Paulo Freire and Eco-Justice: Updating Pedagogy of the Oppressed for the Age of Ecological CalamityWhile the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind's central problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable concern.-- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed [1] I. Introduction:As a radical pedagogy and defense of the Third World, Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains as timely as ever. Rooted in “real and concrete hunger” experiences and informed by a critical understanding of transnational social structure and power, since its appearance in English in 1970, Freire's great text has run alongside (and mostly counter to) the globalization of technocapital and its resulting cycle of mass extinction and planetary oppression. I'll not bother now to further extol its many praises, of which the book is certainly worthy. Rather, in the manner of praxis -- which moves dialectically from an analysis of a concrete situation to an understanding of the concrete's relation to abstract knowledge and then back again towards a transformation of the particular situation at hand -- I would like to begin by analyzing the fact of our present ecological crisis with the intention of then critically relating it to Freire's own theory as expressed in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I hope thereby to provide both greater illumination of the limits of our own situation and of the pedagogy proper, with the paper itself guided by the belief that opportunities must be constructed for future interventions and alliance-building between those struggling against global eco-cide and Freirean educators.
When Freire's work is engaged by the reality of the current ecological crisis, it provides immediate historical insight as to why the people of the Third World, along with other species of the Earth, have been consistently denied the rights and privileges accorded those living amidst the advanced capitalist nations -- there is a logic of domination at work. As Freire theorizes, it has always been the mindset of the oppressors to see themselves as “human,” while those that they prey upon are always less than such; like animals, they are barred from the prospects of history and the possibilities inherent in liberatory conduct. [2] Therefore, it is of little surprise that people in the Third World and species everywhere currently bear the great burdens of “sustainable development,” uttered by the global oppressors as a cure-all for all those already suffering from the previous legacy of development and imposed transformation of their lifeworlds. According to Freire's own thinking, we who stand with the global oppressed should then be especially dubious, if not in outright objection, of such top-down policy initiatives as proposed by global states and federations -- policies that are formed by those who live in great opulence and ease but which are always directed at those surrounded by despair. Duly informed by the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, we might suggest that in contradistinction to the many terrors now foisted by states and state-minded organizations upon the world, we need not globalization-from-above, but globalization-from-below. [3]
The idea of mixing a thorough-going critique of power with a sort of Gramscian-inspired, counter-hegemonic alliance politics is certainly not new within the Freirean legacy. I think it is fair to point to movements as diverse as Critical Pedagogy, the Poststructural--Marxism promoted by Laclau and Mouffe, recent forms of Revolutionary Multiculturalism and to Borderland Feminism as promoting a sort of Freireanism fit for today's anti-globalization set. Yet, as bell hooks herself testifies, this updating of Freire's work was often achieved only with great anguish. Only after concerted effort were feminist, post-colonial, and multicultural criticisms of Pedagogy of the Oppressed allowed to stand and be heard within the Freirean corpus. [4] Now, as we stand smack dab in the middle of a planetary eco-crisis, a catastrophe in which global powers will destroy the peoples and cultures of the Third World along with the species and habitats of their regions, I would like to ask: Is Freire's work in a position to mediate and speak with both those who stand beside the global poor and destitute and those whose deepest commitment is to the entirety of the natural kingdom? Can the Freirean corpus itself find agreement with the multi-faceted movement for eco-justice?
