The compatibility of liberalism and mandatory environmental education

Abstract

Recently scholars have wondered whether liberals can promote mandatory programs of formal environmental education, including education for the environment or sustainable development. Critics maintain that they cannot on grounds that environmental education is a threat to student autonomy or cannot be justified using liberal principles. We argue that the perceived conflict between liberalism and environmental education is exaggerated. Whatever the environmentalist ambitions of environmental education, any complete conception of it must prioritize education for skills and virtues that are consistent with students’ prospective autonomy. Liberalism is also compatible with meeting the demands of intergenerational justice, which arguably will include sustainability education if not other forms of environmental education. Finally, the skills and virtues future citizens need to manage today’s most pressing environmental problems are compatible both with those discussed in international statements on environmental education and with those commonly associated with liberal citizenship. Ultimately, environmental education that will better equip citizens to cope with environmental problems is quite possible for liberal politics.

Keywords

Democratic education environmental education education for sustainable development liberalism virtue ethics

Introduction

Ever since Mark Sagoff (1988) wondered whether environmentalists could be liberals, environmentalism has occasionally attracted the attention of scholars. Some have recently wondered whether liberals can endorse mandatory programs of formal environmental education seeking to foster environmentally responsible attitudes and behaviors. Scholars, international agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) increasingly call for such programs (Curren, 2010; UNEP, 2005; UNESCO, n.d.a). But critics claim that environmental education threatens student autonomy (Jickling, 1992) or conflicts with liberal neutrality (Schinkel, 2009) or cannot be justified by liberal ideals of intergenerational justice (Postma, 2006). These claims seem to indicate that we must either weaken environmental education’s moral ambitions or reject liberalism.

We argue that the perceived conflict between liberalism and environmental education is exaggerated. Whatever the environmentalist ambitions of environmental education, any complete conception of it must prioritize education for skills and virtues that are consistent with students’ prospective autonomy. Liberalism is also compatible with meeting the demands of intergenerational justice, which arguably will include sustainability education if not other forms of environmental education.

We begin by discussing the meaning of environmental education and summarizing recent work purporting to demonstrate the incompatibility of mandatory environmental education with concern for student autonomy and Rawls’s political liberalism. The subsequent two sections counter by showing that environmental education is not necessarily a threat to student autonomy and that critics both misunderstand Rawls and fail to consider other non-Rawlsian conceptions of liberalism. In the fifth section, we shift away from criticism and argue that the qualities future citizens need to confront today’s most pressing environmental dilemmas are compatible with those commonly associated with liberal citizenship. The final section concludes by posing a set of unresolved questions about the moral dimensions of education.

Environmental education and liberal political morality

Environmental education has several possible meanings. One early conception defines it as any education that is in, about, or for the environment (Lucas, 1980). In troubling the relationship between environmental education and liberalism, critics tend to focus on education for the environment (EFE) since it involves aiming to impart pro- environment attitudes and behaviors in some respect (Jickling, 2003; Postma, 2006; Schinkel, 2009). Indeed one of the largest literatures in environmental education includes environmental values education (Mappin and Johnson, 2005), in which the goal is to produce environmentally responsible individuals by transforming students’ environmental character (their attitudes and behaviors) (Carson, 1965; Hargrove, 2008; Lautensach, 2010; Van Matre, 1990).

Steve Van Matre’s ‘earth education’, for instance, is organized around changing students’ behaviors to ‘lessen their impact upon the earth’ by teaching them that all life is interrelated in a complex, interdependent system and by showing how their lifestyle choices degrade that system (1990: 5). Such ideals can be more or less radical depending upon whether they aim to inculcate not only environmentally responsible character, but also nonanthropocentrism, i.e. belief in the inherent value of nature or in the goodness of valuing nature for its own sake. Nonanthropocentrism contrasts with views according to which our reasons for caring about nature are rooted in benefits to us (e.g. aesthetic pleasures) or duties we have to other humans with respect to it (e.g. the duty to support equal access to a safe environment). Since it is not inevitable that any pedagogy, including outdoor experiential learning, will produce nonanthropocentrists, some scholars endorse explicit instruction for nonanthropocentric ethics (Lautensach, 2010; Van Matre, 1990). At least one, however, recommends that educators vary their instruction in environmental values by cultural context, making it sometimes inappropriate to educate for nonanthropocentrism (Hargrove, 2008).

