Environmental Praxis Research Articles

<i>Agua corriente</i>: Towards an Alternative Environmental Praxis around Water in Some Non-Fiction Stories Written by Ex-Combatants from FARC-EP

Since the signing of the Peace Accords in Colombia in 2016, different cultural productions that reflect on the armed conflict from an ecological perspective have emerged. One of these productions is Agua corriente (2022), an anthology of non-fiction stories written by signatories of said Accords and coordinated by the Master's Program in Creative Writing at the Caro y Cuervo Institute in Bogotá. From a critical environmental perspective, this article analyzes three of these stories — “Todo es agua” by Manuel Bolívar, “Aguas en guerra, aguas en paz” by Gabriel Ángel and “Río moribundo” by Elkin Carabalí—, in order to shed light on the different relationships that the signatories of the Agreements had with water, to conclude that, in all of them, the memory processes, linked to water, point to the emergence of an alternative environmental praxis for the post-conflict based on in land conservation, environmental ethics and water democracy.

Co-operatives for learning in higher education: experiences of undergraduate students from environmental sciences

ABSTRACT Non-hegemonic perspectives on sustainability are grounded in environmental sustainability based on justice. We argue about the potential of co-operatives for learning framed through degrowth epistemological visions promoting pedagogical changes in Higher Education. The context is a public university in Catalonia (Spain) implementing an innovative teaching methodology merging service learning and co-operatives for learning in an Environmental Sciences degree. The research question was: What are the experiences of undergraduate students participating in co-operatives for learning about environmental education? Data collection used focus group interviews and individual reflective narratives. Based on the construct of dialectical tensions, we identify three breaking points for the transition to teaching justice-based environmental sustainability using co-operatives for learning: (a) decommodification of work (tradition/innovation; theory/practice); (b) reconstruction of relationships with ‘the other’ (individual/collective); and (c) with nature (capitalism/degrowth). We conclude that students’ environmental praxis is promoted when addressing new perspectives of development and sustainability in university teaching.

Reimagining Freire: beyond human relations

By bridging critical pedagogy and environmental praxis, the contributions in this forum build on Freire’s legacy while stretching his work. As the authors attend to more-than-human life, they theorize and enact relational ways of knowing. Through participatory and multisensory pedagogies, they counter dichotomies between nonhuman and human nature, student and teacher. In this response, I consider how this (re)centering of more-than-human relations expands—and counters—Freire’s thinking, including how he articulates humanization as a primary, liberatory aim of teaching and (un)learning. Along with insights from Black geographies and Black feminist ecologies, bell hooks guides my response. hooks critiqued and engaged with Freire’s work with radical care, with space for complexity and accountability. This way of reading feels particularly suited to this forum, as the authors reimagine Freire’s contributions to critical (environmental) pedagogy for the twenty-first century and beyond.

Environment as Land: Understanding Anti-displacement Politics in Jharkhand

While environmental claim-making is centered on nature as the object of protection or preservation, the invocation of land remains marginal to discussions on environmentalism. Land claims remain in the realm of agrarian or material discursive practices. This article analyzes an anti-displacement adivasi movement in Jharkhand in India to examine its environmental praxis. The movement articulates a distinct attachment of adivasis to land which undergirds the process of resistance to forceful land acquisition. An environmental discourse is invoked to protect continued access to land, not land itself, thereby acting back on such a discursive politics to inflect it with a material praxis that places the producer at the center.

Formação de professores e educadores ambientais: diálogos generativos para a práxis

No presente trabalho argumentamos que analisar a produção científica (trabalhos apresentados) do Encontro Pesquisa em Educação Ambiental (EPEA) é trazer os contextos da prática para uma discussão atualizada sobre a Pesquisa em Educação Ambiental (PEA) no Brasil, abrindo caminhos para formulações teóricas em uma perspectiva da práxis. Caracterizamos os trabalhos apresentados no Grupo de Discussão de Pesquisa sobre “Formação de professores e educadores ambientais” do X EPEA e elaboramos um conjunto de questionamentos generativos como potencial agenda de pesquisa, ou enquadramento metodológico para a (des)(re)construção, ou (re)formulação de pesquisas e ações no âmbito da educação ambiental com foco na formação de educadores ambientais. Entre os limites conceituais-metodológicos atuais/remanescentes da PEA com foco na formação de professores e educadores ambientais discutidos, destacamos: a persistência do histórico gap entre teoria e prática; a desarticulação das “novas” teorias em relação aos contextos geo-epistemológicos do campo ambiental; a ausência de diálogos Norte-Sul e a não-presença de epistemologias do Sul. A ênfase principal dos questionamentos levantados e da agenda de pesquisa proposta é a potencial superação desses limites no sentido da práxis ambiental.

