The powers that be: Environmental education and the transcendent

Abstract

This paper argues that with regard to addressing the potentially catastrophic environmental problems recognized by many as now confronting us, the most fundamental disaster that threatens is a deep-seated and increasing inability in Western style societies to think properly about the issues involved. The highly anthropocentric motives embedded in modernist humanism that prevail, and that view nature as essentially a material resource ultimately comprehended through natural (including ecological) science narratives, has led to important aspects of nature becoming invisible. This stymies both our relationship with nature and our understanding of ourselves in nature, resulting in a defective basis for decision-making on environmental issues. This paper explores the significance in this context of what are considered to be essential transcendent aspects of nature, in the sense that they lie ever beyond our authorship and authority and yet are capable of exercising profound agency in our lives. Included here are what are argued to be nature’s inherent otherness, mystery and integrity, normativity and intrinsic value, and the enlivening elemental powers that run through them.

Introduction

I will take it as given that one of the great issues to confront humankind at this point in its history is environmental degradation. If there remain some who are still sceptical about the evidence supporting the idea of human-induced global climate change, the evidence for other forms of large-scale pollution and degradation is surely compelling – from oceanic pollution, diminution of fish stocks, species extinction, rainforest and other natural habitat destruction, to widespread local noise, sound and light pollution. Anthropogenic pressures and demands on natural systems show no signs of diminishing, especially when account is taken of the rapid growth occurring in and predicted for emerging economies. For some, what is being experienced is widespread local devastation (such as that resulting from deforestation and desertification), for others such phenomena herald the prospect of global catastrophe resulting from a destabilization of the current climatic balance achieved by planetary self-regulatory systems (e.g. Lovelock, 2009).

Of course, the above portrayal is sketchy and much detailed evidence would need to be adduced to substantiate it. Space here does not permit this. The point being made is that it is a widely recognized portrayal of our current environmental situation and the purpose of this paper is not to make the case for it, but to identify and examine some of the issues that arise for those who believe it to be substantially true. What is a proper basis for addressing the issues raised? What perspectives offer most promise for coming to grips with the underlying essentials? Elsewhere (most recently Bonnett, 2013), I have suggested that with regard to our environmental situation the most fundamental disaster that threatens is a deep-seated and increasing inability in Western style societies to think properly about the issues involved. I will argue that too often the motives that inform dominant strands of such thinking are themselves contributors to the problem and that they frequently mask key issues.

Modernist humanism: An unhelpful constellation

From the perspective of identifying and addressing environmental problems, the anthropocentrism that proceeded from the European Enlightenment has conditioned our understanding of the environment – and the natural world in particular – in a number of unfortunate and heavily interrelated ways. I rehearse some key elements.

First, the elevation of human reason as the means to understanding the world was linked to reinforcing aspirations and belief in the possibilities of subjugating nature to the service of human purposes. While motives of this general kind stem back to antiquity, where indeed in the Hellenistic period, for example, there is evidence to suggest an optimism over the ingenuity of man and a celebration of the efficacy his technology in shaping nature (see Glacken, 1967: 117–120), during the European Enlightenment such motives became distilled and encoded in a particularly potent way that ultimately has led to nature becoming viewed increasingly (and until comparatively recently) as essentially an inexhaustible resource. Such a conception is conducive to the aspiration to convert it wherever possible into what Martin Heidegger (1977) has described as a ‘standing reserve’ that can be endlessly switched around in the service of human consumption. This is the final goal of anthropocentric mastery.

Second, there was the supposition that nature is to be adequately accounted in terms of humanly constructed categories, and that it is susceptible of interrogation and explanation in terms of humanly constructed theories. That great luminary of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant was quite explicit about this:

Reason must approach nature not ‘in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he has himself formulated… it must adopt as its guide… that which it has itself put into nature. It is thus that the study of nature has entered on the secure path of a science, after having for so many centuries been nothing but a process of merely random groping.’ (Kant, 1970: 20)

Clearly, indigenous knowledge – the kind of knowledge gained by intimate living with nature – is heavily discounted in such a view, and the abstraction and idealization set in train leads to a stance that readily transmutes into supposing that nature is a human construction – a product of our categories, theories, narratives, and texts. As Merleau-Ponty (1962: 300) notes, rather than something given in experience, on this trajectory “Reality is not a crucial appearance underlying the rest, it is the framework of relations with which all appearances tally.” This is highly congenial to supposing the most fundamental structures of nature to be describable in mathematical terms, the modern concept of the mathematization of nature having been a key feature of the thinking of Galileo.

