The Technics of Environmental Education

Overview & Synopsis

An ambivalent, sometimes destructive, relationship between modern humanity, technology and "outer" or external nature has historically attracted the critical attention of scholars and commentators from a wide variety of backgrounds. The effects of technology on postmodern "inner" nature warrants similar scrutiny. This article examines how technology structures human experience and is structuring education for sustainable development. Propositions about the "technics of experience" and questions for environmental education are posed so as to invite more earnest discussion about the inroads technologies and "vicarious" learning experiences are making into the equally unproblematic ontological treatment of postmodern learners/subjects. Consideration must be given to the question of what users of the technological medium "become"--an ontological issue of crucial relevance to the ongoing aspirations and legitimacy of environmental education. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table and 4 notes.) [Reprinted from "Environmental Education Research" (2003) 9(4), pp. 525-541.)