English and Sustainable Development

7  English and Sustainable Development – the Background Paper

Andrew Stables

Note: Material on these pages has been appropriated and modified from the ‘source publications’ listed at the end.

What should/might English have to do with sustainable development?

Let me make it clear from the outset that, like many English teachers, I object strongly to the idea that subjects exist to ‘deliver’ curriculum objectives. Literature, for example, does not ‘deliver’ sustainable development any more than maths ‘delivers’ social justice or history ‘delivers’ personal growth. Seeing education as a distillation process by which curriculum theory is metamorphosed into syllabuses, which are further separated into teaching activities, so that the whole is covered in stages, is to deny the very processes of meaning-making that characterise it ‘on the ground’.

Except, of course, that in one sense English does ‘deliver’ sustainable development, since ‘sustainable development’ is a term in English, and it is through the medium of English that the whole discourse (sic) of sustainable development is developed, sustained, subverted and interpreted.

It is the proper concern of English, therefore, to ask what this term ‘sustainable development’ is: where it comes from, who takes it to mean what, how it can be interpreted, how it relates to other concepts, and so on.

We might start this by noting that the most common interpretation of the term, and that approved by the British government, is that coined by Gro Haarlem Brundtland: 'development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs' - from which many questions emerge: what is development? What are needs? How do we meet needs? How will we know what the needs of future generations will be?

We might (for example) look at how the concept of development relates to economics and to other contexts, at how we use the term ‘needs’ and how, and when, we distinguish it from ‘preferences’ and ‘desires’? (We might ask, ‘If our only need is to stay alive, why do we ‘need’ development?) We might ask whether ‘the present’ can have generic ‘needs’, and whether these might differ from those of the future. Then there is the thorny question of ‘compromising…ability’. Does ‘ability’ here mean potential, capacity, existing skill, or what? And how might such ‘ability’ be compromised? ‘O! reason not the need; our basest beggars/ Are in the poorest thing superfluous’ rages King Lear. Well, like the rest of us (including environmentalists), he has his axe to grind and is not entirely deserving of our respect, but (rather as when the cowardly Falstaff urges that ‘discretion is the better part of valour’) this does not mean he is talking complete nonsense; the old fool might have a point.

‘Development’ and ‘needs’ apart, the term ‘sustainable development’ is itself deeply ambiguous. Like many policy slogans – most of them generally popular: equality of opportunity, parity of esteem – there seems to be a paradox, an oxymoron here. If something is developed it is, we generally reckon, changed, and therefore not sustained. If it is sustained, it remains essentially the same. What is going on here?

One way of looking at this is as follows. Democratically elected governments seek re-election by appealing to a cross-section of voters. As every issue has two sides (at least!), it is therefore necessary to attempt to appeal to both of them. Thus policies, at the levels of slogans at least, exist to ‘give us our cake and eat it’: to give us equality (the same for everyone, objectifiable) in opportunities (subjective, unpredictable, a matter of opinion); to give us parity (numerical equality) in esteem (the fact of valuing one thing or person over another); to give us ‘justice’ (for individuals, ideally equal under the law) that is, in some way, ‘social’; and then there is the Conservatives’ new ‘social responsibility’, which can be read such that either individuals or ‘society’ is ‘responsible’. This is part of the reason that slogans cannot merely be ‘implemented’, though they are doubtless intended to produce social change, and we tend to assume that politicians do generally have a desire to make society better. In the case of sustainable development, those who propose it (and who dares not?) are signalling some kind of desire for both increasing wealth and a failure to exhaust resources. Ultimately, of course, we know that nothing tangible can be sustained, and that the very act of development is an act of change and therefore death. In Norman Fairclough’s (2006) terms, ‘sustainable development’, like these other policy slogans, has excellent ‘ambivalence potential’. This by no means invalidates the slogan as a ‘call to arms’, but it does make it very hard to implement. Students might like to devise some political slogans of their own, and think about how they might convince others to make their ideas work.

In a more attenuated sense, the discourse of sustainable development is riddled with competing intentions and bristling with rhetorical tricks. In a book called Greenspeak, for example, Rom Harré et al. (1999) show how, for example, notions of time are used to stress the nature of environmental crisis and catastrophe.

Let us think for a moment about the word ‘crisis’. In everyday speech (‘ordinary language’ to philosophers), a ‘crisis’ relates to something immediate, though ‘a sense of crisis’ might be analogous to ‘a sense of foreboding’ and thus not relate to anything immediate at all, other perhaps than something imagined. For a sense of environmental crisis to have public impact, therefore, people must get the impression that something pretty immediate is going to happen; if it does not, they may, quite understandably, deny that there is a ‘crisis’ at all. How do various texts relating to environment issues propagate this sense of crisis, while also retaining an impression of scientific objectivity?