Third is the stance of setting nature as a realm apart from the human (which is not, of course, the same as accepting that there are senses in which it can be distinguished from the human) and as essentially meaningless. The most fundamental structures of nature are taken to be purely physical matter/energy operating according to blind universal laws: a mechanical causal or probabilistic system possessing/generating no internal significances and therefore incapable of possessing inherent intrinsic value. This physicalization of nature is particularly overt in Descartes and itself expresses the deeper presumption that the structure of reality is to be supplied by impersonal rational cognitive categories and ordering (rather than, say, by emotion, aesthetic sensibility, felt value and worth).

It will be argued that the upshot of this constellation of ideas is that important aspects of nature become invisible and that hence our relationship with, and understanding of, it becomes stymied. This results in both a defective understanding of ourselves and defective decision-making on environmental issues. Essentially, this follows from insufficient cognizance of a) the fact that in our experience reality, and our existence, are always emplaced and the situated knowledge that arises here has a value that needs to be reasserted in the context of looming environmental disaster, and b) the transcendent quality of the natural world and the need for our participation in this, for example, by respecting the presence of intrinsic value. I will attempt to amplify these claims presently.

For the moment it is worth noting that it is not that the intrinsic value of, say, non-human species cannot be argued on the basis of some of the above attitudes. For example J. Baird Callicott, drawing on Humean notions of morality as based on feeling, has argued for a ‘truncated’ notion of intrinsic value here that sees itself as being consistent with Scientific Naturalism that holds (following Descartes) that the natural world is objective and value-free. He argues that while the source of all value is human consciousness, it by no means follows that the locus of all value is consciousness itself or some mode of consciousness such as reason, pleasure or knowledge. ‘In other words, something may be valuable because someone values it, but it may also be valued for itself.’ That is, an intrinsically valuable thing is valuable for itself, but is not valuable in itself. Emotive relativism is avoided here by appeal to Hume’s idea of “consensus of feeling” – i.e. the human psychological profile is standardized in certain crucial respects (Callicott, 1986). But now a question arises: why this acceptance of a need to accede to the requirements of Scientific Naturalism? At its philosophical inception, Lyotard (1984) was famous for noting postmodernism’s incredulity over the reign of grand narratives. Insofar as the constellation of ideas described in this section can be seen to function as a modernist grand narrative of considerable ambition and hubris – and to fly in the face of widespread culturally valued experience of nature – surely it should be subject to the same incredulity. I will argue that it deeply misrepresents both nature and the essence of valuing along the lines that: regarding the former, nature is not a value-free realm; regarding the latter, we do not simply confer/project value, but discern it, receive it.

I will develop this avenue of thought by considering what I take to be an ever-increasing threat to our ability to think adequately about environmental issues: the growth of scientism.

Scientism

By scientism, I refer to the phenomenon of presuming that classical experimental scientific thinking has a privileged access to the nature of reality; that somehow its methods, findings and constructions reveal what is ‘really’ real and that therefore it can assume the mantle of arbiter for thinking in general. Clearly, this is to be distinguished from science as a field of research; scientism is a set of presumptions about the significance and application of the assumptions, methodologies and findings of this field of research in our daily lives. Its influence is evidenced in the broad context of education in espousals of aiming primarily at outcomes that are observable and measureable, in seeing the curriculum in terms of pre-specified objectives that can be clearly delineated and ‘delivered’ – educational attainment and ‘added value’ being accounted in terms of scores achieved in objective tests. Similarly, it is expressed in the favouring of theories of learning that need make no reference to mysterious inner goings on in the mind of the learner, the ready substitution of ‘brain’ for ‘mind’, and the arising of neuroscience as an educational discipline. With regard to the natural world – which is here my central concern – it arises, for example, in claims that what in everyday experience we take to be solid objects are to be understood as, say, ‘really’ bits of space traversed by speeding particles; what we experience as their colour or sound is ‘really’ movement of a particular wavelength. When it appears to us that a beaver selects a site to build its lodge, protects this site from river surges by quiet pools resulting from felling nearby trees, gnawing them to manageable size and towing them to narrow parts of the river to construct dams, what is ‘really’ occurring is the working out of blind mechanical processes. The vocabulary of the former everyday account is to be regarded fundamentally as a quaint piece of anthropomorphism. As with the Baird Callicott example cited above, any description of reality must be compatible with Scientific Naturalism.

