Daniel Vidart

Environmental education, and practice

Despite its recent origin, the theme of environmental education has, for good or ill, directed our attention to a number of problems, both old and new, concerning the question of what education is and what it ought to be, in a world society tormented by profound and persistent crises. These crises are particularly discernible in the matter of human fellowship and the growing discrepancies between culturemthe 'second nature', created by man--and the original biogenetic nature of the planet. There are two widely differing views of what environmental education is, or should be, within the framework of Western civilization. Considered in broad terms, environmental education is a pretext for working out a grand theory of education embracing all the philosophical, social and educational ideas that converge to form the 'new education'. It synthesizes them in a way which is more enthusiastic than critical, and presents them as something

Daniel Vidart (Colombia). Anthropologist. Professor of ecology at the National University of Colombia. President of the Colombian Ecological Society. At present Unesco Regional Adviser on Environmental Education for Latin America and the Caribbean. Has published many works, including Colombia: Ecologia y Sociedad (x976), Ideologia y Realidad de America (z968), Sociologia Rural (x96o), La Vide Rural Uruguayana (x955), Caballos y Jinetes. Historia de los Pueblos Ecuestres (z967).

466 Prospects, Vol. VIII, No. 4, z978

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original produced by the creativity and imagination of a revolutionary way of thinking. In the narrow sense of the term, environmental education is not a panacea for all the present and future ills of our civilization; it is, rather, a pragmatic response to the defacement of the environment, both in affluent societies, where 'pollution results from wealth', and in the Third World, where 'pollution results from poverty'. Such a realistic conception is devoid of any illusions about the possibility of giving an environmental education to a smallholder in the Sierra de la Macarena, in Colombia, whose biological needs prevent him from entertaining ideas such as those of St Francis: 'brother tree' or 'sister bird'. Thus environmental education, considered in this narrow sense, is not a 'pre-text' but a modest 'texture' (from the Latin word'textus' meaning 'woven'). It is not a complex universe, but a province with familiar, rustic landmarks. Unlike the contentious attitude of certain radicalized middle-class educators who question the polities, methods and relationships of the participants in the educational process within the framework of the capitalist economy, the narrow approach, seeks to establish an experimental station on a pioneer front and to develop an educational practice that is of a restricted nature. An Argentinian educator has formulated a series of questions on the uncertainties stir-

Environmental education--theory and practice

rounding this new pedagogical development: What is environmental education? Is it a new subject to be included in the curriculum? Is it an aspect of one of the subjects which are taught today, or all of them? Is it a new teaching method? Is it a new type of education aimed at the conservation of nature, hygiene and general health? Is it a new approach to education, seeking to interest and involve people in world problems? Is it an attempt to save mankind from impending disasters? Is it education for economic development? Is it a new integrated approach to education which seeks to link the student to his immediate surroundings, with a view to improving the interaction between man and his environment?t These questions have not yet been answered satisfactorily; and many others could be asked. An understanding of environmental education will facilitate the redefinition of terms, of their symbolic associations and new meanings. This task is ethnocentric, for among the many meanings of the terms 'environment' and 'education' we are bound to select those that are consistent with the values of our Western IVeltanschauung. We will consciously or unconsciously endeavour to impose them in social practice, with little regard for local values. Such an attitude has to be changed, yet the 'anthropological sensitivity' required for such a task requires profound scientific knowledge and not merely a certain level of good sense. Lastly, the conceptualization of environmental education will enable it to be linked to general education and to the purpose of both these aspects of education with a view to future needs. Here we find a conflict of loyalties between a type of education which is seen as advocating the protection of the natural order and an education for the future as called for by the rapid technoscientific progress made in our era. The various scientific and technical explosions of the contemporary world have brought about an ecological implosion, whose full implications have not yet been entirely

grasped; it may lead to catastrophe or to general well-being, or to something between t h e s e l t h e return to the state of enlightened neolithic man.

The e n v i r o n m e n t and its c o n n o t a t i o n s

The French term ~milieuambient' was first used by the French naturalist l~tienne Geoffrey SaintHilaire in 1835~to affirm the dependence of the organism upon its physiographic surroundings: the environment determines the creatures which inhabit it. Auguste Comte went further: he admitted that 'idea of life always presupposes the necessary correlation ot two indispensable elements an appropriate organism and a suitable environment. The phenomena of life inevitably come into being through the reciprocal action of these two elements.'~ Three views have been expressed as to the interrelation between the environment and what it containsmor as to the influence exerted by one of these upon the other. I have adopted for these views the terms 'reciprocal influence', 'environmental determinism' and 'civilizational determinism'. Those who stress the reciprocal influence between the environment and its contents maintain that not only is the living being influenced by all that surrounds itmby objects, by energy and heat conditions, and so o n l b u t the inverse phenomenon, outward feedback, is also an essential feature of the environment. A kind of osmosis takes place: the environment moulds the living creatures which inhabit it, while the latter also influence their surroundings. E. Callot, who has written at length on the relation between human society and its various environments, states that 'the environment [milieu ambient] is always the setting for relations between objects: relations of situation, relations of action, particular localizations and interaction' .4 467

