Policy Futures in Education, Volume 3, Number 3, 2005
Stultifera Navis[1]: institutional tensions, conceptual chaos, and professional uncertainty at the beginning of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development JOSÉ GUTIÉRREZ PÉREZ & Mª TERESA POZO LLORENTE University of Granada, Spain
ABSTRACT The main idea this article develops is the conceptual chaos, methodological tensions and epistemological conflicts that are being experienced in the field of environmental education as a result of the uncertainty generated by some institutions and international organisms. The authors’ perspective starts from the idea that too many expectations have been invested in the celebration of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. The celebration will contribute to making the tensions and fractures grow between the different collectives and professional cultures that inhabit this educational field. While some will find their channels of expression waning and their work models delegitimated, others will increase their popularity and extend their hegemonic power over the dominant models of intervention and the securing of financial resources through the programs and grant competitions they enter. The reason for these tensions lies in the underlying focus promoted by the model of celebration that has been advocated by the institutions leading the process. Introduction Throughout this article we emphasise our critique of the big environmental celebrations, the excesses committed by having so many protocols and institutional rituals, and the expenditure of unnecessary energies and waste of resources under a model which is more focused on the fireworks of the event than on the depth of the questions to be tackled, and where, from the start, the impact these actions must have on reality is ignored. UNESCO’s celebration of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) cannot keep us from falling into the temptation to return to past scenarios. We find a clear parallel between fifteenth-century literary texts [2] and the pretensions and ostentation with which the sustained growth of the DESD is being commemorated, without having established from the outset the least conceptual and terminological demarcation of the meaning of the terms and the options being advocated. The world of education has placed significant emphasis on trying to establish a clear and operative differentiation over the last 90 years (for example, Max-Neef, 1993; Gutiérrez, 1995; Kapp, 1995; González-Gaudiano & de Alba, 1996; Huckle & Sterling, 1996; González-Gaudiano, 1997, 1998; Gutiérrez et al, 1997; Caride & Meira, 1998; Huckle, 1999; Sauvé, 1999; Foster, 2000; Hesselink et al, 2000). More recent contributions further increase these discrepancies by distinguishing between the semantic differences according to the different contexts in use (for example, Stables, 2001; Stables & Scott, 2002; Woollcombe, 2002; Alberts & Grant, 2003; Day, 2003; Whelan & Rocca, 2004), the institutions promoting the actions (for example, McKeown, 2002; McKeown & Hopkins, 2003; Schlesinger, 2004; Ashley, 2005; Klock, 2005), the communities of professional practice (for example, Foster, 2002, 2005a, b; Åkerman, 2005), and the addressees and the means employed to achieve the goals according to the model of development implicit in
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Chaos and Conflicts at the Beginning of the Decade for Sustainable Development each case (for example, Bonnett, 2002; Caride & Meira, 2001; Rauch, 2002; Aik & Tway, 2004; García, 2004; Blewitt, 2005a, b; Gough, 2005; Grove-White, 2005; Winnett, 2005). In a ritual like this one, which must last a decade – 2 lustra, 10 years, 3650 days – we must ask ourselves candidly: what is really being celebrated? Could we go further and ask ourselves more specific questions regarding the advertising expense that an event of this magnitude could incur, and its media impact? It is possible that the communications media will remind us daily that we should do something to commit ourselves to the conservation of the planet; will invite us to get involved, to participate in green campaigns to plant saplings, to wave flags, to wear caps, buttons and stickers with the official slogans of institutions, multinationals and sponsors of different moral fibres. Has anyone asked about the number of companies and the types of employees who are going to benefit from this event? Has anyone asked how we are going to maintain the activity and the attention of citizens ‘in a sustained manner’ for such a long time without people coming to hate education for sustainable development (ESD) and abandoning ship? To dedicate 10 years of our life to a cause of this nature is well worth some preliminary reflections concerning the quality of the content beyond more window dressing. It is legitimate to ask ourselves about the unseen motives the celebration could conceal, the format chosen for the event, the hidden agenda behind each of the activities, programs and projects, as well as the provisions for continuity. What will we do when the DESD is over? Pack up the merry-go-round and the amusement park rides to take them elsewhere? The very expressions of a ritual, a celebration, a social commemoration are the fruit of discordant visions, intercultural conflicts, confrontation between appearances. The commemoration, an extreme simplification of reality, contributes to exaggerated worship of deeds, ‘while history if complicated is sacrilegious by nature’ (Todorov, 1992) and subject to confrontations. Celebrations always play in favour of the hegemonic discourses of those who promote, sponsor and subsidise them.