From Education for Sustainable Development to Ecopedagogy: Sustaining Capitalism or Sustaining Life?

Abstract

Etymologically, a disaster is a kind of misfortune, and so it is one of the great ironies and sorrows of the present age that disasters have become prime fodder for the sort of laissez-faire economic development that aims mainly at the creation of private fortunes for well-connected corporations and individuals (Klein, 2007). Of course if such fortunes were only epiphenomena of more peaceful, just, and balanced societies – in short, ecological societies – then perhaps critical tempers could be mollified to some degree. However, as numerous studies have revealed, ongoing economic reconstruction programs that seek to integrate regional economies into the global neoliberal framework appear not only to have generally failed to improve most people’s lives, but have disastrously grown the gaps between the rich and poor (Scott, 2001; Reuter, 2007; Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 2003). Hence, alter-globalization movements have arisen that seek to challenge the hegemony of this agenda (Kahn and Kellner, 2007), and indeed, philosophies that have stressed cultural empowerment for “less developed” nations, instead of their capital improvement, can now be traced back nearly fifty years. In educational circles, for instance, theories opposing the instrumental extension of global capital into the Third World date to at least the early texts of radical theorists such as Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, who promoted “cultural action for freedom” (Freire, 2000) and a founding form of post-development theory (Rahnema and Bawtree, 1997), respectively. There is also the political and economic global Third Way of so-called liberal centrists like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, whom the New York Times has referred to as the “Impresario of Philanthropy” (Dugger, 2006) because of his Clinton Global Initiative and his work on behalf of disaster relief related to the recent Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. The rhetoric of this approach champions sustainable development as a win-win-win for people, business, and the environment, in which the following policy goals are upheld: 1) development “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland, 1987) and 2) development improves “the quality of human life while living within