Abstract
This article traverses the confluence of ecopedagogies and river ecologies, employing a unique methodological approach that intertwines canoeing with academic inquiry to explore riverscape learning and its potential for becoming ecoliterate with the river. Drawing on wild pedagogies and outdoor education expertise alongside feminist new materialist eco-thinking, the text explores themes of environmental education, critical pedagogy, ecofeminism and place-based learning by playing with river-writing as an ecopedagogical methodological experiment. River-writing as ecopedagogy is responsive to the complexities of ecological systems and the challenges posed by the climate crisis. By engaging with the material and metaphorical currents of rivers, the text underscores the importance of experiential learning and the potential of natural landscapes as educational spaces that can inspire critical reflection, environmental stewardship and a deeper connection with the more-than-human world. The integration of theoretical perspectives from environmental philosophy and the practical insights gained from canoeing provide a rich narrative that contributes to the evolving discourse on ecopedagogies, offering insights for educators, environmentalists, researchers and policy-makers interested in advancing sustainable and inclusive educational practices.
Becoming other with river-writing
Our aim is to write a paper that engages with ecopedagogy across time and place through movement inspired by canoeing on a river. We imagine the text will pull and push as we work together, with varying intensities and with moments of stillness that invite us to contemplate when ‘ecopedagogy’ materialised as a concept, what was there before, what ideas formed sideway currents and what ecopedagogy was responding to at the time and place. Ecopedagogies form the river, the flow and the unexpected, and we are manoeuvring, responding, attentive to side streams, turning against the flow and going with the flow in our text as a raft, as a canoe, that carries us.
Rivers have an allure, a gravitational pull that positions us in particular ways, that orient us towards them and can draw us downstream – funnelling and focusing our movements and mind, but the headwaters and style of the riverscape make a difference to the entire experience. If we were sitting in a canoe, and about to paddle out into the stream of ecopedagogies it makes sense to have an idea of the style of rapids we might encounter, of the geology of the riverbed, and where we might be swept up in those currents. Is this a gentle river or is it a forceful one? Are there tributaries downstream, and is the river flowing underground as well as above the ground? What does a healthy river look like?
Rivers are changing in a climate crisis affected world. Rivers burst, rivers flood, even small rivers can turn into dangerous torrents when a year’s worth of rain drenches the riverscape. Rivers dry up and they change their channels in response to the climate-changing ecologies around them. Paddling the river on a canoe may mean becoming witness to change, and it may mean becoming river literate. ‘Want to fight climate change and drought at the same time? Bring back beavers’ declare members of the Riverscape Consortium from the University of Minnesota (Riverscapes Consortium, n.d). More-than-human expertise as culture and knowledge (in this case beaver culture and knowledge) is what can make a sustainable, ecoliterate difference to river health. How exciting is the prospect of learning with beavers to return waterways to health?
One example of learning with more-than-humans is that of a UK-based rewilding project which features a pair of Eurasian beavers as pioneers and expert river-workers, aiming to demonstrate their impact on flood management in urban settings (Ambrose, 2023). The ecopedagogy that underpins such projects involves public education to remind communities that beavers have been essential members of these complex riverscapes for centuries. Rewilding the riverscape involves becoming ecoliterate about a place. It requires an exploration of its past, its diverse human, and more-than-human ecologies as well as its loss of bio/diversity, to then move into possible futures. Moving with the river in a canoe creates potential for new perspectives of who and what supports healthy river ecologies. How does ecopedaogogy engage with other-than-human expertise? Can our river-writing help us to explore the place of less human-centric contributions to ecopedagogies?
We hypothesise that becoming ecoliterate on the river means learning from those who live in river ecologies and can read them with ease (Auster et al., 2022). It means moving in unexpected ways, at times against the stream, rather than following the strongest current. This in itself is an ecopedagogical move, as Russell (2013) points out when thinking about queer ecopedagogy: ‘ecopedagogy – insofar as it espouses this looking backward to move forward, anticipates difficulties ahead for all beings, and seeks to intervene and “guide” them toward utopian futures – is thus an orientating endeavour’ (p. 15). While we do not intend to guide anyone towards utopian futures, we are keen to embark on an orientating endeavour that unfolds as we explore. Futures are made in the moment-by-moment in this river-writing endeavour. Queering ecopedagogies as Russell (2013) suggests, means orienting oneself in such a way that intervention and guidance is a multi-species, multi-perspective endeavour that opens up towards a multitude of possible futures.
