This review has been accessed  times since August 21, 1998
Bowers, C. A. (1997). The Culture of Denial: Why the
Environmental Movement Needs a Strategy for Reforming
Universities and Public Schools. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
277 pages ISBN # 0791434648
$17.95
Reviewed by David A. Gruenewald
The University of New Mexico
August 21, 1998
In his keynote address
to the 1997 Environmental Education
Association of New Mexico, writer John Nichols recently said it
out loud to a crowd of green-leaning educators:
"The dilemma that an educator must face is that by and large
our schools try to teach everyone to accept the economic
system and to succeed within it. Unfortunately, that
success pretty much guarantees the accelerated blighting of
the planet and all living things, without exception."
In numerous and
wide-ranging writings, C. A. Bowers has for years
been building an argument that supports Nichols' provocative
statement about education. His is a scholarly and culturally deep
environmentalism that includes critiques of technocratic and
emancipatory liberalism, critical theory, and postmodernism
alike. Bowers' main complaint of the various realms of
educational theory and practice is that they all virtually ignore
what Nichols, he, and many others cannot: that the taken-for-
granted ways we learn to think and live have, especially during
the last fifty years, created a mounting ecological crisis.
The Culture of Denial is the third of Bowers' books in the
1990s (Education, Cultural Myths, and the Ecological
Crisis, 1993; Educating for an Ecologically Sustainable
Culture, 1995) to address the connection between our
conception and practice of education and our relationship as
human cultures to life-sustaining ecological systems. Most
fundamentally, Bowers is asking all educators to consider two
questions: "Which cultural patterns are contributing to the
ecological crisis? and What are the characteristics of cultural
patterns that contribute to long-term sustainability" (p.27)?
Careful to analyze the
roles thought and language play in
the cultural landscape, Bowers points out the unnatural
linguistic dualism in our tendency to think and talk about
culture as separate from environment. Separating "human culture"
from "ecological systems" is an anthropocentric mistake that is
ecologically impossible. This cognitive and cultural separation
of "environment" from the human enterprise, according to Bowers
and a host of ecological thinkers, pretty much guarantees all
sorts of destruction. Universities and schools reinforce this
split mostly by ignoring environment. When they do acknowledge
its significance, it is often with an add on approach: courses or
units in environmental studies remain safely apart from the rest
of the curriculum. Bowers argues that the environmental movement
itself contributes to the problem by focusing the public's
attention on specific environmental problems rather than the
cultural origins of the ecological crisis. Bowers acknowledges
the successes and strength of the environmental movement and with
this book asks environmentalists to "shift their focus from
incidental interest in educational issues to a more sustained
discussion (p.21)."
One of the most provocative
constructs Bowers uses to
critique those in denial of our human/ecological relationship and
resulting crisis (that is the vast majority of educators at all
levels) is the term "pre-ecological." This designation, seeming
to disparage and goad underdeveloped thinkers, suggests that a
poorly formed ecological consciousness is something that
education can and should remedy. Perhaps the best way to see if
institutions of education have begun to develop ecologically is
to determine whether or not they acknowledge, in their structure,
pedagogy and curriculum, David Orr's (1992) potent statement that
"all education is environmental education" (p.90). Although
Bowers gives some good examples of educational groups and
programs that try to take Orr's statement seriously (e.g., The
Secretariat of University Presidents for a Sustainable Future
housed at Tufts University, The Green University Strategic Plan
for George Washington University, Portland State University's
School of Education graduate program, etc.), he is concerned that
ecological perspectives remain outside the rigid boundaries of
most disciplines. In other words, disciplines such as
psychology, political science, philosophy, history, economics,
sociology, education, and even some physical sciences remain pre-
ecological. These disciplines, Bowers contends, continue to
distort and ignore the human culture/ecological systems
relationship.
Numerous times in this
and previous books, perhaps hoping to
reach the reader through sheer repetition, Bowers lists what he
calls the root metaphors of modernism that most institutions of
education take for granted. These root metaphors or assumptions
lead, to twist Orr's statement, to a kind of anti-environmental
education. The three most central of these metaphors are 1) a
view of the individual as the basic social unit, 2) an
anthropocentric view of the world, and 3) a view of change as
inherently progressive. Bowers demonstrates that all modern and
postmodern theories of education take these assumptions for
granted (though there is some discussion at least at the
theoretical level about number one). The legitimacy of
individualism, science, technology, and "progress" rules supreme--
all the while overseeing the exploitation of people worldwide and
the demise of life-sustaining natural systems. These
assumptions, Bowers argues, are deeply embedded in our cultural
and thus educational patterns. Bowers calls for all educators to
reflect on these assumptions in the context of what he calls the
"diverging trendlines" of rapidly increasing human population and
resource demand and the rapidly decreasing sustaining capacities
of ecosystems. Bowers wants educators to consider that schools
as currently conceived are a part of the ecological problem. As
Nichols contends, we keep teaching for "success" in an ecological
system that can't tolerate much more of it.