[3] The internal contradictions involved in institutional commemorations are all too familiar; also the tensions they awaken, the conflicts they generate and the controversies they provoke due to the diversity of interests and perspectives brought into play. Since the environment is a controversial field (Tilbury, 1995; Gutiérrez, 2003, p. 86; Schlesinger, 2004, p. 76), surely not everyone thinks the same way concerning how we should celebrate the DESD; what priorities to establish with the financial resources available; how and where to carry out the activities; and with what methodologies, means and professionals to legitimate them? In this article, we ask how this celebration will affect institutionally directed practices and the dominant foci of intervention based on formal models and linked to one kind of academic research. We also warn of the underestimation of non-formal environmental education interventions, intuitive, spontaneous actions, programs and initiatives born from the needs of the practices themselves and oriented toward the urgency of finding real responses to concrete problems, usually on the margin of institutional and academic environments. In attempting to form a cultural heritage from the institutional perspective for all the pro-environment initiatives, we run the serious risk of excessive paternalism and patronage that can, in some cases, attack the rights to autonomy and bioregional diversity. The Foggy Horizon of Sustainable Development We cannot cease to be surprised by the DESD declaration if we keep in mind that the term sustainability originated in the institutional discourses of the Rio Summit and legitimated its status in Johannesburg as an internal strategy for institutionalising ambiguity, the discourse and movements of social protest. The ESD discourse has contributed quite successfully to diluting and blurring all the work of sensitisation, consciousness-raising and denunciation that has been constructed quietly by the pro-environment social movements in recent decades and more recently by environmental education (EE). It has certainly given us the chance to debate and dispute the common field of play, but it is no less certain that it has driven us to conceal, in the same guise, historically opposed interests and visions: ‘the capacity for convergence showed itself to be the strong point of sustainable development and semantic ambiguity its weak point’ (Sachs, 2002, p. 10).
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José Gutiérrez Pérez & Mª Teresa Pozo Llorente The concept sustainable development (SD) has become a kind of multi-purpose glue that has brought environmentalists and real estate agents, entrepreneurs and conservationists, politicians and managers into contact, without the use of the work having solved anything. Perhaps those who have benefited most from this situation are the defenders of neo-liberalism. The term development can mean anything, depending on how we look at it or to what ends it is employed. Behind its docile appearance of semantic neutrality, we can see how its polysemous use permits diametrically opposed meanings that range from those who use it as economic growth per capita in terms of gross national product, without worrying whether the economic growth exploits social and natural capital to produce more monetary capital, to those who define development as a synonym for rights and resources for the poor, and recommend prioritising the search for the common good based on social and natural heritage (Sachs, 2002, p. 14). In linking the idea of development to that of sustainability, limits and restrictions for the exploitation of resources are abolished and markets for free use opened in favour of economic growth. One of the major criticisms of the texts drafted at the Rio Summit has been that pressure from the economic sectors forced the idea of economic growth to be incorporated as a solution and not as a part of the problem, legitimating the problem that the entire effort linked to development requires instruments of growth (Sauvé, 1999; Sato et al, 2005). Until now, most of the theoretical economic models that have appeared have not considered the physical environment and its resources as integral elements of productivity, except to understand them as exogenous variables for the different models proposed and in economic language called ‘externalities’; production does not estimate its cost as valuable goods (Yew-Kwang, 2004, pp. 156-158; Spangenberg, 2004, pp. 83-84). A first step towards doing this consists of integrating the estimate of very local costs linked to the environmental consequences of production, even if the problem is proposed when these costs are not linked to individual environmental consequences (the greenhouse effect, the loss of biodiversity, soil infertility, etc.). The pressure that those affected and the local norms exert requires the production of estimates that transform environmental damage directly into costs for producers and consumers. A second step shows how both the estimate of the costs and the identity of the victims remain outside the reach of justice and raise questions such as: When the evolution of the greenhouse effect has unleashed the flood in Bangladesh, how will we care for the tens of millions of refugees? Perhaps proportionally to each country’s past contribution to atmospheric pollution? (Sachs, 2002, pp. 15-16) Who will assume individual responsibility for multicausal situations: governments, multinational enterprises, businessman or worker? Will the disasters of the past serve to fix the problems of the future? The metaphor of the circular hippodrome where a pack of ingenuous hounds pursues a stuffed rabbit is the conceptual trap into which we environmental educators have fallen by taking the bait of SD.[4] Whoever is happy with economic growth is a hypocrite, not only in private but also in public, for no one with common sense misses the fact that the indicators of economic growth are also indicators of collective self-destruction ... The new pet phrase of SD ... encapsulates in a verbal formula the very contradiction it must resolve; that is, development (economic growth) and sustainability (saving nature) ... While this contradiction continues to be unresolvable, we confront each other in public space with forms of language concerning a polluted common good. (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2003, p. 337) The collective world imagination has not learned many lessons since the Industrial Revolution. If individual achievements and the quotas of well-being are more evident in specific regions, the differences between development in different regions have also grown progressively. We have enough autobiographical tests of how all this affects our individual lives, our frustrations, our disenchantment and our disillusion with the human species, the majestic promises of science and technology; the grandiloquence with which the great managers of these instruments stage their projects. Thought alone (as described in Held & McGrew, 2002; Berger & Huntington, 2003; and Singer, 2003) must find different, plural responses and replies to its crusade in local contexts. Reflection about the environment constitutes an important reversal in knowledge in these processes of
