Teaching and Learning in the Age of Climate Change: Postcolonial Ecofeminism and the Rhetorics of Sustainability

Introduction

Severe droughts have affected many countries during the last few decades and have increased in severity all across the globe over the last few years. In 2022, an out-of-control wildfire in the eastern part of Spain burned more than 47,000 acres, with strong winds making it difficult to control the fire. In August 2022, The Associated Press (AP) reports, “wildfires in Spain have burned four times more land than they did during the last decade” (AP, 2022). Western Europe's most important waterway, the Rhine river, has seen decreasing water levels that make it “too shallow for many ships to pass” which, according to Rob Schmitz (2022), is “a problem for a country that depends on the river for 80% of its water freight” (Schmitz, 2022). Because of the drought in southwestern China, farmers have “lost half its vegetable crop in heat as high as 41 degrees Celsius (106 Fahrenheit)” and it “has shrunk the giant Yangtze River and wilted crops across central China” (Schiefelbein, 2022). In other parts of the world, flooding destroys lives and livelihoods, animals, and homes. South Korea’s record rainfall in Seoul, for example, has led to several deaths, has devastated many neighborhoods and has left people homeless (Bae & Yeung, 2022). In addition, NASA’s report on the driest place in North America, Death Valley, shows that a “thousand-year rainfall event dropped 75 percent of the local average annual rainfall” (NASA, 2022).

The many climate-related disasters, and the crisis surrounding environmental protection and justice efforts provided a starting point for exploring the important role of teaching and learning in the age of climate change. This chapter shows that education for sustainable development needs to move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries in order to promote communication practices that not only emphasize transition and betweenness, but that transcend current definitions of disciplines to create sustainable solutions to existing problems. Such writing and communication practices are necessary, I show, to contribute to 21st century solutions to such monumental issues as increased migration due to conflict, persecution, and natural disasters; food insecurity across the globe; the erasure of economic, social, cultural, gender, civil, and political rights; and pandemics that know no borders.

I expand on Kenneth Burke’s (1965, 1966, 1969) theory of transcendental redefinition to establish the importance of going beyond – transcending – “terministic screens” that determine how we see reality, or, in this case, how we see disciplinary fields and the communication strategies used in those fields. I include Javier Echeverría’s (1999) concept of epistemopolis – a concept that takes into account new social spaces where “a plurality of diverse activities … overlap and interact with each other” – where the “third environment” moves beyond currently established communication frameworks and requires the transcendental redefinition discussed by Burke. I argue that an understanding of transcendental redefinition and epistemopolis is necessary to situate current discussions on transdisciplinarity (Alvargonzález, 2011; Angelstam, 2013; Bernstein, 2015; Hall, 2018; Klein, 2004; Mauser, 2013; Max-Neef, 2005; Nicolescu, 2010; Osborne, 2015) and postcolonialism and ecofeminism (Banerjee, 2016; Carlassare, 2000; Gaard, 2017; Huggan & Tiffin, 2015; Mies & Shiva, 1993; Plumwood, 2004) within the larger theoretical framework of how language constructs knowledge, limits knowledge, and, if we transcend the limitations of our terministic screens, pushes knowledge in new directions by redefining, blending, and expanding existing boundaries.