The following article was copied from context.org.
<strong>A paper by Professor David Orr.</strong>
Professor David Orr was referred to as "one of the most important architects of environmental literacy in higher education, and a leading light of the sustainability movement".
What Is Education For?
If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rain-forest, or about an acre a second. We
will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will
lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by
250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon.
Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.
The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability,
the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.
It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people
with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he
said that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the
Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity.
What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s words: "It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than
human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than
conscience."
The same could be said of the way our education has prepared us to think about the natural world. It is a matter of no
small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainability on the planet for any length of time could not read,
or, like the Amish, do not make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency,
prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for
ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and
human survival – the issues now looming so large before us in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. It is not education
that will save us, but education of a certain kind.
SANE MEANS, MAD ENDS
What went wrong with contemporary culture and with education? There is some insight in literature: Christopher Marlowe’s
Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power; Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, who refuses to take responsibility
for his creation; Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, who says "All my means are sane, my motive and object mad." In these
characters we encounter the essence of the modern drive to dominate nature.
Historically, Francis Bacon’s proposed union between knowledge and power foreshadows the contemporary alliance between
government, business, and knowledge that has wrought so much mischief. Galileo’s separation of the intellect foreshadows
the dominance of the analytical mind over that part given to creativity, humor, and wholeness. And in Descartes’
epistemology, one finds the roots of the radical separation of self and object. Together these three laid the
foundations for modern education, foundations now enshrined in myths we have come to accept without question. Let me
suggest six.
First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. Ignorance is not a solvable problem, but rather an
inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of
ignorance. In 1930, after Thomas Midgely Jr. discovered CFCs, what had previously been a piece of trivial ignorance
became a critical, life-threatening gap in the human understanding of the biosphere. No one thought to ask "what does
this substance do to what?" until the early 1970s, and by 1990 CFCs had created a general thinning of the ozone layer
worldwide. With the discovery of CFCs knowledge increased; but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance
grew as well.
A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth.. "Managing the planet" has a nice
a ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of
Earth and its life systems can never be safely managed. The ecology of the top inch of topsoil is still largely unknown,
as is its relationship to the larger systems of the biosphere.
What might be managed is us: human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But our attention is caught by those
things that avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to
reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.
A third myth is that knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness. There is an information explosion going
on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase
in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is
increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no
longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being
lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not
more important, areas of inquiry. We still lack the the science of land health that Aldo Leopold called for half a
century ago.
It is not just knowledge in certain areas that we’re losing, but vernacular knowledge as well, by which I mean the
knowledge that people have of their places. In the words of Barry Lopez:
"[I am] forced to the realization that something strange, if not dangerous, is afoot. Year by year the number of people
with firsthand experience in the land dwindles. Rural populations continue to shift to the cities…. In the wake of this
loss of personal and local knowledge, the knowledge from which a real geography is derived, the knowledge on which a
country must ultimately stand, has come something hard to define but I think sinister and unsettling."
In the confusion of data with knowledge is a deeper mistake that learning will make us better people. But learning, as
Loren Eiseley once said, is endless and "In itself it will never make us ethical [people]." Ultimately, it may be the
knowledge of the good that is most threatened by all of our other advances. All things considered, it is possible that
we are becoming more ignorant of the things we must know to live well and sustainability on the Earth.
A fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled. In the modern
curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and sub disciplines. As a result, after
12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The
consequences for their person-hood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack
the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs
of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product.
We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost
in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer
than we are.
Fifth, there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success.
Thomas Merton once identified this as the "mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in
an elaborate and completely artificial charade." When asked to write about his own success, Merton responded by saying
that "if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté,
and I would take very good care never to do the same again." His advice to students was to "be anything you like, be
madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success."
The plain fact is that the planet does not need more "successful" people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers,
healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It
needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have
little to do with success as our culture has defined it.