II. The Present Moment as Such: Planetary Environmental Crisis, Mass Oppression and the Dizzy Heights of Global CapitalismIn his book, The Enemy of Nature, Joel Kovel begins by documenting the terrible legacy of human resource degradation (and its consequence for humanity) that spans the thirty-odd years that have now elapsed since the first Earth Day and the release of the Club of Rome's benchmark economic treatise The Limits to Growth. Echoing the findings of eminent environmental and ecological groups and personages such as The Union of Concerned Scientists, Edward O. Wilson, and Peter Raven, the picture that emerges from Kovel's work is that of an institutionalized, transnational, phase-changing neo-liberalism that is loosed as a cancer upon the Earth, a form of “endless growth” political economy that is literally over-producing and consuming the planet to death in the attempt to stave off its own demise. [5] Wholly without precedent, human population has nearly doubled during this time period, increasing by 2.5 billion people. Similarly, markets have continued to worship the gods of speed and quantity and refused to conserve themselves. The use and extraction of “fossil fuel” resources like oil, coal, and natural gas -- the non-renewable energy stockpiles -- followed and exceeded the trends set by the population curve despite many years of warnings about the consequences inherent in their over-use and extraction, and this has led to a corresponding increase in the carbon emissions known to be responsible for global warming. Likewise, tree consumption for paper products doubled over the last thirty years, resulting in about half of the planet's forests disappearing, while in the oceans, global fishing also doubled. Further, since the end of the 1960's, half of the planet's wetlands have either been filled or drained for development, and nearly half of the Earth's soils have been agriculturally degraded. [6]
All these trends are increasing and most are accelerating. [7] Even during what amounts to a current economic downturn, markets and development continue to flow and evolve, the globalization of technocapital fueling yet another vast reconstruction and hegemonic reintegration of the myriad planetary political, economic, and socio-cultural forces into a futuristic “network society.” [8] Over the last thirty years then, humanity has exploded like a shock wave across the face of the Earth, one which has led to an exponential increase of transnational marketplaces and startling achievements in science and technology, but which has also had devastating effects upon the planetary eco-system. Perhaps most telling has been the parallel tendency over this time period towards mass extinction for the great diversity of species deemed non-human, including vast numbers of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Comparing the numbers involved in this catastrophe with the handful of other great extinctions existing within the prehistoric record has led the esteemed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey to coin this age of technocapitalism as the time of “the Sixth Extinction,” a great vanishing of creatures in the last thirty years such as the planet had not seen during the previous sixty-five million. [9]
But, lest we make the mistake of thinking that our present globalization crisis unfolds along the simple lines of human flourishing and resource wasting, it should be noted that even as world gross economic product has nearly tripled since 1970, these gains have been pocketed by a relatively few advanced capitalist nations at the expense of the poor. [10] Recently, the United Nations Development Programme issued its Human Development Report 1999 which found that the top twenty percent of the people living in advanced capitalist nations have eighty-six percent of the world gross domestic product, control eighty-two percent of the world export markets, initiate sixty-eight percent of all foreign direct investment, and possess seventy-four percent of the communication wires. Meanwhile, the bottom twenty percent of the people hailing from the poorest nations represent only about one percent of each category respectively. [11] The divide between rich and poor has been gravely exacerbated, with the gap between the two nearly doubling itself from an outrageous factor of 44:1 in 1973 to about 72:1 as of the year 2000. Much of this is directly related to a series of loans begun by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization in the 1990's, which ultimately increased Third World debt by a factor of eight compared with pre-globalization figures. [12]
So, as approximately 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 per day and nearly 3 billion live on less than $2 per day, the dizzy heights of global technocapitalism have been unfortunate indeed for nearly half of the human population. [13] Globalization has been especially torturous upon poor women and children, who are denied basic human rights en masse and who, in the attempt to combat their situations of mass starvation and homelessness, enter by the millions each year into the relations of slave-labor and the horrors of the global sex trade. Even more tragically, millions of additional poor (many of whom are women and children) have been violently pressed into the circumstance of outright slavery! Thus, when this is properly related to the conditions fostered upon the Third World by the explosion of transnational capitalist development over the last few decades, we can agree with the critical feminist Rhonda Hammer that these very same cultural, economic and political practices by the hegemonic powers constitute a form of global “family terrorism” meant to oppress those most in need of help. [14]
New advances in capitalist lifestyle and practice are then directly responsible for grave exacerbations of widespread poverty and environmental destruction; and in many ways, the exploitation of the environment and of the poor by the rich has come to be integrated so as to be part of one process -- the globalization of technocapitalsm. [15] Interestingly, it was only very recently, in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the U.N.'s World Summit for Sustainable Development, that the plight of the poor and of species everywhere was again expressed as being a result of the sort of “unsustainable development” that has been the planetary norm over the last thirty years. However, sadly, due to pressure by the Bush administration and by other world powers, the conservation of the environment was essentially shelved as a policy agenda and the prescription for poor nations was, ironically, even more transnational capitalist development, market expansion, and resource extraction. [16] Kofi Annan ended the summit by proclaiming, “This is not the end. It's the beginning.” [17] But, in fact, the W.S.S.D. was but the latest in a 30-year lineage of world summits stretching back across the recent history of globalization, to the first of its kind in Stockholm. As we can see then, Annan's promise of change is more appropriately interpreted as a curse.
