Maniates: hopeful critic of environmental studies

I’ll come out and say I’m an unabashed fan of Michael Maniates. I came across his work when I was writing my dissertation on the ethics of consumption in the early 2000s, and he came to DePauw to speak in 2007, giving a talk called “The Liberal Arts in a Time of Climate Crisis.” I assign his work in a number of classes I teach - both the one you just read and another called “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” that starts by calling out Dr. Seuss’s beloved story The Lorax (one I have read to my daughter her whole life) for feeding children the lie that they can “save the planet” through private acts like recycling and green consumerism.
Invariably, some students interpret him in that article as arguing that our own lifestyle choices – the ones really central to Beavan's No Impact Man – are irrelevant to the environmental crisis; he strikes them as cynical and dismissive of the very thing that gives them hope – the belief that we can each make a meaningful difference in averting the looming calamities we seem to be facing. (Later you’ll read Samantha MacBride calling this the “bit by bit theory of social change”.)

Maybe it’s the existentialist in me, but I very much want students to grapple with the prospect that our individual lifestyle choices – what to buy or drive, whether to fly, how diligently to recycle – really don’t matter causally in the big scheme of things. The philosophical question is, well, if that’s the case, then what? Can they still matter morally? And perhaps unsurprisingly, I think they can and do, although it’s a long story to say why. (Beavan does a reasonably good job discussing this in his book on the No Impact Man project.)

But Maniates is really anything but cynical, as you probably can tell from “Civic Virtue and Classroom Toil.” True, he’s terribly good at explaining pithily what goes wrong in environmental education as most often practiced:

“By unconsciously underscoring the primacy of expert knowledge and placing students in an environment where passive acceptance of authority tends to yield the greatest rewards (i.e., the highest grade), the highly efficient, tightly ordered, lecture-dominated classroom can inadvertently stunt the development of the democratic sensibilities and citizen skills of students. Imagine a scene where students sit passively, banking knowledge from their professor-expert who is lecturing about how active citizen participation is the vital ingredient of evolving forms of global environmental governance. In this way, the rhythms of the overloaded, hyperefficient course in global environmental ills almost naturally contradict the lessons about social change that permeate the field. They aid and abet inherent student skepticism about the ubiquity and personal rewards of grassroots activism and hence do violence to the very reasons we come, professors and students both, to college and university with faith in the power of education to shape a better world. Such courses are strong on content, weak in practice and political outcome, and all too commonplace.” (137-138)

Ouch. And his work criticizing higher education in this vein continues in his contribution (“Teaching for Turbulence”) to the 2013 Worldwatch State of the World Report, Is Sustainability Still Possible? Clearly, though, his central message is that the citizen muscle we really need can be developed if we are willing to be more creative. And although he calls a pedagogy that “fosters critical capacities for citizenship while creating intellectual space to grapple with the issues of the day” a “subversive pedagogy,” one of the things that is really wonderful about it is that it is nonpartisanly subversive. Republicans and Democrats, conservatives, liberals, and radicals all need and are entitled to learn how to participate effectively in decision-making about how our society should be structured. So here’s hoping that, while you’re grappling with the existential questions of your individual lifestyle choices, your campus project also fosters the civic capacities Maniates and Leonard are hoping for.