Paddling upstream and orientating ecopedagogy
Sitting in a canoe before entering the stream often involves looking upstream. The stillness of water, or the counter movement of eddies formed by the riverbanks, can mean that the natural positioning of the canoe on the water is facing upstream. We might initially leave the quiet water with an upstream angle, propelled onwards as we move through eddy lines – what does such a position reveal? Eddy lines indicate a fluid friction between the main downstream current and counter flows of still or gently flowing pockets of water. Can we paddle upstream to test the waters, get a feel for the rocks forming the rapids, test our angle across the stream and gain a sense of the river’s speed and undercurrents? What side creeks are entering into the current to sweep us along? Who are the ecoliterate others in this riverscape? As we begin to paddle and turn the canoe upstream it becomes apparent that the rocks in the mainstream demand our attention. Paddling towards the rocks requires effort. The solidity of the rocks creates its own micro-streams, eddies and currents that push and pull while we attempt to move the canoe upstream past the rocks for a closer look.
Despite appearing to move as one, rivers are made up of variable currents informed by obstructions, in-flows, and geomorphology of the riverbed. How, then, might we effectively navigate? How can we read the river and write back to it? What might the cascading headwaters tell us about where the river has emerged from and what might the side creeks tell us about likely flows? Sitting in an eddy, looking upstream, and preparing to enter the flow, the river seemingly beckons us to read its surface waters and currents.
Reading the river
Canoeing in a riverscape involves reading the river, working with, and at times against, its currents. It involves experiencing what the river has to offer, feeling its efforts acting upon oneself, and responding. It is through such engagements with the world that we might also write back to the world. As Freire (1985) suggests, ‘reading the word is not only preceded by reading the world, but also by a certain form of writing it or rewriting it’ (p. 18). Movement on a river is an immersive act. A canoe at once glides through the water and is exposed to the forces of the currents along its edges. To navigate across the river, or downstream, requires a careful reading of the flows, eddies and rapids.
Critical pedagogy, rooted in the work of Freire (1970), provides a dominant current in the stream of ecopedagogy. At the heart of Freire’s philosophy is the liberation of individuals through the development of critical consciousness. For Freire, critical consciousness necessitates challenging the power dynamics and injustices that shape society and resisting them through action. It involves recognising injustices, understanding the mechanisms of oppression, and realising one’s capacity to act upon and change the conditions of one’s existence. The headwaters of critical pedagogy have inevitably mixed in their journey downstream, with the fast-flowing and plentiful eddy lines of environmental injustice – expanding into environmental education and pedagogies rooted in Freire’s philosophy of liberation.
Flowing, as well, through this current is the idea of dialogue, an overarching relational way of being with others that challenges traditional hierarchies of power. Educationally dialogue is made apparent through collaborative educational models in which knowledge is co-constructed through critical reflection and engagement within the world. Freire (1970) articulates a distinctive epistemological approach when he argues that educators should reject a banking model of education and instead take up an alternative problem-posing method in which teachers and students learn together. He suggests authentic dialogue is the touchstone for critical pedagogies, and that it goes hand in hand with an understanding of learning as relational and that knowledge as produced through constant interactions in an ever-changing world (Freire and Macedo, 1987). Dialogue, then, reveals an epistemological position; that human knowledge is emergent, dynamic and co-created.
Apparent also within the main flows, is a strong socio-environmental justice current. Justice in the context of ecopedagogy extends the concept of equity from human communities to include the broader natural world. It challenges an anthropocentric worldview and advocates for the rights of all living beings and ecosystems. This socio-environmental justice current highlights the intersectionality of environmental issues with race, class, gender, and other forms of social inequality. Socio-environmental justice, then, argues that the struggle for a sustainable planet necessitates a struggle against oppression and injustice in all its forms (Martusewicz et al.,2015), and there exists an inseparability between environmental and social violences.
