Environmental education, narrative complexity and ...

INT. J. sci. EDUC., 1993, VOL. 15, NO. 5, 607-625

Environmental education, narrative complexity and postmodern science/fiction

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Noel Gough, Deakin University Rusden Campus, 662 Blackburn Road, Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia In this paper science education and environmental education are considered as story-telling practices and the narrative strategies used by educators in these fields to represent and problematize human transactions with the phenomenal world are critically examined. It is argued that the characteristic discourses of much contemporary science and environmental education rarely encompass the narrative complexities that are needed in order to (i) make problems of human interrelationships with environments intelligible (and, thus, amenable to resolution) and (ii) conceptualize postmodern scientific understandings of 'nature' and 'reality'. It is suggested that these problems and concepts are modelled more appropriately-and interrogated more critically-by much literary fiction, especially the complex and complicating textual strategies of postmodern science fiction. I thus argue that critical readings of science fiction texts should be integral to both science and environmental education and that the narrative strategies of postmodern fiction should be incorporated into their story-telling practices.

Science and environmental education as story-telling Like Grumet (1981) I find it generative to think of curriculum as 'the collective story we tell our children about our past, our present and our future' (however, I prefer to add selective to Grumet's 'collective'). Indeed, the study of narrative is one way of approaching a number of theoretic and practical problems in curriculum and teaching, and I have found it to be particularly useful for addressing both epistemological and strategic issues in science and environmental education. As Knoespel (1991) writes: Narrative theory has challenged literary critics to recognize not only the various strategies used to configure particular texts within the literary canon, but to realize how forms of discourse in the natural and human sciences are themselves ordered as narratives. In effect narrative theory invites us to think of all discourse as taking the form of a story.

My own attempts to apply narrative theory in curriculum studies and teacher education have focused on the ways in which the discourses of environmental education (Gough 1990, 1991) and science education (Gough 1992, 1993, in press) are configured as stories, with particular reference to the adequacy of the narrative strategies used by science and environmental educators in their work. That is, teachers, policy makers, curriculum developers, textbook writers and the like tell stories to learners; scientists, journalists and the authors of literary fiction also tell stories to their respective audiences. Each story-telling practice incorporates a particular selection of narrative strategies and conventions, the implicit or explicit 0950-0693/93 $10·00 © 1993 Taylor & Francis Ltd.


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knowledge of which influences the story-maker's craft, the audience's expectations and the meanings that are mutually constructed. However, we should not take it for granted that the persistence of more-or-less distinct differences between the narrative forms found in, say, scientific reports, school textbooks, mass media journalism and fiction means that these differences are either necessary or desirable. That is, the present narrative conventions of science and environmental education textbooks are not the only-or necessarily the best-means of describing and explaining the phenomenal world (and the world of science) to learners. For example, Hospital's (1988) novel, Charades, uses metaphors and other narrative elements adapted from or inspired by quantum mechanics to explore the permeable and ambiguous boundaries between truth and illusion. Hospital's story of 24-year-old Charade Ryan's search for her own origins unfolds largely through 'pillow talk'-conversations between Charade and her lover, Professor Koenig, who teaches physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One such conversation (Hospital 1988) includes the following exchange: 'Question', Charade says. 'If a woman stands in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue facing MIT, but her memory is so vividly snagged on one particular day of her childhood in the village of Le Raincy that she is unaware...that she is oblivious to the cars around her and so she is hit, run over, killed...Is she more truly in Boston or France when she dies?' 'Well put', Koenig says. 'The indeterminacy problem in a nutshell'. Authors of conventional texts dealing with science and/or environmental subject-matters usually put expositions of the indeterminacy problem in a very different kind of 'nutshell'. For example, Myers (1990) writes: In the quantum world, objects do not possess separate properties, such as position and momentum; these properties are integrally combined. The more accurately a particle's position is measured, the less accurately can its momentum be defined By our choosing to measure position precisely, a particle is forced to develop more uncertainty in momentum, and vice versa. Thus the observer alters the observed by the act of observation, and the observer becomes the participant. Such unqualified, positive statements are typical of what Schwab (1963) calls a 'rhetoric of conclusions' which, he argues, even in the standard science textbook, 'gives a false and misleading picture of the nature of science' (a claim substantiated by a number of social studies of scientists at work, e.g., Charlesworth et al. 1989, Latour 1983, Latour and Woolgar 1979). However, these statements about quantum indeterminism are taken from The Gaia Atlas of Future Worlds, in which the concept is presented as an example of the ways in which the new physics 'probes toward a holistic view of nature and our place within it' and, it is alleged, demonstrates 'that we are more integrally involved with the world around us than we have supposed' (Myers 1990). It is somewhat contradictory to describe quantum indeterminacy in the detached, objectivist terms of modern science and, at the same time, to expect it to exemplify the ways in which we are 'integrally involved with the world'. But, at least in my experience, most science and environmental educators seem to take it for granted that concepts like quantum indeterminacy should be represented in texts by a bald statement of scientists' conclusions rather than, as in Charades, problematizing it in the casual conversation of a novelist's imaginary characters. Yet the narrative strategies of fiction may be more appropriate for representing science and the phenomenal world to learners than

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the expository textual practices that have dominated science and environmental education to date. This is not merely because fictional narratives may be more 'accessible' (that is, less boring) to many learners than the language of textbooks but also because the narrative structures of some forms of literary fiction are better suited to mediating human involvement with the world. Furthermore, certain forms of literary fiction may be especially well suited to expressing and exploring the concepts and methods of postmodern science (and, indeed, of modern science as it is now being reinterpreted).