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Human societies whose level of material development is low and who have little capacity for the technical manipulation of artefacts obey with an almost ironlike rigidity the dictates of external agents: temperature, winds, sunshine, precipitation, height or depth and the geographical situation. But when American citizens built the Little America camp at the South Pole and established in it microclimates and devices which overcame the rigours of the physical environment, they were countering geographical determinism with sophisticated technology. Of course, this may be a case of reverse determinism, as appears in the 'challenge-response' mechanisms analysed by Toynbee. In short, the reciprocal view is that plants, animals and men that live together in an ecosystem do not passively suffer the influences of nature, but actively react to them by developing biological and cultural strategies. Thus living being is both the product and the creator of its environmental circumstances. Specific cases involving the crossing of variables and the gravitation of constants should be studied with a view to determining how, why and in what circumstances elements of the environment prevail at certain times, and at other times the response of the contents of the environment does so; but we must never lose sight of the dialectic interrelation between them. Environmental determinism stresses the influence of the physical environment upon the organisms, communities and cultures which it encompasses. Throughout the history of Western thoughtmalthough environmental determinism is not exclusive to the West, for it was prefigured in the Chinese and Hindu culturesmmany philosophers, geographers, historians and biologists have regarded the physical environment as a force that exerts irresistible pressure upon living beings, their mentalities and their activities.5 Montesquieu's L 'Esprit des Lois is interesting as an exaggeration of this view. A lesser-known geographer, Eliseo Reclus, summed up the e n 468

vironmental determinist view in an aphorism: 'Geography is history in space, and history is geography in time.' More recently, a Belgian sociologist,/]mile Waxweiler, has said that ~every living being, through its organs, its forms and its functions, depends closely upon the elements, climate, food, the soil, space, light and the various factors which make up the environment'.6 The Cclose dependence' postulated by Waxweiler presupposes a unidirectional flow from the environment inward--to organisms and societies; there is a constant centripetal movement. Environmental determinism still has its supporters, who are less stereotyped than their predecessors, but just as dogmatic. The third view, that of civilizational determinism, is that the centrifugal influence of the contents of the environment determines the environment. The environment is formed and enhanced through the constant influence of organisms and societies upon the place in which they live. When the activities of human civilizations upset environmental equilibrium distorting factors enter the environment; hence the succession of pollutants and demands made on the environment today, which disregard the world of nature and which have a harmful effect upon those who make them. The roots of the culturo-ecological view, though few, go back many centuries. Thucydides has some very enlightening ideas on the subject. However, it was Herder who stated this view clearly: There is no question but, as climate is a compound of powers and influences, to which both plants and animals contribute, and which every thing that has breath promotes in its reciprocating mutations, so man is placed in it as a sovereign of the Earth, to alter it by art. Since he stole fire from Heaven and rendered steel obedient to his hand; since he has made not only beasts, but his fellow man also, subservient to his will, and training both them and plants to his purposes; he has contributed to the alteration of climate (i.e. environment) in various

Environmental education--theory and practice

ways. Once Europe was dardr forest; and other regions, at present well cultivated, were the same. They are now exposed to the rays of the Sun; and the inhabitants themselves have changed with the climate. The face of Egypt would have been nothing more than the slime of the Nile~ but for the art and policy of man. He has gained it from the flood; and there the living creation has adapted itself to the artificial climate. We may consider mankind, therefore, as a band of bold though diminutive giants, gradually descending from the mountains, to subjugate the earth, and change climates with their feeble arms3 These ideas, which were formulated in poetic language towards the end of the eighteenth century, were expressed in scientific terms in the early part of the twentieth century. A Soviet author speaks of the growing biologization of the earth brought about by the living matter which not only dynamizes biogeocoenoses at present but also, in the past favoured the emergence o f biogenic matter--combustible fossils of organic origin, coal and petroleum, for example--and was incorporated in the biocosmic matter--certain types of sedimentary rocks--in combination with inorganic elements. Thus, life created the oxidizing atmosphere of the earth some 75 ~ million years ago and invaded the continents, with terrestrial plants, 5oo million years ago, establishing, by interaction with climates, the various types of soil. From the Eozoic era onwards life which was active in the cell and the organism, projected outward a complex ecology, a subtle network which extended the domain of the biosphere in space and in time, continually enhancing its products and increasing their potential, s Scarcely a decade later, the German scientist Goldstein said that the environment surrounding an organism is not something complete; rather, it changes continually as the organism lives and acts. It could be said that the environment has been extracted from the world of the organism . . . . 8 The concept of emergent evolution describes

