Campbell2023 What Do We
Campbell2023 What Do We
https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhad020
Advance access publication 22 March 2023
Original Article
ABSTRACT
Learning about the causes and effects of human-induced climate change is an essential aspect of
contemporary environmental education (EE). However, it is increasingly recognized that the
familiar ‘information dump delivery mode’ (as Timothy Morton calls it), through which new
facts about ecological destruction are being constantly communicated, often contributes to
anxiety, cognitive exhaustion, and can ultimately lead to hopelessness and paralysis in the face
of ecological issues. In this article, I explore several pathways to approach EE, beyond the
presentation and transmission of ecological facts. I position my conceptual discussion around
my own teaching experiences speaking about climate change with undergraduate students
across several Education classes through 2019 to 2021. I situate these reflections within the
current discourse on education and teaching in/for the Anthropocene. Throughout this
discussion, I locate various ways in which much EE fails to contribute to student’s agency and
empowerment by consistently reducing complex ecological phenomena to a set of problems,
mainly economic/technological, to be fixed by technocracy. I propose that a contemplative–
existential perspective to EE is capable of responding to these reductions, most basically by
providing opportunities and practices for students to process their grief and other emotions
through recognizing the Anthropocene as an inescapable reality, but also a reality that cannot
be determinately imagined or predicted.
‘[K]nowing the right thing does not necessarily translate into living the right way.’ (Bai et al.
2020: xii)
Received: April 13, 2022. Revised: August 26, 2022. Accepted: March 11, 2023
© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Philosophy of Education Society of Great
Britain. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
458 • Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2023, Vol. 57, No. 2
INTRODUCTION
Learning about the causes and effects of human-induced climate change (HICC) is
an essential aspect of contemporary environmental education (EE). However, it is
increasingly recognized that the familiar ‘information dump delivery mode’
(Morton 2018) through which new data and facts about ecological destruction
1
For this foundational distinction of ‘matters of fact’ from ‘matters of value’ and ‘matters of concern’
in social theory/critique, see Latour (2004); for discussion in the context of EE, see Gleason (2019).
2
To provide a brief overview of how this continuing project of hosting ‘climate change discussion
groups’ came to be, in autumn 2019 and spring 2020, while I was working as a teaching assistant for
the large undergraduate class, ‘Introduction to Philosophy of Education’, a group of about eight to twelve
students from five separate tutorial blocks (seventy-five students total), decided to meet with me, semi-
regularly outside of class so we could continue discussing recurrent ‘climate change’ themed conversa
tions from tutorials. Participation in these group dialogues was extra-curricular, and completely informal
and optional. This initial class, was, in many ways, the catalyst for this article and study.
C. Campbell • 459
trainable body (associated with atomized and discrete skills) the separation of feel
ing, affect and emotions from logic and rationality (along with it a kind of reductive
sexism that implicitly places women on the side of emotions and feelings and men
on the side of reason and intellect).4
In short, I was noticing a different (ecological) sensibility in my young students
that explicitly rubbed up against this book: these young people were not buying
If you look at everything we’ve learned in field ecology, cognitive ethology, zoology, and other such
fields over the past 30 or 40 years […] it’s clear at this point that we are not the only persons […]
on the planet. And so, at that point things become very complicated. Because if asking the question of
doomsday is always the question of doomsday for whom, and if it’s always a question that’s always
asked from a specific and embedded location, then the interesting thing is that the human is not the
only meaning making location from which those questions of, not just of survival but also of value,
can be posed. (Wolfe and Colebrook 2013)
My student wanted to make a similar point: that we humans were not inherently the
best or the brightest, and not the only beings worthy of our consideration in edu
cation or philosophy. She was, essentially, imagining a post-humanist and ecological
philosophy of education that honoured and took seriously the ‘more than human’,
that considered these silenced animal-beings as part of the educational conversation
(see Affifi et al. 2017; Blenkinsop et al. 2017; Taylor 2017; Taylor and
Pacini-Ketchabaw 2018; Morse et al. 2021)—rather than swiftly dismissing them
at the beginning of a text book.
Shortly after I saw this essay across my desk, I asked students from the five tu
torial blocks if they might be interested in having informal dialogue sessions to
4
‘[A] capacity that is discrete and can be perfected through practice and exercise’ (Barrow 1990: 24;
see also Barrow 1987).