Critics of the compatibility of liberalism and environmental education also tend to highlight what Schinkel calls the ‘transformative expectations’ of education for sustainable development. As articulated in international statements, such as Agenda 21, ‘Both formal and non-formal education are indispensable to changing people’s attitudes . . . [and] for achieving environmental and ethical awareness, values and attitudes, skills and behavior consistent with sustainable development and for effective public participation in decision-making.’ It also asserts that ‘Governments should strive to update or prepare strategies aimed at integrating environment and development as a cross-cutting issue into education at all levels . . .’ (UNCED, n.d.). Similarly a UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) document states that ‘The overall goal of the DESD is to integrate the values inherent in sustainable development into all aspects of learning to encourage changes in behavior that allow for a more sustainable and just society for all’ (UNESCO, 2006: 4).

If environmental education is defined as aiming to transform society by transforming individuals’ environmental character, it certainly appears to be in tension with any liberal approach to education. Morally transforming individuals is not clearly to impart independently usable knowledge or skills (Jickling, 2003). And autonomy – the freedom and ability to live according to one’s own ideals – is a central liberal educational value (Brighouse, 1998; Clayton, 2006). Any version of education for the environment (or sustainable development) seems to fall foul of this value by apparently intending to foreclose students’ ability to assess for themselves the merits of controversial environmental ideologies.

Advocates of education for nonanthropocentric environmental ethics, which is highly controversial, seem particularly vulnerable to this charge. Efforts to inculcate not simply allegiance to certain beliefs (e.g. environmental preservation is good), but also allegiance to contestable reasons for those beliefs (e.g. the environment is inherently valuable, all life is interdependent) seems especially disrespectful of the autonomy of students to make up their own minds. However, it must be noted that, in the US context, programs failing to teach students anything about nonanthropocentric environmental ethics, or any pro-environment ideals, would be equally disrespectful. In that context, anthropocentric and utilitarian ways of relating to the natural environmental are like water to a fish – students are invisibly ensconced in them – and it is highly unlikely that very many could get any critical perspective on these ways outside of formal schooling. But without such perspective they could not be autonomous with respect to them (Brighouse, 1998). It is also impossible to foster students’ autonomy without engaging them in serious consideration of alternatives to the status quo.

Nevertheless, given the apparent tension between transformative education for the environment and respect for student autonomy, any proposal favoring mandatory formal environmental education looks anti-liberal. Liberal pluralists like William Galston (1995) might maintain that liberals should protect the flourishing of a multitude of cultural forms, and so might favor permitting schools to democratically adopt education for the environment. But requiring it would be contrary to this position. On the other hand, Schinkel (2009) and Postma (2006) argue that political liberals cannot require environmental education because it conflicts with neutrality, which forbids liberal governments to intentionally favor any one controversial ideal over another – that is, any ideal subject to reasonable disagreement, including morally permissible ones. This is true, they claim, even though neutrality permits liberal governments to do things that actually make some ways of life easier to pursue than others (Schinkel, 2009: 511–513).

In supporting this argument, both Schinkel and Postma treat Rawls’s political liberalism as the paradigm liberal theory (Rawls, 1993). For the political liberal, because there is much intractable and reasonable disagreement about the good, ‘our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason’ (Rawls, 1993: 137). A corollary of this principle is that a conception of justice for regulating the institutions of the basic structure of society can be legitimate only if it can be the object of an overlapping consensus of citizens committed to diverse conceptions of the good. This means it must be possible to endorse that conception from the standpoint of any of the reasonable ideals of the good held by citizens. For Rawls, this means that such a conception will have to ‘express the priority of right’, i.e. embody a set of principles of right action or duty, not a set of claims about the good life (Rawls, 1993: 192). In this sense it will be neutral between reasonable ideals of the good and not intended to favor or promote any one of them.

Postma (2006) also advances several arguments purporting to show that political liberalism lacks the conceptual resources to justify education for sustainable development. One argument maintains that the demand for reciprocity in liberal theories of justice, such as Rawls’s, renders them incompatible with the demands of intergenerational justice (Rawls, 1999). This is supposedly because the demand for reciprocity means that justice between two parties is possible only when there can be some give and take between them. But, he claims, there can be no give and take between distant generations, such as those that might use nuclear energy and those that might have to live with the waste produced.