Fact, fiction and 'reality' Both science education and environmental education privilege the modernist scientific discourse which claims to have access to the way things 'really' are. Within this discourse it is assumed that reliable (intersubjective) distinctions can be made between 'fact' or 'reality' on the one hand and 'fiction' or 'illusion' on the other. The narratives of both science and environmental education typically include representations of the phenomenal world ('reality') which may include descriptions and interpretations of the global conditions and circumstances which appear to make environmental education necessary and desirable. For example, the need for education concerning the greenhouse effect usually is justified by reference to empirical-analytic research on trends in the atmospheric composition of greenhouse gases, on causal explanations for these trends, and extrapolative predictions of their environmental and social effects. Much education about the greenhouse effect is based on the assumption that understanding environmental circumstances 'objectively' is important in encouraging people to respond appropriately to greenhouse issues. In short, the story-telling practices commonly adopted by both environmental educators and science educators reflect what Harding (1986) calls 'the longing for "one true story" that has been the psychic motor for [modern] Western science'. This longing for 'one true story' has driven the construction of narrative strategies in which fact and fiction are mutually exclusive categories: facts are assumed to correspond with 'truth', and 'scientific facts' are equated with a 'reality' that is described in terms which suggest that it could be independent of human agency. But fact and fiction are much closer, both culturally and linguistically, than these narrative strategies imply. A fiction, in the original sense oifictio, is something fashioned by a human agent. The etymology of 'fact' also refers to human action; a fact is the thing done, 'that which actually happened', the Latin factum being the neuter past participle oifacere, do (OED). Thus, both fact and fiction refer to human experience, but 'fiction' is an active form-the act of fashioning-whereas 'fact' descends from a past participle, a part of speech which disguises the generative act. In Haraway's (1989) words: 'To treat a science as narrative is not to be dismissive.... But neither is it to be mystified and worshipful in the face of a past participle'. Facts are testimonies to experience. Scientific facts are testimonies to the experiences of scientists in actively producing facts with their specialized technologies of data generation and inscription, their rule-governed practices of interpretation, and.their characteristic traditions of social relationships and organization. The opposition of fact and fiction in modern science is thus a fiction —part of a story that has been fashioned to rationalize the strategies used by scientists to produce facts. For example, as Haraway (1989) writes:

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Biology is the fiction appropriate to objects called organisms; biology fashions the facts 'discovered' from organic beings. Organisms perform for the biologist, who transforms that performance into a truth attested by disciplined experience; i.e., into a fact, the jointly accomplished deed or feat of the scientist and the organism Both the scientist and the organism are actors in a story-telling practice.


There can be little doubt that the narrative strategies of modern science have helped to raise our awareness of the nature and extent of numerous environmental problems. But these problems may themselves have resulted from modern science's construction of stories in which the story-maker or -teller is 'detached' from the earth, in which subject and object, 'culture' and 'nature', are categorically distinct. This narrative detachment of human culture from the earth which sustains it also appears to have generated myths about what it means for a person to be or to become 'cultivated' (or a 'cultivator'). Such myths have influenced human behaviour far beyond the realms of science. As Fry and Willis (1989) write: The cultivator, as artist or critic, like the scientist, has so often regarded nature as low, as threat, as transcended origin and therefore in need of conquest and domination. The cultivated subject is seen to be the mind grown above nature and in command of it, totally separate from the baseness of body. This discourse has self-evidently failed. Humanity has damaged its own ecosystem, its collective and interdependent body, through the alienation of self from a nature that is external, other. An ecology of survival extols neither a rationalist command of nature nor a romantic return to it-nature never went away-but a major reassessment of social and economic actions according to their effects on well-being within the biological and social ecology. If humanity is to survive, we must recognise that there is no 'outside' from which to speak or act; we must gain a new normative matrix for the conception and production of the world. Survival is the one universal value that transcends the proclamation of difference.

This 'proclamation of difference' is a relatively recent invention. Prior to the modern era, humans sustained their senses of interdependence and relatedness with the earth through metaphors of kinship. For example, it is a recurring theme in Australian Aborigines' stories that 'earth just like mother and father and brother of you' (Neidjie 1990). Similarly, Native American mythologies are centred on honouring propriety in one's relationships, not only with human kin but also with 'the supernaturals, spirit people, animal people of all varieties, the thunders, snows, rains, rivers, lakes, hills, mountains, fire, water, rock, and plants [which] are perceived to be members of one's community' (Allen 1989). In western agricultural societies this sense of kinship was reduced to the patriarchal concept of 'Mother Nature'-an all-giving, forgiving, ever-providing presence in the background (see Plumwood 1990). In the Christian Middle Ages, nature was constructed metaphorically as a text in which to read God's purposes-as Shakespeare wrote {As You Like It, II, 1: 12), there were 'books in the running brooks, sermons in stones'. But, in the language of modern science, nature was no longer constructed metaphorically as kin, mother or text. Rather, via such degrading metaphors as Bacon's reference to nature as a 'common harlot' (Merchant 1980, p. 171), nature was rendered lifeless, as in Isaac Newton's 'world machine'. Griffin (1988) suggests that the objectifying, mechanistic and reductionist approach of modern science led to the 'disenchantment of nature', that is, 'the denial to nature of all subjectivity, all experience, all feeling'. Nature was thus 'bereft of all qualities with which the human spirit could feel a sense of kinship and of anything from which it could derive norms'; furthermore, 'modern thinkers


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have assumed that this disenchantment of the world is required by science itself (Griffin 1988; emphasis in original). However, Griffin (1988) argues that a reversal of the modern disenchantment of science and nature fits within larger contemporary (that is, postmodern) reassessments of knowledge:


What is distinctive about 'modern' philosophy, theology, and art is that they revolve around numerous strategies for maintaining moral, religious, and aesthetic sensitivities while accepting the disenchanted worldview of modernity as adequate for science. These strategies have involved either rejecting modern science, ignoring it, supplementing it with talk of human values, or reducing its status to that of mere appearance. The postmodern approach to disenchantment involves a reenchantment of science itself. Before considering in more detail some postmodern dimensions of a re-enchanted science, it should be noted that another popular contemporary approach to the re-enchantment of nature involves an appropriation of the myths of premodern cultures, as in books like Knudtson and Suzuki's (1992) Wisdom of the Elders and Maybury-Lewis's (1991) Millenium: Tribal Wisdom of the Modern World. Such books do little more than labour the obvious-that the discourses and practices of communities whose day-to-day survival depends on sustaining the processes by which they are themselves sustained are consistent with what we might call deeply ecological world-views. These books also assume rather than demonstrate that the 'wisdom' of premodern cultures can be applied to western society's struggle to resolve the environmental problems that it has created. By insinuating that the ecological 'wisdom' of tribal cultures lies in their possession of superior propositional knowledge about the processes which sustain life on earth, the authors of these books ignore or overlook the significance of the narrative structures and strategies with which these people conceive and produce meaning in their world. In sharp contrast to the essentializing and universalizing discourses of modern science, the stories of people like Australian Aborigines and Native Americans assimilate language to the complexities of their own experience of their locally contextualized transactions with the world, rather than reducing these complexities to a 'disenchanted' language of objectifying grammar and mechanistic metaphors. Such contextualized languages bridge subject and object worlds. For example, Jay (1986) describes the place of salmon in the lives of Northwest Coast Native Americans, showing how salmon stories incorporate a moral understanding of self, community, earth and the interrelationships among them: ...to the original peoples of the Pacific Northwest, salmon were not merely food. To them, salmon were people who lived in houses far away under the sea. Each year they undertook to visit the human people because the Indian peoples always treated them as honored guests. When the salmon people traveled, they donned their salmon disguises and these they left behind perhaps in the way we leave flowers or food when visiting friends. To the Indians the salmon were a resource in the deep sense, great generous beings whose gifts gave life The Indians understood that salmon's gift involved them in an ethical system that resounded in every corner of their locale. The aboriginal landscape was a democracy of spirits where everyone listened, careful not to offend the resource they were a working part of. This understanding of salmon recalls Leopold's (1970) maxim that 'a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.' It is not difficult to see that the moral imperatives that accompany the narrative construction of salmon as a 'gift'


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are more likely to preserve the integrity of this particular biotic community than comparable western stories which refer to salmon in terms of 'carrying capacity' and 'sustainable yield'. Indeed, in the objectivist language of modern science, which deliberately separates matters of fact from matters of value, salmon stories are constructed so as to ignore an important dimension of our transactions with salmon, namely, the value we place on those transactions. Whether or not we use the gift metaphor, we cannot tell the whole truth about our understandings of salmon without signifying the values that make those understandings desirable and possible. Thus, Native American stories of salmon are fictions that are as epistemologically potent in their own way as those fictions of western science that we call 'scientific fact'. To paraphrase my earlier quote from Haraway (1989), the western biologist transforms the performance of salmon into the kind of truth attested by disciplined experience in western biological science, that is, into a fact, the jointly accomplished deed or feat of the scientist and the salmon. This may, for example, be a propositional truth claim describing or explaining some aspect of the salmon's migratory or reproductive behaviour or its nutritional properties as human foodstuff. In a similar way, Native Americans transform the performance of salmon into the kind of truth claim-in this case a moral truth-attested by disciplined experience in their tribal discourses and practices, that is, into the fact of salmon-as-gift, the jointly accomplished deed or feat of Native American people and salmon. To refer to Native American salmon stories as examples of 'the wisdom of the elders' or 'tribal wisdom' is to conspire in the disenchantment of nature-it distorts Native American world-views by suggesting that they, like us, have stripped nature of the qualities with which humans can feel a sense of kinship and derive norms. While I cannot speak for Native Americans, I think it more likely that in their world-view —a view of a world that has not been disenchanted by modern science-Native American salmon stories are narrative embodiments of 'the wisdom of the locale' (Jay 1986; emphasis in original) rather than of 'the elders' or the tribe. Cheney (1989) uses the making and telling of such stories to exemplify his concept of postmodern environmental ethics as 'storied residence' or 'bioregional narrative'-a 'complex system of images or myths of the human-land community which instructs and does so in a way that is felt to be both obligatory and fostering of individual and community'. It should be noted that the construction of such ethics does not require our appropriation of another culture's stories. While we might be able to accept the moral defensibility of construing salmon as a gift, Native American salmon stories do not match the sense of 'reality' cultivated in modern western societies and it would be naive to pretend that we might find them ecologically instructive. They are not-and perhaps cannot-be an authentic part of our 'storied residence'. However, these sorts of stories are instructive in so far as they draw our attention to a signal failure of the narratives of modern science, namely, the failure to accept that the creation of meaning in the world is a human and communal responsibility. As Watson (1989) writes, among the Yolngu people of Australia's north-east Arnhemland ...the cosmos is acknowledged as one whose meanings have been created and have a history embedded in the lives and social actions of 'Ancestral Beings' in the 'Dreamtime'. This meaning and history is sometimes referred to as 'song'. The explanation that Ancestral Beings created meaning in this world in their actions of social living is a necessary and inevitable component of every aspect of