The present standard of living enjoyed by those across the planet is estimated to utilize somewhere between two to four times the amount of sustainable resources provided by the planet. As population continues to rise toward 9 billion people and living standards increase in commensurate measure, it is calculated that to have a sustainable planet by the year 2070 would entail technical advances capable of enabling 60 times as much production and consumption as presently afforded, while only generating one-half to one-third the amount of present resource and environmental cost. [18] Yet, according to the U.N.'s own UNEP GEO-3 report, released just prior to the summit, a vision of continued growth of this kind is consonant only with extinction; either great changes are made in global lifestyle now or an irrevocable crisis will descend upon the planet by 2032. [19]
III. Putting Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Relation to the Present Global Eco-crisis: A Critical Dialogue Between Social and Eco-JusticeThe environmentally-minded educational theorist C.A. Bowers has repeatedly made the critique of Freire's work and of the “emancipatory educators” who seek to utilize it as a critical tool, that Freirean pedagogy problematically reproduces the conceptual baggage of the Eurocentric Enlightenment tradition that informs his optimistic Humanism. [20] Against those who would charge him with mere Freire-bashing, he has recently taken pains to affirm that -- criticisms aside -- he does believe that Freire's pedagogy is useful (for example) in:
Situations in which a cultural group has been under colonial rule, when the internal cultural patterns organize the distribution of wealth and political power in ways that subject part of the population to poverty, and when traditions of gender and age bias are restrictive and denigrating. [21]But, like bell hooks before him, Bowers often cannot help but recoil at Freire's language of constant energy, conquest, and production-without-end; he insists that it as exactly the type of language that one would expect of an oppressive capitalist, not an anti-globalization radical. Further, he makes an even stronger critique of the anthropocentrism which pervades the Pedagogy of the Oppressed and which was not significantly modified (to my knowledge) throughout Freire's career. Freire's “human-centeredness,” Bowers feels, goes “largely unnoticed by Western thinkers,” but when put into practice it “would further undermine cultures that have developed complex systems of interspecies communication and moral reciprocity with the natural world.” [22]
Leaving aside many of Bowers's other criticisms of Freire, which I think are either mistaken or have been answered appropriately by Peter Roberts in Education, Literacy, and Humanization: Exploring the Work of Paulo Freire (Bergin & Garvey, 2000), I assert that in an epoch when humanity threatens the great majority of all that it deems non or sub-human with extinction, that Freire's pedagogy must meet the socio-political needs of a broad-based anti-globalization movement for Eco-Justice, wherein the destruction of the environment is taken up and fought against alongside the battle to end the terrorizing of the poor and powerless. In this sense, Bowers points in a fruitful direction for the further relevance of Freire's work by demanding that its shortcomings vis-à-vis Nature and the current anti-globalization movement be accounted for and updated appropriately. [23]
In a speech delivered earlier this summer to the national Animal Rights 2002 convention in Washington D.C., the philosopher and activist Steven Best highlighted four reasons why Western thought is “legally blind” as concerns granting rights to animals. In his opinion, the West tends historically to suffer from and promote four fallacious types of thinking: 1) essentialism, 2) rationalism, 3) dualism, and 4) teleology, with the result being that:
From the Presocratics and the Stoics to the medievalists and the moderns, we find the same basic framework that is now widely recognized as but a reflection of the prejudices and fictions of ancient times. On the whole, Western philosophy has badly misunderstood human and animal natures: it created a dualistic division where there is only an evolutionary continuum, it attributed too much reason to human animals and too little to nonhuman animals, it imagined a purposeful universe that relegates animals to a desert of non-moral and legal status, and it enthrones human beings at the reign of life. [24]Certainly, it seems hard to charge Paulo Freire with having reproduced the philosophic fallacies listed by Best, for didn't Freire himself, within Pedagogy of the Oppressed, explicitly connect these fallacies up with dominator logic and oppression? How, then, could Freire have reasoned fallaciously in such a manner?
Productivism is the philosophy that “regards production as our essential activity and as a primary human and social value.” [25] In his “Foreword” to the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Richard Shaull highlights Freire's productivism when he notes that Freire “operates on one basic assumption: that man's ontological vocation (as he calls it) is to be a Subject who acts upon and transforms his world:”. [26] By demanding Subjectivity for those of the Third World, Freire was able to defend the oppressed against the charge of being inhuman -- if they could demonstrate the power to think and act responsibly and to relate to their world, then the poor must be Subjects, and hence “human” by all Enlightenment criteria. Further, by placing the seat of empowerment, of conscientização, within the minds and bodies of the globally oppressed themselves, and by taking it out of Washington D.C., New York, Paris, and Berlin, Freire was able to formulate the sort of motivation for education that a revolutionary pedagogy required.