Derek Bell (2004) has challenged Postma’s reading of the role of reciprocity in Rawlsian liberalism. According to Bell, reciprocity does not serve as a constraint on who can and cannot receive justice, but as an ideal about justice itself in which ‘all citizens who do their part benefit fairly from their mutual cooperation’ (2004: 46). Since distant generations can be engaged in the ‘single cooperative venture’ of realizing and preserving a just society over time, the distribution of benefits and burdens across generations should be fair.

Though conceding Bell’s reading of Rawls, Postma counters that Rawls cannot really maintain this ideal relative to intergenerational relationships because he is separately committed to an ideal of the circumstances of justice, i.e. a view of the circumstances in which it is possible to do justice or injustice to others. As Postma interprets him, Rawls borrows a conception from Hume according to which justice and injustice are possible only between relatively self-interested individuals occupying conditions of moderate scarcity and having roughly equal powers to block or frustrate one another’s activities (Rawls, 1999: 110). In these sorts of circumstances, it is rational for us to agree to reciprocally cooperate with others, even if our reasons for doing so are purely self-interested. As Postma is eager to point out, however, distant generations have no powers to frustrate our current activities and they are almost completely dependent upon us for the range of options available to them (2006: 52). So principles of liberal political justice can make no demands on our beneficence relative to future generations.

Postma observes that this problem could be solved if equality of power were reconceptualized as a merely sufficient rather than necessary condition of liberal justice (Postma, 2006: 39). But he maintains that such a move has two difficulties. First, he argues that it conflicts with the ‘weak anthropological assumptions’ Rawls makes in designing the original position, according to which ‘the greatest possible egoist should be willing to subscribe to the principles defined in the contract’ (34). But because present generations are, he says, not vulnerable to distant generations, egoists would not accept a just savings principle. Therefore, a principle of intergenerational justice cannot be justified within political liberalism. Second, even if the principle could be justified, Postma maintains that liberal citizens could not be motivated to take adequate responsibility for the future by an abstract duty of intergenerational justice, since ‘our contribution to a sustainable future might require serious sacrifices’ (45).

Altogether the case against the compatibility of liberalism and mandatory environmental education, as a form of transformative moral education, seems to rest on three claims:

Environmental education is a threat to student autonomy.

Neutrality forbids liberals to promote environmental education insofar as it embodies a controversial ideal.

Principles of liberal political morality can neither justify nor motivate savings for intergenerational justice.

If these claims are correct, it is indeed difficult to see how liberal governments could legitimately require environmental education. But it is far from clear that they are correct. We make our case below, beginning in the next section with claim 1.

Environmental education and student autonomy

The claim that environmental education is a threat to student autonomy is a red herring if the fundamental reason for thinking so is its moral ambitions. Influencing students’ morals, whether intentionally or not, is not peculiar to environmental education. The nature of a student’s experience in social studies and history, for instance, will inevitably affect the character of her patriotic sentiments, whether cool and critical or ardently attached. But even education that is in or about the environment, which is supposed to be amoral, can be morally transformative. For example, science education (about the environment) can engender students who care more about the decline of natural resources; field trips to natural locations (in the environment), as is common in science and other forms of education, can certainly do the same.

In any case, environmental issues like climate change and environmental injustice are by no means going away and future citizens cannot be indifferent about them; nor is it realistic to say that students, in their roles as future professionals and citizens, will never be in the position to, or have the desire to, cooperate on fair terms with others, at home or internationally, with respect to environmental goods. As a form of civic education, any adequate environmental education must aim to transform behaviors and attitudes at least this far. The question ultimately concerns what stance liberals must take toward any form of transformative civic education, whether hands-off or interventionist. And this will depend on whether the relevant transformations are consistent with liberal principles. We return to this in the next section. In the meantime, there are a few other reasons for doubting that environmental education is a significant threat to student autonomy.

First, as the discussion of the previous section shows, the moral content of programs of environmental education, from education for sustainable development to nonanthropocentrism, can vary widely. So whether environmental education is a threat hinges quite a bit on the precise aims of any particular program, some potentially containing aims more favorable to student autonomy. For example, the goal of autonomy is not clearly lost on even the supposedly too radical proposals like Agenda 21, which explicitly calls for education fostering skills required for public participation in environmental deliberation and decision-making. This presumably includes skills characterizing democratic education generally, which Amy Gutmann describes as ‘capacities for criticism, rational argument, and decisionmaking . . . [including] how to think logically, to argue coherently and fairly, and to consider relevant alternatives before coming to conclusions’ (1987: 50). Such skills are very closely related to those needed for autonomy, for it is only by critical reflection on one’s circumstances that one gets the needed distance that self-governance requires.

