Entitled "Melting Icecap Puts Europe's Woes in Perspective", the column stands out amidst the stories on the effects of free trade and the fate of RIM. Reguly (2012) writes that "extreme weather has gone from rare to almost normal ... the Arctic icecap is disappearing at shock and awe rates, far faster than the vast majority of climate scientists predicted only a few years ago". He notes that on the economic front, climate change is already reducing global GDP by 1.6% and concludes by musing, "Makes you wonder why so much energy and money is being devoted to far lesser crises".
The analysis of climate change by a hard-headed business writer made me think about how humankind got into this dire predicament, and the answers to this issue that are suggested by this week's readings. Matusitz and Kramer (2011) describe how "positivism claims that there is only one true picture of reality, thus negating the possibility of dialogue between them" (p. 299) and "the penchant for establishing the truth, once and for all, with solution and resolution being finalized, emerged along with industrialization" (p. 299). Furthermore, "the modern industrial world is goal oriented and demands production which is units produced per unit of time" (p. 299). "If a forest cannot be timbered or a river harnessed for generating power, providing water, or fished, then it has no value" (p. 300).
The view that humankind has taken of nature (even the use of the words 'humankind' and 'nature' suggests an opposition between them) suggests Nietzshe's notion of perspectivism (p. 292). Knowing subjects in the western industrial economies have been born into, lived in and worked in, a world in which the environment plays a distant second fiddle to economic growth. Until recently, no other perspective was really possible. As Kant writes, society determines what is true and false, right and wrong. "What we think true is a collective delusion from which no one can escape" (p. 295).
Except now, when Ottawa's Rideau Canal has largely stopped freezing during winter, and North America roasts during summers of record temperatures and searing drought, the "collective delusion" that the environment can be trampled upon is fading as rapidly as the polar ice caps.
What are we as educators to do? How can we position ourselves philosophically so that we may play a constructive role in society's adaptation to climate change and, possibly, its efforts to try to ameliorate the situation? In the words of the guiding question we have been asked, how does our awareness of these arguments shape our ontological view of self?"
One stance is surely suggested by Howe's description of transformationists as proceeding by "articulating and employing broad political principles--justice, equality, and the like--to criticize existing conditions and to suggest the direction that transformations should take place" (p. 18). Educators as transformationists could articulate and employ broad political principles that place the environment at the forefront of human concerns and suggest the practical steps that individuals and governments could take to try to address the most pressing issues.
Reguly, E. (2012, September 29). Melting icecap puts Europe's woes in perspective. The Globe and Mail, pp. B1.
Howe, K. (1998). The interpretive turn and the new debate in education, Educational Researcher, 27(8), 13-20.
Matusitz, J. And Kramer, E. (2011) A critique of Bernstein’s beyond objectivism and relativism: science, hermeneutics, and praxis by Jonathan Matusitz1 and Eric Kramer, Poesis & Praxis, 7(4), 291-303.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136698
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