Elsewhere (Bonnett, 2004, 2013), I have questioned this presumption that somehow such scientific accounts are ‘truer’, more objective in the sense of providing a more authentic depiction of the world – one that properly reflects how it really is. Why privilege blind mechanical depictions of the natural world over those that speak of purpose and agency? Why posit as fundamental a world of, say, colourless, blindly hurrying particles when human experience of the natural world is so much richer than this and cannot be adequately articulated through its vocabulary? Is it not that the mechanical portrayal sets the world up as something that in principle can be controlled, mastered, whereas the recognition of fluidity and of otherness of purpose pervading the world precludes this? This former conception might be quite acceptable within the discipline of science with its particular project towards the world and where its limitations as well as its strengths are recognized, but given the richness of experience and depths of intelligibility that it denies, such reductionism looks highly arbitrary when it gets generalized, as with scientism.

Furthermore, when set up as portraying fundamental reality in a generalized way, it gives rise to a serious problem: it makes our inherence in the world highly problematic. Michael Oakeshott (1972) has argued that we live in a world of intelligibles, Martin Heidegger (1973) that humankind is essentially worldly, John McDowell (1996) that concepts go all the way down to the level of our most primordial experience of things and that if nature is seen exclusively within the logical space of blind universal laws which is sui generis as compared with the logical space of reason, it becomes impossible for nature to act as a tribunal for empirical thinking. From their very different perspectives these thinkers are making the general point that meaning is an inherent feature of all aspects of the world – everything that we encounter comes with its significance, not as an addition but in its occurring. The notion of a blind atom is an abstraction, a theoretical construct postulated for particular explanatory purposes, and positing it as more fundamental, more representative of the real, in contexts outside that limited discourse smacks of arbitrariness of a pretty high order. It seems to me that this is foregrounded if we pay attention to some basic features of human experience. Elsewhere, I have argued that we exist in the world through our participation in places and through a process of mutual anticipation:

One is in one’s dealings with a world – partly familiar, partly unfamiliar – that is taken as ‘not me’, ‘other’, in at least a minimal sense. But it must be other in a self-assuring sense of being a place that is to some degree receptive to the self, actively accepts it, provides as it were the questions to its replies as well as the replies to its questions. That is to say a mutual anticipation (and invitation) of self and world is in play in which each is called forth. …On this account, self-assurance and intelligibility are inextricably interwoven. This acknowledges an affective aspect of being in a world that includes our bodily apprehension of where we are: the sense – i.e. feeling – that however hostile the situation, some aspects at least ‘mesh’ with one’s anticipatory structure. Without this minimum level of felt continuity, the situation could not even be experienced as hostile because there is no foothold for understanding it. One is, as it were in freefall. (Bonnett, 2009a)

On this argument anticipation pervades all that we do and experience: for example, for the walker that the earth will bear her up or for the reader that the text has meaning, and while often deeply implicit, it is deeply enlivening and can be quite explicit – as with the anticipation of meeting a friend after a long absence or touching down in some new place. Furthermore, such anticipation is not simply our projection onto an inert world. A place and the things that populate and constitute it can be experienced as awaiting us and as claiming us through the invitations and prompts that they offer. Perhaps we look into the kitchen and see the dirty dishes awaiting our attention, the shade of a tree beckons us on a hot day. We can experience the history or ambience of a particular place as deeply affecting our sense of who we are and what we are doing, whether it is our workplace with its familiar utensils that anticipate and invite our activity there, a hilltop with the particular views that it affords, or the endless lines of white war graves of the Somme that silently await our coming and remembrance.

It is important to make clear that this sense of reciprocal anticipation in our experience of the world emanates not only from the clearly artefactual, but from the quintessentially non-artefactual: nature. The spider’s web anticipates the stray fly; after a hard winter the swelling buds standing out on dark stems anticipate warmer and longer days. We exist through our participation in this interplay of anticipation. Without it, indeed, we would enter ontological freefall. Ultimately there is nothing purely objective or passive about a place – ‘domestic’ or ‘natural’; it only appears so when we have lost touch with its, and our own, genius – as when, under the influence of scientism, we can be persuaded that to recognize its transcendent inviting otherness is to indulge a frothy fiction.

I will now amplify some aspects of the transcendent quality of nature and its significance for our engagement with and understanding of the environment.