Second, it could also be exceedingly difficult in practice to distinguish education in or about the environment, which no one reasonably rejects, from education for the environment. If so, it may not matter whether official policy intentionally aims to transform people’s environmental character. Consider that engaged pedagogies like outdoor experiential learning can be used to promote understanding in environmental studies (Kolb, 1984; Lieberman and Moody, 1998), but are also very common strategies for influencing people’s environmental attitudes (Johnson and Mappin, 2005). And in some contexts, like the US, where there is a great deal of ignorance about the science of important issues like climate change, just promoting scientific understanding is to do something that, if effective, should result in more citizens aligning themselves with environmental causes (Schramm and Anderson, 2011).

None of this complexity should be surprising. It is impossible for educators to be morally neutral since any attempt to do so can be perceived as a tacit endorsement of moral relativism (Colby et al., 2003; Kohlberg, 1981). And as Charles Taylor has quipped, liberalism is itself a ‘fighting creed’ (1994). Like everyone else, liberals must favor certain controversial ideals (like autonomy) over others, though the liberal’s ideals are, crucially, defended as what is most consistent with free and equal citizenship (Rawls, 1993) or the prospects of such citizens living well by their own standards (Brighouse, 2000). So any interest they take in the survival of liberal institutions is at least prima facie reason for them to favor types of moral education suitable to securing such survival (Callan, 1997). If this includes education for the environment and for sustainable development, there is no essential incompatibility between liberalism and mandatory environmental education, though there might well be legitimate and illegitimate ways of implementing it. Executing the pedagogical equivalent of putting an ‘environmental responsibility pill’ in students’ drinking water, for instance, would not do. Such strategies lack transparency and prevent students from voluntarily endorsing (or rejecting) the institution’s position. However, mandating that schools critically direct students’ attention to the environmentally problematic features of the status quo and engage them in meaningful exploration of alternatives is nothing like that. And, as already argued, doing so is crucial for facilitating students’ autonomy with respect to the status quo anyhow.

Environmental education, neutrality, and intergenerational justice

Liberal political morality does not prevent liberals from implementing environmental education. Consider first the arguments from neutrality. Schinkel claims that environmental education embodies or implies a controversial ideal, but liberals are not permitted to intentionally promote ‘any controversial view pertaining to the good, comprehensive or not’ (2009: 514).

It is hardly clear that environmental education embodies a controversial ideal in the relevant sense, which concerns any ideal about which there could be reasonable disagreement. Certainly there are those who believe, for example, that sustainability is a left-wing conspiracy, as well as those who believe that it is a right-wing one. But it is not clear how reasonable it could be to deny that it is good to be pro-sustainability or pro-environment. Who would seriously endorse such a position? Those opposing particular environmental regulations for, say, economic reasons (and vice versa) cannot really mean that (a) it is impossible to square economic and environmental aims and (b) they are for the economy and against the environment, since failing to square these is just not an option.

But let us set that aside. Even if environmental education embodies a controversial ideal in the relevant sense, there is no unavoidable tension here, particularly within Rawls’s framework. For Rawls, neutrality restrictions apply only when settling ‘constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice’, such as the structure of government and equal basic rights and liberties (1993: 214). Policies concerning other matters, such as the content and distribution of education, must be consistent with the essentials. But citizens are free to wrangle over these in the public sphere, without the constraints of neutrality applicable to constitutional essentials. Even if some principles concerning civic education are among Rawls’s constitutional essentials, liberals can still endorse environmental education while remaining neutral about environmentally friendly or sustainable versus other ways of life. To see this, it is necessary to understand the rooting of the neutrality principle in the more fundamental demand to treat all persons with equal concern and respect (Dworkin, 1985).

The basic impetus for neutrality is that there is considerable room for reasoned disagreement about the best way of life. So it would be disrespectful to people reasonably committed to some way of life, let us say the whaling way, if we were to implement a policy hostile to whaling expressly on grounds that non-whaling ways of life are inherently superior to whaling ways. But no such disrespect is expressed if our reason for adopting the anti-whaling policy is that whaling violates third-party rights or poses intolerable health or environmental risks. So what matters fundamentally is showing equal concern and respect for persons, not neutrality itself. And neutrality is compatible with forbidding or promoting anything just so long as the grounds for doing so express equal concern and respect for the beliefs of those adversely affected by it.

