Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World by David Orr - Essay Example

Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World, by David Orr Part I: In the Introductory pages of Ecological Literacy, Orr states that, at the time, there were three crises looming: soil degradation, loss of cheap energy and the possibility that we would be reaching ecological thresholds. In nearly the same breath Orr discusses the failure of capitalism, a system theorized by Hobbes and Locke who postulated humans as entirely self-interested and developed an economic system on that model, with exploitation as the place where people interact. It is indeed a model which, as Orr says, permits "the collapse of morality itself" and in it are the roots to environmental degradation, because exploitation is not hindered, in pure capitalism, by anything. Two concepts that Orr introduces right away prove to be two of the most interesting and immediately useful; that of social traps, and of dishonest bookkeeping. A social trap is some condition which makes it advantageous for us to do something in the short run which is deleterious to us in the long run. Orr speculates that social traps are contributing to our orgy of non-sustainability. Because we can, and because we have designed our societies in such a way as to make fossil fuel burning almost mandatory, we "have" to keep on driving millions of cars every day; even though we can see the day when they will have to come up with an alternative, and waiting until it's necessary will be too late to avoid a lot of adjustment pain. Dishonest bookkeeping is a concept by which, when we put a price tag on something, we ignore all of its costs: one of Orr's examples is that of a weapon costing a certain number of million dollars to build, but even that is cheap considering that the cost of cleaning up its damage is not included in the original cost, and neither are the eventual effects of what we didn't spend the money on: if three million children currently living below the poverty line had been given nutritional supplements for two years, the long run advantage of having healthy children (who could become productive members of society, who could focus in school and thus learn things that we will need later, who developed naturally so that they did not later need state aid for medical care) would have caused a certain net gain for society; and the absence of all of those benefits of nutritionally sound little bodies will have real costs later. A third interesting concept is that of scale: it is posited that different systems, like farms or cities, will balance at a particular size, and to exceed that size, as in the case of agribusinesses and cities, will begin to create weakness and disease in the system. Modernism was based upon man over nature, upon technology being used to 'overcome' our environment and industrialization as the great liberator from a subsistence lifestyle and promoting new and better ways of overcoming nature; so that, in terms of scale, if we wish to fit more people into a space, we just build high-rise apartments; if we wish to work all night, we have 24 hour days and temperature controlled environments at all times. It can be 74 degrees everywhere one goes--in Alaska as easily as it is so in Arizona. Completely divorced from ones environment, it is sometimes easy to forget that there is an 'out there' out there; at least until it comes crashing down on us in ways we aren't prepared for. Postmodernism is the attempt to overcome the unsustainable consumptionism of modernism and use technology to live in harmony with the environment in such a way that everybody has enough and the world is left better, or at least as well, as we found it for our children. Orr recommends that we posit a sustainable society as based upon a calculus of self-interest because "no rational society rewards members to undermine its existence." This requires taking a long-view approach to decision-making; as well as a new kind of education which might allow us to gauge the effects of our decisions in a holistic way. The health of economic systems is almost always presented in terms of growth, but Orr points out that notions of growth are now divorced from sustainability. Rather than judge growth by how big it is, Orr recommends judging growth by how well it "preserves the integrity, beauty and stability of the biotic community" (as quoted by Leopold), or by how well it either protects, or even augments, the world of the future. Orr discusses at length those who recommend that humanity should blithely continue on the path that it is on because people are so clever, that even now somebody is probably inventing some new technology which will make all of our concerns about sustainability moot. Orr suggests that this ideology "has the distinction of being at once bad history and irrelevant" and asks why anybody would assume that growth will suddenly disassociate itself with environmental deterioration. He points out that proponents of a technological solution tend to resolve into mega-corporations and global industries with centralized operations. The effects of this are to divorce decision-makers from the locations which will be effected by their decisions, and thus to increase the probability of insensitivity and corruption. Orr points out as well that concentration of life-sustaining processes, like agriculture, makes everybody more vulnerable, to either error or to intent. Mega-crops tend to become weaker and, divorced from their normal co-species, can become prey to infestation (treated with chemicals, which further the cycle.) Not all technological advances have worked against sustainability; the beginnings of postmodern technology are found by way of solar and regenerative farming. Readers are introduced to some sustainability pioneering efforts: the bioshelters of the Todd's, making living machines to fulfill waste removal needs; the Lovin's and their design of "resilient systems" which are modular and built on the principle that if one module of the system is damaged, the damage won't put the whole system into jeapordy. Orr's Meadowcreek Project is a self-sustaining community, and learning center. These