So far I have discussed texts as collections of words, but there are several senses in which it is possible to conceive of ‘environmental texts’. For a project for the European Commission in the 1990s on The Development of Environmental Awareness Through Literature and Media Education I, in collaboration with colleagues in Portugal, Belgium and the UK, came up with the following:

1. The development of understanding of environmental issues through the study of literary and media texts

Much literature and media education has been concerned with the exploration of social issues. Developing response to text has thus been framed by reference to moral and other social issues of contemporary concern and of relevance to young people. Literary and media theory now valorises readings of texts grounded in particular ideologies or perspectives on social issues: hence Marxist criticism, feminist criticism etc . Ecocriticism is the focus of the next section.

2. The study of literary and media texts specifically concerned with the environment

Certain texts, whether fictional or factual, have been created specifically to air concerns relating to environmental issues. Such texts self-evidently include educational television broadcasts of a documentary nature, but embrace forms as diverse as lyric poetry and newspaper advertisements. Some (e.g. some of Wordsworth's poetry, or much classical Greek and Roman poetry) are very old.

3. The creation of literary and media texts relating to environmental issues

Effective teaching involves the acknowledgment that pupils learn through doing, and good literature and media education have long accepted this idea. Such texts will range in type from pupils' own poems and short stories to videos and urban and wildlife photography, and may be intended as primarily descriptive, emotive or persuasive.

4. The study of aspects of the environment itself as text

It is possible to adopt a very broad definition of ‘text’ which incorporates at the very least crafted landscape features such as parks and gardens, and which, in its extreme form, can even be held to include purely ‘natural’ landscapes. Insights gained from literary and cultural theory can be used to create new teaching approaches in relation to environmental issues, based on models from textual studies and the humanities. These approaches can be used to complement existing approaches taken from the physical sciences and geography.

5. The re-creation and enhancement of the environment with reference to aesthetic considerations.

As an extension of (4), environmental conservation, repair and improvement can be carried out with reference to aesthetic considerations as well as to the notion of the environment as a cultural and social construct.

In other words, the involvement of English teachers with sustainable development is very much open to interpretation. If you take a very broad view of what English is, and what it is for, you may take an equally broad view of its possible uses in relation to environment and sustainability.

Ecocriticism

Harvard Professor Lawrence Buell has described ecocriticism as ‘study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis’ (Buell, 1995: xx): in other words, literary study through a Green lens.

To acknowledge the value of ecocriticism is by no means to excuse that tendency in cruder forms of curriculum theorising vis-à-vis English to reduce the status of literary texts to illustrations of themes or issues. English teachers are rightly wary of, for example, crude anthologies of poems selected merely to illustrate some or other ‘cross-curricular theme’. Rather, it is to place ecological perspectives alongside others of longer pedigree such as versions of feminism and Marxism. Such ‘readings’ should enhance, rather than diminish, pupils’ aesthetic experiences of the texts in question.

What might an ecocritical approach to a text used widely in schools look like? The following is taken from the European project report referred to above.

Consider Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Might the following prove a useful outline for a scheme of work at Key Stage 3 or 4?

An ecocritical approach to Macbeth

Although Macbeth is one of many of Shakespeare's plays that share a concern with the state of the body politic and the interrelatedness of the physical and spiritual health of the nation, it is actually permeated by imagery of the natural world to a spectacular degree. One view of Macbeth is that Shakespeare is presenting a natural system thrown into chaos: environmental and moral disaster, with the two elements - the environmental and the moral – so interdependent that all clear sense of cause and effect becomes lost in a maelstrom of disaster.

This is also a modern concern. People harm the planet and there is flood or drought, but the disturbances in nature never disclose their sources or allow us to evaluate completely the degree to which we are to blame. Macbeth could thus be seen as a powerful evocation of the way we perceive the world around us when events seem out of our control. Such texts can help us question our view of the environment in the light of our own actions and feelings.

Key questions

Before starting: what might be the key questions to consider? Teachers need to be aware of their own thinking so that they themselves have a coherent set of ideas which they can apply to steer the activity and ensure it maintains its focus and sense of purpose. These are some questions which occur to us:

• If Macbeth has the potential to stimulate questions concerning our role in environmental change, what other classic texts might be able to perform a similar role?
• Which scenes within Macbeth are particularly effective in highlighting these concerns, and why?
• To what extent can pupils' own lives be explored in the context of the play itself, e.g. in the way they feel about places, or at particular times about particular places?
• How might such a critical approach allow pupils to learn through other literature, film, advertising and visual art?