the successive stages of a physio-chemico-biopsycho-socio-cultural continuum (please excuse this linguistic monster I) which ascends the steps of various levels of growing complexity~ until it reaches the presence of man and his works on the earth. In such art emergent evolution, the attthropization of the biosphere will have very farreaching consequences. The cultural dynamics ofhnman societies, acting upon the earth, create a technological planet, a humanized landscape, a series of economic areas, a system of objects and a network of effluents which change and destroy the environments into which they are discharged. Neither the biologization of the cosmos, as formulated by yon Bertalanffy,1~nor the holism of Meyer-Abich and Smuts, 1~took into account the consequences of the anthropization of the earth, the solar system and even certain sectors o f the Milky Way. The authors o f the various 'manifestos for survival'--the Club of Rome, the Ecologist Group, the Bussaner Manifest, the Menton Message, etc.---emphasize the negative aspects, yet it is the creative, positive asp e c t s - t h e combination ofnatttral resources with the resources of human ability--that will transform the Apocalypse into an Anthropophany. At this point we must define the characteristics of the environment. The qsms' prevent us from correctly interpreting the interaction o f endogenous environmental factors (life, human society and its techniques) and, exogenous factors (the abiotic supports). We also find that the term ~environment' has a number of different meanings. There is a scientific approach to the environment whereby phenomena heaped in apparent chaos are changed into causal series of facts, that is to say, into observable units that are integrated into processes through the application of a method designed to make reality intelligible, x2 The non-scientific use o f the term ~environment', which may be emotive or ideological,1~

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brings a wide spectrum of connotations into our understanding of the term. To begin with, we shall analyse the elements which in fact make up the total environment. Man is the only creature who talks about his environment. A chimpanzee or a praying mantis would see the environment quite differently, if such creatures were able to define it. Furthermore, man, who establishes scales of values for the perception and appreciation of the environment, is not an abstract being. He belongs to a specific culture, a specific social stratum; he lives in a specific geographic region. 'Environment' means something quite different to the Semang of Malaysia, who are the last representatives of the Palaeolithic period, and to the inhabitants of the polluted city of Los Angeles. In any capital city in the Third World--we could take Buenos Aires as an example--there is an affluent, Europeanized core, surrounded by a belt of slums, which are a revoltingly eloquent testimony to Latin American underdevelopment. The human environment--it is preferable to refer to the environment from the standpoint of its inhabitant, builder and user---comprises three orders of factors: natural, social and cultural. Nature is the stage for the human adventure. Our genetic message was programmed at the time of Cro-Magnon man--modern or neoanthropic man. This was at least 4o,ooo years ago. Nature, then, has moulded our hominid hemisphere; we have not been, nor shall we be, able to escape from it. And nature continues to be the backdrop for the human drama, with its ecosystems and meteors~ the fury of its elements and the diseases which have afflicted human communities since antiquity. 'Nature' involves the circulation of energy and matter in the ecosystems which has been released by the process of photosynthesis. But it is also the subject of ceaseless reflection on the part of man. Nature has been conceived of as the principle of the life and movement of all that 47o

exists (the teleological conception), as order and necessity (a conception common to the theorists of natural law and of Galilean or Newtonian science), as the debasement of the spirit (the opposition between nature and spirit found in romantic and I-Iegelian thought) and as a neutral frame of reference (the functionalist conception). The social order embraces more than demographic factors, the quantitative aspect of animal and human populations; it also takes in the mechanisms, structures, relations and transformations which characterize zoological and anthropic conglomerates, Society is a system, conforming to its own laws, which functions in accordance or at variance with the natural system. The cultural order is peculiar to human societies. Culture is both learned behaviour and the behaviour which creates man. It is the heritage of Homo habilis; it is rake voluntary cultivation of the mind. Although man is 'that part of nature where nature becomes aware of itself' (Engels), this growth in awareness is not a gratuitous act: it is the product of a reflective praxis, of social action converted into the memory of the human group. Man shares the anticipatory symbol and the expressive symbol with the primates; but he creates the arbitrary symbol. He has set the conventional against the natural, as the sophists, the first cultural theorists, observed. Culture has a mental dimension and also a material, or rather materialized, dimension. Culture is transmitted through the products of the mind--the word, the book--but is objectified in artefacts, in activities which modify the form of the earth's surface (cultural landscapes), or in small-scale sign systems, the %ystem of objects', which are incorporated into dally life. Anthropologists have constructed an imposing edifice of concepts and classifications on the theory and characteristics of culture, an edifice based on the extremely comprehensive descriptive notions of Tylor.

Environmental education--theory and practice

Culture comes into being in response to the challenges of the natural and social environment. It is composed of a series of human responses to environmental problems, which have been accepted because they are successful, regardless of whether they are rational or irrational. Ultimately, culture is a matter of learning to solve problems. The cultural system of human societies is responsible for technical assaults on nature. In certain cases, the technosphere becomes the 'suppuration' o f a culture rich in artefacts, dominating the natural landscape, which it modifies or destroys. Consideration of the human environment presupposes, in the words of Ortega y Gasset, a 'reflection on technique'. And if technique is taken to be a body of rules aimed at controlling an activity, such reflection shows that there are three major classes of techniques: techniques for the interpretation of reality, techniques of human interaction and techniques for the manipulation of matter. Techniques, then, are essentially the product of the mind; they are procedures that have been learned or worked out, forms of productive or symbolic behaviour. However, owing to a persistent misuse of terms, technique is looked on as the world of implements, tools and machines, to the virtual exclusion of cognitive techniques (science) and poetic techniques--e.g, art. Accordingly, we regard as techniques the products and not the agents. Despite its cursory nature, the analysis made in the preceding pages will have thrown some light on the natural, social and cultural elements which make up the environment. In reference to the imprecision of the term 'environment', a Brazilian scientist has written: The environment is not only the sum of all the material things that make up the mosaic of the countryside of landscape, and constantly interact with each other. It is much more than this. It also includes the economic structures and the outlook and habits of peoples in different parts of the world.

