Page 33 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

2 Nurturing Morally Defensible Environmentalism 9

the conservation of civil liberties, freedom, oral narratives, species and habitats, the
arts, or conviviality, should not be limited by a politics of conservative and liberal.
With few exceptions, both politics generate and regenerate forms of anthropocentric
tendencies and consumerism as unquestioned platforms. Hence ecojustice does not
represent a neoconservative or neoliberal position within philosophy. Ecojustice
does not seek to renew a philosophical romanticism, which serves as a challenge
for scholars who strive to highlight the vulnerabilities within the confluence of
ecojustice, place-based (science) education, and indigenous knowledge systems.
For ecojustice educators, justice is fairness among humans, nonhumans, and the
Earth. Ecojustice is different from “social justice” and “environmental justice,”
where only humans and animals have some defensible rights. Just because the soil
is not easily defended, it does have the potential of defensible environmental rights,
which may require advocates. In terms of ecojustice, responsibility for justice falls
on those who live within particular communities, where justice is more fully
defined by law and rights. Justice then applies to becoming more informed, reading
newspapers, articles and books, and granting the same status to learning from the
literacies of those who may be considered illiterate and uneducated. Because
humility is a significant part of this philosophy, we must acknowledge those things
we may never know and learn, and we must be willing to protect cultural and communal
differences and biodiversity, as a philosophical principle of “justice embedded
within social ecologies.” Dewey highlighted this transactional approach early in his
work (1916/1966). He notes that subjects are learned and focused on evaluating the
wider spectrum of societal problems in order to set things right. In order to do this,
cultural traditions and habits are endorsed through intergenerational relations.
These things help teachers and their students to evaluate the curriculum of the larger
society and environment. Teachers and students share some of the responsibility for
moving towards the common good, which can be interpreted as the basis for which
degradation is mediated together. Justice is shared and mediated in common. When
we say that we are mediated by just relations, it is to say that we ought to be compelled
to do what is just. Although legal constraint is the most obvious aspect of justice in
most societies there is also an underlying aspect of moral obligations. Thus, if we
are not punished by the law, we are punished by the punitive opinion of other
people, or the burden of bad conscience. In terms of ecojustice, there are few juries
to enact judgment in the sense of moral reprisals against those who commit heinous
acts of cultural and ecological violence.
Justice implies something that is right to do, and wrong not to do, but also something
which can be defensibly claimed from us to have moral rights. We should not
be held responsive to the generosity of others who have insufficiently claimed to
have developed a moralist ecology. A question of what these ecologies should provide
for humans is not exempt from moral theory. Hopefully, this section will open the
mind to some possibilities for defending ecological rights in ecojustice theory,
beyond some human acquired debts to natural systems for which Nature is due. The
“acquired debt” stance within environmental philosophy is a taken-for-granted sup-
position that may need more conversation before these characteristics of ecojustice
become convincing. Consider, for example, how “ruthless” Nature might be judged