Aims and outcomes

We have suggested some aims and outcomes for the activity but you might like to modify them to suit your purposes. Our principal aim is to encourage you to use literature and the media in ways which will awaken children to the possibility that their ideas about the environment could be influenced through the written word.

Aims

• To understand the idea of Scotland as a ‘living nation’ in Macbeth, in which the political and the environmental are interwoven and interrelated.
• To explore the character of Macbeth with respect to the degree to which he is responsible for the moral and physical chaos within the play, and the degree to which he is a victim of it.
• To use the above aims to develop awareness of the Elizabethan/Jacobean world view.

Outcomes

• To achieve the above aims through:
  • whole class discussion
  • detailed textual study
  • relating key issues in Macbeth to contemporary debates about the environment.

Guidance

The two sections that follow are presented as a guide to thinking about the approaches that might be used with the pupils. The teacher thinking section is designed to challenge assumptions and to ask questions about not only what the pupils’ prior knowledge, experiences and background might be, but also what you as the teacher know and understand. The approaches to teaching section simply suggests a sequence of activities which you are free to modify or adapt as necessary. You might think about the strategies you will employ to manage the class. What grouping and sequence of events will work best?

Introducing the idea

The scenes in Macbeth which deal with turbulence in the natural environment have often been dismissed as examples of Elizabethan/Jacobean superstition by literature teachers. However, it is possible to see such scenes as highly relevant to contemporary concerns.

The main question that arises here is perhaps the same question as that which teachers often do discuss with their pupils: does Macbeth control the Witches or do the Witches control Macbeth? In this case, the question is: Does Macbeth upset the natural order in Scotland, or is he merely symptomatic of its upset?

Development

Some study questions are already well established in school and college treatments of Macbeth: for example, ‘How much is Macbeth himself to blame for his downfall, and how much influence do the Witches really have?’ This is seen as a relevant area for young people to explore.

Other aspects of the play, however, are often dismissed as ancient superstition, but have equal relevance to modern concerns. Specifically, the damage that Macbeth causes goes far beyond the murder of individuals: his actions damage both the moral and the physical state of his nation. At the end of the play, Macbeth's world literally collapses in on him and engulfs him as ‘Birnam Wood...come(s) to Dunsinane’ in the form of soldiers hiding behind branches of trees who overpower his increasingly lonely castle. Nature takes its revenge on Macbeth…

Following up

While the intention of work such as this is not to use a Shakespeare play merely as a vehicle for exploring environmental issues, but to enrich pupils' ‘readings’ of it in new and interesting ways, it is nevertheless the case that following the work directly focusing on the text, attention can once again be turned to specifically contemporary issues.

How might the above work on the play enrich pupils' understandings of current environmental issues?

Approaches to teaching

Introducing the idea

Discuss with pupils the difficulty we have in working out our degree of responsibility for aspects of the current environmental crisis.

For example:

To what extent can/should we hold ourselves responsible for climate change? Is the recent experience of extreme weather conditions in various parts of the world ‘our fault’? Do we naturally tend to see what happens in the outside world as a reflection of our good or bad behaviour? In what other cases of current environmental concern might this be the case?

Development

Pupils should explore the complex relationship between human actions and physical consequences in Macbeth in as many ways as possible. Some suggestions follow.

The play begins with atmospheric inversion (fog) and human slaughter. Where else in the play is what happens in nature directly connected to human action? Is this relationship one of clear cause and effect? How does it work specifically in one particular instance? (For example, the atmosphere in and near Macbeth's castle at the time of Duncan's murder.)

If Macbeth has acted in unnatural ways, how is natural order restored at the end of the play?

Some of the disasters (both human and non-human) in Macbeth are reported. How does the reporting of news use natural events to suggest moral issues, both in the play and in our world today? Look at the use of landscape and weather in news reporting, for example.

Following up

Pupils could focus on the reporting of a current environmental issue in the general and popular scientific press. This might be a global issue with local consequences or a specifically local issue. Examples currently relating to the Bath area of England, for example, include:

• the damage to rivers caused by excessive demands for water (a local example of a global problem);
• traffic pollution (another local example of a global problem)
• drought (a global issue with local effects);
• climate warming (a global issue with local effects);
• the pollution of the hot springs in Bath (a specifically local issue).

In each of these cases, how does the reporting of the issues lead us to assess our responsibilities with respect to a) causing the problem, and b) sorting it out?

