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Response to Bowers
The Nature of Political Amnesia:
A Response to C.A. Chet Bowers
DONNA HOUSTON
Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
PETER McLAREN
University of California, Los Angeles

It might almost be comforting to live in C. A. Chet Bowerss (author of How

Peter McLaren and Donna Houston, and Other Green Marxists Contribute to the
Globalization of the Wests Industrial Culture; Bowers 2005) world if it werent
so scary. After all, in Bowerss world everyone seems to know his or her place.
Critical pedagogues are cosmopolites educated in the decadent salons of Western
intellectual fashion, or indurant pedants who cant see past the nineteenth century
models of industrial capitalism, or inkhorns armed with philosophical formulae
and recherch theoretical ingredientsall of whom in some way or another act as
an academic cabal of high priests and priestesses, espousing their missionary
agendas of transformative education to anyone desperate enough to listen. Marxists (green, antiracist, feminist, Third World, or otherwise), apparently blind to the
comings and goings of much of the twentieth century as well as their own widely
varied histories and traditions, are woefully committed to the worst kind of economic, ecological, and cultural reductionism. Non-Western and indigenous peoples, in what only can be described as a reincarnation of the Noble Savage, are
expected to take time out of their ongoing struggle for cultural and economic survival to help White people in the so-called First World feel a bit better about their
complicity in the current global ecological and economic crisis. On the other side
of the natureculture interface, in the place we call nonhuman nature, birds are
chirping in the trees, and fish are swimming happily in the ocean (though admittedly now contaminated with organic and chemical compounds derived from fertilizers and industrial wastes). And even though global capital appears as a relentless juggernaut bearing down on humans and nonhumans alike, anyone who
actually criticizes this world-historical formation is accused of being one of its
principal adherents. Huh?

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Although it is certainly true that we do live in a world increasingly shaped by the

politics of environmental devastation, human and nonhuman immiseration, and economic polarization spurred on by the neoliberal agenda of free-market global capitalism, it is also clear that Bowers has a rather uncomplicated view of the historical
and economic processes underlying this new phenomena and its cultural, political,
and power effects. Indeed, unlike the world Bowers presents in his article, where the
true villains of ecological and cultural impoverishment are so comfortingly identifiable, the one in which the rest of us live is rather complicated, and no onenot birds,
Marxists, or non-Western peoplesare likely to remain in the categories to which he
has consigned them. In the paragraphs that follow, we offer a brief response to
Bowerss extraordinary rejoinder to our article Revolutionary Ecologies: Critical
Pedagogy and Ecosocialism (McLaren and Houston 2004) that we hope will serve
as a corrective to his obtuse and willfully misleading reading of our work as well as
clarify our original intention, which was not to engage with Bowerss oeuvre (although he seems to have mistakenly labored under this rather astounding assumption) but to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue between our respective fields of
political ecology, environmental justice, and critical education.
Having stated our aims, we find it difficult to know exactly where to begin in addressing the many erroneous assumptions Bowers makes in his rejoinder about the
importance of a dialogue between critical perspectives on education for the fields
of political ecology and environmental justice, and indeed, vice versa. Skimming
over the surface of critical pedagogy like a Hovercraft navigating a swamp, his
analysis (delivered in a tone that quakes with Olympian self-righteousness) either
overgeneralizes or cites ideas out of context, all the while ignoring our discussion
of environmental justice and political ecology. No doubt this was because it did not
fit into his preconceived idea about what green critical educators ought or ought
not do (this was also made particularly evident by his aggressive monological style
and frequent slippages in narration, where he referred to us in his original text as a
he!). Although it is difficult to read Bowerss blustering, fuel-injected tirades
without feeling that acrimony intensifies his own delectation, we will put the question of Bowerss tone and temper on hold and attempt to focus on his ideas.
Although we certainly do not believe our own ideas are beyond criticism and
concede fully that our discussion can only be further strengthened and critiqued by
what we hope will be a lively and sustained dialogue between red and green
perspectives in the field of education, it is also obvious that Bowers has been
blinded by the same glare of Enlightenment reasoning of which he is so disparaging. Indeed, since he bypasses in his own work the critical reflection and praxis
that he disdains as colonizing knowledge, he is prevented from seeing how easily
confounded he is by his own rhetoric. It is precisely Bowerss treatment of critical
consciousness as a form of cultural imperialism that leads him straight into a condition of what can best be described as political amnesia.

