Narrative and Nature: Unsustainable Fictions in Environmental Education

Abstract

We live… lives based on selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time — not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based on a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed. (Durrell 1963)Environmental education owes its very existence to a particular interpretation of reality. My purpose here is to examine critically the “selected fictions” on which that view of reality is based — to examine the ways in which our perceptions of environmental problems and issues are “conditioned by our position in space and time”. I will argue that some of these perceptions constitute unsustainable fictions and will consider some ways in which we might work towards living lives based on more sustainable constructions of human interrelationships with their environments. I will begin with an illustration of how an interpretation of reality can be changed by taking (to coin Durrell's metaphor) two paces east or west — by glimpsing something familiar from an unusual vantage point.