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ordinary Yolngu life. Yolngu people continue to sing the world into existence as an everyday activity. Examining the ways in which premodern societies construct the narratives which constitute their 'storied residence' may inspire us to pay more attention to questions of how meaning is created and to see such questions as related to our daily lives. The majority of people in modern western societies have abrogated their responsibility for 'singing the world into existence'. Instead, they accept uncritically the world that Bacon, Descartes, Newton and others 'sang' into existence-a world that presents itself as a disenchanted machine of structures and systems. The re-enchantment of the world requires our participation in the creative reconstruction of a language which foregrounds our kinship with nature. We need myths and metaphors that 'sing' the earth into existence in the conditions of urban and late industrial lifestyles. Clues to such constructions can be found in the symbolic languages of some premodern societies but we cannot, and should not, attempt to appropriate them-we do not live in the worlds that Coyote, Crocodile, Raven or Rainbow Snake made. Rather, we now live in a world in which our involvement with nature is intractably-and perhaps irreversibly-mediated by mechanical, biochemical and cybernetic technologies and the cosmologies insinuated by postmodern science. Postmodern science: reconnecting fact and fiction Modern science was constructed on empiricist and experimentalist assumptions. By the middle of the 19th century it had come to be typified by Newtonian physics and (as Newton had foreseen-and deplored) was materialistic, deterministic, atomistic and reductionist. Scientists and educators alike assumed that science was chiefly a matter of patiently seeking the 'facts' of nature and reporting them 'objectively'. The breakdown of this assumption was given impetus by a series of events in the physical sciences that began in the late 1880s. As Schwab (1962) writes: The new physics...did not come about because direct observations of space, place, time, and magnitude disclosed that our past views about them were mistaken. Rather, our old assertions about these matters were changed because physicists had found it fruitful to treat them in a new way-neither as self-evident truths nor as matters for immediate empirical verification. They were treated, instead, as principles of inquiry-conceptual structures which could be revised when necessary, in directions dictated by large complexes of theory, diverse bodies of data, and numerous criteria of progress in science. Today, almost all parts of the subject-matter sciences proceed in this way. A fresh line of scientific research has its origin not in objective facts alone, but in a conception, a deliberate construction of the mind. On this conception, all else depends. It tells us what facts to look for in the research. It tells us what meaning to assign these facts. In effect, Schwab in describing the emergence of postmodern science-the realization that many of the perceptions, interpretations and explanations that constitute 'reality' and our experience of it are not 'facts' (as modern science conceived them) but meanings fashioned by human agents, that is, they are fictions. 'Science' and 'fiction' do not exist in separate domains but are culturally interconnected. This is not simply a matter of science and literature finding common meeting places in science fiction and other forms of expressive art. Nor is it just a matter of scientific theories being translated into literary themes, a practice


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which long preceded the emergence of science fiction as a distinctive literary mode (for example, Copernican cosmology permeates the poetry of Donne and concepts of disease formation are a distinctive feature of Zola's novels). As Hayles (1984) demonstrates, 'literature is as much an influence on scientific models as the models are on literature', in so far as there is a two-way traffic in metaphors, analogies and images between them. The narrative strategies of fiction are not unknown in science. In the 1930s Einstein defended realism and relativity against the paradoxical truth claims of quantum mechanics by means of a 'thought experiment'-an experiment which so 'obviously' had the outcome he wanted that it was not considered necessary for anyone actually to perform it. Einstein's strategy was persuasive: nearly 30 years elapsed before other physicists went to the trouble of uncovering his unstated assumptions and used them to predict the outcomes of feasible experiments which could be compared with the outcomes predicted by quantum mechanics. Many physicists interpret the results of these experiments as being decisively in favour of quantum mechanics (for further details of this story see McCusker and McCusker 1988). But I am less concerned here with whether or not Einstein was 'right' than with the narrative strategy he used to exercise discursive authority in the community of physicists. In effect, Einstein sustained doubt in the explanatory power of quantum mechanics (for many years and among many colleagues) with no more and no less than a 'thought experiment'-a plausible story, a science fiction (for a more detailed discussion of the narrative strategies of science and science fiction see Broderick 1989 and Ormiston and Sassower 1989). Science, literature and poststructural criticism In recent years, the deep cultural connections between science and literature have been most clearly elucidated through the discourses of poststructural criticism. While poststructuralism is most obviously applicable to literary theory, the cognate interests of postmodern scientists (especially those working in the fields of non-linear dynamics-popularly known as 'chaos') have established poststructural critical discourses as fertile sites for discussing and investigating both scientific and literary cultures and the transactions between them (see also Hayles 1990, 1991). Poststructural criticism is concerned with the problems posed by metanarratives- stories that purport to describe, explain or provide a foundation for other stories. For example, positivism is a metanarrative —a set of rules characterizing positive knowledge. The positivist story makes rules for other stories from categorical distinctions between analytic and synthetic, linguistic and empirical, observation and theory, and so on. The poststructuralist position is that a metanarrative is just another narrative, a social agreement constructed by participants in a particular discourse. The positivist metanarrative has for the most part been abandoned by postmodern scientists in practice—but it persists in the rhetoric of many scientists and in the dominant discourses and practices of science and environmental education in so far as they continue to privilege modern science as the means of making and telling 'one true story'. If science and environmental educators are to provide learners with any understanding of the phenomenal world as postmodern science constructs it, they may need to adopt the scepticism towards metanarratives that characterizes poststructural discourses.



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A poststructuralist position in science and environmental education would encourage an understanding of 'reality' that I once saw encapsulated in the words of a poster in an English (language) classroom: 'the universe is not made of atoms-it is made of stories'. This is a particularly apt contrast: presenting students with a drawing of the Bohr-Rutherford model of the atom as if it truthfully represented some small segment of the 'real' universe is nonsensical in so far as it is an abstraction that is as far removed from a learner's experiential knowledge as it is from scientists' understandings of quantum indeterminacy. The 'truth' and 'reality' of the Bohr-Rutherford model of the atom is that it is one component of a story in which data were produced, inscribed and interpreted by particular people with particular motives and values who worked within a particular social and political context and, furthermore, that this story has in turn generated metaphors and cultural myths which are still affecting society in various ways (not least among them being the myth that being able to recognize, reproduce and/or label a drawing of the model is a meaningful indicator of a student's achievement in 'learning science' in schools). The Bohr-Rutherford model is one fiction which can be fashioned from certain scientific facts-from testimonies to the experience of particle physicists-but it is not the only plausible story that these facts can be used to generate. The insights which can emerge from treating science as a narrative practice are exemplified by Haraway's critical history of primatology, Primate Visions. Haraway (1989) elucidates the ways in which primatology's story-telling practices 'structure scientific vision' and inform the construction of other cultural myths: ...monkeys, apes, and human beings emerge in primatology inside elaborate narratives about origins, natures, and possibilities. Primatology is about the life history of a taxonomic order that includes people. Especially western people produce stories about primates while simultaneously telling stories about the relations of nature and culture, animal and human, body and mind, origin and future. Indeed, from the start, in the mid-eighteenth century, the primate order has been built on tales about these dualisms and their scientific resolution.