462 • Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2023, Vol. 57, No. 2
continue several climate change themed discussions that had started to recurrently
come up in class, partially in response to this chapter and the human-centred tone/
perspective from the course text. Thereafter I commenced running semi-regular
climate change dialogue groups, every second or third week, with a small, slightly
rotating six to twelve-person group of students. I worked on the same course the
following semester, and these dialogue groups continued, semi-regularly with
A factoid is (usually quite small) chunk of data that has been interpreted so as to appear truthful. …
a factoid is truthy because it is in accord with what we think facts are. And because of scientism, the
common belief that science tells us something about the world in the same way that a religion
might do, we think that facts are totally simple and straight: they come out of things themselves.
(Morton 2018: 19–20)
Todd Dufrenes has put this guiding question at the heart of his book The
Democracy of Suffering: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, Philosophy in the
Anthropocene, asking: ‘what does our present time have to do with the future of hu
man subjects? What has any of it to do with what philosophers call ‘ontology,’ with
being? More simply put, what does it have to do with you and me?’ (2019: 8). Such
an existential and world-centred approach towards education (Biesta 2021a) in the
WHAT’S HAPPENING?
I’m pretty sure you’ve all noticed, that the world is not in good shape. People, animals, they are
suffering. (Second-year student)
The thing that my students mostly wanted to talk about in these sessions was the
present moment and what it meant for them and their futures. Our conversations
often began with acknowledging the reality of current life in the Anthropocene: how
the sun and sky had been blocked out for three weeks in Vancouver that summer
behind harsh and choking wildfire smoke, and how this affected us, emotionally and
physically, some more than others. We also spoke about our fears and hopes and
what we saw as possible and impossible in our world: what to eat, where to live,
sharing our feelings about intimate life decisions like reasons for having or not hav
ing children, asking questions about what constituted meaningful employment,
C. Campbell • 465
experiences of climate change (Paschen and Ison 2014; see also Lehtonen et al.
2019: 341). These authors argue that without careful attention and unravelling
of these narratives, both education and policy will fail to empower people with op
portunities, practices, concepts, and ideas resonant with their own localities, knowl
edge, and experience (see Gough and Stables 2012; Stables 2019a).
Yet, despite widespread recognitions within scholarship and research on the im
Again, the problem is that within such ‘business as usual’ approaches to climate
change education, there is effectively no room to be in relation to this knowledge,
to even take in what is happening. Leishanko and O’Brian (p. 2213) continue:
‘As a result, students have difficulty recognizing social, psychological, and emotional
6
This student explained to us how, after trying to describe her feelings of grief and sadness to family
and friends, she felt that her concerns for the animals were diminished. She reflected further how even her
education seemed to diminish the more than human in both tiny and not so tiny ways: ‘Like, I feel like I
wasn’t able to ask this question, to say that it mattered. […] It was stupid to care about these animals
[…]’.
C. Campbell • 467
dimensions of the issue, and often fail to see openings, possibilities, and entry points
for active engagement with sustainability transformations.’7
No doubt, part of the reason why storytelling and dialogue-based approaches
to EE are so compelling is that the future in the Anthropocene is radically unpre
dictable and still needs to be collectively experienced and imagined. It is doubtful
that truly sustainable social–ecological systems can be reached through existing
7
Still, here we should again note that certain classes and subjects (such as Philosophy of Education)
are better suited to provide such reflective–dialogical openings as well as the important point that con
stant existential and reflective dialoguing across educational domains can potentially lead to fatigue and
apathy in the face of HICC.
468 • Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2023, Vol. 57, No. 2
WHY ME?
I grew up always wanting to have a family and kids. Now I’m not so sure. I mean, it really scares me
what’s going on. The fires, the smoke, all the animals with nowhere to go. Where am I going to go?
