Wilderness education’s impact on our modern relation to nature – a paradigm shift?
Our contemporary society is geared towards acceleration and appropriation with individuals being ever more alienated from themselves, others and nature. The detrimental binary culture/nature made up by modern and ‘enlightened’ thought facilitates such a capitalist mode of being in the world and ultimately lies at the core of the paradigm according to which humans shape and exploit the earth as the Anthropocene thesis claims. In this episode, we will explore qualitatively the potential which the emergent and growing field of wilderness education in Global North countries has to transform that paradigm by offering playful and intimate ways to discover, to explore and to be in, or rather: with our common mother earth.
A special thanks to the four people who were willing to share their insights, including Joscha Grolms (Wildniswissen) and Matthias Holzgreve (University for Sustainable Development Eberswalde). And thank you for listening.
Sources and literature recommendations
Jickling, Bob, Sean Blenkinsop, Nora Timmermann, and Michael De Danann Sitka-Sage (eds.) (2018). Wild Pedagogies. Touchstones for Re-Negotiating Education and the Environment in the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan.
Glyn, Thomas, Janet Dyment, and Heather Prince (eds.) (2022). Outdoor Environmental Education in Higher Education. International Perspectives. Springer.
Latour, Bruno (2017). Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press.
Moore, Jason W. (2017). The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(3): 594-630.
Morse, Marcus, Bob Jickling, and John Quay (2018). Rethinking relationships through education: wild pedagogies in practice. Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education, 21: 241–254.https://doi.org/10.1007/s42322-018-0023-8
Oram, Matan (2022). The Ethos of the Enlightenment and the Discontents of Modernity. Routledge.
Paulsen, Michael, jan jagodzinski, and Shé M. Hawke (eds.) (2022). Pedagogy in the Anthropocene. Re-Wilding Education for a New Earth. Palgrave Macmillan.
Rosa, Hartmut, Klaus Dörre, and Stephan Lessenich (2017). Appropriation, Activation and Acceleration: The Escalatory Logics of Capitalist Modernity and the Crises of Dynamic Stabilization. Theory, Culture & Society, 34(1): 53-73.
Young, Jon, Ellen Haas, and Evan McGown (2016). Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature. OWLink Media.
This podcast is part of a larger compendium, where we explore different thoughts and frameworks that can guide sustainable development towards generating systems that serve the needs of the future. Of crucial importance are the ideas that systems need to serve the mass of people, contribute to stabilize ecosystem services and enable an applicable transition. The well-known Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are very essential, but often lack the needed transformation. So dive into the journey – from SDGs to GDS (generating different systems) to hear about holistic ideas for a better future.
The compendium is the work of an international students group of the master's programme Global Change Management (GCM) class 2022/2023, from the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development.
If you would like to learn more about practical examples that relate to underlying concepts like the Doughnut Economy and Planetary Boundaries, please check out our website: https://hnee-gcm-compendium.vercel.app/ that was made from a previous semester group.