Revolutionary Ecologies: Ecosocialism and Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

In this article, we argue that critical and revolutionary educational praxis is increasingly shaped by and through ecological politics and imaginaries. Indeed, given the pervasiveness of environmental crisis in our everyday lives and vocabularies, we argue that critical educators can no longer ignore questions of ecojustice. In keeping with a growing interdisciplinary field of green Marxist scholarship, we argue that "greening" critical pedagogy ought not diminish its radical intent or its goal of transforming oppressive social and economic conditions. Drawing on the field of political ecology, we argue for critical revolutionary pedagogy to be informed by a dialectics of ecological and environmental justice that highlights the situatedness of environmental conflict and injustice toward nonhuman nature without obscuring its historical production under capitalist value forms. In particular, we explore schooling as one site of environmental injustice before embarking on a broader discussion of how justice toward nature more generally may be substantively linked to the objectives of critical revolutionary pedagogy.