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Chaos and Conflicts at the Beginning of the Decade for Sustainable Development transformation and change of vital socio-economic and cultural realities, its importance and consequences systematically included in the Human Development Reports: a. We have seen growth without employment, with its different kinds of repercussions. In developing countries, it is expressed in the need to invest more working hours for low salaries and an increase in the informal economy. b. Growth without equity, in which the fruits of labour primarily benefit the rich. c. Growth without the voice of communities, growth unaccompanied by democratisation and characterised by authoritarian regimes that choke social participation in the decisions that affect the population’s lives. d. Growth without roots, in which cultural identity disappears and uniformity is encouraged that tends to suppress differences while fostering inequality. e. Growth without a future, as when the natural resources are squandered and the environment degraded in the eagerness for short-term economic growth. (United Nations Development Programme, 1996, pp. 2-4) The 2003 Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 2003, pp. 2-3) six policy clusters can help countries break out of their poverty traps: a. Invest early and ambitiously in basic education and health while fostering gender equity. These are preconditions to sustained economic growth. Growth, in turn, can generate employment and raise incomes – feeding back into further gains in education and health gains. b. Increase the productivity of small farmers in unfavourable environments – that is, the majority of the world’s hungry people. A reliable estimate is that 70% of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture. c. Improve basic infrastructure – such as ports, roads, power and communications – to reduce the costs of doing business and overcome geographic barriers. d. Develop an industrial development policy that nurtures entrepreneurial activity and helps diversify the economy away from dependence on primary commodity exports – with an active role for small and medium-size enterprises. e. Promote democratic governance and human rights to remove discrimination, secure social justice and promote the well-being of all people. f. Ensure environmental sustainability and sound urban management so that development improvements are long term. (UNDP, 2003, p. 4) The 2005 Human Development Report of the UNDP (2005, pp. 2-3) makes for depressing reading: most countries are off track for most of the Millennium Declaration Goals (MDGs) [5]: Human development is faltering in some key areas, and already deep inequalities are widening. Various diplomatic formulations and polite terminology can be found to describe the divergence between progress on human development and the ambition set out in the Millennium Declaration. None of them should be allowed to obscure a simple truth: the promise to the world’s poor is being broken ... In 2003, 18 countries with a combined population of 460 million people registered lower scores on the human development index (HDI) than in 1990 – an unprecedented reversal. In the midst of an increasingly prosperous global economy, 10.7 million children every year do not live to see their fifth birthday, and more than 1 billion people survive in abject poverty on less than $1 a day. The year 2005 provides a critical opportunity for the governments that signed the MDGs to show that they mean business-and that they are capable of breaking with current economic policies. This is a good moment to prove that the Millennium Declaration is not just a paper promise, but a commitment to change, to mobilize the investment resources and develop the plans needed to build the defences that can put an end to world poverty. What is needed is the political will to act on the vision that governments set out five years ago. Our task as environmental educators, teachers, managers and researchers in the world in which we currently live is exponentially infinite. On the one hand, we must use expert techniques in a plot of socio-environmental reality, having wedded our instrumental knowledge and skills to foundational frameworks and global visions of the whole that help us to see the forest of