Many of these 'narratives about origins, natures, and possibilities' are sustained by literary and other fictions and part of Haraway's method is to 'read' primatology 'as science fiction, where possible worlds are constantly reinvented in the contest for very real, present worlds': I am interested in the narratives of scientific fact-those potent fictions of science-within a complex field indicated by the signifier SF...a complex emerging narrative field in which the boundaries between science fiction (conventionally, sf) and fantasy [have become] highly permeable in confusing ways, commercially and linguistically...[SF represents] an increasingly heterodox array of writing, reading, and marketing practices indicated by a proliferation of 'sf phrases: speculative fiction, science fiction, science fantasy, speculative futures, speculative fabulation... SF is a territory of contested cultural reproduction in high-technology worlds. Placing the narratives of scientific fact within the heterogeneous space of SF produces a transformed field. The transformed field sets up resonances among all of its regions and components. No region or component is 'reduced' to any other, but reading and writing practices respond to each other across a structured space. Speculative fiction has different tensions when its field also contains the inscription practices that constitute scientific fact. (Haraway 1989)

The final chapter of Primate Visions alternates between 'reading primatology as

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science fiction' and 'reading science fiction as primatology'. Haraway (1989) reasons that:


Mixing, juxtaposing, and reversing reading conventions appropriate to each genre can yield fruitful ways of understanding the production of origin narratives in a society that privileges science and technology in its constructions of what may count as nature and for regulating the traffic between what it divides as nature and culture.

Primate Visions testifies to the potential effectiveness of SF in helping to deconstruct and demystify contemporary orthodoxies-in this case, the social, textual and material history of primatology. Clearly, SF has mediated Haraway's own learning in important ways. The kind of learning that Haraway models in Primate Visions is as applicable to school science and environmental education as it is to research in the history and philosophy of primatology. In my experience, learners in schools require little encouragement to mix and juxtapose the narratives of 'scientific fact' with the narratives of science fiction. Indeed, they may be more willing than their teachers to mix and juxtapose seemingly disparate elements of these narratives in critical and creative ways. The difficulty for science teachers and environmental educators seems to be that many have cast themselves as 'defenders of the faith'-defenders of the privileged status of modern science-rather than as 'understanders' (connoisseurs and critics) of the myths, narratives and rituals which constitute science in the contemporary world. SF, science and education SF often registers new scientific knowledge long before it is recognized by the general public-and even longer before it is registered in textbook science. For example, in The Time Machine, Wells (1895) acknowledges the existence of non-Euclidean geometries and suggests a relationship between space and time that appears, in retrospect, to anticipate the Einstein—Minkowski notion of a space—time continuum. Wells was clearly abreast of the scientific debates of his era and the Time Traveller's opening remarks include an assertion that remains pertinent to this day: 'The geometry...they taught you at school is founded on a misconception'. The limitations of Euclidean geometry were well known to 19th-century mathematicians yet, nearly a century later, few schoolchildren have been taught that Euclid's geometry is only one among many. By the late 19th-century there was growing interest among mathematicians in the abstract geometry of four (and more) dimensions yet this was not reflected in popular or school texts. As Costa (1967) writes: 'For a generation yet to hear of Albert Einstein, the opening pages of The Time Machine provided an introduction to the possibilities of the Fourth Dimension which in 1895 was not elsewhere available outside scientific journals' (for further details of the science and mathematics of The Time Machine see Geduld 1987). Many accounts of the relationship between 'real' science and SF are overly concerned with demonstrating the wisdom of their own hindsight. For example, in The Science in Science Fiction, Nicholls (1982) catalogues the various ways in which particular works of SF can be seen, in retrospect, to have accurately predicted developments in science and technology; he is also concerned to demonstrate 'where science fiction gets it wrong' (Nicholls 1982). But from the point of view of science and environmental education, it may be more important to attend


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to the subject matters about which SF speculates, and to the narrative forms in which these speculations are couched, than to the accuracy or otherwise of its predictions. Both science and environmental education involve representations of various forms of knowledge (among which science is privileged) in their respective curricula. Stenhouse (1975) provides a useful description of what such representations entail: ...a form of knowledge has structure, and it involves procedures, concepts and criteria. Content can be selected to exemplify the most important procedures, the key concepts and the areas and situations in which the criteria hold. Now it might be thought that this is to designate procedures, concepts and criteria as objectives to be learned by the students. This strategy...would, I believe, distort the curriculum. For the key procedures, concepts and criteria in any subject — cause, form, experiment, tragedy-are, and are important precisely because they are, problematic within the subject. They are the focus of speculation, not the object of mastery. Many of the concepts that are 'problematic' and 'the focus of speculation' in science at any given time cannot be found in the textbook science of the day —but it is more than likely that they will be among the foci of speculation in contemporaneous works of SF. Thus, for example, part of the educative value of The Time Machine in its day was that it gave imaginative form to concepts that were deeply problematic and key foci of speculation among late-Victorian scientists and mathematicians, such as the space—time relationship, entropy and evolution-concepts that were not addressed by schooling at the time. In a similar fashion, much of the textbook science of today is concerned with the kind of subject-matter that is amenable to being treated as an 'object of mastery', such as stipulative definitions and relatively secure and stable propositions and 'laws'. It is left to science journalism and SF to provide public access to the problematic concepts which are presently the foci of speculation for many working scientists. Outside the journals in which reports of current scientific research are published, science journalism and SF are key sites for exploring the conceptual territories that mark out the 'leading edges' of science, whereas textbook science seems chiefly to be concerned with the trailing edges of scientific inquiry. A recent example of SF embodying the leading edges of scientific speculation is provided by the emergence of chaos theory as a theme in SF. As developed by Belgian thermodynamicist Prigogine during the 1960s and '70s, chaos theory describes mathematically how open systems under certain conditions (far from equilibrium and fluctuating non-linearly) spontaneously transform themselves into new levels of complex organization, leaping across a statistical bifurcation from apparent chaos to order. Prigogine's model of self-organizing systems as 'dissipative structures' appears to reconcile a number of deeply problematic contradictions in 20th-century science, including the very different models of physical function provided by entropy versus evolution, and the different roles and attributes of time in microscopic physics and macroscopic biology. The profound cosmological implications of Prigogine's work were quickly recognized and he received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1977. However, his work was not published in English in any popular form until 1984 when Order Out of Chaos (Prigogine and Stengers 1984) was translated from the French. Some SF writers seized very quickly upon Prigogine's work, one of the earliest being Attanasio