The environment as a whole therefore includes not only physical or material factors but economic and cultural ones as well. An accurate analysis of the environment must always consider the total impact of man and his culture on all the surrounding elements, and also the impact of ecological factors on every aspect of human life. Viewed in this perspective the environmeat includes biological, physiological, economic and cultural aspects, all linked in the same constantly changing ecological fabric. This concept is much wider and more objective than that of the environment considered merely as a system of mutual relations between living creatures and their natural environment. 1~ The term 'environment' has to be clarely defined at the outset, since we connot know what is the aim of 'environmental education' without first determining the structures and functions, statics and dynamics, the mathesis and dialectics of the environment. I t would be naive, for example, to take the view that nature acts inward from abiotic supports to biocoenoses and human societies, or that cultural 'precipitates' act outward from tectmosystems to biosystems. Human societies have created distinct styles of material civilization, whose mechanisms--culture which is objectified and 'frozen' in forms and in symbolic or economic spaces--become part o f the environment and, being independent of their creators, act upon them, adopting forms o f behaviour and attitudes which are not part o f the natural order. When ecologists and naturalists talk about the 'environment', they use the word in a different sense from architects, doctors, sociologists, engineers, geographers or anthropologists. Apart from the scientific bias which distorts the world view of certain specialists, it is important to bear in mind the fact that modern man does not inhabit an ecosystem. He is not in direct contact with the biosystem; he is so through the social system and the technosystern. ' T h e environment which man inhabits is 47x

Daniel Vidart

primarily a human environment, a system of techniques for production and for the organization of space. It is a long time--at least as far back as the Neolithic--since man lived in equilibrium with nature. If we are to regain the natural equilibria lost by man, we shall have to revert to the state of Neanderthal man'. 15 The environment is composed of visible and invisible elements. Depending on whether it is seen from a geographic, economic or cultural standpoint, a mountain may be an obstacle to communications, a 'loaf of rock-salt', like the formation in Colombia running from Zipaquir~t to Nemocbn, or the abode of the gods, as was Mount Olympus in ancient Greece. For the Mbuti pygmies, the forest is mother and father; its darkness is benign and protective. For Lele, who live on the savannahs, the forest is the refuge of the spirits, from which women in menstruation or childbirth are excluded. 16 The environment is both a medium and a system of relations, as P. George observesW This system of relations varies according to the density and quality of the works--or of the destructive and polluting complexes--which cultures have set up in geographical space. In marginal areas of the inhabited earth, there are still pre-literate and non-literate cultures that live an archaic life in a natural environment which, however, is devoid of primitive traits. Elsewhere, traditional peasant cultures retain economic practices resembling those of Neolithic man, although the 'transistor revolution' has radically altered their ideas about the world. These farmers base their peasant economies on ecotypes which replace the original ecosystems. They pollute and spoil the environment. Their relations with nature can be said to be a series of aggressive processes: erosion, denudation, the clearing and burning of woodland, upsetting the balance of hydrographic basins, overgrazing and the discharge of excreta and other waste from population centres. In turn, they suffer 472

the effects of external factors against which they are defenceless: bad clothing, inadequate housing, proneness to endemics and epidemics. And then there are the large land-owners who hold on to the best land, employers who pay wretched wages for work at harvest-time, money-lenders who exploit people and traders who 'fleece' other human beings. The social environment which fosters malnutrition and illiteracy is as real as the economic environment of the minifundium or the physical environment of the cold, windy plains. Lastly, a complicated technosphere, whose rationality and causality have little to do with nature, has been founded by a dynamic and powerful assembly of cultures in whose hands are the wealth of the world, as well as political and economic power, the urban centres which are the seats of decision, and the communication media, natural resources and machinery, computers and atomic energy, arms and capital, and who control most commercial production and consumption. These higher forms of civilization are the epicentres of regional and planetary pollution. They pollute the atmosphere, water, the soil--there is nothing that they do not spoil. Their power is such that it can destroy ecosystems and endanger life on earth. These areas of overdevelopment and overpoUution are the hotbed of a kind of ecological terrorism with its predictions of catastrophe by the year 200o (the hothouse effect, the thawing of the polar ice-caps, the death of the marine plankton, the extinction of the tropical forests, the poisoning and destruction of the atmosphere, the exhaustion of our energy resources, overpopulation, etc.). An environmental education which seeks to provide guidance for the future should consider the effects of a rational technology and a world economic order in harmony with nature. It should also reject any forms of research and exploration which extrapolate present resources to the resources of the future. The examples given above illustrate three typologies of the environment and three sys-