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José Gutiérrez Pérez & Mª Teresa Pozo Llorente complexity. Firms and markets are not going to change their attitudes, however many sermons, treaties, summits and decades we celebrate. The laws of the market are transparent, clear and precise in this sense, and they do not understand theories of miracles or altruism. Profitability is the logic that directs their functioning. We should not therefore be surprised at the famous words Dalton uttered repeatedly in his public speeches: as long as capitalist destruction continues to produce gains for the owners of the world and to be more important than environmental conservation, the only possibility ecology has to be important is to continue being a business. (Dalton, 1982, p. 35) The current perspective that capitalism imposes on the dynamic of world markets means that the postulates of SD on the human scale (Max-Neef, 1993) assume a posture which is hardly subversive or contradictory to capitalist aspirations and interests, and continues dispensing with externalities that have never cost money, like water or air (Yew-Kwang, 2004; Spangenberg, 2004). With the advance of modern societies, we have seen significant myths fall one by one from the illusions and mirages of the welfare society (Chomsky & Dieterich, 1997; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2003; Beck, 2004): 1. We thought that greater growth would bring less unemployment, and we have seen just the contrary. 2. We thought that greater progress would bring more equality and sharing of goods. 3. We thought that greater scientific advance would bring more civic rationality and a greater ability for peaceful coexistence among peoples. 4. We thought that more technology would bring less pollution. 5. We thought that greater well-being would bring fewer problems of coexistence, exclusion and equity. 6. We thought that equality would lead us to overcome all the myths concerning the reasons for gender, different social and cultural levels, ethnic identity. (Gutiérrez, 2005, pp. 189-190)[6] The role that institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) play in this process deserves to be considered briefly: We must denounce the successive adjustments and programs of the IMF and the World Bank that include both the externalisation of the environmental and social costs of international trade and unequal ecological and economic exchange. The WTO is also oriented to interests of transnational profit, reinforcing a dominant model of development. It is thus not possible to accept the strategies that drive the circles of power as the main subjects of sustainability, nor to accept the dilemma of demographic density as an environmental problem of the first order, much less to accept technological optimism as the best alternative for resolving the environmental crisis. (Sato et al, 2005, p. 105) Among the many accusations usually made against the WTO, four are central when we come to evaluate the role this institution plays and, in general terms, that of economic globalisation is central in the current model of the institutionalisation of macroeconomies: a. The WTO places economic considerations ahead of concerns for the environment, human rights and the well-being of animals. b. The WTO erodes national sovereignty. c. The WTO is not democratic. d. The WTO increases inequality, or rather makes the rich richer and leaves the poorest of the World even worse off than they would be in different circumstances. (Singer, 2003, p. 69)[7] The model of trade and investment promoted by the WTO has unleashed economic forces that systematically destroy forests which are ecologically essential, while at the same time rewarding exploitative practices that accelerate the degradation of the forests (Menotti, 1999, p. 14). The rules constructed by the WTO are primarily ‘rules for stealing, camouflaged by arithmetic and legalisms’ and free world trade, ‘the greatest program for the creation of refugees in the world’, its main consequences ‘the development of slavery’ (Shiva, 1999, pp. 92-123).[8]
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Chaos and Conflicts at the Beginning of the Decade for Sustainable Development Since UNESCO is one of the subsystems that channels the joint actions of the United Nations (UN) in education, science and culture, it is not unreasonable to think that its work as an institution located in a system of relations could be conditioned by some of the other pre-existing subsystems that are close to this institution and in many cases sponsor projects and programs to which it contributes funds directly. It is logical to think that the synergies between subsystems impose some tributes and mutual conditions. The United Nations is also consistently under-funded, and asked to do impossible missions that individual nations could not perform themselves. The five permanent security council members wield exceptional power in promoting their own national interests at the UN while representing only 29 percent of the world. The UN, as a microcosm of the world of nation-states, mirrors the responsibility (or lack thereof) that all governments have in maintaining a strong problem-solving body. (Klock, 2005, p. 49) As Power (2004) mentions, the UN has been kept intentionally weak for 60 years. The miseries of historicism impose interdiction on the many bonds, precariousness, inconsistencies, limitations, weaknesses and deficiencies of the models of social organisation in the panorama of globalisation, and the responsibility that institutions exert must constantly be questioned. Questions concerning the reasons for the growing breach between rich and poor are rejected as ‘vile envy’. They laugh at the desire for justice, accusing it of utopianism. The concept of ‘solidarity’ is only found on the list of foreign loan words ... And the social market economy – in other times a model of successful economic and collaborative action – degenerates into a market economy, such that the social function of property based on the Constitution becomes onerous, and the desire to gain profits sacrosanct ... the fundamental value is the maximisation of gain. Parliaments are subject to the pressure of capital, both at home and globally ... As committed democrats, we must oppose supremely the power of capital, for which the human being is only a material that is produced and consumed. Whoever mistakenly tallies the gift of liberty as a gain on the Stock Exchange cannot have understood what 8 May has shown us year after year. (Grass, 2005, p. 3) Marx voiced these ideas in The Communist Manifesto, in which he assessed the consequences of the market on human freedom: It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade ... All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Marx, 1967, p. 82) In the Europe of old, this philosophy often took a concrete form in errors closely linked to the environment. A