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Let us begin with his prevailing charge against both critical pedagogy and
Marxist perspectives (which he conveniently collapses together as way of minimizing their considerable theoretical differences) but which have in common a focus on transformative political praxis, as intentionally setting out to erase knowledge grounded in non-Western and indigenous cultural traditions. Indeed, what
gives Bowers the megrims and compels him to bloviate in his trademark fashion of
substituting substantive critique with flummery is critical pedagogys supposed attack on all things traditional. But what makes Bowerss work a form of reactionary
anti-imperialism is not his focus on conserving cultural and natural systems (we
agree that it is necessary to recognize what needs to be conserved and to discriminate between forms of conservatism that promote justice and those that perpetuate
injustice) but in his failure to offer more than a hidebound denunciation of critical
pedagogy as an ethnocentric critique that fails to comprehend the cultural roots of
ecological crisis (citing of course, his own work as the antidote).
Curiously enough, he identifies the cultural roots of the current ecological crisis
not within the long shadow of traditional knowledge cast by the canon of Western
reason but with modern industrial capitalism. This is a rather stunning move, in our
view, because in addition to not acknowledging the fact that many ideas about the
separation of humans and nature predate capitalism (although this notion is clearly
congenial to capitals daily operations and ideological production), it also ignores
a great deal of environmental history that teaches us that environmental destruction
wrought by human activity on the earths surface (though obviously not on the
scale we witness today) is not entirely a modern problem. For example, George
Perkins Marsh, considered by many to be the founding figurehead of the American
conservation movement, in his 1864 classic Man and Nature chronicled many historical case studies of environmental devastation. One of the most famous is his attribution of the loss of the agricultural productivity of soils due to erosion caused
by overfarming, deforestation, and irrigation as one of the leading factors in the decline of the Roman Empire. Perhaps even more ironically, in his overeager effort to
cast aspersions on Freire and Marx, Bowers also misses opportunities to get his critique of actually existing socialist regimes right. When he notes, for instance, that
industrial culture requires the autonomous individual and a consumer-oriented
culture, he leaves out the entire history of industrial culture promoted by Stalin and
Mao that negated the autonomous individual. Not only do Bowerss own categories fail miserably to account for ecological devastation in so-called socialist societies, but also he is either unwilling or unable to fathom Marxs most fundamental
ideas. For instance, Bowers assumes a technologicalreductionist interpretation of
Marx that we often see in critics who read about Marx and not works by Marx. If
Bowers had read Marx, he would know that Marx saw development as immanent
within the contextual specificity of the present and that, under certain conjunctural
conditions, it will burst forth. Thus, Marx did not regard the unfolding of history as
some kind of hidden destiny that is foreshadowed from time immemorial but rather