One of many instructive
illustrations of this fact is the
connection Bowers makes between schools of business and colleges
of education. Graduates of schools of business are taught to
lead the way in capitalistic, global economic expansion.
Graduates of colleges of education (at all levels) "socialize the
broader population of youth to the taken-for-granted patterns of
thinking that equate progress with the continual expansion of
technology into more areas of cultural life, and with continued
economic and consumer 'opportunities'" (p.78). In other words,
both colleges of education and schools of business fully embrace
what ecological economist Herman E. Daly (1991) terms
growthmania. They each help promote the current cultural love
affair with the "global market," a phrase with an especially
foreboding anthropocentric and exploitative ring. As a result,
we have schools designed around individual competition for
grades, status, jobs and ultimately commodities produced and
marketed by an ever improving and expanding technological
society. As Bowers observes, the business community's growing
ability to influence public school and university agendas assures
that they will produce consumers and producers socialized to
embrace the ideology of capitalism and economic growth.
As an antidote
to "the doctrine of economic colonization
that treats both the worlds cultures and ecosystems [and children
and students] as an increasingly integrated market system"
(p.80), Bowers first wants to make ecologically destructive
cultural patterns explicit for educators. He then wants to name,
reflect on and revive alternative cultural patterns that would
replace growthmania with sustainability. Such practices would be
based on models of cultural development that have been and remain
present in ecologically centered cultures. These models are
essentially the opposite of modernism's root ideas cited above.
A few of these include: 1) meta-narratives that represent human
beings as interdependent with all life, 2) a view of progress
that conserves the authority of past tradition, and 3) "forms of
community where? patterns of civic responsibility and
reciprocity ensure that economic production and exchange do not
become the dominant force in everyday life" (p.5). Bowers calls
the guiding ideology needed to learn and teach sustainability
"cultural/bio-conservatism; that is, an ideological orientation
that emphasizes conserving cultural values, beliefs, and
practices that contribute to sustainable relationships with the
environment" (p.5).
And here we discover what
Bowers is fond of calling our
double bind. Not only do universities and public schools
marginalize the above ecologically sustainable concepts as
primitive or belonging to political groups such as
environmentalists, but they also indoctrinate their students (and
faculty) in modernist concepts that exacerbate our already
strained relationship with the natural world. Bowers points to
an important distinction embedded in institutions of education
between high status and low status knowledge. High status
knowledge is that which leads to more technological development,
more economic growth, and the further commodification of the
human experience; low status knowledge describes the conservation
of ecologically sustainable cultural patterns. Like Greg Cajete
(1994), Bowers advocates a sort of cultural revivalism that would
uncover and venerate traditions of ecologically centered cultures
such as respect for elders, connectedness to the land, and a
sense of community responsibility. Instead of showing up in a
low-status folklore course, Bowers suggests that these aspects of
cultural/bio-conservatism should guide all aspects of education.
Bowers is extremely thorough
in his deconstruction and
reconstruction of the ideological foundations of education.
Sometimes he may even go a little too far into the shelves of
philosophy to make his point. The Culture of Denial, for example,
resurrects Nietzsche's notion of ressentiment, a word used "to
describe the pathological form of 'will to power' expressed in
the need to maintain a fixed (and safe) worldview" (p.162). The
psychological theory is apropos, if somewhat hard to follow, but
seems more about Bowers' interest in Nietzsche than
reinterpreting culture and identity ecologically. Bowers'
philosophical background is always impressive, but I wonder if
the scope and depth of his scholarship might be a barrier to the
educators and environmentalists he is trying to reach. His
previous readers will notice that many of his past concerns, such
as his detailed critique of liberalism and his argument against
computers, reappear in this latest work. This, I believe, is a
wise strategy. Bowers' critique of the foundations of education
and the direction of contemporary culture is so sweeping, it is
worth considering until educators begin to consider how their
practices, and the metaphors that guide them, always have
ecological consequences. Bowers refuses to allow sustainability
to become just another value position to consider, as Richard
Rorty might, with detached irony. Ecological sustainability is
the table at which all other conversations remain possible.