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(1981) whose novel, Radix, incorporated some of Prigogine's key ideas some years before they were popularized in English. Prigogine's thinking has promoted highly original interdisciplinary work in astrophysics, biology, biophysics, chemistry, ecology, economics, education, management, neurology, particle physics, thermodynamics and traffic studies, but it has had little or no effect on textbook science and school curricula. Nevertheless, many of Prigogine's ideas and their applications can be accessed immediately through SF. For example, in the graphic novel Watchmen (Moore et al. 1987), a dark satire on superhero mythologies and American politics, one central character is the aptly named Dr Manhattan, a towering, blue-skinned physicist with superhuman qualities. Dr Manhattan is the reincarnation of a nuclear scientist who is materially 'deconstructed' when he is irradiated accidentally by subatomic particles. The novel's representation of the scientist's reconstruction involves two intertwining-and contradictory-metaphors. One metaphor is borrowed explicitly from Einstein's rueful reflection on his role in the release of atomic energy: 'if only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker'. The scientist repairs a friend's watch a short time before his demise and his reconstruction is depicted as 'just a question of reassembling the components in the correct sequence'. But other visual and verbal cues suggest that his transformation can itself be conceived as a metaphor of chaos. That is, the scientist's disassembled particles can be interpreted as a self-organizing system, a dissipative structure which spontaneously reorganizes itself at a higher level of complexity represented by Dr Manhattan's superhuman powers. Thus, Dr Manhattan's ambiguous genesis can be seen to symbolize the contesting paradigms of modern and postmodern science—the deterministic mechanics of Newton's 'clockwork universe' versus the unpredictable dynamics of chaotic self-organizing systems. Another novel which incorporates chaos theory in significant ways is Shiner's (1988) Deserted Cities of the Heart. The central character, Thomas, is an anthropologist investigating 'the application of Ilya Prigogine's dissipative structures to the Mayan collapse, circa 900 a.d.' (Shiner 1988). Prigogine's theories provide numerous images and metaphors throughout the story. In a key passage (Shiner 1988), Thomas throws pebbles into a pond beneath a waterfall: The turbulence made them dance, two steps to the right, up for a second, then spinning off sideways and down. Waterfalls were very big in Chaos Theory, of which Prigogine's and Thomas' own work were just a part. According to classical physics the patterns should be predictable, because everything that went into them was quantifiable. Volume of water, depth of streambed, angle of gradient, everything. But the patterns were like living organisms, influenced by their own history and their reactions to each other, and they could never be nailed down. What does this tell us, he thought? This question exemplifies some of the speculations of contemporary chaos scientists. As contextualized in this particular story, it is a question equally open to conjecture by learners in schools. At the moment, such stories are one of the few ways in which the characteristics and possible implications of non-linear dynamics can be explored by young learners (for a more detailed discussion of the links between chaos and SF see Porush 1991a, b). Furthermore, distinctions between 'fact' and 'fiction' are irrelevant to considering the above passage's merits as a 'focus of speculation'. Indeed, embedding the concepts of non-linear dynamics in an



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explicit fiction (rather than in the fiction that masquerades as fact in science textbooks) may make it easier for teachers and learners alike to treat such concepts as foci of speculation rather than as objects of mastery. Speculations about a chaotic phenomenal world should also be central to environmental education. Just as the paths of the stones Thomas throws can 'never be nailed down', there is no 'one true story' we can tell learners about the dynamics and consequences of the production of greenhouse gases, ozone depletion, acid deposition, the cryptic spread of mutant genes or the reduction of biological diversity. The biosphere abounds in non-linear processes in which small, low-energy fluctuations may have immense, unpredictable effects. The simplifying formulae and formalisms of modern science cannot capture the complexity and instability of the phenomenal world that presents itself to human sensibilities. To comprehend the magnitude and complexity of the problems that our transactions with the world have occasioned, we need more complex and complicating discourses, such as are provided by non-linear mathematics and some kinds of literary fiction. Reality, chaos and narrative complexity A number of science educators have recognized the productive links that can be made between SF and science education (see, for example, Nunan and Homer 1981, Dubeck, Moshier and Boss 1988) but their emphasis is on the relevance of the thematic content of selected examples of SF for understanding scientific concepts and methods (see also Gough 1993 for an appraisal, critique and extension of these approaches). But the significance of fictional narrative for science and environmental education is not just a matter of content but also of form. Long before quantum mechanics and non-linear dynamics made their respective appearances as explicit themes in SF (which in both cases was very shortly after they had entered the realms of scientific discourse), literary fiction was modelling the narrative strategies through which humans are able to make sense of an indeterminate and chaotic phenomenal world. For example, consider the unpredictable amplification of low-energy fluctuations in natural systems, popularly known as the 'butterfly effect' (a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil may set off a tornado in Texas). This principle is a commonplace of fictional narrative and, as Porush (1991a) argues, in this respect chaos theory corresponds with the world-view of Dickens, Shakespeare and every other novelist and dramatist 'for whom small accidents send the hearts of mortals and their fates wheeling out of their appointed Newtonian orbits into grand twists of fate and destiny'. Such a view of human experience cannot be accommodated by the simplifying discourses of modern science-and nor can the butterfly effect in global climatic phenomena. Newton's reductionist 'world machine' was-and to some extent still is-seen by many people as a 'common sense' view of reality, yet the common and sensible (that is, irreducibly complex and unpredictable) events of everyday life and the global biosphere cannot be represented by Newtonian mechanics. Newton's world, in which reactions are reversible and interactions reduced to a few simple algorithms, seems like a crude science fiction-a minimalist abstraction from a thought experiment not unlike Abbott's 19th-century novel Flatland. Indeed, Newtonian mechanics is at its most plausible in such fictional worlds —for example, the formula determining force by reference to mass and