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the objective telos of the unfolding historical process that itself produces such
possibilities of human self-emancipation from the tyranny of the material base
which are by no means anticipated from the outset (Mszros 1986, 181).1
Not only does Bowers appear to be unaware of Marxs admiration (much
against the grain of the prevailing attitudes of his time) of the consciousness of
Australian Aboriginal groups, their spiritual materiality and their resistance of European missionaries, but he also accuses Marx of being a Social Darwinist when,
in fact, Marx wrote stinging attacks on Social Darwinism (see Hudis, 2000a,
2000b, 2003a, 2003b, n.d.). Bowerss detached regard for philosophical understanding is perhaps best seen, though, in his erroneous view that Marx accepts
that change is linear and inherently progressive in nature, leading to some future
industrial Cockaigne. Clearly he didnt get as far as he claimed in Ted Bentons
(1996) edited volume on ecological Marxism or he would have encountered Kate
Sopers excellent essay titled Greening Prometheus, which disabuses this
reductive theme in Marxs work. Significantly, by insisting wrongly that Marxists
and critical theorists wish to change everything about the world except themselves,
Bowers ignores the diversity of the historical and social critique that animate
Marxist categoriesincluding feminist, green, antiracist, and anti-imperialist perspectives.
Worse, because he does not have an adequately dialectical view of culture and social justice, Bowers seems to suggest that critical consciousness among indigenous
groups is antithetical to their traditional cultural formations. Whereas critical pedagogues (of all theoretical traditions) do not accept that critical consciousness is restricted to the West, Bowers seems to adopt a position that maintains that non-Western and indigenous groups are culturally stagnant and that they are incapable of
generating critical consciousness that allows them to prioritize their own social justice agendas for ecological and economic sustainability and that constitute a whole
range of collective knowledges, practices, and political repertoires, including strategic essentialisms (see Pulido 1996). Unlike Bowers, we do not assume that the foundations of critical consciousness and collective political action are indigenous to
Europe and not to non-Western societies. Neither do we solely place the burden of
solving the sheer enormity of ecological distress or the problems of racism, sexism,
and divisions in social class onto the worlds most exploited populations, who of
course are not responsible for the rapid dwindling of the natural global commons or
their increasing economic exploitation and commodification! Indeed, one of the
most one disturbing aspects of Bowerss whole argument is his partially submerged
moral encoding of what constitutes the traditional and the authentic with regard
to non-Western cultures in his critique of the pervasiveness of Western patterns of
consumption. Thus, while falsely accusing critical pedagogues and green Marxists
(or was it just us?) for engaging in verbal theatrics and entertaining lengthy silences
on important themes such as conservation, he himself seems quite content to engage
in a few rather revealing silences himself.

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This is particularly evident in a statement where he claims that the one source
of resistance to the further spread of industrial culture are the varied cultural and
environmental commons that have not been enclosed by patents, corporate and private ownership, monetization, and market forces (Bowers 2005). On the surface
this all seems fair enough, and on the surface, we do not disagree. There is of
course a great deal to learn from non-Western cultures, if, despite the several hundred years of colonial relationships with Western peoples that has resulted in the
theft of their land, cultural and ecological resources, and spiritual traditions, they
are still willing to teach us. Where we run into difficulties with this sort of reasoning (other than the fact that it rehearses a quest for origins and authenticity) is that it
also reinforces a rather confounding distinction between nature and culture. One
aspect of our argument in the Revolutionary Ecologies article that we painstakingly set forth was the importance of avoiding always looking to either real or
imagined pristine places when providing examples of environmental thought
and politics. This is a typical ahistorical maneuver of many green thinkers who
look to increasingly small patches of wilderness, and those who inhabit it, as being somehow completely outside of present social and environmental relations and
therefore more capable of generating solutions to the growing palimpsest of environmental problems (which of course is not to say that they are not, or that we
should ignore them).
None of this is to suggest that Bowerss obvious respect for cultural traditions that
affirm and foster sustainable environments and social reciprocity through alternative modes of land use and intergenerational knowledge is wrong. But we do ask
whether the coalition of minority community groups, social justice organizations,
artists, local politicians, government agencies, schoolchildren, and environmental
justice activists currently working to revitalize the Los Angeles River (a 51-mile
concrete ditch that is the centerpiece of one of the most modified and degraded watersheds in North America) are also not capable of generating environmental solutions. Are there not substantive ways in which historically and geographically situated communities can construct a collective environmental politics across the
naturesociety interface and across rural, urban, local, regional, and national boundaries that combine any number of critical and traditional practices? This is precisely
the reason we invited educators to also look at questions of environmental injustice
in schools, factories, mines, and toxic waste dumps, in rural and urban areas, in order
to develop a critical awareness of the scope of environmental politics and to build an
educational framework that David Gruenewald (2003) suggested examines the intersection between urbanization, racism, classism, sexism, environmentalism,
global economics and other political themes (6).
The difficulty with Bowerss reasoning is that in his efforts to inscribe a moral
presence for eco-pedagogy that is not grounded in historical materialism or political economy, or even critical cultural geographical analysis, his own rhetoric falls
victim to a discourse of pollution and contamination. His sheer dismay at the in-