wide range of anecdotes illustrates histories more macabre and surreal than any ingenious author of our time could imagine on the plane of fiction. A few examples suffice to demonstrate the height of the stupidity we have reached in environmental issues: the dumping of sulphuric acid in the south of France as workers’ protest and revenge; ecotaxes for driving a car in cities as yet another neo-liberal privilege where those who pay command in England; dismantling of bicycle lanes in Spain due to the complaints of merchants that the lanes prevent customers from arriving at the door of the establishment; taxes/fines for noise that nightclubs pay shamelessly, without having their activity prohibited in Italy – and an infinite number of local anecdotes that demonstrate on a small scale how far we human beings are capable of going. In the context of the DESD, the role of institutions will be crucial if they actually achieve the margin of action that the corresponding Magna Cartas and their frameworks of constitutional legitimacy theoretically assign them. What remains an important unknown is the role to be played by the connections and alliances established during the DESD among the different nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and UNESCO itself:
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José Gutiérrez Pérez & Mª Teresa Pozo Llorente Clearly UNESCO and the NGOs must play a role: there is an important synergizing exercise to be done to ensure that all practitioners in the field are aware of one anothers’ good practices. (Woollcombe, 2002, p. 18) Should we remain silent at the failure to accomplish some of the public promises made on the occasion of recent international events? UNESCO’s International Registry of Innovative Practices Promoting Education, Public Awareness, and Training for Sustainability, announced with great fanfare at the Thessaloniki meeting, was supposed to accomplish this, but the registry has yet to become fully operational. Though an Internet Web site might be part of the answer, it cannot provide the energy and dynamism that an organization with newsletters, regular conferences, and seminars can. (Woollcombe, 2002, p. 18) Is there sufficient infrastructure, explicit financing, and the capacity to establish global and local alliances and well-defined leaderships to achieve at least one of the grand objectives (see UNESCO, 2005) registered by the DESD documents? UNESCO has always been identified as the task manager for the issue (Education for Sustainable Development) and has never fulfilled its role to the extent that many NGOs [have] ... For example, the first task identified in the CSD [UNESCO’s Commission for Sustainable Development] work program was that UNESCO build a ‘broad coalition’ of governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and practising teachers, and students to promote ESD. But it never showed any willingness to do this, and UNESCO actually cut that task out of its summaries of the work program until forced to put it back in ... Without the support of a coalition and active networking, there has never really been an international lobby promoting the issue – just sole practitioners ploughing a lonely furrow, never sure whether there are others out there who share their concerns ... courses on ESD exist, and the enthusiasm is undoubtedly there among students and teachers. Certain governments have appointed high-level commissions to look into the issue, such as Britain’s Holland Commission on ESD, but there is a lack of energy and leadership in the field. Several major institutions – most significantly the European Union and UNDP (the United Nations Development Program) – have abolished their staff positions that dealt with the issue. UNESCO’s commitment to the task has simply never been satisfactory. With only two staff persons in the department and no additional funding, how could it be? (Woollcombe, 2002, p. 18) Conceptual Ambiguity in the Port of Departure of the Stultifera Navis In his history of madness, Michel Foucault includes a chapter entitled ‘Stultifera Navis’ (2000, p. 30), in which he gives a detailed account of how human imagination in classical civilisations has always been accompanied by a significant dose of madness and fancy. Madness, in his utopian version, is the imaginary place ‘eu-topos’, meaning a happy world and dynamic project for the future, eagerness for change, the desire for transformation and the search for the best of all possible worlds as a function of our ability to mould the environment. The concept of madness also frequently conflicts with the limits of the absurd and the abnormal, the atypical and countercultural, and is thus usually rejected.[9] Welcome to the decade that admits the critique and opens its doors to the utopian imagination! May we dedicate our energy, intellectual space and time for reflection from the outset to that which can be interesting and enriching! But we must not blind ourselves to the rhetoric and hypocrisy of words and the euphoria of rituals, for if we can aspire to anything, it is to normalise EE in our lives and convert it into an everyday matter, not an extraordinary one; to integrate it into our ordinary chores as a normal event. To look on the positive side, the commemorations could also provide an excellent opportunity for open critiques, discrepant reflections, discordant voices and utopian counterdiscourses. Madness as social satire that does not compromise itself for any norm and adopts politically incorrect postures on extravagant occasions which have their own creative value is necessary, since the official commemorative initiatives have not incorporated the possibility of openness to self-critique [10] from beyond the limits of the exaggerated exaltation of