Through this lens, ecopedagogy attempts to address the root causes of social and ecological violences. It requires an active attentiveness within a more-than-human world to the rights of others and the implications of decisions that affect them. As Whitehouse (2018) suggests, ‘the term “eco” in ecopedagogy indicates the educational prospect of actively paying attention to the lives of others and to the aliveness of others, recognizing their living importance within normalized understandings of human enterprise’ (p. 146). And this current of justice is gathering pace as recent in-flows of post-human and new materialist thinking bolster the agential extension of rights in a more-than-human world, and necessarily promote attentiveness to injustices within an interconnected world.
River-writing
Sitting in the canoe our bodies remain close to the river – searching the surface water for the hints of what lies below. It is only as we stroke our paddle into the water again, and the canoe accelerates from the still water, that we can feel the water and adjust our position, speed and angle of the canoe. As we feel our way across the river, these currents work to push and pull the canoe, to expose the surface of the canoe and to sweep us downstream. Although currents often appear in the flow, it is also the edgework pieces of rivers that provide eddies and resting places for currents to mix.
Bubbling up from deep below in the river are currents that actively work to disrupt the status quo, by critically reading how dominant worldviews promote many ecological crises and inequities. In doing so, ecopedagogy notably disrupts both the neoliberal capitalist paradigm that prioritise economic growth at the expense of ecological health and social well-being, and the separation from nature and resulting epistemological injustices and dominance (Misiaszek, 2023). These currents challenge the reductionist and mechanistic views of nature that underpin much of mainstream environmental management and conservation practices, and argue that a fundamental transformation in values, beliefs, and relationships within a more-than-human world is necessary.
Felt in the flow of these upwellings, and informed by the riverbed below, is Carolyn Merchant’s critical eco-feminist perspective that highlights the intersectionality and violence of portrayals of nature and women. Merchant (1980) argues that the scientific revolution facilitated a radical change in the perception of nature from a living, nurturing mother figure to a machine to be controlled and dominated. This shift, she posits, laid the groundwork for the exploitation of both nature and women, underlining the interconnectedness of gender, science, and environmental degradation. As Gaard (2009) emphasises, ‘ecofeminism is a perspective that sees social and environmental problems as fundamentally interconnected. Beginning with a recognition that the position and treatment of women, animals, and nature are not separable’ (p. 323). Merchant’s legacy remains visible in critical ecopedagogy that not only seeks to educate about environmental issues but also aims to empower an engagement in transformative actions for a more equitable world.
The rocks that ground the river
As outlined so far, ecopedagogies have a genealogy that connects directly to Freirean pedagogies of liberation, with emphasis on critical thinking that leads to increased awareness of social and, in his later work, environmental injustices. The hope of this pedagogy is that increased understanding and awareness will lead to actions that ignite change towards a more just and sustainable world. Our river-writing is making evident that ecopedagogy is more than one pedagogy, and perhaps best described as multiplicity, as ecopedagogies (Misiaszek, 2021). Picking up on Merchant’s (1980) seminal work, at the heart of ecopedagogies lies the ability to engage critically with the human-nature relationship, and to work towards planetary justice.
As we explore the mainstream rocks that form the riverbed from our upstream perspective, we can clearly see less visible rocks deeper in the riverbed. The core concerns for human and planetary justice are expressed in the work of feminist scholars such as Mies and Shiva (1993) who argued for a feminist reconceptualization of social, economic and environmental justice that explicitly foregrounds the political injustices perpetuated by patriarchal systems of exploitation. Similarly, Plumwood (1993) emphasises approaches to knowledge production and dissemination that elevate critical thinking as resistance to, and reformation of, white privileged male Enlightenment values aimed at the mastery of nature through reason and rationality. While these feminist thinkers do not explicitly refer to ecopedagogy, their commitment to human justice as a feminist issue that cannot be separated from planetary justice makes them, we argue, key ecopedagogy thinkers. Shiva’s collaborative work in
We move the canoe a little bit further upstream, fully aware of the rocks underneath. The water is clear and the pull towards downstream lessens. The riverbed is alive with plants that cling to stones, and we can see tiny fish darting between stones. Some of these stones seem to radiate sunlight back, and we let the canoe drift towards a shallow pool on the verge of the river. The light dapples the water’s surface. It feels otherworldly, quiet, and peaceful. Tree roots stretch towards the water. The riverscape here feels rich, dense, and ancient.