Environmental education--theory and practice

terns of civilizational forces confronted with the forces of nature. We have yet to consider the ideological connotations of the term 'environment'. This is an important point, because environmental education should scientifically analyse cases of the fragmentation or distortion of reality. The environment may be seen in various ways, for example: I. As a psychological weapon used by developed countries to discourage industrialization in dependent areas. 2. As a vehicle for apocalyptic predictions of world-wide ecocatastrophe by the year 2ooo (chiliasm of the second millennium). 3. As the means of fostering a new attitude towards nature in Western civilization. Such an attitude finds expression in various forms ranging from the paralysation of the socioeconomic dynamic (zero growth) to new axiologies (the primacy of the ecosystem over the technosystem, conservationism, ecoethics). 4. As the generator of projects for political reorganization on an international scale, through an alliance between Utopia and futurology. 5. As an election platform of a mass movement which, on the basis of the slogan 'We are all polluters', uses ecological consensus to put an end to class conflict. 6. As a left-wing argument against the excesses of a plundering and polluting capitalism. 7- The natural environment---or what is believed to be a natural environment since consumer society has not yet damaged itmmay be seen as a refuge for counterculture groups. 8. As a subject exploited by the popularizers of pseudo-science and by sensationalistic journalists who use the destruction of the environment and its claims to support their emotional treatment of the 'end of the world' syndrome.

Another concept that is closely related to 'environmenf calls for elucidation: the 'quality of life'. Study of the environment provides an instrument for describing reality; the quality of life is a factor that gives value to it. The quality of life--at least for the 'enlightened' or 'progressive' members of Western civilization--is something more than pleasant landscapes, trees in the countryside and crystal-clear water. The humanistic concept of the quality of life encompasses such ideals as satisfactory living standards for all, respect for human rights, the collective enjoyment of intellectual goods~ largescale access to education, the economic development of the community and equilibrium between the achievements of a socialized civilization and the natural system. Generally speaking, it is the privileged social groups who call for a high quality of life. 'Quality of life' means something quite different to the depressed classes, marginal societies and the surviving aboriginal populations. The purpose of environmental education is to arouse in such groups aspirations for a better life and to show them how such a life is to be attained. Here, too, there is a clash of ethnocentrisms. The teacher needs a certain cultural sensitivity if he is to understand and respect scales of values that are not the same as his own.

Education in the contemporary world

'Education' is the other component of the term 'environmental education'. One of the universals of culture and mechanism by which culture is transmitted, it is the subject of the second part of this study. The educational explosion of our time, the excessive emphasis placed on education as the driving force of change, the problems connected with innovations in the form and content of education, the controversies surrounding the relation between education and work (or leisure), 473

Daniel Vidart

art and research, the gap between theory, which is often brilliant, and the pitiable resuks achieved in practice--these are some of the issues most widely discussed in the dialogue that is taking place between the generations. There is no such thing as abstract education; what we have is a series of spatio-temporal 'precipitates', a set of historical and etlmographic variations of the teaching/learning process. It is sometimes extremely difficult to see what the aims of education ha detribalized black Africa or in backward areas of Peru should be, or how they can be attained in practice if we base our judgement on the values obtaining in the most highly developed areas of the West. It is not merely a question of different ideologies; the geographical bases, the social relations of production, the technological skills, the different approaches to modern life, the 'them' and 'us' mentalitymall imprint upon educational activities and the policies inspiring them characteristics which are not easily understood from the standpoint of other socio-cultural situations. The coevality of different educational systems does not necessarily mean that they are up to date; geographical co-existence does not imply cultural fellowship. We also have to draw a distinction, as Herskovits has done, 18 between enculturation, education and schooling. Enculturation is a lifelong process, for an entire life is insufficient to comprehend and apprehend the cultural patterns and traits of a group of human beings; in the West, we refer to this process as lifelong education. Education is part of the more diffused process of enculturation, which is implicit: the family group and the immediate social group provide the framework for patterns of behaviour, define them and demand compliance with them. This activity covers the spheres of 'knowing', 'being' and 'having to be'. Its requisites fail within the area which is now known as informal or non-formal education. Lastly, the specialized relations of schooling, 474

which does not exist in the majority of nonliterate societies require specialized teaching staff, a symbolic and functional dimension which removes education from the family context, a curriculum and a specific methodology. Teachhag is an institutionalized practice, which conforms to pre-established models. This is true of what we call 'formal education'. Environmental education should combine retrospective aspects (the preservation of the constants of the human condition) with prospective aspects (the anticipation of a new social order in which men will be engaged in fraternal dialogue with the natural order). In this sense, we may speak of two educational archetypes: the Epimetheans, who come after things and try to explain them as they are here and now; and the Prometheans, who anticipate things, who invent or discover new worlds. Both traits should be equally present ha a balanced environmental education. Seen in their historical perspective, certain forms of education seek, above all, to forge the will of the student; others believe in the circulation of ideas, as Herbart did; others again, concentrate on delight in knowledge; and yet others are directed towards the world of work. The various educational models applied today still include forms of'banking' education, to use Freire's expression: an uncrystallized accumulation of notions dispersed in subjects which are learnt by heart. The rural school in underdeveloped countries is a typical example of such a model. Environmental education will be ineffectual in such schools, unless a determined effort is made to break with traditional stereotypes. Other educational models, to be found in the large cities, in research institutes, in certain university faculties, do not innovate for the sake of innovation, but are concerned with deciphering the complexities of reality and integrating the natural and social sciences into a cognitive continuum. Environmental education should align itself with these modes of education, which set greater store by research than the textbook

