global climate change, for example, we understand that new forms of thinking about energy, food, transportation, and our sense of place, as well as about global commodity markets and resource ownership are required. Final Thoughts ⭈ 193 Environmental literacy is an exercise in balancing cultural, economic, and environmental values. Several of the concepts presented in this volume fall exactly in between these notions. For instance, one can hardly separate concepts like sustainability and equity from cultural notions of well-being and development , not to say modernity and progress. In this sense, few topics serve the exercise of teaching critical thinking and civic engagement—prime tasks of institutions of higher education—so well as environmental issues. No matter the field or professional goal, students provided with the opportunity to become environmentally literate will face and address questions relevant to their lives, daily choices, and ethics, as well as those of the society as a whole. Environmental literacy is an exercise in overcoming simplification and generalizations, and in thinking outside the box. We hope that our three themes (ecosystem services, ecological footprint, and sustainability) allow students to reflect and think critically about the interface between environment and di√erent aspects of society, regardless of their background. Likewise, these concepts provide heuristic tools for students to understand the aggregated impact of their individual choices and political positions. One of the key challenges of environmental literacy is to overcome ideological stereotyping. Environmental issues in general and environmentalism in particular invite popular, as well as political and academic, profiling. While much improvement has happened since the 1980s Brundtland commission articulation of a ‘‘business friendly’’ concept for sustainable development, myth and misinformation still tend to surface during times of high economic and political stakes. How many times have you heard the expressions ‘‘environmental whacko’’ or ‘‘greedy businessman’’ during the past few years? Stereotyping has been a dominant tool of discourse, ideology, and confrontation about environmental issues, and most often a successful way of diverging productive discussion into political propaganda. Most people lack the basic information and historical understanding of society’s environmental problems to identify and properly react to stereotyping . As a result, labels tend to be reinforced, di√erences highlighted, and solutions weakened. University campuses are no exception, and students tend to reproduce these views and label ‘‘others’’ as unethical, dreamers, unrealistic, or selfish. One of the goals of environmental literacy is to recast these debates through a process of fostering critical thinking while respecting di√erences in values and political positions. Essays in this volume as well as our classroom experiences show that in most cases debates based on simplistic, dichotomist positions are empty of meaning, content, and solutions. A prime challenge to be overcome through environmental literacy is the tendency to teach complex problems through single explanatory variables and simple causality. It is commonplace to put emphasis on variables such as population growth, poverty, or economic maximization to explain a variety of environ- 194 ⭈ eduardo s. brondizio mental problems (e.g., deforestation, pollution, resource depletion), at a variety of scales (e.g., county, country, biome, global). From debates between developing and developed countries during the 1972 Stockholm conference on human environment (e.g., poverty vs. pollution) to today’s debates about protected areas (e.g., use vs. conservation), there is a tendency to favor simple explanations to environmental problems over explanations that include historical, political, economic , and geopolitical aspects of society and environment. As some essays in this volume illustrate, environmental problems have historical dimensions and vary according to level of analysis and time-scale. Simple explanations, especially when applied to other parts of the world...