Future Scenarios and Environmental Education

Abstract

This article explores a number of questions about visions of the future and their implications for environmental education (EE). If the future were known, what kind of actions would be needed to maintain the positive aspects and reverse the negative ones? How could these actions be translated into the aims of EE? Three future scenarios are discussed: the limits to growth (the great tragedy and demise); sustainable development and ecological modernization (hope and innovation); and the Anthropocene park. These scenarios are linked to corresponding EE/ESD approaches and instrumentalism in education is argued as a morally justifiable goal. Finally, education for deep ecology is advocated in order to address the ethical implications of the last scenario.

Frontiers in Environmental Education: Philosophical Reflections on the Impact of Power Epistemology and Consumerist Pedagogy in Environmental Education

“…A paradox surrounding transformative subjugation is inasmuch as environmental education continues to rely heavily on technological solutions to environmental problems, it inadvertently encourages at subtle levels of our interactions with nature the substitutions with nature the substitution of living environments with highly inert ones (Kopnina, 2014). In this regard we have endeavoured to extend the argument here to reinforce the point that, the more successful we are in making the world scientifically predictable, the more we make the world of nature ecologically inert.…”

“…The microcomputer was believed to be a panacea for all the educational problems dealing with instruction during the 1980s (Harrington, McElroy, & Morrow, 1990;Knowles, 1983;Lowe, 2002). Even on those rare occasions when we have been able to discern the adverse impacts on the environment associated with the social indiscretions of technology, we continue to believe that we possess the technological ingenuity to deal with any problem that besets us (Kopnina, 2014 electronic tools, such as computers and videodiscs, into classrooms must be accompanied by systemic change in the educational process. Successful utilization of technology depends on how we provide teachers with the necessary environment for training, tools for instruction, and technology evaluation skills (Kimmel & Deek, 1996).…”

“…In contrast to this philosophy of detachment we shall argue that knowledge and the applied technologies which derive from it are value-laden processes, whose implications for environmental education are momentous. Knowledge is not a value-free enterprise (Kopnina, 2014). We shall argue that although we gain a significant measure of control over the world in which we live by methodologically sanitising it, the reductio-mechanistic transformations we make of that world become increasingly chemicalised, inert, lifeless and dead.…”

Science teacher identity and eco-transformation of science education: comparing Western modernism with Confucianism and reflexive Bildung

“…Kopnina 2014). This ideology is characterized by instrumental rationality: (a) nature as a material resource to be exploited, and (b) belief in techno-scientific progress to find environmental solutions (Bader and Laberge 2014).…”

Evaluation of Opinions Related to the Endangered Neopolis Wetland in North Cyprus

“…Nevertheless, environmental education works have gained global momentum with the purpose of finding solutions to existing problems (D'Amato & Krasny, 2011;Kopnina, 2014). Environmental education can be defined as the development of environmental awareness in all segments of society, creating behavioral changes which are environmentally sensitive, permanent and positive, and urging individuals to actively participate in the protection of natural, historical, cultural and socio-aesthetic values and of the solution to environmental problems.…”