A policy favoring environmental education need not express unequal concern or respect for anyone or their beliefs. Political liberals need not favor it expressly with the intention of promoting environmentally friendly or sustainable ways of life. Rather they may intend to secure liberal justice between generations or the sustainability of society, and therefore the survival of liberal institutions. Acting in the belief that environmental education is indispensable to securing those aims, the liberal can argue for it on these instrumental grounds, thereby making no judgment about the inherent superiority of environmentally friendly ways of life, qua ideals, over other ways.¹

Actually Schinkel notices a similar possibility and offers it up as the solution to the apparent problem. He notes that liberal policies cannot be neutral in terms of their effects on the ways of life citizens lead (since no political policy can), but they can be neutral in terms of their aims or intentions. So liberals can endorse environmental education provided they do not intend to promote any controversial ideal over any other. Yet Shinkel does not read this possibility back into the ideals of environmental education he critiques. These ideals are allegedly incompatible because they favor education for the environment, rather than an education that ‘allows evaluation, from various perspectives . . . of these policies’ (Schinkel, 2009: 523). But this is not clear. As we have suggested above, it is quite possible that environmental education can be both for the environment and have dimensions that enable learners to critically reflect on the values being taught. To think that it cannot is, first, to overlook the ways in which problematizing environmental business-as-usual and engaging students in meaningful consideration of alternatives facilitates student autonomy and is an innately critical enterprise, one liable to cultivate capacities for critical thinking. But it is also to think, implausibly, that either it is obvious in every way just what it means to be pro-environment or that reasonable people cannot share an ideal, like sustainability or environmental preservation, and yet disagree about what it means exactly or requires of us in practice. Certainly the environmental justice movement, in its various forms, has shown the many different ways of being pro-environment (Anon, 1991; Bullard, 1990; Suagee, 1994).

But suppose we are wrong about even this. Still, it would not follow that political liberals cannot endorse morally transformative environmental character education. This is because they are free to base their endorsement on principles of right action, such as principles of liberal intergenerational justice, or else on the merely instrumental ground that sustainability, and so the survival of liberal institutions, requires it. In the context of the classroom, this ambiguity means that liberal environmental educators are free to deploy pedagogical techniques instilling an appreciation of nature, such as outdoor experiential learning. However since ardent nature lovers can, and probably will, reasonably disagree about the precise content of their obligations relative to the environment, this instruction needs to be complemented by instruction fostering the ability to think critically about the range of views on those obligations. There is no obvious reason to believe that either of these will be prejudicial to the other.

Postma also misinterprets many features of Rawls’s view relevant to its ability to justify a principle of intergenerational justice. For one, it has never been any part of Rawls’s view that even the most selfish egoist should be able to endorse whatever is agreed upon in the original position. Rather the parties are assumed to be ‘normally self-interested’ in the same way that any self-respecting person is concerned to see to it that her own good is achieved (Rawls, 2001: 84–85). The parties are also assumed to have and to be moved by a sense of justice, so that others can expect that they will understand, apply, and act from principles of justice specifying fair terms of social cooperation. And, in the final versions of the theory, parties to the original position are not even selecting principles to govern their own society. They are selecting for anonymous clients.

In Rawls’s later works, equality of power and vulnerability also play no role in the circumstances of justice as Rawls describes them (Rawls, 1993: 66; 2001: 84). There they include moderate scarcity and the fact of reasonable pluralism, both of which characterize the relationship between distant generations. If so, there is no need to reconceptualize the role the circumstances of justice play in the theory. Since parties to the original position are agreeing to principles for well-ordered societies, in which there is perfect compliance to the principles of justice, and also do not know to which generation they belong historically (even if they do know that they all belong to the same generation), the self-interested among them should adopt a principle of intergenerational savings (English, 1977; Rawls, 2001: 160). If they do, they are guaranteed to enjoy the benefits of the savings from previous generations; if they do not, they cannot be sure that they will enjoy even the minimum resources needed for background justice.