Síntesis transdisciplinaria en la integración de la praxis socioambiental. Método en un estudio de caso

El desafío de la integración atraviesa el compromiso asumido en la investigación científica y la formación universitaria como vértices del quehacer académico. La conjugación de esfuerzos en un proyecto de intervención comunitaria derivada de la iniciativa integración y sustentabilidad, hizo posible dilucidar varios mecanismos relacionantes y sistémicos de la dinámica socioambiental. La contextualización, el proceso e interacciones y la participación se articulan como principios de carácter sociopedagógico en el Método Sintético para la Integración Transdisciplinaria de la Praxis Socioambiental (Msitps). El objetivo de este artículo es presentar los elementos empíricos, las argumentaciones, las categorías, los principios epistemológicos y la ruta nuclear que le dan sustento, del estudio de caso realizado en poblaciones de la Cuenca del Lago de Zirahuén, con la intención de contribuir en el desarrollo curricular y en la reflexión de la praxis socioambiental a través de una proposición metodológica de investigación vinculada a la formación técnica universitaria.

Tramping the Mobius: A Curriculum of Oral and Literary Tradition as a Primer for Rural Education

In this article, we illustrate how outdoor activities that foster the development of human relationships with intact ecosystems are an essential aspect of environmental education. Through a curriculum of oral and literary traditions, this article takes up Ed Rickett’s and Aldo Leopold’s life work and theories (shared by Joseph Campbell and John Steinbeck) as they recount the genesis of Pacific Tidal Pool ecology, also applied to poetry, taxonomy, and philosophies that involved studying nature. Ongoing experiential decline has significantly altered environmental praxis leaving older environmentalists as among the last of significantly spatially shaped generations. We investigate how these naturalists mediate Indigenous perspectives and settler perspectives by paying close attention to the natural world. This relationship demands a journey into those places to uncover how place and story shape eco-hermeneutics.

Caminhos para a práxis da Educação Ambiental: Um Estudo de Caso sobre a Percepção de Alunos do Ensino Fundamental da Escola Municipal Francisco de Assis e sua Importância no Processo de Sensibilização Socioambiental

The objective of this article is to analyze the importance of studies related to Environmental Perception in the educational process and understand its nuances in the construction of action and reflection in education and environmental awareness. Thus, through the discussion of environmental education and its theoretical and practical aspects, we seek an analytical dialogue between concepts such as praxis and interdisciplinarity and its application in the educational practice, using a field trip as main tool. In this context, we present a case study based on the perception of students perception at Escola Municipal Francisco de Assis about the Paraiba do Sul River in Campos dos Goytacazes - RJ. For this purpose, we identified connections and uses of the river by the students and, with this information, we organized a field trip to a fragment of riparian forest. The field trip activities aimed to contribute and foster an open dialogue among educators and students, sharing their perspective of the physical and natural environment and its connections with the social, political, economic and cultural relations, paving the way for an education based on environmental praxis.

Intersystemic Care: How Religious Environmental Praxis Expands the Pastoral Theological Norm of Relational Justice

This essay provides theological reflection, theoretical resources, ethnographic data, and pastoral theological proposals regarding religious environmentalism as a form of intersystemic care that can connect social and ecological justice-making pursuits. The religious environmental praxis of the Central Texas Episcopal Church demonstrates how this form of religious praxis represents efforts at an ecologically inclusive relational justice, a key norm for pastoral theologians. This article explores theological and contextual rationales for pastoral theological engagement with ecological issues as a more thorough way of addressing structures of violence that impede the flourishing of both people and planet.

MANUSIA DAN LINGKUNGAN DALAM NOVEL LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS KARYA REBECCA HARDINGS DAVIS

This study aims to investigate the possibilities of alleviating the damage of the environment as a result of industrialization driven by the capitalist system as seen in Life in the Iron Mills, a novella by Rebecca Harding Davis. This study applied ecocriticism which succinctly might be defined as study of the relation between literature and environment conducted in a commitment to environmental praxis. The findings show that there should be the actions of moral principles as a consideration in social policies, politics, and economy. The principles include respect, responsibility, love and care, simplicity, and justice. These actions allow changes from the material-oriented lifestyle to the simple lifestyle and are done by an individual or community to encourage the reform. Everybody should jointly and actively practice the environmental ethics.