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fecting properties of industrial culture is convincing enough, but he further compounds this by insisting that hyperconsumerism is the present historical villain
in the enclosure and colonization of the global commons. As Deborah Bird Rose
(2003) insightfully observed, to disallow certain classes of stories because they
appear to be tainted is already to fail to work toward decolonization (54). What
Bowers does not make clear is what happens to those traditional cultures already
contaminated by industrial capitalism and internal colonialism, or to those who
are at present policed by the policies of the North American Free Trade Agreement
or the World Trade Organization. Are these people then lost forever to the relentless forces of commodification and privatization that so characterize neoliberal
globalization? What happens, in Bowerss view, if people from traditional cultures
adopt nontraditional methods to resist such enclosures to their cultural and natural
commons, such as a scientific survey in order establish a baseline for community
health, or geographical information systems to map their territories, or the Internet
(which is arguably, despite its military origins and policed architecture, one of the
most significant advancements in the global cultural commons in our time) as a
strategy for political mobilization or for the sharing and dissemination of environmental knowledge? And although the Internet example clearly invites serious concerns about the nature of the digital divide and obvious questions of education
and access, we think is important to acknowledge the ways in which Bowerss apparent romanticization of the cultural and natural commons gets quite out of hand.
Furthermore, in his effort to establish a moral ontology for eco-justice based in cultural and ecological value but that ignores critical reflexivity and a historicalmaterial analysis of power, we are left wondering exactly what Bowers himself is indigenous to? In this regard, his conflation of a critique of Western industrial
culture and political economy with the transmission of its most destructive values
leaves him in a rather curious position.
Indeed, one of the most powerful contributions of the field of political ecology
for educators interested in environmental politics is that it avoids these sorts of pitfalls precisely because it recognizes that the environment is an arena of contested
entitlements, a theater in which conflicts and claims over property, assets, labor,
and the politics of recognition play themselves out (Peluso and Watts 2001, 25).
Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts further explain that one the strengths of a political ecology has been its careful documentation of a panoply of differentiated
actors (including households, nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] social
movements, communities, capitalist enterprises, and state agents and their institutional networks) and the ways in which they operate in historically and culturally
constituted fields of power (2001, 25).
Let us be clear: The point we wish to drive home is that understanding the underlying historical and economic causes of our present global environmental crisis
cannot be reduced to being simply a problem of Western cultural consumption (although it is obviously a major contributing factor). This is not to say that the chau-

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vinistic and racist Western cultural attitudes that have historically undermined,
marginalized, and erased the intrinsic value of indigenous knowledge systems,
patterns of land use, and spiritual beliefs have not been a central actor in a whole
long and bloody history of genocidal and ecocidal acts. Take the case of the Western Shoshone people, who can claim to be one of the most bombed nations on
earth, as their traditional lands encompass those parts of the Great Basin occupied
by the Nevada Test Site and more recently the proposed site for the desert burial of
the nations high-level nuclear waste. The imposition of radioactive colonial racism on the Western Shoshone certainly has as much to do with the attempted erasure of an Indian presence in a sacred landscape that dominant Western ways of
seeing have characterized as a desert wasteland as it has to do with the need for
economically and militarily powerful nations such as the United States to create
national sacrifice areas for their industrial and military detritus (see Kuletz 1998).
To suggest, as Bowers (2005) does, that those who are concerned with the interconnections among environmental justice, political ecology, and critical pedagogy
are incapable of supporting traditional knowledge systems or of standing in solidarity with indigenous groups in their struggle for sovereignty, cultural awareness,
and economic self-determination is, quite simply put, absurd. This is particularly
astounding given critical educations emphasis on what might be considered nontraditionaltraditional knowledge in the classroom, such as testimonio, oral histories, social justice case studies, and literature written by minorities (for further
reading on this topic, we suggest looking at Adamson, Evans and Steins [2002]
wonderful edited collection The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics
and Pedagogy, which comprises a rich and varied discussion). Moreover, we agree
with Rose (2003), that one of the responsibilities of those who claim a settler heritage (i.e. the nonindigenous peoples of North America, New Zealand, and Australia) is that such work can only be achieved in collaboration with the indigenous
peoples whose lives bear the imprint of colonizing violence (53). For the most
part, this kind of intersubjective dialogue requires more listening than talking,
and it also challenges the ways in which cultural traditions of environmental
knowledge are framed and policed in the contexts of environmental crisis (Rose
2003, 53). Calling for collective political action to transform the unjust social and
economic relations of imperialism and neoliberal capitalism and its historical war
on the poor, racial minorities and the environment does not require, as Bowers
would have it, the perpetual transformation of all the worlds diversity into a
Borg-like (think Star Trek) technocratic utopia whereby the worlds most exploited
people can experience the comfort of a culturally dominant collective if they would
only agree to give up the last vestiges of their cultural and spiritual distinctiveness
into a social whole of unfettered connectivity.
In our view, such a perspective slides over the ways in which what Giovanna
DiChiro calls the common language of the commons is also subject to political
discourse (2003, 205). Far from being timeless and unchanging, indigenous envi-

