THE UNSUSPECTED TEACHERS: ENVIRONMENTAL IDENTITY AND SUSTAINABILITY ...

179 Pages·2015·0.78 MB·English

The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of Education

THE UNSUSPECTED TEACHERS: ENVIRONMENTAL IDENTITY AND SUSTAINABILITY
EDUCATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

A Dissertation in

Educational Theory and Policy

by

Peter Dawson Buckland

© 2015 Peter Dawson Buckland

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

May 2015
ii

The dissertation of Peter Dawson Buckland was reviewed and approved* by the
following:

Madhu Suri Prakash
Professor of Education
Dissertation Advisor
Co-Chair of Committee

Jacqueline Edmondson
Professor of Education
Associate Vice President and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education
Co-Chair of Committee

Mindy Kornhaber
Associate Professor of Education

Christopher Uhl
Professor of Biology

Gerald LeTendre
Professor of Educational Theory and Policy
Department Head of Education Policy Studies
Center for the Study of Leadership in American Indian Education
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Abstract

People in higher education institutions are designing, advocating, and
implementing curricular changes for sustainability and ecological literacy. This study
sought to understand the environmental identities of sustainability education advocates
working in higher education. Do they have self-conscious environmental identities? If so,
what do those identities entail for their actions, ethics, and professional lives? To answer
these questions, I used two research methods. First, using memoir and poetry, I wrote an
extended researcher identity piece to investigate the development and facets of my own
environmental identity. Second, the study detailed the environmental identities of twelve
sustainability education policy entrepreneurs working at two Pennsylvania universities.
This information was obtained through semi-structured interviews. The presentation of
this study concludes with modest but transformative recommendations to foment a
culture that values strong environmental identification and creates positive feedback
loops for faculty and staff who work for ecological literacy and sustainability.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………….v
Chapter 1: Ecological Crises, Sustainability Education, Policy Entrepreneurship, and
Environmental Identity………………………………………………………………..1
Ecological Crisis: Unraveling Nature’s Threads………………………………….2
Sustainability: An Orienting Concept…………………………………………….13
Sustainability in Higher Education……………………………………………….25
Policy Entrepreneurs……………………………………………………………...33
Environmental Identity………………………………………………………....…35
Methods and Methodology………………………………………………………..45
Chapter 2: Awakening………………………………………………………………...53
Chapter 3: The Unsuspected Teachers………………………………………………..97
Bucknell University……………………………………………………………….98
Penn State University……………………………………………………………..109
Chapter 4: An Unsuspected Transformation of Higher Education……………………135
Appendix A: Recruitment Form……………………………………………………….152
Appendix B: Informed Consent Form…………………………………………………153
Appendix C: Interview Protocol……………………………………………………….154
References……………………………………………………………………………..156
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Acknowledgments

Over the last several years, thoughtful, insightful, and kind people nudged me
long. I should especially like to thank Emily, Katie, Beth, Alex, John, Seth and Seth,
Jared, Zach, Kachine, Garrett, Steve, Derek, Kelley, and all the kids from 3E-COE and
Eco-Action; Gary from Sierra Club Moshannon, Ed from National Wildlife Federation,
Adam at Penn Environment, Braden from Groundswell, Barb, Jenny, Steve, and all my
anti-fracking compatriots; my Collapse bandmates who gave me a venue to bark about
ecological devastation; the many men and women with whom I’ve shared rides on ridge
trails in Penn’s woods; the people at Voices of Central Pennsylvania; Mike my co-host on
Sustainability Now Radio; the faculty and staff in the College of Education, the former
Penn State Center for Sustainability and Office of Sustainability (now both folded into
the Institute for Sustainability), Rock Ethics Institute, Office of Physical Plant, faculty
members involved with Bucknell University’s Greening Initiative, the many participants
in the Pennsylvania Environmental Resource Consortium, my friends, colleagues, and
students at the Darby School, and my coworkers at Tait Farm.
My committee supported me, too. Mindy Kornhaber and Christopher Uhl
repeatedly encouraged me to find ways to be my most authentic self. Chris in particular
confronted me as only a male elder can confront a younger man. I will never stop
celebrating Jacqueline Edmondson’s warmth, calm intelligence, sense of humor, and her
openness to my desire for conversation. She moved me on with firm and kind hands each
time frustration threatened to stop me and once seemed likely to drive me over the brink.
I could not and would not have done this work had it not been for Madhu Suri Prakash.
She shines a light on our ways of living and being. She also seeds hope in both spirit and
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action. In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus wrote, “The struggle itself for the heights is
enough to fill a man’s heart.” My committee sends me there.
Finally, my partner and my family have supported me. My ex-wife Jessica did an
enormous amount of work for our household and me. I do much of this work for my son
Sacha for a beautiful world in which he too will know the beauty of the rhododendron
and the hemlock. My sisters Catharine and Julie celebrate with me at every turn. My
partner Meg has listened and nudged me to always be my best self. Finally, my mother
and father have loved me more than words can say. My father did not live to see me earn
this doctorate. His passion for teaching lives in and through me and I am proud to be his
son. Like Telemachus to Ulysses, I meet adoration to his household gods. As he is gone, I
work my work, him, his own. And now I strike the sounding furrows. This work is
dedicated to my mother and father equally.
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Even among ecologists and environmental activists, there’s a tacit sense that we’d better
not let our awareness come too close to our creaturely sensations, that we’d best keep our
arguments girded with statistics and our thoughts buttressed with abstractions, lest we
succumb to an overwhelming grief—a heartache born of our organism’s instinctive
empathy with the living land and its cascading losses. Lest we be bowled over and broken
by our dismay at the relentless devastation of the biosphere.