Nature as transcendent

One clear sense in which nature is transcendent resides in its inherent otherness: it stands there already before us, arises out of itself. Central to our idea of nature is that we are not its author, it is essentially non-artefactual (which, of course, is not to deny that our concepts of nature are humanly produced). Though we may affect nature in myriad ways, ultimately we do not determine it; it lies ever before and beyond our intentions. This is true even if we take that part of nature that we most intimately inhabit, indeed that is part constitutive of us as individuals: our bodies. Our bodies are intimately involved in all our perceptions, actions and choices, and as Giddens notes, increasingly aspects of our bodies are capable of our decision through the diet we chose and the possibilities opened up by surgery and modifications by technological devices such as pacemakers and brain implants. In this sense ‘anatomy is no longer destiny’ (Giddens, 1994: 214), our power to manipulate and shape our bodies – and in this sense achieve a degree of authorship of them – is increasing. Yet it remains the case that, for example, we maintain our health by interacting with powers of which ultimately we are not the author and that lie beyond our ability to transform. No matter how far we push forward the frontiers of manipulation and control, there remains a nature, an order, recognized as external to our will and with which we have to deal and find an accommodation (Bonnett, 2004: 44). What is true of something that is so quintessentially ‘ours’, known by us and controlled by us as our bodies, must be at least equally true of aspects of nature with which we do not have such ‘internal’ intercourse. And this is underlined when we include in the account the myriad ways in which the natural world affects us with no reference to what we might will or desire, for example, from the oceanic micro-flora that recycle the atmosphere to volcanic eruptions that pollute it (from our point of view).

Another closely related aspect of nature’s otherness that gives it a transcendent quality is its inherent mysteriousness. However intimately involved we may become with an aspect of the natural world, no matter how familiar it may come to seem, it can never be fully known. To attempt to intellectually posses it is to destroy it in its essence. Natural things are many faceted, capable of exhibiting profiles and countenances only some of which we can witness or guess at. Each individual in nature emerges from a unique past and draws towards an open future that surpasses both our capacity to know by acquaintance and to fully encompass in any summative knowledge. This is as true of some passing insect as it is of a distant constellation. And of course generalized scientific explanations say nothing about the sheer existence of natural things, their individual standing forth as just ‘this’ in a here and now, and their power to surprise us if we are attentive, and sometimes if initially we are not – such as when our attention is caught by the unexpected momentary brilliance of the sheer blue flash of a kingfisher as we look languidly out over some stream.

Finally, for present purposes, the transcendence of nature is revealed when we experience its integrity. This occurs both positively and negatively. For example, we can be struck by the ‘rightness’ of some natural thing – perhaps its subtle adaption to its environment and the contribution that its presence, participation, makes, the way it fits in. We can be struck by the intricate and complex integration of functioning systems, whether it is that of a ciliate protozoan or the human brain. Similarly, a wilderness landscape or natural phenomenon such as the emerging stars at dusk, the play of sunlight on the surf of breaking waves on the shore, the wild but seemingly orchestrated dance of leaves and branches caught in a strong breeze: all can impress us with a sense of not simply how things are, but how they should be. Conversely, the despoliation of a sea shore and the sickly movement of waves covered by an oil slick, or suddenly encountering the contents of fly tipping strewn across a country path as we round a bend can bring us up short and provoke a sense of outrage. Although, it is true that, as Giambattista Vico once argued, its alterity means that we cannot understand nature from the inside as we can our own artefacts, we can nonetheless be impressed with a sense of what constitutes the integrity and well-being of natural things, what might count as their fulfilment, and the need for this to be respected. In this sense nature is imbued with a normativity that is not simply conferred by us, but that is given to us, there for us to discern.

In these (and other) ways we experience nature as transcendent: its inherent otherness, mystery and integrity. These have the power to shape our perception, understanding and existence and in so-doing connect us to the cosmos as a whole. This is illustrated by recognizing some of the processes that pervade natural things and natural space and that can be understood as transcendent powers that inform and energize their, and our own, being. Characteristic of the things and spaces of nature in their occurring are phenomena such as birth and death, growth and decay, sound and silence, lightening and darkening, movement and stillness, and, as I have now argued, rightness and wrongness. It is through the play of such contrasts that the world – and our being in it – is enlivened. Such powers light up being, make a difference. It is important to note that this enlivening is far from being purely physical or cognitive. Rather it is deeply normative and aesthetic. Beauty and truth are in play. In such experience we are vouchsafed intimations of what is or is not a fitting description or response. As we enter some natural place or encounter some natural thing we can experience, for example, an inhibition against unnecessary trampling of the bluebells emerging through the woodland floor, or the wanton destruction of an ancient oak, that emanates from the things themselves. This is to say that such normativity is not experienced as a result of ratiocination, but immediately in the way that these things meet us. ¹ Our participation in this interplay conditions (but does not determine) our sense of our own existence and what could count as a good life. This is not an argument for the subjection of human purposes to all natural processes; it is an argument against indifference to the normative significance of the transcendent in nature in the framing and enactment of those purposes.