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ronmental frameworks critically inform the transformative contexts of collective

environmental struggles precisely because of their firsthand experience of poisoned rivers, depleted soils, over-logged forests, polluted air and environmental
illnesses (DiChiro 2003, 205). However, despite all of this, it is Bowerss charge
that exponents of critical pedagogyand, along with them, green Marxists, or
anyone else for that matter who disagrees with himcolonizes the commons with
universalistic god-words and clichs that work against the self-sufficiency of
indigenous groups and retards their revitalization in the process. The centerpiece
of this, of course, is the argument that all that is bad about critical pedagogy can be
laid at the feet of its peccant father, Paulo Freire, whose work amounts, in Bowerss
view, to little more than a cultural imperialist assault from the south. To be sure,
from a green perspective there are a number of themes in Freires work that are
worthy of critique (see Kahn 2003). However, instead of acknowledging the significant concrete contributions Freire has made in helping create some conditions that
oppressed people found to be important in liberating themselves, and the way in
which his work might be productively critiqued, Bowers chooses to ascribe a set of
subjective motives to him. Thus, instead of regarding the legacy of a courageous
man (whether one agrees with him or not), who spent seventy days in prison and
sixteen years in self-imposed exile standing up for the poor and for those whose
voices had historically been erased and marginalized, Bowers claims that Freire
was really motivated by more personal concerns such as that his royalty payments were being ripped off in certain countries (Bowers 2005).
Not only has Bowers recycled the same pervicacious critique of critical pedagogy for decades (which would be understandable if critical pedagogy had remained frozen in time), but in misprizing its Marxist dimensions (which are not as
readily embraced by all critical pedagogues), he has misunderstood the dialectical
theory and humanism that undergirds its most radical formulationsa dialectical
humanism that speaks to an ethics of relation across the naturesociety interface
that includes innovation, conservation, inhabitation, revitalization, and of course,
change. Ensorcelled by the mistaken assumptions he has harbored for so long
about Marxism, Bowers prolongs his own ignorance about the fundamentals of
Marxs work for critiquing the historical and economic processes behind escalating ecological devastation and for recognizing the power of collective political action and cooperative social struggle for local, regional and global environments. In
our article, we proposed that a modest template for a dialectics of justice as it is
shaped through the politics of the environment (see Low and Gleeson 1998) might
allow us to illuminate the relationship between environmental justice (which entails the uneven distribution of harmful and unjust environments among people)
and ecological justice (justice toward nonhuman nature) as a way of framing the
many different forms that environmental politics take (McLaren and Houston
2004). In doing so, it was our hope to offer a slight corrective to overemphasizing
the role of locality and place as an antidote to all the problems of industrialization