Somerville (2020) states ‘the only way to think and become differently in the face of the enormity of anthropogenic change to the Earth’s climate, and the consequent loss of biodiversity, is through becoming embedded and embodied in the intimacy of local places’ (p. 14). Somerville’s river ecoliteracy is enmeshed with the riverscape of the Nepean River in Hawkesbury, on Country of the Darug peoples in western Sydney, Australia. The river is the lifeblood for plants, animals, stone and rock, and people: ‘the riverlands inhabit the (dream)space/time in the ever-present casuarinas or sheoaks that line its river’s banks’ (Somerville 2020: xi). Somerville cites Noel Nannup, Nungar Elder, who carefully explains how time and place merge with culture and nature: Every person is born in a catchment, so the rain falls, the water flows, so does spirit and they’re all intertwined, and as we move across land, we shed from the largest organ of our body, which is our skin and it falls to the soil . . . the skin would be taken down into soil through mycorrhizals and the vascular bundles of the sheoak trees and our DNA would be in the tree. Those trees will only grow where there is close surface water . . . the name we give those trees is kwell, the tree of our ancestors . . .. (Nannup in Somerville, 2020: xi)
Riparian ecotones
We leave the quietude of the river edge and let the canoe drift where it wants to go. We are swept along towards ecopedagogies that become larger than concepts, which spill out over the edges and pages, that flood like a river and create wetlands and bogs and marshes. These wetlands are in-between spaces where water and soil intermingle. The idea of ecotones has been used to describe these transitional spaces, and ecotones themselves seem to belong to ecopedagogies. Ecotones already made an appearance in critical environmental education three decades ago in a book titled
This is where the rocks in the river become a riverbed. Critical pedagogy, based on Freirean philosophy, argues for the radical reworking of educational practices to offer an additional disruptive current in the flow. Feminist ecophilosphies have made clear that disruption to deeply embedded nature/culture separation, steeped in Enlightenment philosophies that support patriarchal social, economic and political structures, is a core task for socially and ecologically just futures. Rather than working against each other, these diverse approaches to radical change converge as the canoe shifts from the river’s ecotones into the main current.
Rivers from where we write
For ecopedagogy, education is not something to be tinkered with at the edges, rather, it must be radically reimagined and redesigned to foster ecological literacy, critical consciousness, and provocative socio-environmental praxis. No easy task given the radical rejection of dominant worldviews required, upon which western education is based. Ecopedagogy advocates for experiential, place-based, and interdisciplinary learning that connects learners with their local environments and communities. It emphasises the importance of developing critical thinking, empathy, and a sense of connection in a more-than-human world. The radical disruption required asserts that education must play an active and leading role in the required transition towards more just and sustainable societies (Gruenewald, 2003; Orr, 1992). Such pedagogical currents inevitably mix with underlying streams of an interconnected and agential world. Gaard (2009: 333), for example, asserts the need for teaching not only ‘about’ the social and natural environment – but also critically ‘in’ and ‘through’ the social and natural environment. Such ecopedagogical guides for praxis reflect the mixing of side currents and possibilities for hope as we travel downstream.
Canoeing on a river involves somaesthetic experience. It provides a method for refining movements of awareness, experiencing being intertwined with the river’s currents, and developing an appreciation for the river’s textures as a concrete indicator of environmental connection. Such experiences do not begin or end; rather, they move forward and backward in time through embodied memory. The movement of a canoe on a river requires feeling the forces of the water through the paddle and responding with movement, guiding the canoe’s speed, angle, and tilt. Such responses are not the result of logical thought, rather, they rely on embodied experience of the world.
Educational movements, too, carry with them memories of previous events, places, and understandings. Writing from lutruwita/Tasmania we are reminded of previous river experiences and a campaign that helped shape environmental activism and politics. The Franklin River on the west coast of lutruwita/Tasmania holds palawa people’s continuity over tens of thousands of years, and ecology for millennia. Such histories that can be read and written back to. To paddle on the Franklin River, through one of the last temperate rainforests in the world is to be immersed in a riverscape of histories that can fundamentally alter one’s understanding of time and place. As Hay (2008) reflects: The river holds all of time within its flow. I’d once thought Europe old – that I lived in a young place, one lacking any thread to a deep, unfolding past. All its history ahead of it. I’d thought this until I came to the Franklin, until the ancient Gondwana forests reached over me, gathered me into time itself, and my life changed, my scale of things, and my understanding of what is right and what is wrong. (n.p.)