In Capital, Marx himself formulates a similar productivist theme of humanity as that class of being which transcends itself by realizing itself in the world through the process of its own labor. Clearly inspired and indebted to Marx, the following could just as well have been taken from Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. [27]But, of course, Marx here unapologetically trumpets a form of thought that could be called fallaciously 1) essentialist: humanity is essentially a producer, 2) rationalist: humanity is that which possesses a higher-order category of mind, 3) dualist: humanity is ultimately different than mere Nature because it is humanity's gift to forge this difference, and 4) teleological: in its Promethean emergence from Nature, humanity must represent something like its apotheosis. Again, all this is not to say, therefore, that Marx's socialism fails as a critique of capitalist society's inability to effectively employ the forces of production, or that Freire's pedagogy is a dreamy farce. In fact, I would argue vehemently for the opposite in each case. However, while we might not hold it against Marx that his theory fails to be adequately informed by the many advances within the theory of the Subject made during the 20th century, Freire must be held more accountable.
In light of his over-reliance upon Marxist productivism, we must take Freire to task for his problematical discourse on the distinction between humans and animals. The language in Pedagogy of the Oppressed wherein he codes animals as mindless, timeless and merely instinctual beings, no different in “the forest or the zoo,” lost in “an overwhelming present,” and lacking individuation is unfortunate and politically regressive in the context of our current situation. [28] All told, it is this type of language, along with Freire's rather uncritical promotion of Humanism, subjectification and print literacy as vehicles to authentic liberation, that needs to be more thoroughly historicized and properly contextualized by the histories of civilization and oppression of which they are a part. [29]
IV. In Conclusion:Like bell hooks, I have found much “water” in Freire's work as I “die of thirst” in the struggle against oppression, and yet I am also aware that an important oversight appears to exist within his thinking. [30] The challenge remains, then, to justly relate the human ecology, which Paulo Freire devoted his life to charting and championing, to the larger ecology of the planet as a whole. Finding only a “human-centered” world in Freire, critics like C.A. Bowers have attacked him as a “speciesist” and have used this theoretical limitation to cast doubt upon other aspects of his work. But, against those who would raise the charge of Freire's speciesism as an end in itself, I believe that this apparent limitation in the educator's work is actually a great benefit to his students.
Freire himself begins Pedagogy of the Oppressed by asserting that it too is but an example of the radical praxis of which he speaks. It is not an overarching dogma, free of historical limitations:
The radical committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a “circle of certainty” within which reality is also imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled...I will be satisfied if among the readers of this work there are those sufficiently critical to correct mistakes and misunderstandings, to deepen affirmations and to point out aspects I have not perceived. [31]It was Freire's great achievement in his pedagogy to instill within those trapped within the confines of limited situations the need to gain consciousness of the root structures by which they were bound. For, by becoming literate in the limitations imposed upon people by the structures of experience, Freire felt that people would become dialectically aware of the possibilities such structures also veiled. Acting upon the world in a manner in accordance with our dreams is then part of the process of unveiling social structures, naming oppressive power regimes, and fostering future possibilities.
In 1970, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed emerged into a new global discourse to fight against the further colonization of the Third World by the advanced capitalist nations. Emerging alongside, but not yet in proper relation to the dawning environmental movement across the planet, Freire's work failed to perceive the radical kinship his pedagogy should claim for all species, not just homo sapiens. Now, three decades later, Freire's students are in the position to perceive what the teacher could not. I call upon them, therefore, to properly criticize the language of species oppression (or the lack thereof) that exists within the enduring corpus of Freire's work, and so to recreate the living texts anew. In this way, the pedagogy will remain engaged by the type of transformation that Freire correctly recognized is a revolutionary strength, and this epoch's attempt to reconstruct a counter-hegemonic globalization-from-below will itself begin with a revitalized Pedagogy of the Oppressed that is capable of negotiating the alliance that is currently necessary for the proponents of social and eco-justice.
