Environmental Crisis Highlights Western Culture of Denial

By C. A. Bowers

Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. 1997

Pbk. US$18.95. Pp. 276.

In the high profile milieu of political and economic wrangling, with public relations and image-making defining the terms of debate, deeper problems were obscured or distorted. But proceeding from the assumption that the ecological crisis is at bottom a cultural crisis, some environmentalists and activists have challenged the very terms of the debate. In 'The Culture of Denial,' C. A. Bowers asks hard questions about the nature of culture, and asserts that people living the modernist Western lifestyle, and Americans in particular, are participating is a culture that is in denial regarding major environmental issues. Bowers takes this argument even further, by insisting that schools and universities perpetuate this culture of denial, and that, implicitly, 'all education is environmental education.'

Public schools and universities have not recognized that by advancing a particular knowledge system, they are actually sorting knowledges into different qualitative categories. High status knowledge, according to Bowers, is that which is favored by the modernist educational system and is primarily concerned with technological progress and economic growth. Low status knowledge, on the other hand, is generally excluded from view and refers to that which does not promote the modernist system. Many still-vibrant revealed religions and non-Western traditional cultures, especially those that teach material constraint and living harmoniously within an ecosystem, are by definition low status in the modernist educational scheme.

Educational institutions reinforce behavior that is pervasive in consumer society. Bowers discusses how the American corporate media also promote a message that equates 'modern' and 'progressive' with a consumer lifestyle and technological advancement. Media coverage of local knowledges, especially those that have coherent and workable visions of ecologically sound living, are virtually non-existent. Bowers argues that many Western-oriented societies share a conceptual matrix that denies the ecological impact of their taken-for-granted cultural beliefs and practices, irrespective of the surface political debates that busy them. He argues that it is not only toxins and pollutants that destroy living ecosystems; the real culprits are Western and modernists behaviors, values and beliefs.

With the advent of satellite television, Western corporations and their local proxies advertise the modernist way of life to the world, or to those parts that can afford the equipment. This makes sense because Western civilization has largely lost sight of its identity, and has come to rely on advertisement and fantasy fulfillment to define what is important, and to create a sense of self and society. To the extent that people take this lifestyle for granted, corporate media images distort concepts of what is needed for a wholesome and fulfilling lifestyle.

At bottom, people need fresh air, clean water, and healthy food, yet on the surface they think they also need computers and automobiles. Bowers shows that this puts people into a 'double-bind,' in which one set of needs causes problems with another set. Western consumer culture is obsessed with fulfilling its glittering desires and wants, but disregards the broader ecological implications of its lifestyle. The necessary connections are obscured by Western educational systems, which generally promote the assumptions and values of consumerism.

Bowers tries to show that Western educational systems reinforce the cultural beliefs that contribute to environmental destruction. American public schools, for example, provide students with only the 'romantic aspects of the ideology of modernism.' Bowers shows that universities provide students with a narrow, disciplinary and compartmentalized view of life that creates a mythic ambiguity around modernist culture.

High school students are primed to enter the world of high status knowledge because they receive a very limited knowledge base with which to make meaningful decisions. This creates a sort of class system that is less economic and more conceptual in nature, yet which keeps people focused on their own narrow economic interests by way of competitive job markets for high status knowledge. Some one receiving a university education is usually provided with nothing more than the tools and ideology to develop more efficient means of destroying the natural world, in the guise of economic progress and technological advancement.

Bowers challenges the high status, low context version of education promoted by Western university systems, since they ignore the broader ecological implications of the knowledge systems and cultural practices they promote. He argues instead for a more balanced approach to education, which would produce a culture of awareness about how society is dependent upon nature. In fact, Bowers seems to be calling for an overall more balanced way of life for Westerners, and advocates a society in which people are aware of how they are impacting their environment and how their present practices narrow options for the future.

Following discussions of technology, in which he develops their cultural embeddedness, Bowers turns his attention to the role of language in reinforcing the culture of denial. He believes that language encodes reality into cultural beliefs, and that culture shapes every aspect of a people's thought and behavior. Accordingly, education can either reinforce or dismantle a cultural system by way of the language it uses. Western educational systems lack any sort of awareness of the cultural and linguistic basis of the ecological crisis, and promote instead a haphazard and absent-minded relationship to the environment. For Bowers, the key to solving the ecological crisis lies in reforming education, so he next turns his attention to the present day environmental movements in the West, focusing on what they can say about educational reform.

Reform efforts advanced by environmental groups have fallen short in understanding the total scope of the problems they claim to address. One difficulty, as Bowers points out, is in their tendency to fragment ecological diversity into specific political causes. While the environmental movement is made up of a wide range of interest groups, many of them deal only with specific environmental problems and fail to consider how broader cultural assumptions are causal factors, and how these assumptions are perpetuated by education. Bowers believes that a major cause of this dysfunction is that the environmentalists rely on many of the same modernist assumptions as that they claim to be fighting, especially those assumptions regarding uses of science and technology. He insists that environmentalists develop more coherent and broad strategies for educating people on the implications of the ecological crisis.

To advocate environmental awareness seems passe nowadays. Even the American vice president, Al Gore, claims to be an environmentalist. Many corporations claim to have environmental policies, and advocate a program of 'wise use.' But these are nothing more than hegemonic co-optations of a problem that is not well understood. Bowers goes a long way toward unpacking the problems with pseudo-environmental awareness, and by identifying the very real ecological crisis as a cultural crisis, he challenges all those who claim to be environmentalists to rethink their foundational cultural assumptions. For others, the book should be a wake up call that Western civilization is no longer viable, which ought to give pause for reflection on tenable and sustainable alternatives.