Naar een ecologische zorgethiek voor milieueducatie

Abstract

Ever since the publication of the United Nations report Our Common Future in 1987, programs for environmental education were more and more couched in the language of sustainable development. However, the currently leading framework of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) highlights a rather formal and anthropocentric understanding of environmental responsibility. In the search for a fruitful framework to explore our relationship with nature in more substantive existential terms than provided by the imperative of sustainability, I explore the possibilities of Noddings' theory of care. Unfortunately, Noddings herself does not allow us to derive an ethical ideal of care for nature from our caring involvement with the natural environment, since she assumes that a particular kind of reciprocity is lacking here. In my paper I will criticise this assumption by elaborating on the ideas of Merleau-Ponty. In his meticulous analyses of perceptive experiences, he concludes that the possibility of perception itself is conditioned by an existential 'chiasm' between man and world, preceding re?ection and judgment. I will argue that this kind of reciprocity does allow us to extend the interhuman ideal of caring to the non-human natural world. Furthermore, I will explore the implications of this conclusion for practices of environmental education.