Philosophical reflections on the importance of a values-based program of environmental education, with special reference to the pedagogy of empathetic educaton

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)My aim in this thesis is to show that there exists a fundamental ‘moral tension’ between the ostensible goals of environmental education on the one hand and the politicization of China’s ideology of power and obsession with global economic dominance on the other. This moral tension is particularly evident in the case of the Chinese Three Gorges Dam Project (TGDP), where the unresolved collision of these conflicting value presumptions has led to massive ecological degradation on the one hand and issues of social injustice associated with population dislocation on the other. Although considerable engineering planning by the government has gone into the construction of what is claimed to be the most energy productive and largest dam project in the world, its horrific legacy of decimation to the surrounding land and water environments has been catastrophic. Similarly, the forced dislocation of so huge a population of local people (now called ‘reservoir refugees’, at least 1.3 million people based on the official figures) makes clear that the humanitarian ramifications of the TGDP were hopelessly unanticipated, or based upon epistemological presumptions which served to marginalize their moral importance. The Three Gorges Dam (TGD) is politically applauded for several innovations, three of which I wish to draw to the reader’s attention. First, it is hailed as being the largest dam in the world, and second, it is touted as being capable of producing far more ‘safe’ energy than any of the other major dams scattered around the globe. Last but not least, it has unashamedly been exalted with pride as the most expensive construction project of any kind in the world. The question I pose is whether the price that has been paid and is still now being paid in terms of environmental destruction, humanitarian suffering, and ‘cultural genocide’ as I shall call it, are prices far too high to pay. Although the full environmental consequences and social justice issues raised by the TGDP have due to political reasons, not been teased out sufficiently in the Chinese public arena, I shall argue that the deleterious environmental and social impacts of the TGDP are incontestable and can better be understood as representing the inevitable outcome of a misguided epistemology of power and control driven by a political ideology within which values issues of social injustice, equity, and environmental stewardship have been irrevocably compromised. The main body of my thesis will be concerned to reflect critically on this moral tension between environmental education and the political epistemology and ideology of power which challenges it. Once this first major task has been completed, I will then propose a more comprehensive framework of theory and praxis grounded in an environmental pedagogy of ‘empathetic epistemology’ within which the moral issues raised can be treated with serious educational consideration and respect. This thesis thus endeavors to provide a new vision of our relationship to nature which is sponsored on the epistemic insight that the spiritual quality of our own existence cannot be defined independently of the moral integrity of our relationship to nature