Guest blog by Stephen Sterling, Emeritus Professor of Sustainability Education, University of Plymouth
I see myself as an environmentalist. And have done so ever since my early teens – which was a long time ago. So why would I be writing a blog with such a title? On the face of things, perhaps it seems a bit contradictory – a little sacrilegious even – amongst fellow greenies.
I was prompted to write because of the Chief Inspector of Schools’ recent statement, on launching Ofsted’s Annual Report. Amanda Spielman worried there were efforts to ‘commandeer’ schools and the curriculum to cover worthy social issues, including environmental causes and tackling racism. Well, that view probably needs an additional blog response, but it’s what she said next that bothered me. Which was, ‘I think my message would be – don’t revise the curriculum in the context of a single issue or purpose’. Such as the environment, she meant. On the face of it perhaps, this sounds a reasonable argument. But it arises from a basis of misunderstanding and misapprehension which is widely shared.
The problem is that word environment, or more precisely, the meaning we attach to it. It’s a helpful label for sure, and it carries a perception and conveys certain ideas which are widely recognised. So when the newscaster says, ‘over to our Environment Correspondent’ we have a reasonable idea of his/her territory.
But let’s dip a little further. Here’s a question: where do you think ‘the environment’ starts. At the end of your fingertips maybe, or above your head? Or outside your front door? Or where the urban area meets the country?
See the problem…? Then what about your family, or friend, partner, colleague – they are part of your environment, clearly, but so also you are part of theirs. So if on reflection, the environment seems to be everywhere, then it raises the question, ‘what isn’t the environment?’ The everyday answer might be that it’s the indoors, or perhaps the town or city. But that’s an unsatisfactory position, because they are clearly environments too. And yet, commonly ‘the environment’ is perceived as being an ‘externality’. Crucially, and disastrously, this misapprehension has been a guiding assumption in conventional economics for decades. So, this calls for some urgent re-thinking, and re-perception. In fact, such re-thinking is not new.
Kenneth Boulding was an American economist who developed the metaphor of ‘Spaceship Earth’ and was one of the founders of ecological economics. In one of his books he stated:
We must look at the world as a whole…as a total system of interacting parts. There is no such thing as an ‘environment’ if by this we mean a surrounding system that is independent of what goes on inside it (1978, p.31).
That was written more that forty years ago, but this one statement totally flips our common understanding of environment, and the disconnected sense of reality that it perpetuates. Why? Because Boulding’s perspective puts paid to the idea we are or can be in any sense separate from the biosphere. We are, to use his term, ‘inside it’. The trouble is, it is customary – almost to think of ourselves as separate from the environment, so for example we think and talk of ‘people and nature’, and ‘economy and ecology’ as if they were unrelated.
At a deep level of our psyche, this sense of separateness and lack of identification with the Other can lead to feelings of alienation, or worse, allows us to exploit and misuse the natural world. Nature is then easily regarded as a resource primarily, and ‘nice to have’ secondarily –rather than as the very foundation of all life. So ‘people versus nature’ and ‘economy versus ecology’ seem plausible notions in debate. But in his classic 1973 book ‘Small is Beautiful’, the radical economist E.F. Schumacher wrote: ‘Modern man talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.’
Nearly fifty years later, with unprecedented fires, storms, floods, loss of species – and now a devastating global pandemic – Schumacher’s words seem particularly prescient. One feels he would feel sadly proven correct, if he turned up now in a time machine.
So this is a major problem of language and perception. These two aspects of meaning-making are closely related. Is there a better description of the complex and intertwined reality of human and natural systems? Nearly forty years ago, the educator and systems thinker Donella Meadows (1982, p.101) made a brave attempt with the following:
The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological-social-psychological-economic system.
Full marks for accuracy! But really problematic otherwise – it’s not exactly a handy label for widespread use. Alternatively, sustainability scientists have for some years been employing the terminology ‘socio-ecological systems’ – whereby people, communities, economies, societies, cultures are viewed as embedded parts of the biosphere: they both shape it and are shaped by it. The economy is a subsystem of society, which in turn is a subsystem of the biosphere. So therefore, the health and functioning of the biosphere is a precondition of human flourishing from local to global scales. This is incontrovertible, as is becoming ever more evident.
This holistic framing – which views humanity as unavoidably integrated within the larger biosphere system – helps us go beyond the narrow perspective of the human-nature dualism that has dangerously skewed our understanding and consciousness for so many years. As I have argued (Sterling 2010), ‘we are not on the Earth, we are in the Earth, we are inextricably actors in the Earth’s systems and flows, constantly affecting and being affected by the whole thing, natural and human, in dynamic relation.’ There are echoes here of calls to shift our consciousness and thinking from anthropocentrism and egocentrism towards ecological intelligence and ecocentrism – which is the concern of such movements as ecopsychology.
Encouragingly (if a little perversely) the knot of ‘wicked problems’ now affecting the world is giving rise to a changed sense of ourselves as embedded participants in the drama of our times that is now playing out. Something seems to be shifting. No longer separate bystanders, there is a growing sense of our grave responsibility for the future, and an awareness that all actions have systemic effects or consequences—from minuscule to massive, from micro-second to long term. And that ‘business as usual’ is no longer a viable option. This realisation is central to what may be termed a participatory or ecological worldview and I have long argued that this sense of ourselves and of our planet is essential to securing a liveable future. The urgent need for such awakening has been underlined by such news as microplastics being found both in the deepest ocean trenches and on Mt. Everest, and the very recent report that human-made materials now, in 2020, outweigh the entire living biomass of the Earth.
Such evidence – and no doubt Covid, and the burgeoning climate crisis – appears to be accelerating new thinking and interest in the green economy and innovation across many aspects of human activity which acknowledges meeting human needs within environmental limits and planetary boundaries as the new ‘bottom line’, although there is a very long way to go.
But this still leaves us with the problem and connotations of the world ‘environment’. We will, of course, continue to use it – but this is a plea to be aware of its limitations. Perhaps we should think more of the ecosphere and technosphere as the two fundamental systems that interact and intertwine on Earth – a view put forward by the late Barry Commoner whose ‘Four Laws of Ecology’ in his book ‘The Closing Circle’ (1971) were an early influence on my own thinking.
So, I’m afraid the Chief Inspector of Schools is just wrong. ‘The environment’ is not the environment as commonly understood – a separate ‘something to do with nature’ thing. Understood properly, it’s much more than that. The word underplays and belies the profoundly intertwined reality – and fate – of humanity, fauna and flora and natural systems, now under threat as never before in human history. Understood this way, ‘environment’ is not a ‘single issue’ but an essential window on the critical state of society and the planet, and a door to new, holistic and regenerative ways of thinking, being, and educating that give us some hope of securing the future. This way, we are all ‘environmentalists’ and indeed environmental educators – or should be.
Stephen Sterling
Emeritus Professor of Sustainability Education, University of Plymouth
Website: ‘Re-thinking education for a more sustainable world’
https://www.sustainableeducation.co.uk/
transformativefuturelearning.home.blog 