(Third-year student)
terms with the general undecidability that we could now see would begin to char
acterize life in the Anthropocene.10
Ultimately, this kind of anxious concern for the future gradually settled into a
feeling of all-embracing grief. As Head notes at the very opening of his Hope and
Grief in the Anthropocene: ‘This is the converging, congealing grief at the loss of
the conditions that underpin contemporary western prosperity. It is grief for the ap
The purpose of death literacy is not to tame death or to alleviate the pain of grief and loss. […] If
anything, death literacy will awaken the pain of death, and of all loss and grief, and dignify it with
fuller awareness, […]—a way of turning toward pain (rather than away from it), and of allowing
the reality of our vulnerability and the inevitability of loss and grief to burn through our emotional
bodies. (2020: 76)
10
Some student examples highlight these feelings and concerns: ‘I always wanted to live in the in
terior, when I was older. […] Like, I grew up with horses, and I always thought, yup that’s where I’d
be—living with my horses, near where I grew up. With all the smoke and fires, my neighbor’s ranch
got burned down in 2017, […] I really don’t think it’s going to work.’
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WHAT NOW?
Maybe you’re not saving the world or anything, but it orients you differently, like in terms of how
you live your life, and that’s something. (Second-year student)
To reiterate: this question of how to live well and meaningfully in the Anthropocene
appeared later on in the dialoguing process, after students first acknowledged more
foundational considerations pertaining to their own lives (‘what’s happening?’ and
‘why me?’). In some ways, this ‘what now?’ dialoguing process intersected with our
earlier conversational phase of acknowledging ‘what’s happening?’, as both focused
prominently on sharing stories and experiences about ways to live meaningfully in the
face of ecological catastrophe. But seriously, ‘what now?’.
As these dialogue groups emerged from an introduction course to the philosophy
of education, with a specific section of the curriculum on virtue ethics and philo
sophical conceptions of human flourishing (eudaimonia), we became aware that
we were in part discussing and exploring ecological virtues, as guides or means to
flourish in the face of widespread crisis and despair. But what does it mean to
live well in the Anthropocene and what constitutes these kinds of ecological virtues?
This is the central question at the heart of the recent volume, edited by Bai, Chang
C. Campbell • 471
and Scott, A Book of Ecological Virtues: Living Well in the Anthropocene. Given that
we are living in the Anthropocene and are witnesses to the attendant suffering of all
forms of life, what changes do we need to make to our lives in order to minimize
suffering and maximize well-being for all? Put differently, what does living well,
and suffering well, look like in the Anthropocene?’ (2020: xi; see also Bleier 2021).
Our discussion on virtue ethics proved, in fact, to be useful in exploring this line
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Any serious kind of reflection on climate change provokes deep-rooted existential
questioning. As explored in this article, these kinds of questions range from ‘what
does it mean to be human?’ to ‘what does it mean to live well, in this moment of
anxiety and worry?’, and ‘what does it mean to acknowledge and care meaningfully
about non-human life?’. Perhaps the most difficult (but perhaps also central) aspect
of an existential approach to climate change education is that it moves us away from
an explicit concern with representing the facts and reality of life in the
Anthropocene towards experiencing holistically what this means for our living, right
now in this moment. What is revealed through this dialoguing is a kind of world-
centred commitment: a commitment to try to ‘stay in and with the world’
(Biesta 2021a) even if this is difficult or messy; to respond to the precarity of the
present moment and what it demands of us, even if this process is uncomfortable
or distressing (see Chinnery 2015; Wallin 2017). It involves fully taking in fears
and anxieties, loss, and pain, when they emerge in these conversations (Stanger
2016). As discussed in the ‘Why me?’ and ‘What now?’ sections, most fundamen
tally, this work involves recognizing limits; ‘that the world, natural and social,
puts limits and limitations on what we can desire from it and can do with it’
(Biesta 2021a: 3), which is, as Biesta further observes ‘both the question of democ
racy and of ecology’ (p. 3).
13
Indeed, our discussion groups confronted this early on, through the basic fact that they had begun
assembling outside of class hours, extra-curricular to the course, while the majority of their peers did not.
C. Campbell • 473
Of course, the shape of this work cannot ultimately be dictated by a kind of teach
ing strategy but a rather a pedagogical ethos, rooted in, what I would claim are fun
damentally ecological principles of being with and seeking out plurality,
participation, and complexity: ‘the wider and more complete participation of all
components in a whole’ (Bookchin, cited in Hern et al. 2018: 91). Ultimately,
this involves a kind of pedagogical responsibility that requires teachers and students
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