Page 68 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

44 M.S.R. Maulucci

ways to harvest and produce products from the tree? How do trees increase
property values? Environmental perspectives bring forth questions about the
aesthetic and ecological values of the tree in the landscape. How does this tree
enhance the beauty of our community, park, or forest? How do trees help clean
the air and water? How can trees serve as windbreaks or carbon sequesters? How
do trees reduce stormwater runoff and soil erosion? Spiritual values might offer
yet another set of questions. What wisdom do tree leaves whisper in the wind?
Will this tree help me to sustain life? For example, the tall, eastern white pine
symbolizes the Iroquois people’s Tree of Peace under which they cast their weap-
ons (Schroeder 1992). The five needles in each bundle represent the Five Nations
bound together by the Great Law of Peace, its spreading branches shelter the
nations committed to peace, and its white roots spread in the four sacred direc-
tions. Imbued with power by its ability to connect the Earth and sky, the tree
embodies spiritual dimensions that surpass its physical, biological, ecological,
economic, or aesthetic values.
Martusewicz, Lupinacci, and Schnakenberg assert that ecojustice perspectives
disrupt exploitation of the world’s diverse living systems or the impoverishment of
communities as normal or natural outcomes of providing for human needs. From
an ecojustice perspective, decisions of how, when, or if people cut down a particular
tree would consider a broader array of cultural, spiritual, and ecological values for
trees, animals, and ecosystems alongside humans. For example, in the Philippines,
the indigenous Ikalahan people light a fire beside a big tree they intend to cut, and
if the fire goes out, they see that as a sign that a spirit protects the tree (Senanayake
1999). They do not cut the tree. Moises O. Pindog, Omis Balin Hawang, and Baliag
Bugtong explain:
Our name [Ikalahan] means “the people of the oak forests”. … We distinguish ourselves
by the type of forest that we live in. ... We feel the presence of these spirits of the forest as
we ourselves feel different when we encounter their territories. Sometimes when a large
tree is cut, we can hear the crying voices that tell us of its spirits (p. 161).
Science, technology, and the idea of “progress” have been particularly insensitive
to the rights and needs of many indigenous peoples to maintain their traditions,
cultures, languages, and ways of living in, rather than on the Earth. How might
invoking the sacred begin to sensitize science and science education to a broader
array of cultural, spiritual, and ecological values? One way forward is to under-
stand the ways language, as a medium of expression, carries forward “culturally
specific ways of thinking,” in the form of unexcavated, taken-for-granted, root
metaphors including patriarchy, anthropocentrism, individualism, mechanism,
and progress (Bowers 2001). The dialectical relationship, agency–passivity cap-
tures the ways our words and languages are not our own (Derrida 1998). Thus,
individuals have agency to utter particular words and use them to express ideas,
thoughts, or emotions; yet, they are passive to the root metaphors and diversity
of meanings others may derive, given their unique and situated cultural and his-
torical experiences. What culturally embedded ways of thinking does the word,
sacred, invoke?