Not all Rawls scholars endorse this argument. Roger Paden (1996) rejects it, claiming that it conflicts with the restrictions on self-knowledge in the original position. His view is that the veil of ignorance should prevent parties from knowing that they all belong to the same generation (or rather that their clients do technically; we drop this way of talking for simplicity). But actually this is not obvious. The restrictions on self-knowledge in the original position are intended to model the conditions needed for the parties to deliberate fairly, no one negotiating from a position of exceptional power or weakness. This in fact is why Rawls called his doctrine ‘justice as fairness’. So we can permit self-knowledge to seep through the veil provided that it is necessary for fair deliberations or will not affect their fairness. In the present case, knowing that they all belong to the same generation might prejudice the parties in favor of their own generation. But they would be unwise to have that prejudice since they do not know to which historical generation they belong, whether earlier or later. In any case, if this self-knowledge is removed, so that contractors do not know whether they belong to the same generation or not, the case for adopting some intergenerational principle is only strengthened. In that case, to reject a just savings principle would be to cross one’s fingers and hope that one lives early in the history of generations.

However persuasive this argument is, critiques of Rawls would in any case not suffice to show that liberalism cannot justify a robust principle of intergenerational justice.² Rawls’s liberalism is just one form that a liberal view can take; others might more straightforwardly do the trick. Brian Barry (1997) construes liberalism as a universalist ideal according to which it would be arbitrary from the standpoint of justice to favor our own interests over those of later generations in a way that would be prejudicial to their ability to live at least as well as we do. Or if neutrality and contractualist reciprocity are the obstacles, perfectionist liberal views in the tradition of John Stuart Mill or Thomas Henry Green are candidate replacements (Green, 1986; Mill, 1978). As developed by Steven Wall, perfectionist political moralities are those according to which it is legitimate for states to ‘take an active role in creating and maintaining social conditions that best enable their subjects to lead good lives’ (2009: 100). So perfectionist political moralities are liberal views just when they maintain, as Mill and Green do, that extensive individual freedoms are essential to leading good lives. Since it is very plausible that some fairly extensive set of individual liberties and freedoms is essential to leading a good life (Raz, 1986; Wall, 1998), some version of such a view is plausibly a liberal view.

Such views need not be fetishistic when it comes to the value of individual liberties, however, since liberties can just as well prevent as enable people to lead good lives. Any liberty that does so is to that extent not valuable and merits no special protection. This can be applied to environmental education. If, when left to determine their own relationship to the environment, people tend to make decisions that diminish the overall worth of their lives, the liberty to do so lacks value and merits no special protection.

Perfectionist liberalism might seem threateningly anti-liberal since it requires a conception of a good life and there is nothing to prevent perfectionists from favoring oppressive ones. Indeed Wall points out that the notion of a ‘good life’ is ambiguous between a life that is high in well-being, and so goes well for the person who leads it, and a life that is high in overall value. He then argues that perfectionists should favor the broader interpretation since ‘it is possible that the most valuable life that a person could live requires him to make sacrifices in his own well-being for the sake of other persons or goods’ (2009: 101). But in this respect, perfectionist liberalism is no worse off than any other theory. Communitarian or civic republicanism just as well as neutralist or political liberalism requires people to make sacrifices for the sake of other people or goods. There is nothing to prevent advocates of these views from requiring them to do so on oppressive grounds (and perhaps even less than there is for the perfectionist liberal, who has the value of liberty to the good life to fall back on). Finally, there is no inherent incompatibility between the liberal’s concern for individual freedom and duties to others. Freedoms are impossible without corresponding duties to honor them.

The complexity of environmental dilemmas and the virtues of liberal and environmental citizenship

If the arguments of the previous sections are correct, liberals are not prevented by their own principles from endorsing environmental education, including some forms of education for the environment and education for sustainable development. However, the challenge critics pose to liberal environmental educators is not merely the challenge of showing that liberal political morality permits it. It is also the challenge of showing that the civic virtues that liberals value – such as autonomy, critical thinking, reasonableness, toleration, and self-respect (Callan, 1997; Gutmann, 1987; Macedo, 1990) – cohere with the civic qualities fostered through environmental education. And whether that is so finally depends on precisely which qualities environmental educators, as moral educators, should seek to foster. So, finally, we argue in this section that some important qualities they should seek to foster in fact do cohere with those that liberals value.

Setting aside the misleading distinction between education in, about, or for the environment, there are generally four schools of thought in the literature on environmental citizenship education. Two of these, education for sustainable development and environmental values education, we described in the section on environmental education and student autonomy. A third, the science literacy approach, prioritizes instruction in knowledge and skills needed for assessing scientific information, such as reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), relevant to environmental policy decisions (Schramm and Anderson, 2011). A fourth approach, the ecojustice approach, prioritizes teaching students how the forces behind environmental degradation, such as structural racism or the exploitation of cheap foreign labor, are the same ones that destroy social and community bonds (Martusewicz et al., 2011).

