Education and the Anthropocene: The Paradox

A blog post by Adriaan Lucassen (5 EC)

It can easily be argued that education is an important tool to battle the anthropocene, for example, by increasing knowledge and battling ignorance about the environment in areas where educational attendance is low.
However, if you make the “easy” claim that more education means less “bad anthropocene”, then you walk right into the trap of the paradox that is connected to this subject. This happened to me in the first class in which I discussed this subject; I felt stupid and did not know what to say when other students argued with me about it. It is easy to overlook this contradictory factor when you are formulating a stance or question about education and the anthropocene, since it is not something which you realise you are missing.

The main point of the paradox is as follows. Education can be good to promote knowledge, but the most powerful people are often the people that are most educated and they are the ones initiating most environmental devastation.

To expand, education can be said to promote awareness of environmental issues. Of course this depends on what form of education you mean and perhaps on the curriculum of a school or country, but in general, people will learn at least something about nature. Even if they don’t, a formal education can provide people with key skills they need to obtain knowledge about any subject, like learning to read and write or to use the internet, and be therefore also indirectly beneficial.
Conversely, most large-scale worrisome environmental problems are caused by governments or large companies. The people in power behind these operations are almost always among the highest educated. And yet, they are the people doing the most damage. This is confusing to think about and almost seems to defeat the point of talking about education as a way to better the anthropocene and this is what was brought to my attention in that aforementioned class.

I have now come to see this as a matter of scale. Damage to the environment is done at various levels and scales. The director of a fuel company may order trees to be cut down which is then done by a local worker. And the same tree could also be cut down by a poor person with a different job who just does it in order to keep their family warm. Some African animal species may become endangered because a Chinese company has ordered locals to poach them, but they can also be hunted on a much lower scale.

Obviously, less education is something that virtually no one is striving for; you don’t want a completely uneducated society and the wealthy elite will just get their (children’s) education abroad. And should we still strive towards more education in places that lack it? Yes, because everyone has the right to be educated and learn what is considered important. Again, not doing that will just increase the outside influence on your education and educated people and not change anything about the elite problem described earlier. Thus, the fact that the most educated end up in the most powerful positions to take the most environmentally bad decisions cannot really be changed in any way, especially not in the short term.

That means that the paradox in the larger scale will still exist for the time being. However, this does not mean that we cannot do anything. On a smaller level, environmental education can make a difference. Teaching locals how to grow plants sustainably, what crops are best, and which animal species can be hunted and which should not, can still do a lot. Both formal education and educational projects can help with this, to get people all over the world more aware of how our planet works and how it thrives the most.