Synthesis of Richard Kahn’s “Towards Ecopedagogy”

            Ecopedagogy is a movement towards promoting environmental education to the public. Being educated about the environment is important because it is essential to alerting awareness, teaching skills and behaviors towards the environment, developing sustainability, and promoting balances between human’s life and relationships with animals and the environment. Although environmental education is very important, Richard Kahn, in “Towards Ecopedagogy”, also explains how environmental education has been “unable to provide either solutions or stop-gaps for ecological disasters that have continued to mount due to the mushrooming of transnational corporate globalization over the last few decades,” (Kahn 7). He describes how globally, we need to be more than environmentally educated to become more environmentally sustainable.

As the world has become more focused on industrializing and less on conservation, the environment has been the most effected by it. With the population doubling and growing extremely larger every year, forests, animals, ecosystems, and fossil fuels are all disappearing. Kahn explains that we need to change the way we are living or everything is going to become extinct. He mentions that capitalism is responsible for the poverty and the suffering people are experiencing today. Worldwide, people are not realizing and are not educated on the issues of today’s environment. People are quickly destroying and damaging what is left of the environment and that is why Kahn, along with many others, is towards ecopedagogy. Recent studies have shown that Americans want environmental education to be taught, but the same studies show that Americans have a huge misunderstanding of a lot of the basic environmental ideas and facts, which show that even with environmental education, there is still a lot work left to do. Modern environmental movements have tried to come up with ideas to help preserve, protect, conserve, and help the environment, but they have not been successful. William Stapp, founder of environmental education, believed that “the goals of environmental education were: knowledge of natural environment, interdisciplinary exploration, and inquiry-based student centered framework,” (Kahn 7). Kahn states that the development of cultural ecoliteracy is essential for our goal of sustainability. Being ecoliterate gives one an understanding of the roles imperialism, colonialism, and industrial capitalism has had on the environment and an understanding of how to act towards the environment.

Many founding figures of the ecoliteracy movement believe in multiple parts of the environmental education, including education for sustainability, humane education, and ecojustice education.  Founding figures see the essentialness of environmental education, but they also see the problems of it too and wonder why it is not fixing the crisis. In Apple Valley, Minnesota, students, who attend the School of Environmental Studies, go to zoos to incorporate it into their studies and environmental themes into their work. Students who attend Zoo schools have shown to “improve reading and math scores, performed better in science and social studies, and develop ability to transfer knowledge from familiar to unfamiliar contexts,” (Kahn 7). Although students are being educated with environmental issues and ideas, it lacks students becoming involved in environmental programs and reaching out to environmental issues and rights.

In “Towards Ecopedagogy”, Kahn discusses the importance of ecopedagogy, the movement of development of environmental education and sustainability. Federal and state governments have said that environmental education needs to be taught in public schools, and most Americans have agreed that this is important. Even though being educated about environmental issues and ideas is important, it is shown in studies that most adult Americans do not know the basic facts and information about the environment. Followers of the ecopedagogy movement see how essential it is to inform the public about the environment, but they see how, even with education, we are still struggling to conserve and be sustainable. The amount of animals and species being killed and ecosystems being destroyed annually is increasing large and it keeps getting worse. With environmental education, people are able to understand how to treat the environment and be aware of the problems we are facing. It is important to be educated on environmental issues, but it also important to act on ideas that are working to help the environment and are promoting well-being of animals and ecosystems.