Urban Nature and Childhoods

Iris Duhn, Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, Iris Duhn, Karen Malone, Marek Tesar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000639032
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book challenges the notion that nature is a city's opposite and addresses the often-overlooked concept of urban nature and how it relates to children's experiences of environmental education.

The idea of nature-deficit, as well as concerns that children in cities lack for experiences of nature, speaks to the anxieties that underpin urban living and a lack of natural experiences. The contributors to this volume provide insights into a more complex understanding of urban nature and of children's experiences of urban nature. What is learned if nature is not somewhere else but right here, wherever we are? What does it mean for children's environmental learning if nature is a relationship and not an entity? How can such a relational understanding of urban nature and childhood support more sustainable and more inclusive urban living?

In raising challenging questions about childhoods and urban nature, this book will stimulate much needed discussion to provoke new imaginings for researchers in environmental education, childhood studies, and urban studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research.

Beyond stewardship: common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene

Affrica Taylor

ABSTRACT

Interdisciplinary Anthropocene debates are prompting calls for a paradigm shift in thinking about what it means to be human and about our place and agency in the world. Within environmental education, sustainability remains centre stage and oddly disconnected from these Anthropocene debates. Framed by humanist principles, most sustainability education promotes humans as the primary change agents and environmental stewards. Although well-meaning, stewardship pedagogies do not provide the paradigm shift that is needed to respond to the implications of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene-attuned ‘common worlds’ pedagogies move beyond the limits of humanist stewardship framings. Based upon a more-than-human relational ontology, common world pedagogies reposition childhood and learning within inextricably entangled life-worlds, and seek to learn from what is already going on in these worlds. This article illustrates how a common worlds approach to learning ‘with’ nonhuman others rather than ‘about’ them and ‘on their behalf’ offers an alternative to stewardship pedagogies.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, scientists have been warning that the ‘Great Acceleration’ of human extractive and consumptive activities over the last 50 years has fundamentally changed the earth’s geo-biospheric systems, causing the relatively stable Holocene era to tip into the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2015). The anthropogenic earth systems changes they identify include: climate change and global warming caused by massive carbon emissions; alterations to the earth’s carbon and nitrogen cycles; ocean acidification; and the catastrophic rate of anthropogenic biodiversity loss attributable to urbanisation, industrial agriculture and forestry (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007). The cumulative body of scientific evidence of the Anthropocene in turn heralds uncertain ecological futures, profound challenges for the children who will inherit these uncertain futures, and a whole new level of responsibility for educators who are tasked with the job of preparing children to meet these profound challenges. It portends the need for a serious rethinking of the business-as-usual of environmental education, particularly the education of children.

The proclamation of the Anthropocene has spawned a cascade of interdisciplinary debates. Recent years have seen the establishment of a number of dedicated Anthropocene peer reviewed journals and academic book series, and a plethora of peak international Anthropocene-themed conferences. Within the social sciences and humanities, Anthropocene debates have prompted calls for a paradigm shift in thinking about what it means to be human, what we mean by the natural environment, and about our place and agency in the world (Latour 2014; Gibson, Rose, and Fincher 2015; Hamilton 2015). Noting that it is no longer feasible to deny the inextricable enmeshment of human and natural histories, fates and futures, there are mounting calls for a new kind of scholarship and practice that firstly resists modern humanist tendencies to enact the epistemological nature-culture divide that separates our species off from the rest of the world; and secondly to think and act as if we are the only ones that shape the world (Rose et al. 2012; Yusoff 2013; Lorimer 2015).

Given its charter, it is important that the field of environmental education has a discernable voice within these interdisciplinary Anthropocene debates. It is also important for environmental education scholars to respond to the calls of critical Anthropocene scholars to renew efforts for a paradigm shift in understanding human-environmental relations (Chakrabarty 2009; Gibson, Rose, and Fincher 2015). Whilst acknowledging the interdependence of social and environmental issues, and the importance of avoiding anthropocentric attitudes towards the environment, in practice, most environmental pedagogies still pivot around resolutely humanist understandings of agency and position learners as potential environmental stewards.

In the first half of this article, I argue that although well meaning, stewardship pedagogies do not lead us towards fundamentally rethinking our place and agency in the world. To fully engage with the profound implications of the Anthropocene, including the uncertainties of our ecological future, the complex ecological challenges we bequeath to children, and the new onus of responsibility born by environmental educators, we need to move beyond humanist stewardship frameworks and their implicit human exceptionalist assumptions. I detail some of the key feminist critical Anthropocene re-theorisations that reframe our human species as just one of many that make and shape worlds together.