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

* * *

I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances,
silence would be indefensible.

Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination

* * *

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what
we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so
that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own
innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Chapter 1: Ecological Crises, Sustainability Education, Policy Entrepreneurship,
and Environmental Identity

People in higher education institutions are banding together and implementing
sustainability policies to ameliorate and adapt to ecological crises such as climate change,
extinction, loss of ecosystem services, and declining human-environmental wellbeing. In
so doing, they are also creating opportunities. People—not machines—are imagining
these policy changes, advocating for them, and implementing them. Who are these
people? This dissertation seeks to understand the environmental identities of
sustainability education advocates who are working in higher education. Do they have
self-conscious environmental identities, defined as “the meanings one attributes to the
self as they relate to the environment” (Stets & Biga, 2003, p. 406), and, if so, what do
those identities entail for their actions, ethics, and professional lives?
This chapter establishes the warrant for this investigation. First, it lays out the
evidence for the ecological crises before us, especially regarding anthropogenic climate
change and human-caused extinctions. Second, it reviews “sustainability,” looking at five
ways in which the concept has been developed by the United Nations (UN), business
leaders, engineers, a post-carbon activist economist, and sustainability education’s most
prolific champion. Third, this chapter addresses the ways and depths in which
sustainability has taken hold in higher education, especially in curriculum. Fourth, to
understand the people who are developing these programs, this chapter presents the
concept of policy entrepreneurs—people who have recognized problems and have
developed policy solutions that they can propose and advocate. Fifth, because these
people have participated in and/or devised policies that are meant to address ecological
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crises, I investigate “environmental identity” as a way to understand them and their
commitments. Sixth, and finally, I describe the methods and methodology that I used to
complete this study.
*
I need only to stand in the midst of a clear-cut forest, a strip-mined
hillside, a defoliated jungle, or a dammed canyon to feel uneasy with
assumptions that could yield the conclusion that no human action can
make any difference to the welfare of anything but sentient animals.

John Rodman, “The Liberation of Nature?”

Ecological Crises: Unraveling Nature’s Threads

The educated and developed humans of the world have transformed Earth’s
physical systems and undermined the biosphere in a blink of geological time. Uneducated
and undeveloped people did not. Barely checked growth in the globe’s human population
and material economy is leading toward global ecological “overshoot” (Meadows,
Randers, & Meadows, 2004, p. 2). From intensifying wooly adelgid infestations of
Canada’s hemlock trees, clear cutting of Pennsylvania’s forests, and constructing natural
gas drilling pads over the Marcellus and Utica Shale plays, to massive tropical
deforestation for mineral extraction, new highways, and industrial agriculture, the effects
of “progress” are causing ecocide—ecological suicide, but a suicide predicated on the
murder and despoliation of other species (Diamond, 2005, pp. 6-7). We no longer live in
the Holocene period—the whole period. Rather, now we live in the Anthropocene—the
human period—a period marked by the transformation of nearly every aspect of the
planet by industrial humans (McKibben, 2010). Should humans go extinct, the chemical
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traces of our civilization will remain in ice cores and soil samples in tens of thousands of
years. Some might say we have remade the earth in our image.
Since the early 1970s, international global reports provided more evidence of
dangerous human-environmental incursions. As Princen (2010) states in Treading Softly,
simply too many reports demonstrate that industrial humans are the cause for ecocide—
so many that there is no real point in aggregating them in all their gory detail. And as
McKibben (2010) makes plain in Eaarth, industrialized people have re-engineered the
planet in ways that make it fundamentally different from the planet in which modern
civilization emerged, and consequently the planet is much a more challenging place for
us and for other species to inhabit (p. 38). Sadly, ours is an age marked by death at an
inexplicable rate. Human-caused extinctions are so rapid that Leakey and Lewin (1995)
call it “the sixth extinction.” (The fifth extinction occurred when an asteroid hit what is
now the Yucatan and extinguished the dinosaurs.)
Two works produced by the UN made the existence of an ecological crisis
painfully clear. In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development
(WCED), led by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, presented
Our Common Future, in which the commissioners said warned that humanity had failed
to fit its activities into nature’s patterns and was fundamentally changing planetary
systems at its own peril. “This new reality, from which there is no escape,” they wrote,
“must be recognized—and managed” (Brundtland & the WCED, 1987, p. 18) because
our actions had lacked management in the light of our recognizing our environmental
impacts. The commissioners concluded that human progress was linked to economic
growth and technological expansion. Economic growth and technological expansion, they