Hence, by ‘transcendent’ here, I refer to the ways in which nature lies beyond our authorship and authority, and yet exercises agency in our lives. It does not merely ‘shove us around’ as Rorty (1994: 375) would have it; rather nature engages us as a source of significance, catching – indeed, sometimes compelling – our attention and intimating what is fitting. Under the influence of abstract thinking we become disconnected from the elemental and turn away from the powers that vitalize the world, now ‘behind our backs’. While ecological science has in one sense re-alerted us to our emplacement in nature (for example, by revealing our participation in and bio-physical dependence upon nested ecosystems, including various feedback processes that maintain or disrupt states of nature congenial to human physical welfare), these are described in abstract – increasingly mathematical – terms from which elemental contact with nature has been drained. Previous argument indicates that primordially, the unity and transcendence of nature is precisely not discursive, not that of abstract laws, but something felt in the presencing of things: their standing forth, showing of themselves. In experience the wholeness of the world manifests itself in an intuitive sense of the mysterious ground out of which things arise and in which they are rooted, and the powers that run through it. This is quite different from a discursive sense of interrelatedness conveyed through webs of rationally constructed categories and objectively quantifiable physical forces.

Insofar as an argument is being mounted in support of moral regard for nature in itself, for its own sake, a problem arises in the context of conventional Western morality that holds that rights, duties and interests only occur within communities, towards things (ultimately, rational beings) with which we are in relationship. Andrew Brennan (1995) has discussed John Passmore’s view that while ecology has attempted to demonstrate that we are members of various natural communities, it is questionable whether ecological versions of ‘community’ meet the standard required since ‘Bacteria and men do not recognize mutual obligations nor do they have common interests’ (Passmore, 1974: 116). Notwithstanding the contractarian view of community that seems to be implicit in this way of formulating the point and that there might be other kinds of community relationship that can generate obligations (such as our relationships with domestic animals), Brennan points out that recognition of others as worthy of moral consideration does not always seem to result from our recognizing any shared community with them and provides examples where, indeed, ‘the community within which value has a place would be formed consequent upon our recognition of them as having moral standing’. ² In terms of the perspective that I am developing that emphasizes the otherness of things in nature – and therefore the limitations on the possibilities of community with them – this is an important point. Not only is it the case that we can become aware of nobility and worth inherent in things whose overriding presence is sensed as mysterious and other, the occasions of such awareness can be the very points at which they arise for us in their ‘thisness’, haecceitas, and we enter into a relationship with them, perhaps developing an incipient sense of something existentially shared – such as a world. Again, it is important to note that this latter is not the same as an ecosystem as described by the biological sciences, or a physical universe of the kind elaborated by the exact sciences. Rather, in Heideggerian vein, it is the environing space of the stir of intelligibility, of significances, of disclosure of being, within which ideas such as ‘ecosystem’ and ‘physical universe’ occur.

While it is the case that this kind of apprehension of nature that respects its alterity, integrity and inherent value – and thus does not aspire to intellectual possession – has been prominent in non-Western cultures and in Romantic poetry rather than mainstream Western philosophy, there are notable exceptions. For example, that our primordial experience of reality is not constituted by rational cognitive schema and the significance of this for our understanding of existence was developed by Max Scheler. He argued that:

…every kind of intellectual comprehension of whatness (Soseinserfassung) of an object presupposes an emotional experience of value related to this object. This proposition holds true for the simplest perception as well as for remembering, expecting and, finally, also for all types of thinking; it holds true for the intuition of primordial phenomena (i.e., the basic structure of things freed from sensation and hic-nunc-existence) and for immediate idea-thinking, both of which lead to a priori knowledge. It holds true for all cognition of fortuitous facts which rest on observations, induction and immediate thought: perception always presupposes value-ception (Wertnehmung). The first words of a child contain wish and feeling-expression. Psychic expression, however, is also that which is perceived first. That sugar is ‘agreeable’ is comprehended by the child before he comprehends the sensational quality ‘sweet’. (Scheler, 1980: 109)

Scheler argues that love (and its aberrant form, hatred) is an immediate mode of response to objects of value and as such it is fundamental to feeling. It is therefore presupposed by any knowledge of objects since it constitutes the immediate contact with the world before all acts of thinking. Love allows higher and higher value to ‘stream off’ the object without the lover’s exertion or wish and reveals the structure of values within which there are the cognizable things (see Frings, 1996: chapter 4). ‘Ontologically, man is the place of the occurrence of feelable values’ (Frings, 1996: 69). This sphere of emotional cognition is totally different from intellectual perception, thinking and reasoning and its axiology is likewise totally independent of the logic of judgement – the latter can only be made about values after their immediate feelable presence.