projects attempt to use as their guide the biosphere, which it is helpful to define as "a catalogue recorded over millions of years of what does and doesn't work." Orr discusses the international system and the fact that it was created long before humans and our technology began to affect so much of the planet. Although global warming is on the table to some extent in the international system these days, Orr notes that the environment had not at that time found its way as a topic of discussion in the international system. Post-industrialization, the impact of human beings upon the earth is unprecedented and negative. Orr discusses change strategies and suggests that outcomes be measured by the extent to which everyone is better off in the long run. There are low risk approaches such as "wringing inefficiency" out of the economy and tying self-interest to lowering energy/resource use per dollar of GNP; to combine "economic rationality with ecological virtue." Orr discusses alternative economics, and alternative economists like Daly and Cobb. Daly posits bioregional economies which keeps the use of resources, and waste removal sustainable "via population controls, resource depletion quotes, the redistribution of wealth, restriction on mobility of capital" and the protection of local economies. Alternative economics are fundamentally humanistic; all require that everybody gets their basic needs met, that the biotic resources be conserved, that barter should be encouraged, that wealth should stay local; the "subordination of economics to social needs and the restoration of local cultures." Prescriptions for this educated population are holistic, solutions oriented and include developing practical knowledge about a particular place, a multi-disciplinary approach to ecology, participation, interrelatedness; to gain an understanding of how quickly crises are developing, species extinctions, population growth trends and to be able to diagnose the causes of ecological destruction. Orr has cautions too: against over-specialization which, because it removes knowledge from its whole, limits true comprehension. Education must educate the whole person and in order to be whole, you have to be present, you must inhabit a place; and to inhabit a place requires intimate knowledge: the place itself should be integrated into the education. One avenue for integrating place into education is in the regional survey, in which students study the flow of energy in and out of the university: where food comes from, where waste goes, etc. These regional surveys could be done nation-wide and used as a way to map out the wide network of interrelatedness. They are one way of ensuring that students interact with their environment. Orr cites a study finding that Americans had a very low understanding of the environment. But in order to negotiate a sustainable future, America will need people who are proficient in a number of practical fields: solar design, horticulture, waste, composting, greenhouses, intensive gardening, food preservation, household economics and on-site energy systems, and can apply those skills in an ecologically sensitive way. He recommends that education by linked to the Greek concept of Paidea: self-transformation; because we will need total social transformation. Finally, education means understanding how bad our odds are. We learn, and are taught, based on what are determined to be our social and economic priorities. Orr contends that people are learning in ways that are either not productive for our true needs, or are actually counter-productive: lots of agri-business graduates every year; not so many sustainable agriculture graduates. People graduating now are not equipped to deal with the environmental collapse going on around us. Orr cites a few college programs of the time which worked towards ecological literacy and what they shared: ecological sustainability, appropriate scale, cultural and ecological diversity, the reevaluation of the goals and the direction of industrial societies and issues of justice and peace. Towards the end of Ecological Literacy, there is some discussion about the discussion of "managing" the planet earth. It is pointed out that this is a rather arrogant, and fruitless endeavor, since even a few tablespoons of dirt contains organisms which haven't been studied yet. Orr discusses the need for learning to 'live poorly': distinguish needs from wants, reduce dependencies, take full advantage of the free services of nature, the use local resources, rebuilding local and regional economies and rebuilding strong, participatory communities. When Ecological Literacy was written, the task facing humanity was daunting; it is no less daunting today. Americans have seen first hand the results of short-sighted policies in, possibly, the very fact of (if indeed caused by global warming) Katrina, but certainly in the management of Katrina's aftermath, by an administration who, according to climate scientists, has been actively engaged in repressing data about climate change. Ironies abound. Part II: It is now over a decade since the publication of Orr's book. Only this week a news outlet reported that the planet was melting on both poles, not just the North Pole as expected, and recently news outlets have reported findings that glacier melt in general is happening much faster than expected. Some scientists wonder if we may have already reached a tipping point on global warming. The news is accompanied by news of species die-offs and unprecedented and extreme weather events as would be expected in reaction to our planet having reached an ecological threshold. Further, we are envisioning the day when we run out of oil, and are already experiencing more expensive fuel: Exxon posted record profits this year. Most analysts, since 911, see foreign dependence on oil as a national security threat. None of Orr's suggestions on sustainability, or in the advancement of ecological literacy, have been instituted and Orr's book is as relevant as if we were frozen in time; even if our world is thawing. Both of the concepts of social traps and dishonest bookkeeping have real world, present day implications. The irrational, damn the