Environmental Education - Why Bother?

Gene Myers

Oct. 1999

Environmental education is based fundamentally on human adaptability. Understanding that reveals realistic possibilities rather than just gloomy inevitabilities.

We are a species like many others - a recently-evolved one - entrapped on the ultra-thin coating of life on a small planet only 8000 miles through. So thin a coating it is - our ocean's average depth is only 1/8000th of earth's diameter. If you breath on a balloon, the thickness of the mist from your breath would be less than that in proportion to the balloon. Like all other heterotrophs, we ingest sunlight, captured and held from the solar flux warming earth before radiating back into the void. Our dizzying twisting turns of Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, Cytosine balance momentarily amidst the bio-geo-chemical flows that compose and decompose us. Given the right developmental environment, that deoxyribonucleic acid encodes ancient pathways, structures, and abilities in us. In a true sense, 'my' eyes have been beholding this earthly home far longer than my own years -- they are as old as the millennia it took natural selection to sculpt them. Like all species, we also have behaviors that have proved fit and successful in the past.

And yet what worked in the past may be what is not working today. Is it programmed in our genes to be selfish, bear lovely multitudinous babies, enjoy rapid degradations of highly concentrated energy, consume profligately? (A primatologist once told me she felt we're the same as gorillas tossing out a fruit after one bite, high-grading it all.) Can we perceive the longer-time frame, the miniscule toxicant, the over-heating macrocosm? Did our DNA prepare us to survive mindful of whole systems we've changed? Can our nation-states overcome differences and create international responses concentration of global economic power aligned under GATT and the WTO? Can we overcome the ordinary self-interestedness that innocently (or knowingly) leads to the tragedy of the commons? These are the tough questions. If one can face them squarely, and still find reason for hope, then one can continue to function and be effective. Or else, the enemies of fatalism, denial, indifference, resignation, purposelessness, escapist hedonism await.

But those prospects may assume an incomplete analysis of human adaptability. It does seem that we are the species gone awry. But there have also been selection pressures for very extended periods of learning, interdependence, and symbolic transmission of experience. If you take a short time frame - say, our own lifetimes, the environmental changes look bad. In a longer time frame, one of cultural evolution, we have undergone several major transformations of cultural life pattern already. Moreover, the technologies and accompanying increases in consumption and population that have given rise to our confrontation with limits are only a very few centuries old. And the most acute damage has come about not just since the industrial revolution, but since the Second World War. And even before that last period a response has been mounting.

What accounts for that? It's our adaptability. Science is one institutionalized example of this, imperfect and human as it nonetheless is. It gave us not only DDT, but an understanding of its effects. It has given us an incredible framework for understanding our place in the universe, and the nature of life... There are many issues to explore regarding the role of science and technology, but here I only mean to call attention to the ways it has helped us understand, and through that, to alter our actions. It is a new development for learning and science to be key inputs to policy.

Adaptability comes in many shapes and forms. It is the stuff of education (as well as of policy, planning, etc.). What are our abilities for adaptation? -- they go far beyond the rigid instincts we suppose (often mistakenly) other animals to have. The ability:

-to learn by observation, instruction, the experience of others

-to question, think independently

-to gather evidence and test our assumptions

-to learn from our experience and mistakes -- indeed, to plan to do so

-to invent instruments, extensions of our senses into the unseen, unheard, untouched

-to track our progress; to use findings of science

-to extend social control and purpose over technologies

-to innovate, diverge, create, do the unpredicted or unpredictable

-to cooperate and work with others

-to disagree and work with others

-to create, alter, and (even) improve social institutions

-to conform our conduct to standards

-to critically examine the ends we strive for

-to hear the 'yet small voice' of conscience -- potentially at any moment

-to resolve conflicts, make up, move forwards

-to sense and conceptualize our connections to a more-than-human world

-to spin and tell webs of significance about our relation to larger systems

Do these capacities always win out over 'selfish instincts'? Clearly not always. But it's incorrect to opt for the simpler more dismal view. Human behavior is multiply determined.

The curious thing about our species, however, is that much of what we do isn't a matter of mechanics. We have to participatively enact abilities to develop them. People do not understand the full extent of their adaptability until they've been shown it - that is, lived it. Then it sticks, step by step... then it even generalizes. So environmental education (or any education) is the practice of involving people in activities like those suggested above. Such education creates the full reality of our adaptability.

There is still no guarantee we will meet all our challenges in time. So if you derive your hope from a faith things will get fixed, you may find its base gets eroded. We can find examples of results that justify hope. But it is also true that the very exercise of our capacities for adaptability and learning can be intrinsically satisfying. It is in meeting a challenge together, in that very act of asserting and applying ourselves, that we develop, realize who were are -- that is, realize our place in the world the composes and decomposes us. And in that I find great hope, for it means people will keep trying.