13 - Ecological intelligence: viewing the world relationally (2009)

Summary

The concepts and implications of ecoliteracy, sustainability intelligence and ecological intelligence have been part of environmental and sustainability education discourse for a long time now – although rather overtaken in recent years by a focus on “competencies”. Ecological intelligence implies something a lot deeper, as articulated in David Orr's pioneering book Ecoliteracy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World (1992). In this brief chapter, I attempt to clarify and contrast the two different worldviews – mechanistic and ecological – that are central to the argument in this book. This is approached by contrasting ten assumptions and thought habits that typify the mechanistic/reductionist mindset with another ten that are consistent with an ecological/systemic view of reality. We humans have honed the former habits – which have limited appropriateness in a systemic and complex world – but we need to learn and employ the latter, which are badly needed. This is another challenge for education, and seven inquiry questions are suggested that can help generate such learning. Those who wish to go deeper might want to look at my 2002 article (see References).

If we want the chance of a sustainable future, we need to think relationally. That's it, full stop. No need to write any more … or there wouldn't be, if it was that obvious. It's because we don't think in a relational way that we need to explore why we don’t, how we can, and what it means. The world is increasingly complex, interdependent and unsustainable, yet conversely, the way we perceive, think, and educate tends to be fragmentary and limited, and we tend to live “like there's no tomorrow”. Addressing this mismatch requires developing competencies in systems thinking, critical thinking and creative thinking, but it requires something more fundamental and challenging besides: no less than our becoming “conscious agents of cultural evolution” (Gardner 2001: 206) towards a more ecological culture and participative worldview, consistent with and able to address the highly interconnected and endangered world we have created.

Worldviews are “epistemological structures for interpreting reality that ground their picture of ‘reality’ in their own construction” (Milbrath 1994: 117). The contemporary challenge is to transcend our self-referential constructions, recognizing that the increasingly pressing sustainability problems we face are rooted in the dominant underlying beliefs and worldview of the Western mind, which, according to Clark (1989: 472) has grown “maladaptive”.