5.6 Conclusion
Mankind has long been driven to seek power. Our obsession with the use and abuse of power over our fellow man and environment, has been ineluctably integrated into the broader framework of ‘power epistemology’, within which issues of human rights and the fate of the species on Earth are subservient to the prevailing epistemology of power and its vested interests (Patterson, 2001; Laura & Cotton, 2010). The epistemology of power relates not only to the ecological destruction caused by the Three Gorges Dam on the one hand, but also to the massive dislocation of the inhabitants of the dam areas, along with the decimation of their socio-cultural traditions and language dialects on the other. The noble efforts which have been made to think environmentally and in qualitative value terms about the dam, including the various aspects of its disruption to the environment and to the communities of people dislocated to build it, are severely limited by the foundational epistemological presumptions of power which define the goals of engineering in control terms. Human’s “lusts for power over nature expresses itself inhumanely within the human community as power over each other” (Laura & Cotton, 1998, p.192). This epistemology of knowledge focused on the detachment of human and nature and ultimately on the conquest, domination and control of nature through transformative subjugations of scientific knowledge and technology (Laura& Cotton, 1998 & 2010; Oliver-Smith, 2010).
Instead of allowing knowledge to be driven by our obsession by a form of power which is destructive and denigrating of everything it seeks to have power over, a conscious and concerted educational effort must be made to reconceptualize knowledge as connectivity, expressed empathetically (Laura & Cotton, 1998 & 2010). The goal is to reconstruct an epistemic framework as a means to empathetic connectivity, rather than as a means to power, which eschews needless technological texturing in the name of progress. If the concept of educational knowledge is driven by the desire to connect oneself with the rest of nature rather than master and molest it, the expression of the intention will be to find new ways of participating with the things of nature, not detaching ourselves from them in the name of objectivity.
Rifkin’s emphasis on a form of knowledge which helps us to rediscover how best to integrate the economic rhythms of commercial productivity with the biological rhythms that define the flow of renewal within the natural environment is, we submit, a concept of central importance for the resacrilization of human relationships. When the concept of educational knowledge is motivated by our faith in the virtue of connectivity as the ultimate form of security within human society and within nature, participatory interactions with each other, be they between humans or between human and nature should be followed. This being so, the measure of security is shifted epidemiologically from how well we know how to dominate and control nature and each other, to how well we know how intimately to connect with the nature and each other. This shift of epistemic vision encourages a transition of dispositional posture from doing battle with each other to being in empathetic partnership with reverence, respect and love for nature, for each other and for ourselves (Laura & Cotton, 1998 & 2010).
I submit that reflection upon this new way of construing the world of nature may serve to provide an epistemic heuristic, a way, that is, of proposing hypotheses about the nature of knowledge which are much richer and more comprehensive than the traditional ones. In recognition that there may yet be better models for understanding nature, we can at least now see that the universe in which we live is one which depends upon its integrated unity for its cohesiveness. This being so, I suggest that a more comprehensive interpretation of environmental education is one which reflects not so much an epistemology of power as an epistemology of empathetic connectivity. It is our contention that by empathetically reconceptualizing the nature of the universe in which we live, it is possible to promote the aims of an environmental education which encourages an attitude of caring and participation towards the environment and indeed towards each other.
I have been arguing that progress is not merely a matter of looking ahead to capture through our technological innovations some idyllic world of success. We propose that progress entails also being able to look back at what we may have lost that was actually worth preserving. Once we know what in our livers is worth keeping, then we also know what is certainly worth restoring; and we also know what is worth living for. Thus genuine progress is a matter of protecting, now and always, the events, occasions and human relationships that make us more rather than less human, more rather than less grateful for the gift of life and more rather than thankful for the intimacy of human relationships and the blessing of love.
When all is said, I conclude the thesis with an idea of paramount importance that has emerged out of it. Within the context of empathetic environmental education is pedagogically a form of religious education, in the sense that ‘ecological honoring’ involve the resacrilization of nature which, when all is said, is itself an empathetic exemplar of grace. With this new vision of knowledge as empathetically driven by what we call ‘consciousness entanglement’, the deeper moral issues associated with the TGP can no longer easily be marginalized, and certainly not eschewed.