Functional environmental literacy

In attempting to read texts in this way – indeed, in attempting to ‘read’ landscapes, or other aspects of the environment itself as ‘texts’ – we are inevitably promoting some form of environmental literacy. Collocations ending in ‘literacy’ have become popular almost to the point of ubiquity in recent years: scientific literacy, computer literacy and so on – but how often do such definitions pay any real heed to what English specialists understand as ‘literacy’?

In relation to language development, whence the term derives, it is common to distinguish between functional, cultural and critical literacies.

Functional literacy is generally understood as the ability to decode what is encoded within the black marks on the white paper into intelligible words, phrases and clauses, and to understand their literal meaning on a superficial level. Functional literacy, for example, allows you to read a sign bearing an instruction, such as ‘Stop!’ and to act upon it. It allows you to read a story but does not account for whether you can draw any implications from it. Functional literacy (with relation to print) can therefore be taught through the learning of phonic rules. It is not directly concerned with reading for meaning. However, it does involve the ability to recognise the surface meaning of words and phrases in context: for instance, to understand ‘stop’ in constructions such as ‘pull out the organ stop’, ‘forgot to use a full stop’ and ‘Danger - Stop!’. Statistics concerning rates of literacy and illiteracy generally relate to functional literacy, and obscure the fact that what it takes to be functionally literate varies considerably from time to time and place to place. (Consider, for example, the level of print literacy needed to ‘function’ as an agricultural worker in the nineteenth century compared to the twenty-first; misunderstand the instructions on the pesticide cans and both you and your environment can be in real trouble.)

Functional print literacy can be measured by objective tests, which can be purely summative, or may be diagnostic if subjected to miscue analysis, which analyses readers’ errors. Functional literacy is not just a matter of knowing what words mean, but of being able to find out what they mean in the context of whole sentences by the use of phonic and contextual cues. Functional literacy also involves being able to read words referring to commonplace abstractions (beauty, goodness, fear etc.). It involves literal comprehension.

Functional environmental literacy must, therefore, refer not only to the ability to remember what an oak tree is, but to recognise one; not only to recognise several trees within a given area, but to know whether they form part of a wood or an area of parkland. Functional environmental literacy must also involve the ability to ascertain, from contextual cues, what something half known is likely to be: for instance, to make an informed guess, using observation, at the types of woodland flower within a beech copse overlying chalk rather than an oak wood on more acid soil. Functional literacy is not, therefore, a mere prerequisite to more advanced forms of literacy, but involves a series of complex skills and an accumulation of knowledge which has unlimited capacity for growth. Arguably, much science education in schools focuses chiefly on what is defined here as functional literacy, whether or not this entirely reflects intentions. Certainly, its role in environmental education should not be underestimated.

Cultural literacy

Unlike the above, cultural literacy is a phrase the popularity (or notoriety) of which is largely attributable to one man. The work of E.D. Hirsch has had an enormous effect on literacy teaching in the United States and a considerable effect elsewhere, not least because of the author's closeness to the Reagan administration of the 1980s. Hirsch actually produced a list of ‘what every American needs to know’, on the assumption that social and cultural cohesion depends on the ability to understand the significance American society places on, for example, Thanksgiving; not merely its existence as, say, a public holiday. Like functional literacy, cultural literacy is, in a sense, passive: it is the ability to know the received wisdom about some cultural event or institution rather than to make meaning for yourself. However, it is a powerful idea, the ramifications of which can be seen in the various ways in which governments around the world have begun, or continued, to use national curricula to reinforce national identities.

Cultural literacy refers to the ability to understand the significance that society attaches to cultural icons. Such icons include, of course, living natural objects: national parks; the Californian redwood; the English oak. An increased cultural environmental literacy would be gained by a reading of Schama's Landscape and Memory (1995), in which the author discusses a series of landscapes of rich significance to contemporary societies (including part of the Eastern European forest, the English Greenwood and the Californian redwoods) in terms of cultural history with respect to the ways in which these landscapes have been viewed, used and reshaped over a millennium. One of the abiding impressions gained from a reading of Landscape and Memory is that the landscapes in question have often been strongly shaped by cultural and social forces throughout the period in question. Schama effectively dispels the still partly-held misconception, for example, that much of England was covered with virgin forest until the last couple of hundred years.

On one level, a degree of cultural environmental literacy merely enables one to recognise the significance of natural images in human culture, along with some recognition of why and to whom they are significant: the American bald eagle, or the white dove of peace, for example. However, it also allows for an understanding of why the landscape itself is as it is, shaped not merely by climate, glaciation and topography, but by arguments about enclosure, the need for timber and patterns of land ownership dating back many centuries. While functional environmental literacy develops knowledge of what natural things are, cultural environmental literacy enables us to explain why they are there when the causes are clearly not simply geological or climatic with no apparent human intervention.