Environmental education--theory and practice

or the lecture. Lastly, we may distinguish between democratic forms of education, which are intended for all members of a given social group, and 61itist forms of education, which are confined to the privileged circle of the dominant classes who possess power and knowledge. Environmental education should be for everyone: that is one of its greatest strengths, and also one of its weaknesses in the case of highly stratified formal democracies which, as in colonial Latin America, may revere it without making it a practical reality. The educational crisis is one of the main aspects of the great crisis of our times. This crisis has been brought about by the disparity between ends and means, between the ambitious nature of programmes and the mediocre ability of those responsible for carrying them out, between the universality of the norm and the selectivity of social stratification, between theory and practice. There is, for example, a contradiction between the democratization of knowledge and the conservation of the environment. If Unesco had accomplished its plan to bring about universal literacy, it would have been necessary to fell all the trees in the forests of Amazouia, the Congo and Indonesia in order to print the books and manufacture the exercise-books required. This is the perhaps somewhat exaggerated view of a distinguished geographer, formulated in the light of contemporary papermanufacturing technology, which uses wood pulp. 19 In addition to the educational crisis and critieal education, which questions the processes of adaptation to the system, maintaining, with Althusser, that education is part of the ideological apparatus of the State ~~we are faced today with the confrontation between imposed models and proposed models, between the forces of constraint and the forces of liberation. The future outcome of this dialectic defies our powers of prediction; we cannot even be sure what the words 'freedom' and 'justice' will mean in tomorrow's world.

The philosophy and aims of environmental education On the basis of the guidelines laid down at the seminar held in Belgrade in I975, under the joint sponsorship of Unesco and UNEP, a statx has been made on the task of drafting, organizing and developing environmental education programmes. These programmes are designed for primary, secondary and university levels. They reflect situations and are geared to rural and urban problems. Despite their aims and successful application, such developments should be considered as approximations, or as isolated experiments, since they are not yet linked by a common theory. This lack of a common theory should not be regarded as regrettable. Pilot projects, which may succeed or fail, are needed if we are to get a clear idea of the aims, content and methods of environmental education. Various trends are to be discerned in the general development of environmental education, whether conceived lato sensu or stricto sensu, as specified in the opening paragraph of this article: Environmental education as a naturalistic type of education with a distinctly ecological bias really amounts to ecology, respect for nature, knowledge of the ecosystems in general and of the local ecosystem. Its limited nature means that it is but one more subject on the curriculum--let us call it simply 'ecology'-which will become more complicated and richer as it reaches the higher levels in the educational system, if its inclusion throughout the educational process is accepted. Environmental education as a bias to be given to all the subjects on the curriculum, a second trend, means that, without altering the subjects on the curriculum, teachers will give them an ecological or economic slant towards environmental problems. If teachers are to do this they will have to be given a lengthy and costly training. Unless they have a profound insight 475

Daniel Vidart

into the mechanisms of nature and the aggressive processes of the economy and technology, they will not be able to carry out this difficult task successfully. Environmental education as a new style of education, an all-round approach to education, is a third approach, with ambitious goals, which will seek to make pupils fully aware of the problems connected with their environment, so that they wiU be able to taclde these probtems with a sense of responsibility and with the technical skills which will enable them to contribute, alongside other members of their community, to their solution. This awareness of environmental problems is social awareness rather than ecological awareness. Such problems win be solved through collective action aimed at eradicating the social and economic causes of the degradation of the human environment. The political aspects of this search for solutions may give rise to conflicts of various kinds. One such conflict, and not the least, is the collision between the educational system and the private interests which operate in alliance with the powers of the State. A Chilean ecologist says that the alms of education concerned with solving environmental problems are: To develop new attitudes and behavioural patterns in pupils which enable them to make decisions concerning the necessity of preventing the deterioration of the environment, through respect for ecological equilibrium, greater solidarity with and love of nature, and increased involvement with the natural environment and the 'concrete jungle' in which they live. (The author does not mention rural economic areas or the environmental problems of farmers and cattle-breeders. He confines himself to the large urban centres from which nature has disappeared, devoured by the city network. This puts us on our guard against a one-sided approach to environmental education, which should be diversified according to the actual environments in which it is provided.) 476

