On a planet with a biosphere, what’s education for?

In 1994 the American eco-literacy pioneer David Orr published Earth in Mind: on education, environment, and the human prospect, a collection of essays that revolve around his own troubling realisation, as a lifelong lecturer and academic, that the Higher Education knowledge economy of his day was proliferating in close step with a global ecological collapse that, far from being solved by this educational flourishing, was in large part being driven by it. 

“On a planet with a biosphere,” Orr’s work asks us, “what’s education for?” He notes the confusion inherent in referring to this situation as an ‘ecological’ crisis, as if what was lacking here was an adequate grasp of ecology. “For all that we do not know,” he muses, “we know without question that we are rapidly unravelling ecosystems and destabilising the biosphere with consequences that cannot be good … Why then, do we find it so difficult to do what is merely obvious and necessary?”

Speaking to us across an accelerating mass-extinction which has more than doubled across all key rubrics since he wrote about it, Orr’s observations are all the more troubling for when they’re written. But perhaps his preferred term for what’s at play here, “a political crisis”, doesn’t quite get us there either. In its common usage that word turns our attention towards societal infrastructure, policy making, legislation – domains which in this context are unfolding downstream of a far more basic ontological disorientation.

To speak of that disorientation as a spiritual crisis might be closer to the mark, inasmuch as this slippery word leans us towards the paradox which industrial consumer societies’ collective behaviour present: How is it that these societies have so normalised their own destruction of Earth’s biosphere as to discount it as a regrettable externality, required by their faithful adherence to grown up economic priorities?

Knowing what biospheric collapse means for complex human societies – which is to say, knowing what it means for everything and everyone we humans love, value or need – how is it that the citizens of such consumer societies seem by and large not to mind?