In not dissimilar vein, considering A. N. Whitehead’s postulating the ‘event’ as the fundamental category of process that is the reality of nature, Joseph Grange (1997) argues that ‘Whitehead’s model of the event as a process structured through normative aesthetic measures is a deliberate effort to return to nature a proper sense of its own value’ (pp. 223–4). This means that ‘Order is more a matter of aesthetics than of rational configuration’ (p. 235). Such aesthetic ideals are felt by the human body as it enacts its modes of environmental perception (p. 228).

So, again the question arises: by what warrant does the pronouncement that nature is structured according to the laws of physics trump, say, the aesthetic experience of nature as structured by contrasts and feeling tone? In lived experience these latter are not some secondary embellishment projected upon some previously given ‘neutral’ entity or phenomenon. They constitute things in their presencing, and it is in terms of this experience of their coming into presence that things are to be primordially understood. And in this regard nature does not dissemble, it always possesses the nobility of being itself. In presencing, a natural thing reveals the operation of those previously mentioned elemental powers such as movement and stillness, birth and death, that make the presencing of the thing possible – part constitute it – provide the energizing geist within which it exists. Recognition of intrinsic value involves recognition of the thing so constituted, i.e. as possessing the integrity and nobility of being constituted by these powers in pure unadulterated form.

I conclude this section by recapping what I have argued to be some central aspects of nature’s transcendence:

Its sheer self-arising existence and what we might term its ontological mystery;

Its possession of inherent intrinsic value, including aesthetic;

Its internal purposive integrity – and therefore authority in indicating the limits of what response is fitting or not fitting;

The elemental powers that run through it, sensitivity and responsiveness to which connects us to the cosmos and provides the fundament of our lives;

The ways in which all the above participate in shaping the places in which we live and that part constitute us through the anticipative claims that they make on us.

And to hark back now to scientism: the great danger is that of its normalization in thinking such that it abstracts us from the above and engenders policies that hence are disconnected from lived reality.

Emplaced transcendence and environmental education

Earlier in this paper I noted the centrality of place to human existence. It seems to me that the hegemony of scientism might be most effectively disturbed by re-entry into precisely those realms of experience that it attempts to nullify, namely those experiences that are personal, embodied and emplaced. In a number of previous papers (Bonnett, 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2012, 2013) I have begun to set out elements of this argument and I would like to take the opportunity of recapping and integrating some of the emerging themes here and developing their significance for environmental education.

Previously (Bonnett, 2009b) I have taken up the point that all concrete experience is emplaced by reflecting upon a notion of ‘selving’ that is expressed in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the poem Binsey Poplars, which laments the felling of a stand of poplars, Hopkins (1979: 76) speaks of ‘strokes of havoc’ that ‘unselve the sweet especial scene’. It seemed to me that this way of putting things intimates an important dimension to natural things: they do not exist in isolation. Not now in the sense that scientific ecologism would hold that all organisms are nested in some causal network on which they are biologically dependent and in this way are interrelated. Rather it is in the sense that each inhabitant of a place participates in the occurring of other inhabitants and that these reciprocal relations constitute the place. That is to say that each inhabitant participates in a place-making. Thus, it is not simply that the removal of the trees described in Hopkins’ poem physically destroys them, it is that withdrawn from their ‘especial place’ they can no longer presence as the particular things that they are. For example, a tree transplanted from its natural woodland home to, say, a shopping mall is transformed from, perhaps, a gentle sheltering presence to a silhouette on neon (Bonnett, 2012). Furthermore, it is not only that some objects have been removed from the place, it is rather that havoc has been wrought on the place itself, the subtle interplays of presencing that constitute the ‘sweet especial scene’, its ambience, has been so disrupted as to bring it into disarray and destroy its integrity.

