Soka education and the land ethic: educational leadership toward the ‘creative co-existence of nature and humanity’[1

Abstract

As research has shown, the kind and degree of environmental ethics and eco-philosophy (or the lack thereof) may determine the effectiveness of pre-service teacher training in education for sustainable development. This is especially the case where in the ethical substratum of the conservationist Aldo Leopold and his Japanese precursor, the human geographer, Tsunesburo Makiguchi, sustainability is understood as the joint growth and development, the interconnected safety and protection of humans and non-humans alike, members of the biosphere. In reducing human beings to their own existence, anthropocentrism limits the parameters of that existence to the lesser self, when in Leopoldian and Makiguchian terms a greater self permeates and encompasses natural laws and principles over all time and space. Two global initiatives of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and more recently the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development (2005) and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), counterintuitively run against this non-anthropocentric environmental ethics. The search for a ‘creative co-existence of nature and humanity’ lies, on the other hand, at the heart of Soka education, a philosophy of education founded by Makiguchi and implemented worldwide at K-12 and tertiary schools by his successor, Daisaku Ikeda, a philosophy calling instead for the ‘sympathetic interaction’ of self and the environment. This is the epistemological revolution that environmentalists need to undergo for the sake not simply of sustainability but to decolonize and extend the Land Ethic from place-based to truly land-based in both theory and practice, the planet earth and the surrounding universe laying the foundation.