Why Care for Nature?: In Search of an Ethical Framework for Environmental Responsibility and Education

225 Pages·2006·1.01 MB·English

by  Dirk Willem Postma (auth.)

Why Care for Nature?
The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics
VOLUME 9
Editors
Michiel Korthals, Dept. of Applied Philosophy, Wageningen University, Wageningen,
The Netherlands
Paul B. Thompson, Dept. of Philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, U.S.A.
Editorial Board
Timothy Beatley, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, U.S.A.
Lawrence Busch, Dept. of Sociology, Michigan State University, Lansing, U.S.A.
Anil Gupta, Centre for Management in Agriculture, Gujarat, India
Richard Haynes, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Florida, Gainesville, U.S.A.
Daryl Macer, The Eubios Ethics Institute, University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan
Ben Mepham, Centre for Applied Bio-Ethics, School of Biosciences, University of
Nottingham, Loughborough, United Kingdom
Dietmar Mieth, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
Egbert Schroten, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
WHY CARE FOR NATURE?
IN SEARCH OF AN ETHICAL
FRAMEWORK FOR ENVIRONMENTAL
RESPONSIBILITY AND EDUCATION
by
Dirk Willem Postma
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-10 1-4020-5002-X (HB)
ISBN-13 978-1-4020-5002-2 (HB)
ISBN-10 1-4020-5003-8 (e-book)
ISBN-13 978-1-4020-5003-9 (e-book)
Published by Springer,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
www.springer.com
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 2006 Springer
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
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CONTENTS
About the Author vii
Acknowledgements ix
1. Introduction 1
1.1 A brief history of environmental education 2
1.2 ESD: Research questions and directions 12
2. Because we are citizens 19
2.1 Future generations as fellow citizens 23
2.2 Future generations as heirs of our community 53
2.3 Future generations as imagined strangers 61
2.4 Education for an open future 90
3. Because we are human 105
3.1 In defense of an aesthetic account of intrinsic natural value 107
3.2 On the status of nature and her evaluators 125
3.3 Towards an ethic of environmental responsibility 139
3.4 Conclusion 170
4. Because we educate citizens caring for nature 181
Bibliography 205
Index 215
v
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dirk Willem Postma was born on 21 August 1973 in Gorredijk, the Netherlands.
After completing his secondary education in 1990 he studied at Teacher Training
College for Primary Education in Drachten. Having obtained his teaching qualifica-
tion in 1994 he moved to Groningen to study Philosophy and History of Education at
the Department of Education of the State University of Groningen, where he gradu-
ated in 1997. During his college days he participated in several environmental organ-
isations and local pressure groups. From 1999 to the end of 2004 he worked as a
PhD-student at the Institutes of Philosophy and History of Education of the Radboud
University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and the Catholic University of Leuven,
Belgium. His study deals with the ethical and politico-philosophical dimensions of
environmental responsibility and education. Dirk Willem Postma was editor of
Vernieuwing(Reform), a progressive magazine for education and teaching from 1998
until 2005. Since spring 2005 he works as editor for SWP Publishers, a Dutch pub-
lishing house of books and magazines in the field of education, youth care, social
work and humanism. As such, he is editor of the educational magazine Pedagogiek in
Praktijk(Education in Practice).
vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Having written in virtual seclusion this past year has nevertheless given me a
deeper appreciation of the philosophical commonplace that authors are not the
intellectual owners of the texts they write. Obviously, this book has been written
by me, in the sense that the touch of my fingers on the keyboard caused the text
to appear on the computer screen. But on a more intellectual level, this book
ought to be read as the result of an ongoing conversation with others on issues
of shared interest, or even as a testimony of sharing a common life with some of
them. Therefore, I would personally like to thank all these ‘others’for their part
in the creation of this dissertation. However, I do feel that there are more proper
ways to express personal gratitude than a few sentences on the first page of an
academic monograph such as this. Let me suffice here by confining myself to a
rather compact list of acknowledgements.
First of all I would like to thank my supervisors Paul Smeyers and Wouter van