Forty years ago, the contemporary battle to save the Franklin River emerged onto the world stage to challenge and change ideas of what was possible in environmental conservation, providing a landmark environmental movement that influences ecopedagogy. The campaign against the proposed damming of the Franklin River for hydroelectric power generation became a pivotal moment in the global environmental movement, illustrating the power of grassroots activism in conserving natural landscapes. The campaign emerged as a battle between a government corporation determined to dam all Tasmanian rivers and provide power for unceasing economic growth – and conservationists on the other hand determined to stand up for the Franklin’s right to exist and for the well-being of future generations. The desperate and seemingly unlikely victory of the conservationists was to be a defining moment for environmental activism, the birth of the Green political movement, and a provocation for hope among environmentalists.
For many campaigners, more than 1400 of whom were arrested, their resistance to the proposed damming of the Franklin River was inspired by the place itself. Bob Brown and others paddled the river and were so profoundly moved that they could not comprehend a world in which the environmental violence of damming the river would be acceptable. The campaign was driven by activists inspired by the river, and with a desire to contribute towards the social and cultural change required to safeguard the existence of such places (see also, e.g., Arne Naess’ involvement in the campaign to save the Mardola River in Norway). The Franklin River campaign was rooted in a specific locality but had global implications and showed how local environmental issues are relevant to broader social concerns.
The movement to save the Franklin River was a desperate attempt to extend a socio-environmental justice argument into the public domain. The ecopedagogies of the battle included sustained grassroots activism (locally and across Australia), provocative visual eco-literacies (see for example, Dombrovskis, 1979), a focus on Indigenous lifeworlds (Griffiths, 2018), and a critical evaluation of the political and economic structures driving the project. It was an act of intense political action that empowered conservationists and re-shaped socio-environmental justice possibilities around the world. Such inspirations for justice resonate strongly in the development of ecopedagogies and continue to inspire educational practices that unpack, critique and actively challenge the politics of socio-environmental violence.
The Franklin River campaign marked a particular moment in time. A moment in which people responded to an unthinkable ecological violence. Just as then, we must now, as educators, find more urgent and radical responses that work to transform ecopedagogy into real-world action.
Riverscapes and pedagogy
Paddling on a river one can experience first-hand previous and future injustices. We can read not only the results of climate change, unabated development and the stripping of riverine resources, but also, we can read future changes of migratory bird patterns, mass fish kills, and the tragic death of rivers. Riverscapes themselves, as locations of more-than-human events offer opportunities to frame and provoke dialogues of justice. Rivers attract life and communities (inclusive of the more-than-human), drawn to rivers as sources of water, food, transport, and spiritual inspiration.
Rivers offer opportunities to experientially explore the social and environmental politics of violence. Stewart (2004), for example, highlights ways in which engaging with the Murray River in South-eastern Australia, in particular ways, offers ecopedagogical possibilities by contrasting two river journeys. Stewart compares the first possibility of what might be considered a more traditional form of outdoor education on a ‘wilderness’ section of the Murray River in which the focus is on canoeing and camping, with that of a second possibility of what might be described as a more typical human altered section of the Murray River that explores the river ‘as a place with a particular ecology, inhabitants, history, and a range of cultural understandings’ (p. 137). This second possibility provides conducive opportunities to engage with slower waters, Aboriginal histories, settler violence, human induced changes to river flow, declining river health, and a transport lock system. It is not to suggest the two possibilities are mutually exclusive, rather, Stewart highlights the pedagogical possibilities via these contrasting journeys. Thinking further with the Murray River as a site for ecological dialogue, Stewart (2018) later evokes the concept of assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) to consider the plight of the Murray Cod: Thinking with assemblage brought into ecopedagogical focus aspects of the river including the dynamic between the fish, ecological health of the riverScape, industrial agriculture, politics, bio-physical-cultural history, and how human activities, intentionally or otherwise, influence the life and circumstances of the riverScape inhabitants. (p. 137)
Riverscapes provide times and places for reconsidering educational approaches, and, as currents of socio-environmental justice mix with in-flows of post-human and new materialist theory, further provocations emerge (Jukes et al., 2021). Somerville (2020), motivated by ‘a sense of grief and the loss of local and global ecosystems and the escalating rate of species extinction’ (p. 15) enacts Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming’ to offer quotes as forms of poetry that entice engagement in the complexity of riverscapes. Through a series of walking encounters on the Hawkesbury Nepean River system she employs the ‘slow writing’ proposed by Deborah Bird Rose (Rose, 2013) to write back to the river and take readers on an embodied journey through local waterways. As well as bringing together Australian Aboriginal ways of knowing, and Deleuzian, posthuman and new materialist philosophy – it is hard, also, to avoid feeling ecopedagogical currents as the text pushes and pulls the reader towards possible futures.
