Environmental Education and the Arts–Science Divide: The Case for a Disciplined Environmental Literacy

Abstract

My purpose in this chapter is to draw attention to the limitations of the epistemologies we have inherited from Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment rationality with regard to the possibility of an education for environmental sustainability. I shall suggest that more than crossdisciplinarity, and more than interdisciplinarity as conventionally defined (that is, as mixture of arts and science) is required, yet that we are constrained by inherited traditions of thought to do no more than move slowly and tentatively in this direction. First, I suggest that we must attempt to transcend these traditions through a greater emphasis on their cultural histories, so that we can appreciate both where they have come from and where they seem to be leading us; secondly, I argue for a more disciplined approach to the cultivation of forms of what, for want of a better phrase, I shall term ‘environmental literacy’.