Hauntology of Trash in Environmental Education

Abstract

Industrialisation in third-world countries has brought about developmentalism that persists in their societal dynamics. Third-world countries have been producers of raw natural resources, yet there are massive consumers of processed products from first-world countries. This exploitation of production and consumption affected how third-world countries, especially Indonesia, perceived environmental education (EE). Massive consumption has led to massive trash and waste; currently, environmental policy in Indonesia focuses solely on the massive trash problem, which is reflected in the country’s education policies. The problem of trash and its management haunts every effort to commence EE. Trash management has become one of the variables used to measure a school’s capability to manage the environment. The variable then becomes a ghost, a spectre of terror, that haunts school policies, including planning, managing, and resolving the trash problem to achieve the “Adiwiyata” title or the like. Admittedly, trash induces terror when it experiences a change in a domain from school to other institutions to the public. It is indubitable that trash management is not only a matter of education but also of public policy and facilities. However, as it stands, trash is implicitly only seen as a means to a prestigious identity: schools flocking to orient themselves towards SDGs, birthing environmental/ecological heroes, and equipping themselves with jargon like “green”, “clean”, and “eco”. Ambiguity persists in commencing EE, either as an obligation or as a mere ceremonial event to celebrate the narratives of SDGs. Therefore, the implementation of SDGs is always haunted by trash, starting from when it is present at school until when it is absent. In the end, is the ideal trash management EE to teach possible amidst the hegemony of the SDGs narrative? In this paper, we argue that using hauntology to analyse the trash problem would reveal gaps in practising EE between the global North and the global South, where a history of developmentalism and consumerism places vast environmental issues, such as the planetary approach and conservation, seemingly too far to reach.