Environmental education under siege: Climate radicality

Abstract

The present article gravitates around the radical dilemma in which the evolution of the current human civilization has placed us. This route derives from certain global problems, such as most notably climate change, which have exacerbated the magnitude and complexity of the known socio-environmental problems. Avoiding the most extreme scenarios requires us to promote urgent structural social changes aimed at reorienting the course followed by the dominant development model, by undertaking a deep socio-ecological transition in an extremely short time – during the next 10 or 15 years –, or face an imminent collapse of civilization. Climate change represents the glaring effect of the radical crisis of this style of capitalist development, towards which we should align the whole range of efforts we might undertake in order to try to reduce the most drastic effects of the changes we are already facing, as well as those we will face with greater force during the next decades. In this process, education plays a role of the highest social priority, in which environmental education should set the course along which to travel, to modify the wastage of inherited natural assets and the human potential created. This desirably central role of environmental education contrasts with the weakness of the educational dimension in global, regional and national policies that attempt to address the climate crisis, more concerned with technological and economic solutions than with the radical social and cultural changes that we will be faced with. However, during the last fifty years, conventional environmental education has remained anchored in a set of environmental issues and problems to whose resolution it has contributed little, by promoting pedagogical strategies of individual change that lacked the necessary socio-political substrate and prospective vision that should stem from the increasingly evident environmental and social complexity. Likewise, we have insisted on greening the educational processes of a school system that, in general terms, has exhausted its heuristic potential and that responds more and more to the dictates of the interest groups and factual powers that have created the current panorama. What can environmental education offer in order to face these terrible conditions? What alternatives are there to promote a reflexive citizenship that can modify the collision course with the limits of the biosphere in which we live? What means and tools can we use as a contribution to at least mitigate the collapse, considering that education cannot do everything? These are the questions that we modestly try to answer with this article.