Like many other scholars who are concerned about the environmental crises . . .
that are threatening humankind and the earth in general, environmental studies scholar David Orr sees the roots of the problem in the beliefs that inform our educational, social, and economic practices. Accordingly, Orr argues that simply integrating environmental studies into the existing curriculum is essentially worthless as a strategy for addressing the environmental crises we face, for such a strategy does not address the fundamental problem of our worldview – a worldview that, I have argued in this webtext, grows out of our prevailing Western conception of self as fundamentally intellectual and separate from the physical world. For Orr, "questions of environmental education cannot be separated from the broad issues of education" (144). Thus, he argues, "education can no longer afford to ignore two challenges arising from the environmental perspective":
The first is the challenge of interrelatedness. We have structured education and the entire knowledge enterprise along Cartesian lines stressing reductionism, discrete entities, literality, and simple causation, and must now shift to perceive patterns, context, systems, and complex networks of causation that span the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Further, we must learn to overcome the parochialism inherent in nationality, geography, generation, sex, species, race, and class. If it can be done at all, this revolution in thought, perception, and behavior will go far beyond the Copernican or Darwinian revolutions, whose effects were scarcely felt at the level of daily life, politics, or international affairs.I agree, which is in large part why I believe it is so important to understand and challenge the prevailing Western sense of self, which I have suggested enables the very crises that Orr alludes to in this passage. Like Orr, I believe we can accomplish this change through careful but radical education reform, which can draw on distinct but related movements, such as ecofeminism, for its ideas and momentum.
The second challenge posed by environmentalism concerns the essential misconception of our role in the natural world. For the past five hundred years our sciences, social sciences, and humanities alike have been committed to extending and celebrating the human domination of nature. The idea that we can dominate nature, however, is proving to be both a dangerous and paradoxical illusion. The ecological implications of the philosophy of domination now loom ahead like the icebergs before the Titanic. [. . .] Any change in this course will require that we rapidly transform values, institutions, and the way we define and transmit knowledge. (145)
Teaching With Technology for a Sustainable Future | Works Cited