In the second half the article I provide an overview of some of the theoretical and pedagogical work done by members of the Common Worlds Research Collective (2016) that resists the ubiquitous reach of the nature-culture divide – including the divide that positions urban childhoods as antithetical to natural childhoods. This work brings childhood studies,and early childhood environmental education into conversation with the Anthropocene debates within the feminist environmental humanities and more-than-human geographies. Drawing examples from this ‘common worlds’ research, conducted in urban natureculture environments, I illustrate how common world pedagogies seek to move beyond the limits of humanism and environmental stewardship by acknowledging more-than-human agency, learning with more-than-human world rather than about it, paying attention to the mutual affects of human-nonhuman relations, pursuing more-than-human collective modes of thought, and by learning from what is already happening in the world.

Anthropocene paradoxes and dilemmas

The implications of the Anthropocene are highly contested, as is the name itself. Not everyone agrees about the most appropriate responses. The paradoxes and dilemmas of the Anthropocene are increasingly the focus of analysis and debate (Crist 2013; Haraway 2015; Haraway et al. 2015; Yusoff 2016). Feminists have been quick to point out that one of the greatest dilemmas is that the adoption of this name risks validating human exceptionalism by reifying the ‘reign of Man’ (Stengers 2013). This, in turn, leads to the ultimate paradox, in which heroic techno-rescue and salvation responses, such as the scramble to find grandiose geo-engineering fixes, simply rehearse the same kinds of triumphalist anthropogenic interventions that disrupted the earth’s systems in the first place. Of equal concern are moves that see the naming of the Anthropocene as an overdue recognition of ‘Man’s’ exceptional powers, and as an excuse to redouble efforts to become ‘better’ at managing the environment, in order to establish what is being referring to as the ‘Good Anthropocene’ (for instance Ellis, cited in Hamilton 2015). Many regard the ‘Good Anthropocene’ proposition as the most worrying response of all (Hamilton 2014; Haraway et al. 2015), as it not only acknowledges that humans have exerted destructive power, but it celebrates this power as something intrinsic to being human. It fails to differentiate between human cultures and their radically uneven impacts on the environment. It also fails to acknowledge that not all cultures everywhere see themselves as separate to nature, omnipotent and invincible.

For those of us who have been thoroughly acculturated by humanism’s exceptionalist premises, it takes considerable effort to resist the temptation to default back to the comforting belief that we can always find another ‘solution’ to the problems that we have created. There is a senseless futility in always seeking new techno-fixes or better management regimes. This is because such searches and endeavours perpetuate the circularity of the delusional exceptionalist logic that has created the mess we now face and bequeath to future generations. Something has to change. Along with many other feminist scholars from the environmental humanities and more-than-human geographies, members of the Common Worlds Research Collective approach the Anthropocene naming event as a wake-up call and a moment for intervening in the business-as-usual of everyday thought and action (Instone and Taylor 2015; Somerville and Green 2015; Taylor 2017, Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2015; LLoro-Bidart 2016;). Such an engagement seizes the proclamation of the Anthropocene as an opportunity to interrupt the suite of ‘grand narratives that have led to our blindness’ (Stengers 2015a, 12) – whether they rehearse the tropes of human mastery of nature and environmental control and management, or the seemingly benign tropes of human environmental protection and stewardship (Stengers 2015b).

When read as an irrefutable sign of the inseparability of cultural and natural worlds, the figure of Anthropocene can lead us to humility rather grandiosity. When approached as a figure of natureculture entanglement (Haraway 2008) rather than one that confirms human supremacy, it reaffirms the inextricable enmeshment of human and natural worlds, and signals that it is no longer plausible to perpetuate the nature-culture divide that structures western knowledge systems and underpins humanism. This is an important distinction, for it is this same nature-culture divide that leads to the mistaken belief that we can act on nature, at will, and with impunity. Depending upon how we engage with it, the figure of the Anthropocene can interrupt such divisive thinking, and lead to a modest, reflective and ethically attuned response. Changing the entrenched habits of modern western humanist thought, which are so adept at dividing humans off from nature, requires persistence, vigilance and a preparedness to take risks. It is hard work. It requires us to continually interrogate what it means to human, to resituate humans firmly within the environment, and to resituate the environment within the ethical domain (Rose et al. 2012; Gibson, Rose, and Fincher 2015). It also requires us to radically rethink our agency in the world, to understand that we are just one agentic species amongst many, albeit a formidable and potentially destructive one (Latour 2014; Haraway 2015; Tsing 2015), to refocus upon our mutually productive relations with others in this world (Haraway 2008; Alaimo 2010) and to recognise that a precarious and vulnerable environment simultaneously implicates our precarity and vulnerability as a species (Colebrook 2011; Hird 2013).

