Fields of Green: Restorying Culture,Environment and Education

During the week I was reading Fields of Green: Restorying Culture, Environment and Education, the radio, television and internet were filling the airwaves with reports of dire environmental consequence. The book was just the tonic required to counteract the daily deluge of cataclysmic TV images and news reports. However, some of the wide-ranging essays chosen by the editors, although ambitious and eclectic, seemed to be the environmental equivalent of arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Perhaps the particularly dire images on the TV screen made my patience for the more erudite and ‘academic’ essays in the collection a little thin. I found myself at once stirred and challenged, frustrated and stymied. But this unevenness is perhaps to be expected in an anthology that ‘works across various fields of green, drawing together poetry, philosophy, journalism, sociology, curriculum studies, indigenous scholarship, feminist and social justice work, environmental ethics, and a range of other fields of inquiry and practice’ (p. 3). Bringing together such a diverse body of scholarship is difficult and perhaps says much about the current transitional state of sustainability education as it seeks to re-define itself for the twenty first century and the mounting challenges ahead. Humanity’s way forward will require a collective effort by all disciplines coming together to offer new insights while making connections with ancient wisdoms.

Fields of Green comprises 20 chapters and numerous poetic, narrative and visual vignettes designed to act as ‘presence and proxy for realities of the world’ (MacKenzie et al., p. 3). The chapters are divided among four themes: Complicated Conversations; The Sensuous; Waves, Hybrids and Networks; and Geographies and Place-Making. Each of these sections contains essays that, to varying degrees, successfully shed light on the dynamic relation between human interpretation and a complex world. By and large, the contributors recognize that the relation between humans and their world is dynamic and advocate living with respect and restraint on Earth rather than achieving a conclusive state of being to be attained once and for all. The anthology avoids simplistic, universal answers to complex environmental problems.

In Part 1, Complicated Conversations, Noel Gough selects this notion of language being a source of intelligence through narrative inquiry. Complicated, difficult conversations can be, in themselves, sources of insight and breakthrough. Gough enters into a conversation or ‘narrative experiment’ using Deleuze and Guattarri’s geophilsophy and the fiction of Ursula Le Guin. Gough contends, ‘If my narrative experiment does the work I intend, readers will experience ‘rhizosemiotic play’ immanently, as emerging from this text’ (p. 69). I will leave it to the readers to judge whether Gough has successfully carried out his narrative experiment, yet his premise and intention seem promising. In the hands of a capable writer, the narrative inquiry becomes a poetizing activity (van Manen 1997). Gough reflects on the ‘rhizomatic connections’ (p. 77) between Le Guin’s novel The Telling and the collection of short stories Changing Planes, and Deleuze and Guattari’s figuration of the plane of immanence. He allows language to speak; it is a vision of language that is deeply relational and interconnected. In Gough’s experiment, like poetry, it is inappropriate to ask for a conclusion, summary or findings. ‘I have no “conclusion” to this essay but will simply pause (in the middle of things) to reflect briefly on what I have learned by writing it’ (p. 79). In so doing, Gough resists the temptation to offer systematic solutions to complex problems. Rather, he opens up new pathways to cultural and ontological diversity and the possibility for patterns of thinking to emerge that will reveal possibilities for positive, collective, environmental action.

In a particularly bleak look at the potential of environmental education to fulfil its promise, Sean Blenkinsop and Kieran Egan posit that the underlying theoretical underpinnings of environmental education have not been adequately parsed and, by default, are predominately tied to general educational theory, which runs counter to the goals of sustainability education. In the chapter “Three ‘Big Ideas’ and Environmental Education” the authors admit to being ‘slightly provocative’ and wanting to ‘plant the seed that environmental educators cannot rely uncritically on general educative theory’ (p. 85). Egan and Blenkinsop help us see the limitations of schooling as a vehicle to inculcate the values, knowledge, skills, attitudes and perspectives to live sustainably. The instrumental rationalism and technical, managerialist language that is dominant in education today are pervasive and powerful. The discourse reflects a way we have come to know the world—an epistemology. However, what happens when epistemology becomes ontology? In other words, what are the implications when the discourse of science-technology-industry claims to reflect the physical reality of the natural world and constructs how we humans are to ‘be’ in this world? E.F. Schumacher said, ‘The volumes of education…continue to increase, yet so do pollution, exhaustion of resources, and the dangers of ecological catastrophe. If still more education is to save us, it would have to be education of a different kind; an education that takes us into the depths of things’ (in Sterling, 2001, p. 21).