Cultural literacy depends on a degree of acceptance of cultural hegemony: it links the learner with a dominant value system. The culturally literate individual in England will know what is implied by the term ‘heart of oak’, or understand the English Lake District as a kind of symbol of Wordsworthian Romanticism, even though these conceptions may be more associated with English ‘high culture’ than with popular culture, as well as having no scientific basis. Cultural literacy refers more to cultural heritage than to cultural analysis. The subtitle of Hirsch's book is ‘What every American needs to know’. Insofar as cultural literacy is empowering, it empowers by giving the learner access to socially powerful perspectives; cultural literacy alone does not enable the learner to act upon that knowledge, once acquired. Effective action requires critical literacy.

Critical literacy

Critical literacy implies the ability to make sense in your own terms of the ideational potential of a text. It includes the ability to ‘get behind’ the text to interpret it in terms of its ideological underpinnings: to distinguish, for example, between factual account, polemic and propaganda. ‘Critical’ here is used in a double sense. On the one hand it has a long pedigree in the liberal-humanist tradition of literary criticism in which the ‘critical appreciation’ of texts demanded an extended personal response and evaluation of the text as work of art: an exploration of the reader's initial affective response. On the other hand, it can refer to Habermas's (1987) conception of ‘critical-emancipatory’ knowledge whereby the reader responds to the text not merely as a naive individual who can only ‘interpret’, albeit for practical ends, but as one who understands the cultural, social and political forces that shape the text, and can therefore guard against being taken in by it. Because of this dual use of the term ‘critical’ (the personally engaged as opposed to the socially critical), readings of texts in recent decades have varied from the overtly personal to the apparently dispassionate and deliberately political: Marxist readings, feminist readings, ecofeminist readings and so on. For present purposes, ‘critical literacy’ can be held to relate to both liberal-humanist and the socially critical perspectives: i.e. to that kind of literacy which involves active exploration of significance and meaning.

Critical literacy is, therefore, the ability to understand the text on a deeper and more creative level: the ability to discuss the use of genre in context, to question the motives and ideology of the text, and to explore and develop personal (and broader social) response to it. Critical environmental literacy must then imply the power to develop an understanding of the factors that contribute to environmental change and to have a view on how to further to oppose that change in a way which can be translated into action. Critical environmental literacy involves the ability to explore questions such as ‘What does [a place or an issue] mean to me?’; ’What does it mean to us, or to others?’ ; ’What are the consequences of carrying on in this way [in relation to this place or this issue]?’; ‘Should we act differently, and if so how?’; ‘How do we translate our values into effective action - and are our values themselves ready for change as a result of what we now know or feel?’

As has been stressed above, critical literacy cannot be effectively developed without good levels of both functional and cultural literacy, though the latter are arguably pointless without the former. Critical environmental literacy relies on functional environmental literacy because both environmental debate and environmental action rely on information. Critical environmental literacy relies on cultural literacy not simply because environmental debate and action need to be grounded in an awareness of the norms and values of, say, national cultures, but because influence on environmental change demands an understanding of the norms and values of the dominant culture.

In conclusion, there are many ways in which valuable thinking about sustainable development can feature in productive English lessons. Whether or not one takes the broad view that ‘everything is a text’ and that, therefore, English teachers are concerned with our general semiotic engagement with our environments, or the narrower view that English should focus specifically on ‘literacy’ and ‘the literary’, it may be useful to employ the concepts of functional, cultural and critical environmental literacies in developing appreciation of, and responses to a wide array of texts, issues and opinions, thus helping to embed ‘sustainable development’ in the discourse of the younger generation whose interests the idea has been formulated to serve.

Source publications

Stables, A. (1993) English and Environmental Education: the living nation in Macbeth, The Use of English 44/3, 218-225
Stables, A. (1998) Environmental Literacy: functional, cultural, critical. The case of the SCAA guidelines, Environmental Education Research 4/2, 155-164
Stables, A. (2001) Language and Meaning in Environmental Education: an overview, Environmental Education Research 7/2, 121-128
Stables, A. (2003) Education for Diversity: making differences, Aldershot/New York: Ashgate, 1-144
Stables, A. (2004) Can Education Save the World? A response to David A. Gruenewald, Curriculum Inquiry 34/2, 233-240
Stables, A. , Soetaert, R., Stoer, S. and Lencastre, M. (1999) The Development of Environmental Awareness through Literature and Media Education, Environmental Education and Training: selected projects, Brussels: European Commission
Stables, A. and Bishop, K. (2001) Weak and Strong Conceptions of Environmental Literacy: implications for environmental education, Environmental Education Research 7/1, 89-97

References