All of this has specific implications for the field of environmental education. Although Greenwood (2014), LLoro-Bidart (2016), Somerville and Green (2015), Somerville (2017) and Malone, Gray, and Truong (2017) in their introduction to Reimagining Sustainability Education in Precarious Times have all called for environmental education scholars to address the Anthropocene, as a field, environmental education has been slow to engage in the interdisciplinary Anthropocene debates and to consider how the Anthropocene’s mind-bending complexities, challenges and implications affect its own core-beliefs and approaches. It seems somewhat ironic that sustainability education took centre-stage within the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2015), for it was during this same time period that scientists were increasingly warning that the patterns of human resource extraction and consumption associated with capitalist-driven ‘development’ are manifestly unsustainable on a planetary scale and stating that nothing short of a paradigm shift in our thinking about sustainability is needed (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007; Steffen et al. 2015). In other words, even though the Anthropocene, as a threshold crossing event, ultimately testifies to the abject failure of sustainable human ‘development’, and throws up all sorts of pressing epistemological and ontological challenges to modern humanist ‘progress’ and ‘development’ discourses, the education for sustainable development policy focus that captured the mainstream of environmental education scholarship during these times, effectively cordoned it off and buffered it from these substantial challenges.

Moves within environmental education

This is not to negate the diversity of approaches on offer within environmental education, nor to deny that some of these approaches, notwithstanding a lack of engagement with the Anthropocene debates, have championed moves to de-centre the human and challenge the nature-culture divide that underpins traditional western separations of human and environmental sphere and issues. Socio-ecological approaches, for instance, have consistently promoted an eco-centric disposition that values the environment for its own sake, in lieu of the entrenched anthropocentric disposition that only values the environment in terms of its usefulness for humans (Wattchow et al. 2014). Intersectionally-attuned scholars and educators who take a critical socio-ecological approach emphasise the interconnections and interdependencies of social, political, economic and ecological systems and concerns (Kyburz-Graber 2013). However, such challenges to the status quo consistently work against the tide of default human-centric concerns and priorities. Articulating reservations about the consequences and effects of the field’s shift away from an environmental focus and towards predominantly social sustainability agendas during the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, Kopnina (2012, 699) argues that the privileging of human welfare and economic redistribution within sustainable development frameworks, resulted in ‘obscuring environmental concerns’ and ‘underprivileging ecocentrism’. Other critics claim that because education for sustainability has an essentially human focus, it cannot value the environment for its own sake – within a sustainability framework, the environment can only ever be regarded as a human resource (Hovardas cited in Edwards 2014a, 26).

Anthropocentric and dualistic thinking has also been challenged by environmental educators interested in human-animal relations (Oakley et al 2010). In the editorial for a special issue of Canadian Environmental Education called ‘Animality and environmental education: Towards an interspecies paradigm’, Oakley (2011, 9) condemns ‘outmoded’ divided frameworks that position animals as ‘other’ to humans, simply as a way of promoting the superiority of humans. She points out that an understanding of our own animality ‘runs deeper than being exclusively ‘about’ the environment’, and not only leads to self-knowledge, but also to ‘considering the subjective experiences of other animals’ (Ibid, p.9). Others have pointed to the ways in which attending to human-animal relations can shift our understandings of the learning process. From studying how children come to understand their human-ness through living and thinking with other animals, Fawcett (2002) was the first to challenge education’s individualistic and human-centric understandings of knowledge production. In lieu of individual learning she proffers the alternative notion of collectively learning within multispecies epistemological communities (Fawcett 2002, 136).

More recently, Malone (2015) has retheorised child-animal street relations in Bolivian urban slums by engaging with Anthropocene-attuned posthumanist philosophies and common world theoretical approaches to the study of childhood. She finds this an effective way of moving beyond the nature-culture binary, but also of thinking about children’s environmental learning in ways that do not default to idealised and sentimentalised western notions of children and nature. She is one of the few environmental education scholars who is calling for ‘a new imagining of a ‘collective ecology’ of human and nonhuman for future sustainability and environmental education’ in the Anthropocene (Malone 2015, 20).

Motivated by an engagement with posthumanist theory, Malone’s notion of ‘collective ecology’ is not the same as calls for ‘environmental collective action’ emanating from political ecology and some of the more activist branches of sustainability education. While the former moves from an understanding of the ‘collective’ as already constituted by humans and nonhumans alike, the latter assumes that humans need to band together to take collective action on behalf of the environment. As I have already mentioned, education for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Troubling the intersections of urban/nature/childhood in environmental education
• 1 Beyond stewardship: common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene
• 2 Reconfiguring urban environmental education with ‘shitgull’ and a ‘shop’
• 3 Thinking with broken glass: making pedagogical spaces of enchantment in the city
• 4 ‘I saw a magical garden with flowers that people could not damage!’: children’s visions of nature and of learning about nature in and out of school
• 5 ‘Staying with the trouble’ in child-insect-educator common worlds
• 6 Between indigenous and non-indigenous: urban/nature/child pedagogies
• 7 Going back and beyond: children’s learning through places
• 8 Learning from cities: a cautionary note about urban/childhood/nature entanglements
• Index