Session 6: Education and Environmental Justice

Andrew Brown - Sustainable Earth: Deep Ecology and Public Health - A Case Study in Educational Design
Planning Specialist, Management and Policy Sciences, Associate Dean for Planning and Development, University Of Texas School of Public Health, Houston

The ecological perspective mandates a new educational vision. This presentation describes one institution's approach to the challenge of integrating global environmental awareness into traditional Public Health education. How do health educators make visible the profound relationship between human and environmental health?

The discipline of Public Health has always been concerned with the interaction between the environment and human populations. But the discipline has traditionally concerned itself with the health of specific populations in limited environmental settings.

The interdependency of earth systems and the inclusivity of the life-supporting biosphere pose new challenges for the understanding of human activities and the design and functioning of sustainable societies.

These challenges involve the urgent need to interpret and present the environmental crisis as a threat to the health of human populations, and to investigate implications for societal change that will promote the survival and health of human societies and ecosystems on which they are dependent.

The health of individuals, even the health of local and national communities, can no longer be understood apart from the health of global ecosystems. Nor can the health of human societies be understood apart from issues of economic and behavioral health.

Added challenges include understanding complex interactions, indirect rather than direct outcomes, and cumulative effects over time. The new element in the challenge is the realization that the biosphere is essentially a closed system with finite limits and resources, and that humans are now capable of placing intolerable stress on this system.

To provide effective future societal leadership, health educators and health professionals must therefore develop ecological literacy. Literacy must involve an integrated understanding of the social determinants of global environmental health and the environmental determinants of global societal health. Ethics, governance systems, economics, and psychology, among others, will play an increasing role in definition of environmental literacy.

Ecological literacy will reveal the health of the earth as the foundation of human health, and it will imply the sustained maintenance of responsible human-ecological interaction as the foremost medical and public health priority of all societies.

Profound educational change is therefore required. The University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston is developing a program in environmental literacy as the theoretical foundation of the concept of sustained human health.

In keeping with the mission of the University Leaders for a Sustainable Future, and in the spirit of the Earth Charter, we are designing an educational framework appropriate for an Academic Health Science Center.

Public Health education must now grapple with the reality of biological, physical, economic, and behavioral inter-dependencies. This presentation will illustrate the intricacies of integrating the global trans-disciplinary perspective into the traditional sub-disciplines in the compartmentalized world of traditional academia.

John Robinson& Tony Shallcross - To Become a Nobody One Must First Become a Somebody: Education as Environmental Justice
Institute of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University

Environmental justice as discussed in this paper is rooted in ethical rather than jursiprudence conceptions of justice and is addressed alongside concerns for social justice. To use Naess’s conceptualistion of the four levels of deep ecology, environmental justice implies concrete actions (level four) and decisions (level three) based on a platform (level two): a set of espoused principles. The platform espoused by deep ecology is based on ecocentric values which assume the inherent worth of nature and the rejection of the view that humanity is of sole value or of greater value than other lifeforms. But environmental justice is more tangible than more abstract ethical concepts such as value and goodness. For many deep ecologists the ultimate norm (level 1) on which the deep ecology platform is based is that of an ontologically or cosmologically based self-realisation which rejects environmental ethics as the basis for environmentally just actions. This paper posits the proposition that rather than rejecting ethics, from the viewpoint of formal education ethics can be seen as the precursor to ontological or cosmological self-realisation. Thus self-realisation, which is linked to Kant’s conception of beautiful action, action based on inclination can flow from ethical actions, actions based on duty with an ethics of character or virtue as an intermediate step. From an educational perspective it is questionable whether environmental justice can be founded on actions based on inclination rather than actions based on duty, especially when the achievement of self-realisation appears to be based on serendipitous, exclusive experiences of nature and wilderness. An integrated ethical education can lay the communitarian foundations for environmentally just actions based on duty which then lead to sound environmental action becoming second nature initially through an ethics of character leading eventually to ontological self-realisation where acting on ecocentric principles becomes part of being.

Tony Shallcross& John Robinson- Being as the Becoming of the Possible; The Goldilocks dilemma the problem of appropriate scale for decision-making. A theory of action for achieving environmentally just education.

We have many competing radical philosophies on which environmental just actions may be based such as ecofeminism, social ecology and deep ecology. While a deductive approach may be appropriate for the academic derivation of such new, non-standard deep green theories of environmental justice it does not follow that such critical, transformatory theories of the middle ground can only be accessed through a deductive theory of action in which environmentally just actions are derived from ultimate values. To many teachers such a transformation would appear difficult, if not impossible, and therefore psychologically disempowering for a coherent theory of action to achieve an environmentally just education. To propose a theory of action that derives educational practice from the theoretical base of deep green ethical values represents a major transformation in procedure and perception for most teachers. Just as it is good practice in the education of children to start where they are; it is equally appropriate in initial teacher education (ITE) and the continuing professional development (CPD) of teachers to do the same. This paper proposes an inductively derived theory of action that is potentially inclusive of competing environmental philosophies educational ideologies and the social, economic, spiritual and scientific dimensions of sustainability. What is advocated is a pragmatic approach to change which psychologises ecophilosophy by seeing change as a feasible journey rather than a daunting destination