To increase awareness of our responsibility for our actions in relation m the environment and their immediate and long-term repercussions. (An education which teaches students to be aware of their own actions, but not to judge the actions of others, may be unsatisfactory. Generally speaking, the most dangerous polluters are not individuals, but the large industrial and agricultural concerns, whether publicly or pn'vately owned. It is not enough merely to encourage students to make value judgements; they must be equipped with tools which they can use to denounce and combat this sort of thing. At all events, people must be taught to treat the environment properly at a personal level.) To protect and preserve natural resources and, hence, to use them rationally, in the light of the ecological situation in each particular country. To help bring in a technological world which is consistent with the real needs of individual development and the social development of each country and which does not conflict with its cultural patterns, and to develop autochthonous technologies and introduce only those technologies which are suited to local or regional circumstances. To increase the part played by technical education in the existing educational system, so that solutions to problems are evolved in each country's actual circumstances, and not imported from abroad. 2t Environmental education should not be excessively concerned with the natural environment. Men have not inhabited the ecosystems for millennia. They have created cultural landscapes and modified the surface of the earth to suit their economic needs and aesthetic ideals. Furthermore, large-scale aggression against the environment occurs in sectors where the ecologically aware individual is powerless to do anything. The pollution of the urban atmosphere harms city-dwellers rather than the ecosystem. Consumer civilization introduced

Environmental education--theory and practice

the car; the car dictated the design of urban structures and adapted to its mechanical logic both the interplay of human needs and our conceptions of time. The car has also caused and continues to cause pollution. But car sales and car advertising go on just the same. How can the ecologically aware individual combat the mass production of cars by the giant car manufactures? We should not play down the importance of such questions, since they confront us with the grave dilemmas and obstacles that environmental education has to deal with, owing to facts of 'free enterprise'. Environmental education should take into account the different gee-economic regions and the varied web of social relations in the contemporary world. The environmental problems that the British city and the Indian shanga have to cope with are necessarily different, for they are connected with European industrial production and Asian rural life respectively. Different problems call for different solutions. Nevertheless, there is only one world: it should not be divided by ecological nationalism or environmental balkanization more than it already is. In regard to the origin of techniques, it should not be assumed that allochthonous techniques are bad techniques and autochthonous techniques good techniques. A technique in itself is neither good nor bad. What is bad is the application of techniques which use the natural resources that belong to the many for the benefit of the few, or which pollute the public environment for private gain. What is good is the application ofteclmiques (such as the techniques advocated by the proponents of ecodevelopment) aimed at the economic and cultural development of mankind without causing too much damage to the regenerating processes of the biosphere. Environmental education should be broad, open to the internationalist spirit; it should not offer protection to narrow-minded chauvinism. It is not difficult to discern the propagandistic

aims of the great industrial powers who have no hesitation in using 'hard' technology in the areas of influence while recommending developing countries to use 'soft' technology. Environmental educationists who are wide awake to the situation should be able to detect these and other idola, the contemporary version of the Baconian fallacies, and confront them with intellectual thrust and pedagogical courage. It remains for us to consider what today's world can reasonably expect from environmental education. Generally speaking, specific aims of environmental education fall into three groups: I. Cognitive aims. These include imparting knowledge about the environment and an ability to think which will enable the individual and his social group to work out practical solutions to the wide variety of problems connected with the environment. 2. Normative aims. These relate to the inculcation of an ecosocial awareness which will be conducive to the creation or modification of value models enabling the individual and the group to identify the factors that upset the environmental equilibrium (which is nothing other than the ecological equilibrium) and protest against them. 3. Technical and applicative aims. This means planning collective practices which preserve, improve or restore the quality of life, as understood by the community in the light of formal and informal education, in such a way that the demands made by economic development do not conflict with the biological rhythms of the ecosystem. Environmental education, in the narrow sense of the term, is not intended to replace general education or to become a world with its own laws. It should have a dearly defined objective: an all-round understanding of the natural system and the social system, the treatment of reality as a whole, the consolidation of the various subjects so that they form an environmental science which will enable students to get 477

Daniel Vidart

a unified view of the world. However, a distinction should be made, in the accomplishment of this task, between the realm of nature, which is one of necessity, and the realm of man, the keynote of which is freedom. It is extremely important that the systems theory should be applied to the total reality of the environment, but it is also essential to realize that there cannot be harmony between the social system and the natural system unless the relations between men are harmonious and rational. An understanding of the situation as it is should enable students to decide what it should be. Scientific education is useless unless it is directed towards the attainment of the highest human ideals. : T h i s all-round approach to environmental education has at least two antecedents. On one hand, there are the theories and achievements of the 'new education' which, as Ivan Illich points out, ~ aims to learn 'from the world', linking the educational institute to the natural and social environment, instead of learning 'about the world' in the classroom. On the other hand, there are the operative processes of the educational methodologies which see the acquisition of knowledge and the adoption of attitudes purely in terms of the global understanding of the environment. This presupposes the integration of study and work and the introduction into the curriculum (something which evolves, not something which is previously imposed; a plastic situation, not an aprioristic mould) of the problems actually encountered by the communities among which the school--as understood by Vasconi is locatedJ s In this way, theory and practice are linked, so that pupils learn about the world from their own locality and district, instead of obtaining abstract knowledge o f it from textbooks. S u c h an environmental education is something much more than the fashions which have invaded education over the past three decadesma constant indication of its disorientation in the midst of a disorientated culture. Availing itself of the advantages conferred by its aim--the 478