There are clear resonances here with Heidegger’s bridge that swings over the stream with ‘ease and power’ and that ‘…does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream… it brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighbourhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream’ (Heidegger, 1975: 152). But here Heidegger is concerned with human dwelling and the way that the bridge can be understood as articulating the play of the transcendent powers of the ‘Fourfold’ of earth, sky, divinities and mortals that for him constitute this. Hopkins’ feel for the ‘inscape’ of natural things – of natural things in themselves and for themselves – would take issue with what might be described as a lofty anthropocentrism still to be detected in Heidegger’s account at this point.

Now, in the light of this discussion, a number of points can be made concerning natural places and what might count as authentic engagement with them – itself, presumably an essential aspect of environmental education.

First, it becomes clear that natural places are not mere locations in some space-time continuum. Rather they are unique neighbourhoods, each with its own ambiences and countenances, and in which the presencing of each thing is ontologically related to/affected by the presencing of others. With regard to the character of our engagement with nature, this means that attentiveness to presencing – what is immediately occurring, as against any summative cognition of definable objects – is a primary requirement. This in turn foregrounds an essential embodied multi-sensory receptiveness in coming to know nature; a receptiveness that is not just cerebral, but in which our whole being participates and is thus enlivened. But it is very important to note here that what is being described is not simply a matter of receiving physical sensations, but of ideation – of being open to, sensing through feeling, the presence of the normative. As Scheler put it, ‘value-ception’ precedes both ‘pure’ sensation and intellectual cognition. Here we have what elsewhere I have termed emplaced transcendence (Bonnett, 2012), meaning by this that full open celebratory felt participation in a particular place – truly being there – puts us in touch with immanent yet transcendent powers that are both familiar and ineffable in their running through the cosmos bringing contrast and animating existence. Through this process of mutual anticipation and place-making things in nature are experienced as purposive and as possessing agency and value. That is to say they are experienced as agents and as value – these are not additions to their being, but constitutive of it: they are implicit in the occurring of things. This means that the essential structure of their being is not blind bio-physical in the ways conceived by science. We never encounter such things as a cherry tree in blossom in objective space-time, only neutered objects devoid of their own vigour and intrinsic significance.

Second, a focus is given to something else that has been distorted by the modernist humanist constellation of motives identified earlier in this paper: the nature of valuing. Essentially modernist humanism sees values as a human construction projected upon reality. Ultimately, in principle, we choose our values. Freed by unimpeachable reason from the yoke of superstition of subservience to some supernatural power or order, values become the product of the human will. In contrast to this, the view presented in this paper argues that while it might be true that value can only be explicitly recognized by humankind (or its conscious equivalent), internal to the idea of valuing is a certain passivity. Valuing something as against, say, merely desiring it, involves an apprehension of value qualities that are inherent in the thing itself (Bonnett, 2004: 116). In the case of intrinsic value, which is here our central concern, something is not intrinsically valuable because we think well of it or desire it, rather we think well of it or desire it because we perceive its intrinsic value. Such value cannot be simply conferred – if this were the case it could be conferred on anything – but must be discerned (by, it has been argued, affective cognition). ³ Hence, while values might only occur – come into the light – in the space of human consciousness (or its equivalent), they are not entirely anthropogenic, not purely a product of human estimation and grading of things where the metric is human-authored. For example, beauty can claim us, we can be held rapt by it and in such experience we can be given a metric rather than apply or impose one of our own device. To think otherwise would be to indulge the hubrism that this paper wishes to overturn. Previous argument suggests that nature possesses two kinds of transcendent value: truth (integrity) and beauty (aesthetic). The recognition of these entails moral regard.

Third, returning now to the idea that we inhere in places through ongoing mutual anticipation, there is a significant sense in which places claim us. It is not only that the ongoing play of reciprocal anticipation results in us experiencing – again often, but certainly not always, implicitly – prompts and claims that constitute us being in, inhering in, a place, rather these can be such as to determine incisively how and who we are when we are present there (Bonnett, 2009a). Our workplace, the place of some seminal personal encounter or tragic occurrence can claim us in this way. This means that the normativity, values, that it has been argued are inherent in places, likewise claim us and can shape our being. Considering the necessarily multi-sensory experiencing of nature, ultimately, there can be no substitute for immediate firsthand experience. Engagement with virtual places made available through ever advancing technology will of course involve mutual anticipation, claims and prompts, and it can be interesting to speculate to what degree – necessarily being engineered and selective compared with natural places – they could approach the experience possible in places in which physical nature is authentically present. Lack of space forbids a proper examination of this issue here, but I suggest that the transcendent qualities of nature previously outlined pose serious problems for any such endeavour. In addition there is a danger that, for example, the enhanced graphics now becoming available can sensationalize aspects of nature, such as to make experience of the real nearby or ‘everyday’ thing appear dull, ‘tame’, in comparison. Should this occur, it would stymie precisely the kind of attentiveness that proper engagement with nature requires and distract us from appreciating more subtle kinds of spontaneity and surprise that receptive engagement can divulge.