Finally, there is a myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement: we alone are modern,
technological, and developed. This, of course, represents cultural arrogance of the worst sort, and a gross misreading
of history and anthropology. Recently this view has taken the form that we won the cold war and that the triumph of
capitalism over communism is complete. Communism failed because it produced too little at too high a cost. But
capitalism has also failed because it produces too much, shares too little, also at too high a cost to our children and
grandchildren. Communism failed as an ascetic morality. Capitalism failed because it destroys morality altogether. This
is not the happy world that any number of feckless advertisers and politicians describe. We have built a world of
sybaritic wealth for a few and Calcuttan poverty for a growing underclass. At its worst it is a world of crack on the
streets, insensate violence, anomie, and the most desperate kind of poverty. The fact is that we live in a
disintegrating culture. In the words of Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Review:
"Our culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision,
imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion.
Increasingly in the late 20th Century, the economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of
what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul."
WHAT EDUCATION MUST BE FOR
Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let me suggest six principles.
First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of
or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or
those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do
with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum.
A second principle comes from the Greek concept of paideia. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but
of one’s person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of
marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one’s own person-hood. For the most part we labor under a confusion of ends
and means, thinking that the goal of education is to stuff all kinds of facts, techniques, methods, and information into
the student’s mind, regardless of how and with what effect it will be used. The Greeks knew better.
Third, I would like to propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the
world. The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley:
monsters of technology and its byproducts for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take
responsibility. Whose responsibility is Love Canal? Chernobyl? Ozone depletion? The Valdez oil spill? Each of these
tragedies were possible because of knowledge created for which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come
to be seen for what I think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our
ability to use it responsibly. Some of it cannot be used responsibly, which is to say safely and to consistently good
purposes.
Fourth, we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their
communities. I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to "disinvest" in the
economy of the region. In this case MBAs, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and capital mobility
have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American city with total impunity on behalf of something
called the "bottom line." But the bottom line for society includes other costs, those of unemployment, crime, higher
divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught in the
business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow
destructive economic rationality that valued efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.
My fifth principle follows and is drawn from William Blake. It has to do with the importance of "minute particulars" and
the power of examples over words. Students hear about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that
often invest their financial weight in the most irresponsible things. The lessons being taught are those of hypocrisy
and ultimately despair. Students learn, without anyone ever saying it, that they are helpless to overcome the
frightening gap between ideals and reality. What is desperately needed are faculty and administrators who provide role
models of integrity, care, thoughtfulness, and institutions that are capable of embodying ideals wholly and completely
in all of their operations.
Finally, I would like to propose that the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses.
Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the
illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the "real
world." Dissecting frogs in biology classes teaches lessons about nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus
architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. My
point is simply that students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the content of courses.
AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THE CAMPUS
If education is to be measured against the standard of sustainability, what can be done? I would like to make four
proposals. First, I would like to propose that you engage in a campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your
business as educators. Does four years here make your graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in
Wendell Berry’s words, "itinerant professional vandals"? Does this college contribute to the development of a
sustainable regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the processes of destruction?
My second suggestion is to examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water, materials, and waste. Faculty and
students should together study the wells, mines, farms, feedlots, and forests that supply the campus as well as the
dumps where you send your waste. Collectively, begin a process of finding ways to shift the buying power of this
institution to support better alternatives that do less environmental damage, lower carbon dioxide emissions, reduce use
of toxic substances, promote energy efficiency and the use of solar energy, help to build a sustainable regional
economy, cut long-term costs, and provide an example to other institutions. The results of these studies should be woven
into the curriculum as interdisciplinary courses, seminars, lectures, and research. No student should graduate without
understanding how to analyze resource flows and without the opportunity to participate in the creation of real solutions
to real problems.
Third, reexamine how your endowment works. Is it invested according to the Valdez principles? Is it invested in
companies doing responsible things that the world needs? Can some part of it be invested locally to help leverage energy
efficiency and the evolution of a sustainable economy throughout the region?
Finally, I propose that you set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students. No student should graduate from
this or any other educational institution without a basic comprehension of:
- the laws of thermodynamics
- the basic principles of ecology
- carrying capacity
- energetic
- least-cost, end-use analysis
- how to live well in a place
- limits of technology
- appropriate scale
- sustainable agriculture and forestry
- steady-state economics
- environmental ethics
Do graduates of this college, in Aldo Leopold’s words, know that "they are only cogs in an ecological mechanism such
that, if they will work with that mechanism, their mental wealth and material wealth can expand indefinitely (and) if
they refuse to work with it, it will ultimately grind them to dust." Leopold asked: "If education does not teach us
these things, then what is education for?"
