Critical Realism: a Common Sense Philosophy for Environmental Education?

By and large, modern societies take it for granted that nature, or ‘the environment’, is apart from society. However, this separation promotes the view that the environment should be managed for profit or pleasure, or that it exists in exotic or wild places experienced only as a fantasy world. As a result, environmental problems are seen to arise ‘out there’ instead of inside our heads, which conceals what was obvious to Marx that people live in their relationship to a real nature. That this relationship is dialectical is the theme of this paper and leads me to examine critical realism as a philosophical basis for environmental education. Critical realism holds that reality can be apprehended by tracing the origins of experience through to the level of events, and then to underlying structures and processes. I show that this stratification of reality avoids the conceptual breaks in thinking associated with the narrowly calculative rationality of positivism that treats knowledge as simply the accumulation of sense-experiences, while recognising the limitations of strong forms of constructivism that assume that reality is simply dependent on our cognitive choices. Finally, I conclude by giving an example of how my attempts to develop a dialectical relationship with my students on a distance education Masters course in Environmental Education enables us to facilitate our mutual praxis as environmental educators based on a stratified view of environmental and educational knowledge.