Comments on David Gruenewald’s “A Foucauldian Analysis of Environmental Education”

Abstract

David Gruenewald's use of Foucault's way of understanding the connections between knowledge systems, the multiple ways in which they influence the exercise of power, and the resulting form of subjectivity makes a major contribution to understanding the double binds that make current approaches to environmental education more part of the problem than the solution. I think Gruenewald is essentially correct in making the argument that the way environmental education is integrated into the dominant way of thinking about educational practices, which in turn are based on the deep cultural assumptions (a symbolic ecology that Foucault calls a regime of truth), ensures that the cultural roots of the ecological crisis will not be addressed. His argument that the dominant discourse that governs most approaches to environmental education marginalizes any consideration of the social and ecojustice issues is also correct. The language of science, the industrial-driven marketplace, and the messianic drive to spread the Western form of individual subjectivity and supporting cultural assumptions exclude the language required to make explicit what is being subjugated. That is, theJanus face of science is seldom recognized, with the result that the role of science in advancing the Industrial Revolution, and the digital phase we are now entering, goes unchallenged. Thus, science is equated with emancipation and empowerment, and not with the delegitimation of the knowledge systems of other cultures and the marginalization of intergenerational knowledge that has not been monetized and thus has a smaller ecological footprint. As environmental education is so closely aligned with the supposedly culture-free epistemology of science,