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Chaos and Conflicts at the Beginning of the Decade for Sustainable Development universal goals, grandiloquent declarations and decontextualised documents with their degree of vagueness and generality.[11] We may pay dearly for a bad example of EE, which can mean a return to the conquests of social and professional legitimisation to which we environmental educators have dedicated so much energy to show the usefulness of our work. The boomerang effect that fickle experiments can have may contribute to them displacing the true essence of the debates, ends and conquests of superficial pretexts that take much care with forms but do not address the underlying questions. The undesirable effects of institutionalisation have been emerging in the curricular sphere on repeated occasions in academic circles, with progressive reforms that have adopted the most radical discourses, making them official in pursuit of a constructivism without financing, means or deadlines: for this reason, reality has not changed, or rather, has aroused reactions of uncontrollable adversity. Our positions start with the idea that it is not enough to adopt discourses, prophesy sermons and to worship wonderful doctrines on the benefits of ESD; we must mobilise collective consciences and change structures. We object to the ESD discourse and content ourselves with maintaining the identifying characteristics of EE. Consciousness-raising and participation go hand in hand and grow simultaneously; education and participation are two terms exempt from ambiguity, given substance by history and successful experiences. If what we intend with this decade is to convince ourselves that we need only sensitise and the rest will follow, the incubation chamber for marketing sensitisation may find its ecological niche for this scenario in a farce that seems more like a child’s rhyme than a plan for mobilising mentalities and changing the cultural horizon. The linguistic debates yield their own fruit; we could spend the entire decade arguing over EE for ESD, and ESD for EE. Meanwhile, reality moves on, and we miss opportunities, as we can attest from the multiple strategic plans that have been sold to us as stellar products, of the latest generation, with the EcoSchools, EcoCourtyards and EcoAgenda-21 sites in cities, schools, neighbourhoods and families. And no one ever really dares to evaluate in economic terms of socio-educational cost–benefit, in cognitive terms, in democratic terms, or in terms of participatory maturity and impact the consequences of these countless program fractals that have invaded our lives and taken up the time of our institutions without knowing for certain the consequences for the development of citizens’ capacity for participation. Perhaps it would be smart to set sail on this ship, although we are initially a bit seasick or provoke small conceptual mutinies that make the institutions uncomfortable. But if it is only to sail sailboats, advertising banners streaming from planes at the beach, we would do better to stay on solid land and leave the boat to drift, without a clear course, without provisions or fuel; without a skilled captain or sailors. If room is made for other options, ideas and proposals, different ideas and initiatives, our proposal is practical: take advantage of the DESD as the occasion for systematic analysis! In contrast, ESD will not cease to be a new social satire of the life and customs of an era that remembers its impotence to arbitrate the operative measures for climatic change. As we are all aware, the current education system is very good at turning out planetary vandals – young people trained to plunder the environment for economic growth, their heads filled with unsustainable aspirations to large homes, three-car garages, power boats, golf, and skiing holidays. It is not yet very good at producing young people eager to create a more peaceful, harmonious, and sustainable planet. Moreover, it is the most educated nations on earth that are doing the most damage to the environment. (Woollcombe, 2002, p. 18) The media society is leading us to live for trivialities ritualised to the detail and served à la carte with a dose of intrigue, concerned with things that are remote and that will not contribute to our collective well-being or to increasing the reasons for equity in the world; nor, of course will they solve the most pressing socio-environmental problems that torment us and that cannot be put off. People spend their time contemplating the so-called ‘white smoke’ that announces that the world can sleep peacefully, since ‘habemus papa’ again in Rome, Charles, the Prince of Wales, has consummated his second marriage and has broken its own audience records. As long as we do not determine fundamental reference points, starting points and goals for the DESD, we will be adrift on the ‘ship of fools’, which we will have to get on or off, varnish with words in different languages and bedeck with the flags of different nationalities. Meanwhile, the other boats ‘adrift institutionally’ will pass the backyard of our homes like ghost ships, loaded with
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José Gutiérrez Pérez & Mª Teresa Pozo Llorente petroleum or human beings who seek paradise far from their cultural origins, dreaming that their arrival on dry land must save them from the hell they have left behind. What ESD are we talking about when we dedicate so much time to blowing out candles, setting off firecrackers, and celebrating ephemeralities, while the real environmental conflicts surround, invade and restrict our existence, no longer the subject of distant legends but of everyday altercation, vital alarmism and daily hostility in the society of global risk? (Beck, 2002a, b; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2003; Beck, 2004) Meanwhile, we lose precious time bailing out the boat with a can, as if it were a game for children who wish to make the sea their boat and the boat into the sea of happiness. EE has long proclaimed and insisted on greater social commitment in its speeches, programs and actions. Nowadays these questions are present in the environmental education discourse. The attention our texts have dedicated to these questions are not new. What does the DESD have to offer for all