A rare event these days; I've had a new paper published – on Taylor & Francis Online in a special issue of the journal Global Discourse, edited by John Foster. It's in response to a paper by Steve Gough in the special issue which is, itself, a review of John Foster's book After sustainability: denial, hope, retrieval. All rather involved, but it worked as a process and it made me think about sustainability. Of course, to make complete sense of what I write, you'll have to read Steve's paper, and John's book, and ...
This link will take you to the article. To whet your appetite, this is how it ends:
My final point is to note that I read [Gough's] paper with the Abstract in mind because the last part of this holds out a particular promise for the paper. It says:
“The paper … identifies education as a common denominator; itself both a long term characteristic of evolved social behaviour and a short term social preoccupation. It suggests that, when both these aspects are considered simultaneously, education has considerable unexplored potential for the reflective, iterative management of interactions between humans and the rest of nature, under uncertainty.“
At the end of the paper I asked myself whether it had done justice to that idea, and to that potential. And I don’t think it quite does as much as it might have. I thought about this as I read the last part of the paper, starting from “Modern Institutionalism …”. I think that the way that Gough deals with Hodgson’s work (particularly through the 2007 quote) is valuable here. It seems to me that the “people” that Hodgson was writing about must include the young, but I wonder if young people are sufficiently of a special case to warrant a separate comment. They are, after all, subject to two forms of influence that most other people are not, both of which involve a moral guardianship: the home and family, and the school. Both these institutions are intent on inculcating good habits, often under the general heading of educating, and sometimes are in sharp opposition to each other. Think, for example, of Jamie Oliver’s school food trials and the Yorkshire mothers who thrust burgers through school railings to ensure that their children got, what was in their view, proper food. Inevitably, they got little thanks for taking an active interest in their children’s welfare.
In the end, the most important of Gough’s points might just be this:
“Education seems attractive as a solution because it offers the hope that people might come to make better choices for themselves, rather than be in any way compelled.”
Oh, if only all environmental educators saw things so clearly.
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