[1] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (New York, Continuum Press, 2000), p. 43.[2] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pp. 56-57, 63.[3] See Douglas Kellner, “Theorizing Globalization,” forthcoming in Sociological Theory at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/theoryglob.htm .[4] bell hooks, “bell hooks Speaking about Paulo Freire -- The Man and His Work,” in Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, eds. Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard (New York, Routledge, 1993), p. 148.[5] Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World, (New York, Zed Books, 2002), pp. 38-39. For the Union of Concerned Scientists, see “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity” in Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future (Washington, D.C., Island Press, 1996), pp. 242-50. For Wilson, see The Future of Life, (New York, Knopf, 2002), pp. 43-78. For Raven, see “What We Have Lost, What We Are Losing,” in Michael J. Novacek (ed.), The Biodiversity Crisis: Losing What Counts, (New York, New Press, 2001), pp. 58-62.[6] The statistics are listed in Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, pp. 3-5.[7] Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, p.4.[8] On the structural relations involved in the growth of technocapitalism since World War II and their meaning for the present moment, see Douglas Kellner, “Theorizing Globalization,” forthcoming in Sociological Theory at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/theoryglob.htm .[9] For the connections between transnational capitalism and Leakey's Sixth Extinction see my forthcoming paper for Social Thought & Research at http://getvegan.com/holesnotwholes.htm .[10] Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, p.4.[11] United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1999, New York, 1999 at http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/1999/en/ default.cfm .[12] Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, p.4.[13] World Bank, World Development Report 1998, at http://www.worldbank.org/ .[14] For a thorough discussion relating globalization to the oppression of poor women and children, see Rhonda Hammer, Antifeminism and Family Terrorism: A Critical Feminist Perspective, (Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), pp. 187-194.[15] In John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism (New York, Monthly Review Press, 2002), p. 60: This oft-quoted memo from when Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard and former Treasury Secretary for Bill Clinton, worked for the World Bank serves as the penultimate articulation of how oppression of the environment and poor are linked together by technocapitalist elites:
Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]?:I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that: I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.[16] For critical coverage of the Bush administration's hand at the W.S.S.D. see the stories dated August 26 to September 6, 2002 on my weblog at http://getvegan.com/blog/blogger.php and Douglas Kellner's at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/blogger.php .[17] “Sustainable Development Summit Concludes in Johannesburg: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Says It's Just the Beginning” at http://www.johannesburgsummit.org/html/whats_new/feature_story39.htm .[18] Ted Trainer, “What is Sustainable Development?” in EDucate! Magazine 5 (Karachi, 2002), pp. 38-40.[19] United Nations Environment Programme, Global Environmental Outlook 3: Past, Present, and Future Perspectives, 2002, pp. 13-15, at http://www.earthscan.co.uk/asp/bookdetails.asp?key=3703 .[20] For Bowers most recent resuscitation of the arguments, see C.A. Bowers, Educating for Eco-Justice and Community, (Athens, Univ. of Georgia Press, 2001), pp. 31-76.[21] C.A. Bowers, Educating for Eco-Justice and Community, p. 72.[22] C.A. Bowers, Educating for Eco-Justice and Community, p. 75.[23] In fact, precedents do exist for students of Freire's work to integrate environmental and Eco-Justice concerns into their pedagogy. Following in the lines of such personages as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, bell hooks has recently begun to make environmental and ecological issues a priority by relating them to issues of race, class and gender. See her interview for CSPAN's Booknotes in 2002 for an example. Further, in an article which speaks directly to the present moment's crisis from Peter McLaren, in 1995, see his interview with the Freirean-inspired, environmental-justice educator Edgar Gonzalez-Gaudiano, “Education and Globalization: An Environmental Perspective” in International Journal of Educational Reform, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Jan. 1995), pp. 72-78.[24] Steven Best, “Legally Blind: The Case For Granting Animals Legal Rights,” speech delivered for Animal Rights 2002 at http://utminers.utep.edu/best/papers/ legallyblind.htm .[25] Sean Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature, (London, Routledge, 1998), p. 57.[26] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 32.[27] Karl Marx, Capital: Vol. 1, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, p.177 at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm .[28] The passage in question is Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pp. 97-102. Other mentions of Freire's view of “animality” occur on pp. 125, 82, and 84.[29] For the problems inherent in Western visions of emancipatory literacy and Humanism, and their relation to the history of oppression, see my paper “Paideia and Humanitas: Western Civilization, Global Reality, and the Current Crisis of Ecological Catastrophe” in Democracy and Nature (2003) at http://getvegan.com/paideia.html .[30] bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, (New York, Routledge, 1994), p. 50.[31] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 39.