torpedoes usage of social traps --because we do use them, as rationalizations--and dishonest bookkeeping are society-wide problems. They dovetail into other 'reasons why we're living this way' articulated later in the book, especially that of a social ethic of 'man over nature' which posits nature as a commodity to be exploited; as well as the consumptionism that characterizes our lifestyle. Orr's anathematic eschewing of the collection of ever more things as embodied by the Amish makes a nice counterpoint with which to assess the meaningfulness of a lifestyle centered around buying stuff. The third concept of appropriate scale is actually dealt with throughout the rest of the book because scale is implicit in sustainability; at Orr's Meadowcreek, the salient question was: once we've done the best we could in terms of efficient use and replacement of resources, how many people can this much land entirely support This sort of careful balancing of resources and people is very refreshing, as most of the negative aspects of our lives are the result of lack of attention to this very thing. City planners are concerned with how many people can be crammed into one area (to maximize profits I suppose) without making the area too unlivable (thus eating away at profits I suppose.) As regards the notion of the collapse of morality in capitalism, this is of course the root of the anomie found in industrialized societies. Orr comments that postmodernism has retrieved the sacred for the sake of the future; it may not be the sacred of pre-industrialism, or the troubled sacred of modernism; but an awareness of nature beyond the material would suit genuine human nature (not that perverse vision of Hobbes') better. The postmodern endeavor to leave a better future has never been so important, as there is a high probability otherwise that we will be handing off an environmental and economic disaster to our children. Redefining self-interest to include the community and the future is absolutely necessary, and most cultures prior to modernism have lived with the consciousness of the well-being of the children and of others as a priority. The focus on the individual found in modernism finds its limits where it cuts one off from that continuity. Orr considers that people's willingness to behave in a sustainable way will be limited by how expensive it is to do so: I may be able to pay $100 a month more for organic food and a healthier environment, but $300.00. Education is paramount to Orr; his Meadowcreek Project was intended from the beginning as an educational facility. He spends some time on the nuts and bolts of education, but in fact, almost all of the energy now being spent towards sustainability lies in the area of education: the dismal number of people who even understand that the environment matters (even now, surrounded as we are by signs) means that no policies will change, especially not those that require sacrifice, until ordinary people understand that it is crucial for our survival. It seems clear that people will not preference sustainable environmental policies unless forced. Even global warming alone isn't enough: people must understand that, regardless of the attempted muzzling of the science, what people do directly impacts the future; and people do not understand that. I suppose that is why Orr himself is more educator than practitioner: we can't act before people understand that we must act. There are grass-roots movements away from the McWorld: today's anti-globalization activists are reacting to the current modus operandi in which the only values are simply unfettered exploitation and maximization of profits, by whatever means necessary. The EU recently received a blow towards globalization when the people flatly voted down a major proposal (surprising unification movers and shakers who hadn't really asked those whom it would effect most, and justifying Orr's critique of a cluelessness as to the democratic process.) The theorists/inventors/entrepreneurs Orr introduces his readers to are involved with very exciting ideas; they suggest a radical, and positive, change; and typify the "unprecedented creativity" Orr spoke of as necessary for this paradigmatic shift toward sustainability. Orr's discussion of alternative economists was as heartening as his discussion of sustainability pioneers. Although, just as in 1992, when Orr was writing, the democratic process was limping along due to lack of participation, over a decade later we can't cite many improvements. Since 1992, people have begun to suffer from environmental change; we are seeing massive displacement now due to environmental disasters. The heat wave in France that killed so many elderly people is one recent event that has woken people up. It's disheartening that the international system has only responded to already occurring disasters; it may already be too late, and we've missed our chance to some extent. In addition to the practical skills Orr notes above, pioneers of postmodernism will also need to know how to proceed with radical transformation, and perhaps how to educate individuals and collectivities along that path. Orr was not optimistic at the time, and unfortunately, there has been a lot more damage to the environment since then. Katrina is a perfect example of the results of short-sighted policies, of "management" (instead of responsiveness) from afar and of living beyond our means along with living in alienation from our environment. Every place seems much like another as we move about the country and it is tempting to imagine that every place is the same, and to live in absolute disconnect with our environment. Even while we know that we aren't prepared for some 'theoretical' disaster, like the levees being breached, we are too busy living our private lives to really press for it. Additionally, people feel so powerless that when the federal government declines to approve money to fix the levees time after time, and local government can't afford it, people simply lapse back into passivity, hoping for the best and not prepared for the worst. Orr, David W. Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. New York: State University of New York Press, 1992 Read More