We suspect that there is something of value in each of these. Future citizens are unlikely to make wise environmental decisions if they cannot competently engage with relevant scientific information, have no appreciation for wilderness or other species, do not comprehend the dilemmas of sustainable development, or fail to see the connections between political inequality and environmental destruction and injustice. If this is correct, good environmental decision-makers will indeed need at least one of the qualities that liberals value, namely critical thinking. It is unlikely that a person could engage competently with scientific information without this capacity, and also probably unlikely that she could comprehend the dilemmas of sustainable development or see the connections between political inequality and environmental destruction and injustice (given how politically organized campaigns of misinformation have sought to obscure these).

However, rather than make the case for each of these approaches, which are covered in detail elsewhere, we want to make a case for a further component of any adequate environmental education that is at best implicit in these other approaches. This is participatory character education, or education for the skills and virtues – enumerated below – that enable people to participate well in collaborative deliberations with others about environmental dilemmas.

To see the importance of participatory character, consider that future citizens should be equipped with capacities needed to cope with the class of issues in which environmental dilemmas fit. These issues, from climate change to water quality to sustainable agriculture, are extraordinarily complex. Take climate change, for example. Groups of people living across various regions will experience climate change impacts differently. This leads to disagreements and divergences in terms of what questions to ask about climate change and over what the best approaches are for mitigation and adaptation. Climate change involves social and ecological systems that we do not know very much about, and there are multiple sources of knowledge, experience, and expertise on the effects of climate change. What we do know, as reflected in the IPCC reports, is subject to skepticism that is closely tied to various political views (Mccright and Dunlap, 2011). Our current institutions were not designed to address problems of the complexity of climate change (Gardiner, 2010) and it is quite possible that our everyday intuitions and systems of morality cannot guide us for the sorts of collective decisions our societies will have to make (Jamieson, 2010). Mitigating and adapting to climate change can also not be left to international negotiations, but will also occur at the subnational level, involving partnerships among communities, groups of citizens, and public, private and non- governmental organizations (Lemos and Agrawal, 2006). This means that citizens will deal with climate change through many of their responsibilities, from voting to consumer choices to civic and community engagement.

Policies at the federal level or international levels will have to be put into action by people on the ground facing varying local circumstances. Citizens will have to work with one another locally, and be prepared to do so globally, despite differences in their environmental values and virtues (or lack thereof) or in how they express these values and virtues. They will also have to deliberate on fair terms with (or at least in consideration of) others who potentially face very different risks and levels of risk, including those in other countries (Curren, 2010). Environmentalist communities in industrialized countries will have to be coordinated with communities in developing countries and Indigenous peoples. There will likely be cases where environmentalists and environmental justice advocates will have to work alongside corporate parties and political conservatives. Even supposed allies have been shown to express ‘shared’ values very differently, as the literature in environmental justice shows in cases where environmentalists and environmental scientists work with members of Tribes and First Nations (Arquette et al., 2002; Nadasdy, 2005).

Citizens will also be expected to participate in national and global networks used to address environmental problems. Examples include blogs, de-centralized networks that work toward goals like renewable energy, and national and international public engagement activities. While these sorts of networks may be associated with particular positions on sustainable development and environmentally friendly behavior, their effectiveness will be improved the more citizens with different values and ideas participate well in them. That is, people who have good skills for entering into these deliberative networks regardless of their values will contribute toward improving the capacity of the networks to be relevant to a wider range of citizens.

Based on the landscape we have just described, citizens will have to have a set of qualities that allow them to work well with regulatory authorities and other stakeholders in the face of uncertainty and deep differences. As it turns out, there is considerable overlap between these qualities and those of liberal citizenship. For example, in their dealings with other stakeholders, citizens will need tolerance, but also qualities like friendliness, temperance, empathy, sincerity, reasonableness/fairness, integrity, and deliberative humility and wit. Take deliberative humility, for instance. This is a mean with respect to certainty in one’s beliefs (Aikin and Clanton, 2010). The deliberatively humble person is not without convictions, but she is also aware of limits to her knowledge and is open to the possibility that she might be wrong about some things. The exercise of qualities like deliberative humility in group-deliberations facilitates synergies which in turn enable the production of new knowledge and fair compromise or consensus (Aikin and Clanton, 2010; Ferkany and Whyte, 2012). Such humility, however, is arguably a component of the reasonableness, or readiness to propose and act on fair terms for social cooperation (provided others are also prepared to) that political liberals prescribe for deliberating within the norms of public reason, i.e. for justifying claims by appeal to evidence, shared principles, and ideals (Rawls, 1993: 224). A person who is prepared to acknowledge limits to her moral knowledge or consider that she might be mistaken is at least much more likely to set aside her convictions and argue for her views on the basis of considerations others can accept.