"Mont Blanc" and the Sublimity of Materiality

"Mont Blanc" and the Sublimity of Materiality Louise Economides (bio) One of the ironies of poststructuralism's critique of logocentrism, a project that has the potential to progressively deconstruct anthropocentric subjectivity, is that it often fails to fully actualize this potential due to a problematic conflation of materiality and linguistic différance. A critical focus on language as the chief means of subverting dominant paradigms frequently has the effect of rewriting the subject as an ideally free-floating "text" existing in a purely cultural field, independent from, yet simultaneously constructing the material world via language games. Contemporary critics such as Brian Massumi observe that in the process a certain "cultural solipsism" is inadvertently reproduced whereby nonhuman domains (and subjects) are seen as significant only in terms of how they are linguistically constructed by humans.1 Thus, "theoretical moves aimed at ending the Human end up making human culture the measure and meaning of all things, in a kind of unfettered anthropomorphism" (Massumi, 100). During the past decade, dissatisfaction with unresolved traces of philosophical idealism in poststructuralist thought has been fueled by a growing awareness of ecological decline occurring in the earth's physical biosphere. Global warming, melting of the polar icecaps and glaciers, ozone depletion, unprecedented extinction rates in nonhuman species, and explosive human population growth all seem to demand more sustainable constructions of "nature" and materiality that do not simply construe the real as a domain that is wholly determined by human beings but that in turn has no appreciable effect on the evolution of culture. This is not to advocate an unmediated bridging of the gap between material and linguistic systems, what Paul de Man associates with the unifying impulse of the symbolic in Blindness and Insight. Rather, this essay [End Page 87] will explore Niklas Luhmann's theory of communication as a possible framework for thinking issues of materiality that avoids the extremes of absolute constructivism on the one hand and naive realism on the other. Today's ecocritics must find more productive ways to address language's constitutive role in establishing the contours of meaning even as they maintain that signs do not exhaust (or fully determine) our ways of experiencing nature as an "outside" to communication systems. As a complex account of communication's autopoiesis (self-generation) in response to potentially infinite ways of processing meaning in the world, systems theory provides not so much an escape from the "prison house" of language as a way to rethink its limits, the way linguistic closure necessitates blindness and multiple observation but also leaves open the world as a material domain that necessarily exceeds our cultural constructions.2 Furthermore, a systems-theoretical approach to communication sheds new light on an already existing discourse that addresses the limit between language and its outside: the romantic sublime. As one of the most famous (and infamous) articulations of the boundary between culture and nature in the modern era and the project of bridging this divide, it is not surprising that critics have frequently turned to this aesthetic as evidence of a proto-ecological awareness among nineteenth-century poets. Jonathan Bate, for example, considers the romantic sublime to be ecologically progressive because, as evidenced in Wordsworth's poetry, it succeeds in its aim to unproblematically bridge human culture and nature, language andits material referent. During the early nineties, Bate called for a re-evaluation of the romantic sublime as an ethos that could provide contemporary society with an ethical grounding for environmental praxis. In "Toward Green Romanticism," he claims that nature today must be regarded as it was by the Romantics, "with wonder and reverence, not rapaciousness" (67). In this regard, he feels the romantic sublime is instructive because it "conveys a sense of the insignificance, the smallness, of man. It offers a necessary humbling, a first step toward the knowledge that humankind is not self-sufficient." Unfortunately, this reading overlooks the fact that what might be termed the "anthropocentric sublime" operating in Wordsworth's texts represents a dialectic wherein the subject is only temporarily "humbled" before nature; the second moment in this exchange is [End Page 88] typically one in which the subject's mind and/or imagination isexalted above...

Ecotheology and Environmental Praxis in Guatemala

One can argue that religious beliefs have more influence for changing societal behavior than does scientific knowledge. Thus, the rediscovery of ecological themes in a variety of religious texts (ecotheology) can be a step toward environmental activism and conservation behavior, where science alone has been relatively ineffective. The article presents this argument, reviewing relevant literature. Next, the article tests this argument for the potential influence of religion in promoting environmentalism through a comparative case study of three Guatemalan villages: one in which religious traditions are quickly disintegrating because the population was forced to move; one in which religious traditions remain largely intact; and one in which Guatemalans, Europeans, and North Americans practice environmental preservation in a pluralistic religious setting. Shared values and the common religious theme of caring for creation can be a motin