these controversial themes – themes that are not politically correct and that unsettle a single way of thinking by proposing fundamental revisions of the models of organisation of the economy, use of resources, reasons for wars, motives for exploitation, injustice and inequality; for the nonsense of external debts and the lack of food, health, education and general well-being? In the neo-liberal contexts in which we move, perhaps the environmental professionals never come to commit themselves to a finalist’s model of global change. In the classroom we do not have the skills to influence the markets, economy, politics, industry and mass media in the short term. In the face of the complex world that surrounds us, we placate our anxieties about professionality. We are satisfied with the rhetoric of transversals in the curriculum, the erudite discourse of strategic plans for EE and the design of Walt Disney-style pedagogical materials, where the environment is seen as a petit bourgeois hobby, one more way to occupy leisure time alongside stories like Harry Potter, with adventures, intrigue, and neighbourly do-it-yourself projects in the local park, placating the population’s conscience with philanthropic formulas that use children as enlightened educators of the bad environmental habits of adults, and thereby exempt us from any other kind of real commitment to fighting social injustice, inequality and environmental crime. From this simulation of virtual experiences that conceives the environment as a commercial entity promoted in the colours of the season and artificial parks to show environmental conservation spaces, in wood huts surrounded by tropical nature and Coke machines, we will never come to feel the need for the role that our models of intervention can play – as a countercurrent questioning reality and unsettling the institutional, personal, social, political and economic inertia with which we conduct our professional actions and in our everyday lives as citizen consumers. Environmental discourse has a strong dose of unavoidable commitment, as we see it, with respect to reflection, action, training and research. If the environmental mediators do not adopt the ideological assumptions in the most basic terms implicit in the discourse of taking responsibility for the environment and making decisions committed to environmental problems and the structures that they maintain, we will never propose real, coherent, lasting changes that are environmentally committed and ethically sustainable. Perhaps we justify our incoherence by invoking the myth of work in the most depressed socio-economic regions, as a specific concrete responsibility for Third World countries or rural villages and communities, as idyllic virgin spaces; conceived in the style of the Romantic nineteenth-century travellers or the insatiable settler who tried to Christianise the world at any cost. Environmental mediators could, with the help of international agencies, now acquire greater shares of commitment and more lasting models of environmental actions coherent with a model of global change in the personal and institutional. This might increase the distance between environmental education in the ‘First World’, conceived as a complement to the general culture of any ‘modern’ citizen, which would be equivalent to a capacity like that of our visual education to distinguish a Van Gogh from a Rembrandt, or a polka from a ranchera, and a vital environmental literacy based on active socio-environmental commitment, change and transformation of nearby realities. The danger of these positions is always that those who have most end up having even more, and those who pollute least must assume greater responsibilities in their everyday life and on the margins of the precarious resources with which they survive. Clearly, the promised welfare society has incurred high doses of malaise, injustice and a good number of unfulfilled promises, both in the so-called ‘First World’ and for those who follow. Does the DESD have indicators for monitoring these socio-environmental problems? What instruments will evaluate its achievements? Which professionals and institutions will lead the
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Chaos and Conflicts at the Beginning of the Decade for Sustainable Development programs and administrate public funds? Will the NGOs again be the ones who lead the initiatives alone? Are there no qualified professionals? ‘EE for life and in all lives!’ This would be a good slogan to light up the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Notes [1] Stultifera Navis, translated as ‘The Ship of Fools’. All translated quotations in this article are free translations. [2] In the full transition from the agony of a dark and decadent medieval world to the awakening of the brilliant Renaissance of ideas in Europe, Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff (1494), an original social satire translated into Latin as Stultifera Navis (‘The Ship of Fools’), appeared. At this time, it was common to find in the Atlantic Ocean and navegable canals ships adrift with paupers, beggars, and especially the insane, who wandered the seas in ships without any fixed course. In fact, the theme left artistic and literary traces in this period – the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries – such as Bosch’s painting The Ship of Fools, Jodocus Badius Ascensius’s Stultiferae naues, Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, and Mumer’s Conjury of Fools. We use this metaphor to introduce the risks in which we environmental education professionals are involved when we accept the game rules imposed by a decade dedicated to sustainability and are set adrift in a ship of this kind, full of trade uncertainties, conceptual chaos, and even institutional tensions, many of which are created by the noise generated by the discursive field of education for sustainable development. And, with the added problem that the celebrations have an excessively formal, official character that leaves no space