In their dealings with experts and regulatory authorities, too, citizens will also need courage and basic self-confidence, the latter of which is a component of Rawlsian self-respect (Rawls, 2001: 59). Without these traits, citizens are liable to defer excessively to the judgments of experts, which may or may not be well informed about local conditions. Citizens will also have to be skilled at contributing their best to processes the goals of which may range from compromise to agitation, and at respect and honoring the differences of others with whom they have to engage collectively. Such capabilities are implicit in the UNESCO conception of education for sustainability, which asks ‘What if education systems prepared learners to enter the workforce as well as handle a crisis, be resilient, become responsible citizens, adapt to change, recognize and solve local problems with global roots, meet other cultures with respect, and create a peaceful and sustainable society?’ (UNESCO, n.d.b).

The capacities we have just described have been noted by others who advocate environmental education. Consider Randall Curren’s conception of education for managing the crisis of global sustainability. Like us, Curren argues that children are ‘entitled to learn about [sustainability problems] and be prepared to deal with them constructively’ (Curren, 2010: 71). Curren’s ‘curriculum of survival’ includes more systematic instruction in environmental studies, more honest portrayals of history and prehistory, education on economics, the enjoyment of environmentally friendly activities, and the de-commercialization of schools. But it also emphasizes capacities that will be required for citizens to deliberate and participate well in collective decisions, such as the capacity for global cooperation, to distinguish truth from propaganda, and to be resourceful, inventive, and adaptable.

Whether liberalism and environmental education are compatible is often assessed without giving due respect to the types of issues that environmental education should prepare citizens to understand and address. Many of the most pressing environmental dilemmas are collective action problems with complex dimensions that will have to be confronted through collective deliberations in which citizens exercise the participatory virtues. Our list – persistence, courage and self-confidence, friendliness, empathy, sincerity, reasonableness/fairness, integrity, and deliberative humility and wit – coheres with those virtues typically associated with liberal citizenship – reasonableness, toleration, critical thinking, humility, and self-respect.

Conclusion

It is not at all obvious that liberalism is incompatible with mandatory transformative environmental education, the arguments surveyed in this paper notwithstanding. The very idea of education for the environment is inherently ambiguous, and engaging with alternative perspectives is both progressive and autonomy-promoting. There is little in Rawls to condemn environmental education, and liberalism can take universalist or perfectionist forms that are more obviously compatible in any case.

The in-principle compatibility we hope to have established here does not settle all questions, unsurprisingly. Much work remains to be done concerning the moral dimensions of environmental education. How, for example, can science literacy, environmental values education, education for sustainable development, ecojustice pedagogy, and participatory character education be coherently integrated? What would a complete curriculum combining these look like, and what are the best pedagogical practices? The moral foundations of liberal political theory remain controversial, too. How best should liberal theory be developed, as a form of political liberalism or liberal perfectionism? No doubt answers to these questions will turn up important results for the compatibility of environmental education and liberalism. But we doubt this will show that they are, after all, incompatible.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors are a grateful to the editor and an anonymous referee for helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Funding

Work on this article was partially supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation.

Notes

Biographical notes

Matt Ferkany is Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at Michigan State University and affiliated faculty of MSU’s Environmental Studies and Policy Program. His work focuses on political, ethical, and pedagogical problems relating to environmental ethics and education, civic and moral education, and well-being and virtue. He has published in journals such as Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Environmental Values, Journal of Philosophy of Education, and Ethics, Policy, and Environment.

Kyle Whyte is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. His work is in environmental justice, the philosophy of technology, and American Indian philosophy. His articles have appeared in journals such as Ethics, Policy, and Environment, Synthese, Human Ecology, Journal of Global Ethics, American Journal of Bioethics, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, Philosophy and Technology, Environmental Justice, and Continental Philosophy Review, his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Spencer Foundation. He is a member of the American Philosophical Association Committee on Public Philosophy, and the Michigan Environmental Justice Work Group.

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