Emerging onto the plains
Rivers are messy and full of life. They can be unpredictable, forceful, and productive. After spilling through the upper reaches of the river one can emerge onto the plains below. Some riverscapes spread into bogs and marshes mixing with muddy earth below, while others such as the Murray River in Australia, form unlikely splits known as anabranches as they (attempt to) flow to the sea. As we emerge onto the plains, the view from our canoe inevitably means we are unable to see clearly what lies ahead, but this is exciting too.
We carry with us the knowledge and embodied experience of having traversed the currents and rapids. Our attention has been held by the rocks, the in-flows, the disappearing corners and the riparian eco-tones. And, as one emerges onto the plains our attention is rested as we search across the plains for a hint of what lies below. We will continue to be drawn along by the flow and pushed and pulled by the currents – at times needing to paddle the still sections – yet the gathering rainclouds above might hint at a river not done with us yet.
River-writing towards a future
We have navigated the confluence of interdisciplinary ecopedagogies by imagining ourselves canoeing on a river, reflecting the collaborative insights of wild pedagogies and canoeing expertise, and feminist new materialist eco-thinking. The river is present as a dynamic entity, embodying the fluidity and relationalities of ecopedagogical practices and concepts. Our river-writing emphasises the possibilities of becoming ecoliterate by engaging with river ecologies and learning with more-than-human others who shape and sustain multi-species ecologies in and around the river.
This exploration underscores the critical and urgent shifting nature of rivers in a climate-impacted world, highlights the pedagogical possibilities of teaching in and with rivers, and advocates for an educational shift towards a more-than-human perspective that values the contributions of all beings in sustaining healthy ecosystems. By intertwining critical pedagogy’s emphasis on liberation and critical consciousness with environmental education, we aim to contribute to expanding the scope of socio-environmental justice to include planetary rights and well-being for all beings, human and more-than-human (Duhn, 2024).
What has been left un-said and un-explored in this text is the highly complex, messy and insolvable nature of the planet’s river health. Ecopedagogical approaches will not create the massive changes required across local and global scales, across convoluted and diverse cultural, social, economic and political systems to heal polluted rivers. What ecopedagogies can do is to rapidly increase eco-literacies that ensure humans are educated about their places and their environments and are able to engage with human and natural ecologies to create changes. Rivers can have rights, it is possible to integrate more-than-human voices into policies and actions (Strang, 2023). Ecopedagogies and ecoliteracies can make a difference in the world but this may very well be at a slow pace. Multilayered ecosystem regeneration takes more time than fossil fuelled hyper destruction. This is one of the many challenges: how to respond to fast-paced change when time scales are vastly different? Ecopedagogies encourage a response that says: let’s make a start. Step in, step up, step with care, be slow, but do it anyway. The doing is the change.
Through the act of river-writing, we experiment with the articulation of a responsive and imaginative engagement with rivers, drawing from the embodied experiences of canoeing to inform a deeper connection with, and understanding of, riverine landscapes. We argue for a radical reimagining of educational practices that prioritise ecological literacy, empathy and a relational understanding of the world. Ultimately, we hope to offer provocations for ecopedagogies that are as dynamic, complex, tame and wild, post colonised, post exploitative, impure and convoluted as the rivers we draw inspiration from; inspirations for ecoliteracies that respond to river-beings as they sustain diverse ecologies and nurture imaginings of lively, biodiverse and complicated futures in the face of ongoing environmental crises.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