for open critique. [3] In 2004, the State Society of Cultural Commemorations celebrated the fifth centennial of the death of Queen Isabel the Catholic as a symbolic figure in universal history. The exposition was preceded and surrounded by a series of popular protests in the city of Granada, demonstrations reported on in the press and altercations against the event. Perhaps the most striking icon was the anonymous act of covering the Queen’s face on a poster with red paint, as was also done a few years ago to a monolith dedicated to Bill Clinton in front of the Nazari Palace of the Alhambra. All historical commemorations inspire mishaps, the more so if they involve a controversial figure surrounded by the aura of war and exclusion in the expulsion of Jews, gypsies and atheists. It is logical that the ESD event will also arouse tremendous ideological rejection given the institutional tensions around the event. [4] Today, it has become the ‘Fable of the Stuffed Rabbit and SD’, like the moral of a traditional folktale repeated by environmental educators. [5] The Millennium Declaration is a plan of action aimed primarily at the top priority and high priority countries most in need of support. Global policy attention needs to focus on countries facing the steepest development challenges. Without an immediate change in course, they will certainly not meet the goals. With that in mind, this Report offers a new plan of action aimed primarily at these countries: the Millennium Development Compact. To achieve sustainable growth, countries must attain basic thresholds in several key areas: governance, health, education, infrastructure and access to markets. If a country falls below the threshold in any of these areas, it can fall into a poverty trap (http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/reports/index.htm). [6] The current situation in Germany is a perfect example of this situation. The arguments of Günter Grass, the 1999 Nobel Laureate in Literature, on this subject are supremely eloquent: ‘All unemployment disappears. The consequences of this evolution disguised as globalisation leap into view ... With the number of unemployed, which has held constant at around five million for years, and the just as constant resistance of entrepreneurs to creating new jobs despite demonstrably high revenues, particularly in the export sector, the hope for total employment has disappeared ... The Federal Republic – a country that continues to be rich – tolerates a growth of shameful proportions: that of “childhood poverty”’ (Grass, 2005). [7] For the general development of each of these accusations, see the chapter entitled ‘Una sola economía’ of Singer’s book Un solo mundo (Singer, 2003, pp. 65-121). [8] Victor Menotti is director of the Environmental Program of the International Forum on Globalization, and Vandana Shiva is president of the Indian Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology and co-editor of The Ecologist (Singer, 2003).
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José Gutiérrez Pérez & Mª Teresa Pozo Llorente [9] In the same way, France and the Netherlands have succeeded in gaining a ‘no’ to the European Constitution by arguing reasons of discontent with the process, the model, the methodology and the general attitudes of the text in form and content. [10] They can also fall into the same trap when they commemorate to confuse and create conceptual noise (as described in Huckle, 1999; Sauvé, 1999; Sachs, 2002), which is quite different from commemorating in order to do justice to historical memory, as is the purpose of the Wall of Names in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Paris’s Jewish quarter, the Visitors’ Centre at Auschwitz in Poland, and the Jewish Holocaust Memorial designed by Eisenman in Berlin. [11] The proposed DESD objectives are to: 1) give an enhanced profile to the central role of education and learning in the common pursuit of SD; 2) facilitate links and networking, exchange and interaction among stakeholders in ESD; 3) provide a space and opportunity for refining and promoting the vision of, and transition to, SD – through all forms of learning and public awareness; 4) foster increased quality of teaching and learning in ESD; 5) develop strategies at every level to strengthen capacity in ESD (UNESCO, 2005, p. 25).
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JOSÉ GUTIÉRREZ PÉREZ is senior lecturer in educational research methods in the Faculty of Education at the University of Granada (Spain), where he teaches program evaluation and research methodologies in environmental education. He is head of the Quality and Evaluation Unit of the University of Granada, director of the Environmental Education Research Group, and was also winner of the National Educational Research Spanish Prize in 2004. His research focuses upon the evaluation of environmental education centres and the assessment of their educational programs. He played a key role in the development of the Spanish National Strategy for Environmental Education. He has published a number of books and is a member of the editorial board of several international environmental education journals. Correspondence: José Gutiérrez Pérez, Faculty of Sciences Education, Educational Methodology Research Department, University of Granada, Campus de Cartuja s/n 18071, Granada, Spain (
[email protected]). Mª TERESA POZO LLORENTE is associate professor in educational research methods in the Faculty of Education at the University of Granada (Spain), where she teaches program evaluation and social work methodology. She has published a number of books on social work methodology research, program evaluation and sociocultural centres. She is currently in charge of a national research project on multicultural education. Correspondence: Mª Teresa Pozo Llorente, Faculty of Sciences Education, Educational Methodology Research Department, University of Granada, Campus de Cartuja s/n 18071, Granada, Spain (
[email protected]).
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