Part 2, The Sensuous contains one of the most important essays in the collection. It is written by Heesoon Bai and titled Reanimating the Universe: Environmental Education and Philosophical Animism. Bai addresses modernity’s psychic numbness, sensorial autism, our deafness to the living earth that surrounds and permeates our very beings, and yet does so as we go about our daily lives in unperturbed ignorance. The author writes, ‘In environmental education…there is an overwhelming tendency to prescribe and command respect, care, love. Or what have you: “We ought to respect (protect, conserve, care about, love…) the environment”’ (p. 145). Bai underscores the ineffectiveness of this moralistic didacticism. Educating the heart and mind through opportunities for embodied integration into the living landscape can elicit the care and compassion that we as educators seek.

David Jardine’s Birding Lessons and the Teachings of Cicadas and Bob Jickling’s Sitting on an Old Grey Stone: Meditations on Emotional Understanding also select the strands introduced by Heesoon Bai and weave them further. Jardine writes, ‘A birding lesson: I become someone through what I know… Coming to know, whatever the discipline, whatever the topic or topography, is never just a matter of learning the ways of a place but learning how to carry oneself in such a way that the ways of this place might show themselves. Education, perhaps, involves the invitation into such living ways’ (emphasis in original, p. 156). Bob Jickling advocates for the ‘experiential’, the phenomenal, which he admits for a technical, managerialist educational view, ‘will… be unaccountable in the language of learning outcomes’ (p. 168). Jickling turns to Wordsworth—to poetry and language—to better understand the possibility to know the animate Earth through an understanding of education that is inherent in the sensible. Jickling advocates for the kind of learning that cannot be measured, a ‘kind of learning that is wrapped up in feelings—of joy, wonder, and sometimes anguish—and experience—especially in ontological attention and care for particulars’ (p. 172).

Waves, Hybrids and Networks is the theme interconnecting the essays in Part 3 of the collection. Claudia Eppert in Remembering Our (Re)Source: Eastern Meditations on Witnessing the Integrity of Water crafts a meditative tract combining Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist perspectives and practices with two contrasting views of water—one being western with its objectivistic, resourcist bias and the other eastern, which views water ‘more reverentially as a medium for educational insight’ (p. 192). Once again, Eppert is opening the reader to a different kind of education, ‘one that takes us into the depths of things’. The author admits that such a journey is not easy, it is a process that necessarily means ‘the slow, laborious, and painful mourning and letting go of attachment to a separate self, and the interminable cultivation of an interconnected, contemplative, and fluid sensibility’ (p. 196). Eppert, too, invokes the idea of the sensible—the emotional consciousness and delicate attention that ties us to a vulnerability to be hurt by displays of unkindness and uncaring.

The final section of Fields of Green explores Geographies and Place Making. David Greenwood argues for a place-responsive education that focuses on the lived experience of learners. Greenwood also advocates for a different type of schooling as our gaze ‘turns outward from schools to the culturally rich contexts of community life. This does not mean abandoning the classroom, but re-thinking its relationship to the wider community’ (p. 279). Greenwood evokes the idea of ‘living in place’, which is a central tenet of bioregionalism. The idea is to ‘re-inhabit’ local places ‘by becoming native to place through becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it’ (Berthold-Bond, 2000, p. 6). This acts as a counter to the all too common situation whereby schools ‘remain disconnected from actual communities outside their institutional boundaries’ (p. 279). The challenge for educators is to activate and re-activate an attunement and awareness for the bioregions in which we dwell. In rural communities, this means deepening a relationship with the biotic community, with history and culture. However, for urban children, who often live in homogenized and utilitarian landscapes that are ecologically and aesthetically impoverished, a special urgency is required to attune children to the issues, history and biology that will call for increasingly complex understandings of the world and the local community within that world. Milton McClaren selects these themes and develops them further in his essay The Place of the City in Environmental Education. Through student urban narratives, McClaren believes students are able to revisit their assumptions about how cities work. The idea is to allow for a closer attention to the specificity of the local, while valuing and measuring that specificity in the context of larger entities of time and space.

The collection concludes with a clarion call by the editors. The reader is encouraged to take up the tasks of representing, critiquing, regrounding and imagining. All of these tasks will lead to pedagogy of a different kind. Our times call for the development of an eco-pedagogy that radically deepens our sense of interconnectedness, bioregional wisdom, Earth-centeredness and humility that are both accepting and mindful of the flux, uncertainty and contingency of life. Fields of Green is an important contribution to building an eco-pedagogical vision for education. It is my hope that this book is part of a future direction in curriculum studies that is driven by a planetary consciousness that encompasses a concern for critical pedagogy and phenomenological studies, for feminist and gendered perspectives, for post-colonial studies and indigenous and sustainability education. This collection makes apparent David Orr’s statement, ‘All education is environmental education’ (2004, p. 18).