Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, & Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement (review)

How do we get ourselves out of the ecological crisis? How do we steer societies in a different direction? How do we transform our unsustainable ways? These are the questions every student of global environmental politics wants to answer. Richard Kahn, in this nicely written and theoretically sophisticated book, tells us that a key route to transformation rests with ecopedagogy. We need to critically analyze contemporary conditions and instill a sense of emancipatory agency in our fellow citizens in the service of minimizing injustice and securing a livable future.

Creating a sustainable world is not simply a matter of greening business, designing better products, using less, or even instilling a sense of ecological care. We are too embedded in economic, social, cultural and political systems that pervert knowledge, fuel wholesale injustice, and otherwise cultivate an ideology of environmental and social domination for marginal efforts to make a real difference. We need to dismantle techno-capitalism, overturn anthropocentrism, root-out patriarchy, undermine corporate globalization, break free of overconsumption, and bring an end to the whole frenetic, instrumental productivism that animates much western life and causes injustice and degradation throughout the world. Kahn argues that our systems are mutually reinforcing and only a pedagogical politics of critique and wholesale transformation has a chance to make a genuine contribution to a sane and safe future.

Kahn looks for rifts in three spheres of collective life: cosmological, technological and organizational. The cosmological refers to our worldviews—the stories we tell ourselves about ultimate value, and humanity’s relationship to the more-than-human world. Kahn suggests that we can identify chinks in the narratives of our lives by noticing that not all cultures are or have been, say, anthropocentric or motivated by instrumental rationality. Moreover, in every system there are ideational contradictions that allow alternative thought and practice at the margins. Using the ancient Greek concept of padeia—the educational ideal of forming knowledgeable citizens to create and sustain democratic cultures—Kahn calls for exploiting these entryways and turning them into sites of resistance and transformation.

Similar contradictions exist in the technological realm. Kahn suggests that, in the service of a green world, we need not ditch technology completely but must find ways of gaining distance from its contemporary uses, and reorient its productive trajectory. Today, technology has become more than a tool. It constitutes a way of being in the world—defined primarily by functional ends and market-based dynamics—such that we have become defined by our tools. Kahn calls for cultivating alternative and multiple technological literacies. He does so by using the pedagogical insights of Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich to articulate a transformative technopolitics in line with green politics.

Kahn’s final site for ecopedagogy is organizational. He criticizes the ways in which dominant structures organize knowledge and practices to reinforce a world bent on ecological destruction. Kahn contrasts what he calls “WMS” (“Western modern science” and “white male science”) with “TEK” (“traditional ecological knowledge”), and illustrates the many contributions TEK can make to reorganizing collective life in the service of environmental wellbeing and social justice. He does so by bringing in the only empirical case of the book, the Shundahai Network Peace Camp near the Nevada nuclear test site, and discussing (and romanticizing) its social practices.

Kahn’s book will sound familiar to many of us. Its comprehensive diagnosis, in which the causes of environmental harm course through and reinforce the multiple ideational and material structures, and its prescription: wholesale transformation, seem “right” given the magnitude and complexities of our current ecological and social predicament. Furthermore, he uses enough inspiring, progressive, politically correct vocabulary so that we can feel sufficiently hip in his company. But the argument’s very familiarity sounds a rather hollow ring. Yes, our problems are monumental; and, yes, social structures are mutually moving us toward ecological disaster. But it is increasingly unclear what to do with this kind of analysis. It is all well and good to talk about a pedagogy that sensitizes people to...