Haaften for their professional supervision, inspiring and meticulous criticism
and personal involvement. Furthermore, I am grateful to my colleagues at the
Department of Philosophy of Education in Leuven as well as in Nijmegen, in
particular Ger Snik and Johan de Jong who ought to be mentioned for their con-
tribution to my research plan and criticism of the initial texts. I am most grate-
ful to my roommate and friend Femke Takes for her solidarity and our sharing of
the ups and downs in the mad life of a junior researcher. I want to thank the par-
ticipants of the Dutch Kohnstamm Network and the participants of the Leuven
Research Community for the stimulating debates on relevant issues in our field
of study. I would also like to express my thankfulness to the senior colleagues of
different universities who were prepared to comment on early drafts of my
papers on several occasions. Wilna Meijer, Bas Levering, Jan Bransen, Paul
Standish, Richard Smith, Michael Bonnett, Stefaan Cuypers and Hub Zwart
deserve special mention – as well as those junior colleagues who were never
tired of discussing social, political and philosophical issues in a personal and
generous way. I want to thank Scott Rollins for his careful editing of my manu-
script. My fellow editors of the educational magazine Vernieuwing (Reform)
kept me from becoming narrow-minded by widening my horizon of concern to
issues and opinions beyond the immediate scope of my research. And of course,
there are my friends who have endured my moods and absent-mindedness, and
who have – each in their own personal way – showed me that there are worth-
while things to do and experience outside of my study. In doing so they
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
regenerated and strengthened my determination to go on. Most of all I thank my
parents, Pier and Willy Postma, for their unconditional faith and support with-
out which I would never have been able to accomplish this. Finally, I am grate-
ful beyond words to my partner Niek. He knows why.
Dirk Willem
Amsterdam, November 2004
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to
narrow the range of thought?
George Orwell1
This book has been written in a time of environmental neglect. A time in which the
expansive needs of multinational corporations, western consumer interests and the
politically celebrated ideals of economic growth and technological progress appear
to override any consideration for preserving natural beauty as well as consideration
for those unable to speak and negotiate on their own behalf: third world citizens,
future generations, animals, plants and landscapes. This neglect is evident in the
withdrawal of national governments from the requirements of international agree-
ments on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (Kyoto treaty), it is manifest in
the organised inability and unwillingness to establish more equal trade relations
between rich and poor countries as well as in the lack of political commitment to pro-
tect extraordinary sites of natural beauty from economic exploitation (Alaska, the
Amazon rainforests, the Dutch Wadden Sea). In times like these, environmental edu-
cation is a hazardous and primarily ambiguous enterprise, since it easily comes to
function as a means to foist present responsibilities onto future generations. Some
proponents, for instance, argue that environmental education should ‘create a new
generation of citizens who are greener than their parents’(Bell, 2004, p. 43). Thus,
new born citizens are burdened with environmental responsibilities that we failed to
live up to ourselves.
This predicament prompts careful reflection on the nature and status of environ-
mental education: if environmental education is designed to create ‘green citizens’
and advance a ‘sustainable development’, how should we judge the prespecified aims
of ‘citizenship’and ‘sustainable development’? And if environmental education is
meant to raise aesthetic appreciation and care for the natural environment in our
every day behaviour, how do we judge intrinsic value-claims and ideals of environ-
mental responsibility? These questions will be at the heart of this PhD-thesis, which
is dedicated to examining the ethical and politico-philosophical dimensions of envi-
ronmental responsibility and environmental education. To be more specific, the focus
of this study will be on the framework of Education for Sustainable Development
(ESD), which dominates at present in all countries who participate in the educational
and environmental organisations of the United Nations, (who recently declared the
upcoming decade of 2005–2015 as the ‘United Nations Decade on Education for
Sustainable Development’).
1