In a recent examination of the character and importance of Nature Education, Dirk Willem Postma and Paul Smeyers (2012) discuss how children’s play in nature, through responding to the immediately present, can engender responsive care: a caring for a nearby future that allows us to continue caring. Such an approach to environmental education avoids an unattractive and often ineffective austere ethic of self-restraint frequently associated with sustainability discourse and focuses instead on the intrinsic motivation arising from what one cares about in the nearby of one’s life-world, and the value of a playful relationship that can open up an in-between space for new educational possibilities. They develop an argument to show that unstructured play in nature occurs in spiral time where ‘the things we do and launch in our world turn back on us’ and must therefore be faced, but where linear long-term causal responsibility with its repressive attempts to predict and control the unpredictable and uncontrollable is attenuated. They argue that the latter invites the imperative of precaution rather than care for the continuation of things that make our life worth living, engenders fear rather than joy, and retrenchment rather than adventurous engagement with the call of an indefinite and open future. There are strong resonances here with the idea of participants in natural places being claimed by those previously mentioned transcendent qualities of otherness, mystery and integrity and the open receptive-responsive attitude – in Schelerian terms, love – that their recognition involves.

Fourth, one central upshot for policy of the foregoing points taken together is that environmental education should seek to bring about, and itself requires, cultural change. It must seek to disturb and disrupt some powerful current cultural grand narratives in order to overcome what Heesson Bai (2009) has aptly dubbed a deep-seated ‘psychic numbing’ – an autism – that she argues prevails in Western thinking where nature is conceived essentially as matter radically separate from mind. Elsewhere (Bonnett, 2000, 2004), I have argued that metaphysically Western culture can be characterized in terms of the ascent of the motive of mastery, and the scientism discussed in this paper can be interpreted as one aspect of this. Economism – where everything is evaluated in terms of its contribution to goods and services and the price that humankind is willing to pay for consuming them – would be another; reducing things to mere units of consumption represents an extreme form of subjugation and mastery. Hence, ambitious and long-term, as it will be, significant cultural change must be high on the agenda of environmental education, and this will involve a radical exposure of the motives and practices that turn nature into a resource, the ways that these are normalized notwithstanding the prominence of Green rhetoric and public avowals of commitment to sustainability, and the ways in which we are implicated in this simulation in our daily lives. Recent papers by Bob Jickling (2013) and Andrew Stables (2013) are eloquent in their portrayal of important aspects of this, and the need for radical vibrant civic conversation about environmental issues espoused by the former is to be applauded, though tempered by a need to be alert to dangers of such conversation, under the influence of a prevailing metaphysics of mastery, becoming worded in ways that divert it from its true point (Bonnett, 2013).

In this regard, and coming at matters from the perspective of practical school-based education, Sean Blenkinsop (2012) illustrates some important issues in his account of the early stages of a project, funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to set up an eco-school determined to resist such (re-)colonization and the consequent ‘backgrounding’ of the non-human world. A start has been made on cultivating learning that allows the natural world to be an ‘active co-teacher’ by, for example, locating it in natural settings ‘where we can listen for what the more-than-human world has to teach us’, developing an educational community deeply rooted in place, using a knowledge of natural ecosystems (for example, their exhibiting the values of interdependence and diversity and the ways in which they sustain flourishing) gradually acquired through intimate acquaintanceship to guide thinking in addressing problems that confront the school (for example, those emanating from an antagonistic super-ordinate culture), and so forth.

To conclude, living in experience in ways foregrounded above (contrasted with extracting oneself from it by living predominantly in rational abstractions) one is acknowledging and participating in transcendence in the following important senses:

one’s experience is permeated by the otherness and ontological mystery of things;

this otherness is experienced as normative: it makes demands upon us and sets parameters for what counts as fitting response;

in our experience of the occurring of these (strange) things – in their becoming and in their passing – we are brought back to the domain of elemental powers that condition our lives and bind us with the cosmos.

Environmental education, if it is to enable understanding of what is fundamentally environing and thus provide an adequate basis for addressing the kinds of degradation noted at the start of this paper, can aspire to nothing less than to promote such participation.