comprehension of the whole--it makes its way towards the goals of what E. Clapar~de has called the 'Copernican revolution' in education. Unlike traditional education, which turns its back on reality or, worse, creates caricatures of reality, and which breaks the concrete unity of the environment into discrete elementsmsubjects--an all-round environmental education should seek the gnoseological reinstatement of the real as an interrelated whole. At the same time, as all knowledge is derived from a practical concern, it should endeavour to rediscover the importance of combining manual and intellectual work, to restore man to his economic environment and to teach him to act creatively. Such an environmental education repudiates both fossilized methods and the gap between teacher and pupil. The rediscovery through work of the natural, social, cultural and sociological environment will be a joint task undertaken by all the members of the educational society, which is responsible for the management of its education and for shaping--or at least reshaping--the curriculum. The important thing about this integral and integrating education is the fact that it deals constantly with the realm of values. It is therefore not based upon an axiological theory, but upon economic and social practice. Students will understand the environment and be in a position to improve it, instead of accepting it uncritically as a legacy of injustices and absurdities. The world around the school, the high school or the university is no abstraction; it is the sum of real, tangible situations where the natural and/or technological environments (country and city) are dialectically related to socio-cultural mechanisms through the production process. Thus, environmental education will not be merely a matter of inculcating respect for the natural order or appreciation of it. It will be a scientific and practical study of environmental problems, which originate in human relations rather than in man's relations with things. Such an environmental education is forward-

Environmental education--theory and practice

looking; it concerns all ages and is designed for all social strata. It reinstates the former association between Homo faber and Homo sapiens, helps to raise the standard of living and the quality of life in local communities through collective self-management and seeks to give tangible expression to the highest social values inspired by human civilization. Ultimately, the integrating capacity of a steadily maintained environmental education tends to blur the boundaries between the formal and non-formal aspects of education.

Notes 1. Mirta de Teitelbaum, Educacidn y Medio Ambiente en America Latina: Panorama General de las Tendencias y Actividades Actuales, Paris, Unesco, 1976 (mimeo.). 2. ]~tienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, l~tudes Progressives d'un Naturaliste pendant les AnnEes 1834 et I835, Paris, I835. 3. Auguste Comte, Cours de Philosophic Positive, Legon 40, Paris, 183o-42. 4. 1~mile Callot, La 8oci~td et son Environnement, Paris, 1952. 5. An excellent Snmrn~ry of the views of the environmental determinists is to be found in Lucien l%bwe, La Term et l'l~volution Humaine, Paris, 1922. Another useful volume is by H. Becker and H. E. Barnes, Social Thought from Lore to Science, New York, 1938. 6. Emile Waxweiler, Esquisse d'une Sodologie, Brussels, 19o6. 7. J- C. Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of theHistory of Mankind, University of Chicago, 1968. 8. V. I. Vernadsky, Biosphere, Leningrad, I926. 9. K. Goldstein, Aufbau des Organismns, 1934. English version: The Organism, New York~ 1939.

1o. L. yon Bertalanffy, Das biologische Weltbild, Bern, 1949. This work exists in English (Problems of Life, New York, 1952); in Spanish (Concepcidn Bioldgica del Cosmos, Santiago de Chile, I963); in French, Dutch, etc. 11. Holism is confused with totalism; however this Csim plifying deduction' seeks to deduce physical laws from biological laws, arguing that the latter axe more general than the former. It is not equivalent to an integral interpretation of the continuum of reality, as some mistakenly understand it to be. i2. Scientific method is a technical procedure, an activity guided by laws, which transforms perceived phenomena into facts established by factual analysis. I3. 'Ideology' is here used in the sense established by F. Engels in his letter to Mehring of 14 July 1893: r is a process which the self-styled thinker performs with a degree of awareness, yet with a false awareness. The true driving forces behind his action remain a secret to him, otherwise the process in question would not be ideological.' I4. Josu6 de Castro, 'El Subdesarrollo, Primcra Causa de Coutaminaci6n', La Lucha Contra la Contaminaci6n, Barcelona, Unesco, 1974. 15. P. Gourou, Pour une Gdographie Humaine, Paris, I973. 16. T. C. Weiskel, CNature, Culture and Ecology in Traditional African Thought System', Cultures (Paris), Vol. I, No. 2, 1973, p. I23-44. 17. P. George, L'Enoironnement, Paris, 1972. 18. M. J. Herskovits, Man and His Works. The Science of Cultural Anthropology, New York, 1948. The work exists in Spanish (published by Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, Mexico) and in French (published by Payot, Paris). 19. R. Furon, L'l~rosion du Sol, Paris, 1947. 2o. L. Althusscr, 'Id~ologie et Appareils Id~ologiques de l'l~tat', La Pensde (Paris), No. 151, I97o. 21. L. F. Capurro, Ecoeducaci6n (Ecologta y Educaci6n), Santiago de Chile, Unesco Regional Office for Education, 1976 (mimeo.). 22. I. Illich~ Deschooling Society, New York, Harper & Row, I971. 23. T. A. Vasconi, Contra la Escuela. Borradores para una Crttica Marxism de la Educaddn, Medellin, 1974,

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