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acceleration (F — ma) is best demonstrated in frictionless space. By contrast, the world described by chaos theory is recognizably sensible-a world in which 'nature' and 'reality' are, as it were, speaking the same language as the great mimetic artists. Non-linear dynamics is thus an important step in the 're-enchantment' of science because it reinstates scientific understanding to the domain of human language and literature: in chaos theory, the natural sciences have 'rid themselves of a conception of objective reality that implied that novelty and diversity had to be denied in the name of immutable universal laws' (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Paradoxically, science textbooks are already like mimetic novels in some respects, despite the fiction of their differences and despite each being characterized by very different narrative strategies. Both kinds of text sustain the illusion that they do not mediate between reader and an exterior world but, rather, that they are offering transparent windows onto that world. A key difference is that the authors of mimetic texts usually are conscious of their own artistry in sustaining the reader's belief in the verisimilitude of the world 'revealed' by the text, whereas authors of science textbooks seem to believe that they are constructing a neutral transmitter of 'reality' to the reader. But a poststructural approach to the representation of a chaotic phenomenal world in a text requires that the text draws attention to its own structures and properties as a chaotic generator of meaning and significance. In literary criticism, such a text is known as a metafiction, a form of writing which, as Waugh (1984) writes, 'draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality'. A textbook-whether it be intended for science or environmental education-should aspire to no less: it, too, should pose questions about the relationship between the stories constructed by scientists and the realities they purport to describe and explain. In other words, science and environmental education texts should provide critiques of their own methods of construction, not only to lay their own structures and assumptions bare, but also to explore the fictionality (the social constructedness) of the worlds outside the texts. For example, one of the fictions sustained by conventional textbooks is that of separating 'scientific research' from the language in which it is conceived and reported. As Brett (1991) writes: Scientists do their research, then write it up. The writing is seen as ancillary, after the fact, and in no way constitutive of the research itself. The adoption of this way of talking about research masks the centrality of language and writing.... The fiction is of reality apprehended before language and of the act of writing as a simple one of reporting on or describing that apprehension. The true work is thus seen as collecting the facts...the findings, and the writing is simply the report, written in the plain impersonal style characteristic of reports, as if the author were absent. The role of language in shaping and probing reality is denied....

In other words, scientific writing masks the extent to which scientists' language produces the data they report. The narrative strategies of scientific writing (such as the use of the passive voice) create an illusion of neutrality, objectivity and anonymity which contributes to the authority of the text. Scientists tend to write as though language is merely another inscription device-a vehicle for transmitting data about the objects and outcomes of their research-rather than a medium which chaotically generates a multiplicity of meanings. The meaning of a scientific report is not fixed in printed words or in their representation of an author's intentions but,


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rather, in the multiple and various readings of the report by others, including colleagues, students, science journalists and members of the public.


Science and story-telling

environmental

education

as

metafictional

The convergence of postmodern scientific and critical discourses creates a promising site for generating the kind of 'new normative matrix for the conception and production of the world' referred to by Fry and Willis (1989), a conception of being-in-the-vvorld which accepts that there is no 'outside' from which to speak or act. For science teachers and environmental educators, this means abandoning any attempt to authorize the stories they tell by claiming 'objectivity' and, instead, to elucidate with learners the processes through which multiple subjectivities (including their own and those of people who call themselves scientists) interact in the social construction of consensual (intersubjective) understandings of 'reality'. As Polanyi (1958), himself a physical scientist and philosopher, wrote in his Preface to Personal Knowledge: I start by rejecting the ideal of scientific detachment. In the exact sciences, this false ideal is perhaps harmless, for it is in fact disregarded there by scientists. But...it exercises a destructive influence in biology, psychology and sociology, and falsifies our whole outlook far beyond the domain of science. An appropriate pedagogy for contemporary science and environmental education would thus explicitly foster the kind of thinking that postmodern science tacitly embraces, deliberately drawing attention to the relatedness of the observer and the observed and the personal participation of the knower in all acts of understanding. Such a pedagogy implies a reversal of many taken-for-granted assumptions about the relationship between fiction and 'reality'. As Ballard (1974) writes: In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles...it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction.... We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind-mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. Postmodern science suggests that Ballard is not exaggerating—that the world indeed operates more like novels tell us than modern science describes. As Stoicheff (1991) writes, 'metafiction and scientific chaos are embraced by a larger revolution in contemporary thought that examines the similar roles of narrative, and of investigative procedure, in our "reading" or knowledge of the world'. In a world in which dissipative structures, non-linear dynamics, indeterminacy and unpredictability appear to be the most powerful explanatory concepts we have, than as educators we must accept that 'reality exists at a level of human experience that literary tools are best, and historically most practiced, at describing...by science's own terms, literary discourse must be understood as a superior form of describing what we know' (Porush 1991b, p. 77). If this is the case, we are clearly justified in

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adapting to the natural sciences a proposal Rorty (1980) makes in respect of the social sciences:


If we get rid of traditional notions of 'objectivity' and 'scientific method' we shall be able to see the social sciences as continuous with literature—as interpreting other people to us, and thus enlarging and deepening our sense of community. Seeing the natural sciences also as being 'continuous with literature' means, to paraphrase Rorty, seeing both science and literature as interpreting the earth to us and thus 'enlarging and deepening our sense of community' with the earth. The consequences for science teaching and environmental education are perhaps best understood in terms of story-telling: we must abandon the conceit of trying to tell 'one true story' and, instead, deliberately treat our stories as metafictions—self-conscious artefacts which invite deconstruction and scepticism. In such a project we can be aided enormously by those authors who have explored or exemplified postmodern world-views in their literary texts—Pynchon, Barth, Calvino, Robbins and, among the more explicitly SF authors, Ballard, Dick, Delany, Le Guin, Gibson, Sterling, Butler, Russ and many others. Most of the stories by these authors exemplify, in ways that are accessible to learners at many levels, a position on human understanding of our transactions with the world that is shared by postmodern science and poststructural critical discourse—a world-view in which, as Stoicheff (1991) writes, 'the world is a text that is read, and our interpretation of our world is a function of our reading of texts'. I am arguing here that both science and environmental education presently privilege too narrow a range of texts and that there are good reasons for including SF among the texts which influence interpretations of the world in both disciplines-and especially where these disciplines intersect (as in the kinds of science education-such as ecology and meteorology-which are assumed to provide bases for environmental studies, and in the kinds of environmental education which privilege scientific understandings of environments). In the short term, we need to treat standard textbooks and SF texts more equitably, recognizing that each represents a significant cultural expression of human transactions with environments and allowing each kind of text to mediate and transform interpretations of the other (see Gough (1993), for numerous examples of applying this strategy in science education). In the longer term, these mutual transformations may produce a new kind of textbook—foreshadowed by Haraway's (1989) groundbreaking Primate Visions-in which stories of scientific 'fact' and science 'fiction' are not polarized but reciprocally generative. The narratives of scientific fact-testimonies to the past experiences of scientists —are necessary but not sufficient for resolving environmental problems. We also need the narratives of SF which, as de Lauretis (1980) writes, are: ...potentially creative of new forms of social imagination, creative in the sense of mapping out areas where cultural change could take place, of envisioning a different sort of order of relationship between people and between people and things, a different conceptualization of social existence, inclusive of physical and material existence. Such 'new forms of social imagination', which include different conceptualizations 'of physical and material existence', are central to SF. To take one example that is particularly pertinent to the epistemiological grounds on which I have argued for privileging postmodern SF texts in education, Sterling (1985, 1987, 1989a, b) has richly imagined a future in which Prigogine's version of chaos theory has long been


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the culturally dominant paradigm that, as Hayles (1990) argues, it is now becoming. In Sterling's (1989a) future history, Prigogine is an 'ancient terran philosopher' whose theories of evolution have been borne out by subsequent developments in social, biological and technological organization. This 'Prigoginic' world-view is so taken for granted that is it taught in schools much as atomic theory is today. There is, however, a subtle (and amusing) difference, as we learn from a young student in Sterling's (1985) Schismatrix:


[The student] pulled a notebook from inside his willow-printed coat. He read loudly, desperately. 'A dissipative self-organizing system evolves along a coherent sequence of space-time structures. We may distinguish between four different dimensional frameworks." autopoeisis, ontogeny, phylogeny, anagenesis.' 'And this is from my poetry class!' I would like to think that students today could meet Sterling's words in a science or environmental education class-and greet them with neither surprise nor desperation. References ALLEN, P. G. (ed.) (1989). Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women. London, Women's Press. ATTANASIO, A. A. (1981). Radix. London, Grafton. BALLARD, J. G. (1974). Introduction to the French edition of Crash. In J. G. Ballard (1985) Crash. London, Paladin. BRETT, J. (1991). The bureaucratization of writing: why so few academics are public intellectuals. Meanjin, 50 (4), 513-522. BRODERICK, D. (1989). Frozen music: transcoding literature, science and science fiction. Unpublished PhD thesis. Geelong, Deakin University. CHARLESWORTH, M., FARRALL, L., STOKES, T. and TURNBULL, D. (1989). Life Among the Scientists: An Anthropological Study of an Australian Scientific Community. Melbourne, Oxford University Press. CHENEY, J. (1989). Postmodern environmental ethics: ethics as bioregional narrative. Environmental Ethics, 11 (2), 117-134. COSTA, R. H. (1967). H. G. Wells. New York, Twayne. DE LAURETIS, T. (1980). Signs of Wa/onder. In T. de Lauretis, A. Huyssen and K. Woodward (eds), The Technological Imagination. Madison, Coda Press. DUBECK, L., MOSHIER, S. and Boss, J. (1988). Science in Cinema: Teaching Science Fact through Science Fiction Films. New York, Teachers College Press. FRY, T. and WILLIS, A. (1989). Criticism against the current. Meanjin, 48 (2), 223-240. GEDULD, H. M. (1987). The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Well's Scientific Romance. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. GOUGH, N. (1990). Healing the earth within us: environmental education as cultural criticism. Journal of Experiential Education, 13 (3), 12-17. GOUGH, N. (1991). Narrative

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STERLING, B. (1985). Schismatrix. New York, Ace. STERLING, B. (1987). The Artificial Kid. New York, Ace. STERLING, B. (1989a). Crystal Express. New York, Ace. STERLING, B. (1989b). Islands in the Net. New York, Ace. STOICHEFF, P. (1991). The chaos of metafiction. In N. K. Hayles (ed.), Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (pp. 85-99). Chicago, University of Chicago Press. WATSON, H. et al. (1989). Singing the Land, Signing the Land. Geelong, Deaking University Press. WAUGH, P. (1984). Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London, Methuen. WELLS, H. G. (1895). The Time Machine. London, Heinemann.