Because people are generally not impressed with the notion
of an ecological crisis (unless it erupts in their own
backyards), the problem of educating for ecological
sustainability represents a huge challenge to ecologically
literate educators. Pre-ecological university and public school
education continue to reinforce ideological orientations that
allow the growth-obsessed market to convince us that all is well,
buy more stuff. Many of us really are in denial that our
cultural patterns not only are unsustainable but are destructive
of other cultures and ecosystems. Plenty of media images--perhaps
our era's most successful educators--constantly tell us not to
worry about it. Even serious news outlets--National Public Radio,
for example--religiously report on the status of our economy as
measured by the Dow the GDP or the rate of economic growth.
Never do they make the connection that growthmania in the global
market has serious consequences for peoples and ecosystems
worldwide. The author wants educators to make and teach such
connections.
Bowers' critique of the
modernist assumptions behind
educational practice is powerful. It is careful analysis and
corroboration of Nichol's claim that our economic success is
blighting the planet. Bowers' strategies to begin moving
educational institutions in the direction of ecological literacy
and cultural change are less convincing. One interesting
scenario asks for an "environmentally oriented foundation" to
hold retreats for "top administrators down to the level of deans
of major units of the university" (p.228). These top-heavy
retreats would feature well-known scientists demonstrating how
the growth in human population and resource demand is impacting
the Earth's ecosystems. Such retreats, Bowers hopes, would
challenge university officials to rethink their roles in
reproducing the modernist version of progress and high status
knowledge. This seems important, if unlikely, given that
universities continue to bow to the pressures of the market and
do not seem interested in questioning growthmania and their role
in contributing to it. In a slightly more realistic vein, Bowers
urges environmentalists to "set as their goal that over the next
five to ten years all education courses will address some aspect
of how formal education can contribute to a more ecologically
sustainable future" (p.258). Those of us familiar with colleges
of education know how difficult it is to pursue any kind of
fundamental change. Colleges of education train teachers to fill
existing roles without paying much attention to the roles
teachers and school organizations play in mediating cultural
knowledge and experience. Bowers is not the first theorist to
call for educators to be more aware of how culture is embedded in
our practice. Perhaps that is why this book explicitly calls on
the environmental movement: if environmental organizations
directed their considerable resources to the right leverage
points, maybe they could make some things happen. In any case,
replacing the root metaphors of modernism with sustainable root
metaphors is a provocative theory. Following Bowers arguments
could lead the reader to some clarification, even transformation,
about the nature of his/her relationships with the world. But
the theory begs for examples describing the problems of
implementation at the institutional level: it lacks a theory for
creating change.
Like Orr (1992), Bowers
believes change in education is the
only way out of the growing ecological crisis. Although
growthmania and its ecological consequences are chief concerns
for Bowers, he does not attempt to critique how the structures of
capitalism permeate all aspects of modern life on an increasingly
global scale. This lack might be viewed as a weakness to those
readers concerned that education is in many ways controlled by
political structures outside of education. One might ask: is it
possible to change education without simultaneously changing the
structures that control it? Bowers does not grapple with this
question. His critique and his vision for change focus more on
cultural beliefs than institutional practices.
Bowers is aware that the
kind of ideological change he is
promoting will not come easily. He repeatedly points to recent
success in overcoming some elements of sexism and racism as
examples that our modern biases can change as long as there are
groups capable and willing to keep the pressure on. Depending on
one's perspective regarding the success of movements opposing
sexism and racism, one may or may not feel that this is reason
for hopefulness. With his latest book, Bowers condenses and
extends many of his previous arguments and asks the environmental
movement to help generate and sustain the larger cultural
conversation that might help steer educational institutions away
from the destructive patterns of modernism and toward ecological
sustainability. Until that conversation is embraced by
universities and public schools, they will no doubt remain pre-
ecological and largely ignorant of the consequences.
References
Bowers, C.A. (1993). Education, cultural myths, and the
ecological crisis: Toward deep changes.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Bowers, C.A. (1995). Educating for an ecologically sustainable
culture: Rethinking moral
education creativity, intelligence, and other modern
orthodoxies. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Cajete, G. (1994). Look to the mountain: An ecology of
indigenous education.
Durango: Kivaki Press.
Daly, H. E. (1992). Steady-state economics. Washington,
D.C.: Island Press.
Orr, D. (1992). Ecological literacy: Education and the
transition to a postmodern world.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
About the Reviewer
David A. Gruenewald
The University of New Mexico
Email: dgruene@unm.edu
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