Page 494 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

39 Ecodemocracy and School Science 469

environmentalism does not adhere to certain virtues. For example, in Germany the
environmental movement was adopted by the rise of the Nazi party to warrant
genocide (Bowler 1992). Eco/environ mentalism fit “into the Nazi’s ideology
because they encouraged a suspicion of urban values and saw a renewed peasantry
as the foundation of their social order” (Bowler 1992, p. 513). The Nazi party
“established nature reserves – on land cleared of Jews and Poles sent to the death
camps” (p. 513). Not surprisingly, the American public developed a disdain for
environmentalism in the postwar years, and yet it caught on as an important
endeavor linked with the preservation of the natural world with early scholars such
as John Wesley Powell (1834–1902), famous explorer of the Colorado River, who
“warned that it would be impossible to irrigate large areas of the arid lands of the
west and protested against the destruction of forests” (p. 203). Another scholar,
William James (1901) wrote about the destructive clear-cutting practices of the
colonial settlers in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. In turn, Aldo Leopold
(1949/1968) and Rachel Carson (1962/1994) began writing about conservationism
and land ethics. A theme of “respect for nature” emerged during the 1960s and in
1972, the Club of Rome report on the status of the environment improved cultural
attitudes toward environmentalists. And finally, in the late 1970s and early 1980s
there was a reemergence of holistic theory with scholars such as James Lovelock
(1979/1987). For scientists, Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis sounded too much like
cultural mysticism (i.e., eco/environ mentalism) to take seriously.
Cultural mysticism and science/environ mentalism is now recognized as intimately
woven into the social threads of scientific and popular cultures. Science may be used
to legitimize particular modes of reality construed by humans, conceptualizations
which reflect and endorse beliefs and values, as well as the expectations and interests
of the constructors. Bowler (1992) warns:
Whether you support the free-enterprise system, or see industry as a curse that must be
removed, you should do so because that is how you feel about the situation in which you
live, not because you think science offers unequivocal support for your position. (p. 548)

Science does not “speak for itself” and cannot be used to support an exclusive-
objective or reality position – not even for the ecological crisis (Mueller 2009).
Rather, the significance of multiple cultural perspectives, including agendas on
both sides of an issue ought to be upheld. When faced with high uncertainty, there
is always more than one right or certain way of knowing, which may conflict with
the Status Quo. The importance of bringing together cultural studies with environ-
mentalism, with justice, place, and endemic wisdoms, cannot be understated.
A study of the history of the environmental sciences and eco/environmentalism
helps us to witness the emergence of the ecological crisis, whether anticipated or
real. The metanarrative came to be, as humans started to learn from, and apply
knowledge to, the changing and complex Earth. These explorations have been
traced to the ancient Greeks and through the emergence of the environmental
sciences. Humans have been creating metanarratives to think of Earth in certainty
since the beginnings. These metanarratives share common grounds when the taken-
for-granted assumption is that humans have been granted the essential anthropocentric
rights to survive and reproduce on Earth (we return to this point). The notion of