Ecology and Pedagogy: On the Educational Implications of Postwar Environmental Philosophy

Abstract

Environmentalism, an ethical imperative to preserve and protect nature, has become in the last decade a central ethical and political theme. A rising attention to humankind’s responsibility over nature, environmentalism echoes today’s dreads of global warming and its catastrophic ecological implications. These current, post-modern, environmental apprehensions contend that nature has to be shielded from modern technological and industrial destructive progress; they oppose to the modernist approach that contended that nature is to be exploited for the benefit of humankind. At the same time, one can say that in contemporary environmental fears, ‘Annihilation’ as a fundamental component of postwar memory culture, is transformed into anxiety vis-à-vis “Ecocide”, meaning an ecological catastrophe that signifies the end of human civilization.