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and globalization and instead suggesting that a critical pedagogy attuned to political ecology and the production of geographical scale may offer a partial resolution
to this complex issue.
At the end of the day, the tragedy here of course that we may have found some
more common ground with Bowers if not for his insistence on boiling everything
down to a linguistic struggle over whether the word transform or the word conserve is the most appropriate political term. After all, although we take his point
that the word transform is not always applicable to all possible discussions about
education or the environment, surely Bowers must also acknowledge that neither is
the word conserve. For example, as Bina Agarwal (2000) noted, there are times
when poverty and starvation can limit a communitys ability to adequately conserve its communal resourcesand that this is not a cultural decision but a matter
of survival. Finally, by presenting this dilemma as an eitheror question, Bowers
cannot account for the very real sense in which collective community projects that
are concerned with conserving, reclaiming, restoring, and revitalizing degraded
ecological commons often construct their labor as transformative politics (efforts
to restore the Los Angeles River to health is one such example that ties together naturesocietyjustice themes, such as sustainable watershed management and flood
control; the ecological importance of conserving riparian corridors for encouraging the biodiversity of nonhumans; the social and economic justice implications of
neighborhood revitalization for poor communities; and the need for green space
and healthier environments in heavily developed, polluted, and park-deprived urban areas). Ultimately, by reducing such complex issues to a set of trivial matters,
what Bowers (2005) offers is a misleading argument that maligns the political,
economic, and cultural struggles of many committed global citizens (himself included) on this planet who are from diverse historical backgrounds and who share
in a collective vision for their local places and for the places of all other people and
life formsthat of an ecologically and socially just future.

Note
1. Marxisthumanist scholar Peter Hudis, who has written brilliantly about the cultural and
political roots of Marxs alleged Eurocentrism, posed a central question: whether the central concepts that defined Hegel or Marxs thought are fundamentally opposed to the internal dynamic and development of non-European societies. Hudis argued that studying the
philosophic traditions that have unfolded in the non-Western world will support the view
that the dialectical mode of thinking that was universalized by Hegel into a philosophic system has roots within non-European societies, including in the Middle East. In fact, the bulk
of Marxs writings on non-Western societies do not support the view that Marx held to a
unilinear concept of historical progress that emanated from Europe (e.g., the Islamic Abu
Yaqub al-Sijistani, a member of the Ismaili underground missionthe dawa, as it is
known in Arabicthat operated in the Iranian province of Khurasan and Sijistan during the
tenth century, was the first to use the term negation of the negation in extant philosophic literature (see Hudis n.d.). Bowers would do well to explore Marxs Notebooks on
Kovalevsky, which he wrote in the fall of 1879 (keeping in mind that the bulk of Marxs

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Notebooks was published in 1975 as an appendix to Lawrence Kraders The Asiatic Mode of
Production; the full text, which is over 100 pages long, was published in German in 1977 by
Hans-Peter Harstick as Karl Marx ber Formen vorkapitalistischer Produktion:
Vergleichende Studien zur Geschichte des Grundeigentums 18791880) and to study
Marxs writings on Russia in the 1870s and 1880s, especially since Marxs studies of India,
Indonesia, and the Muslim world from this period remain little known or discussed.

References
Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein. 2002. The Environmental Justice
Reader: Politics, Poetics and Pedagogy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Agarwal, Bina. 2000. Conceptualizing Environmental Collective Action: Why Gender
Matters. Cambridge Journal of Economics 24:283310.
Benton, Ted, ed. 1996. The Greening of Marxism. New York: Guildford.
Bowers, C. A. 2005/this issue. How Peter McLaren and Donna Houston and Other Green
Marxists Contribute to the Globalization of the Wests Industrial Culture. Educational
Studies 37:185195.
Di Chiro, Giovanna. 2003. Beyond Ecoliberal Common Futures: Environmental Justice,
Toxic Touring, and a Transcommunal Politics of Place. In Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, edited by Donald S. Moore, Jake Kosek, and Anand Pandian,
204232. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Gruenewald, David A. 2003. The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place. Educational Researcher 32:312.
Harstick, Hans-Peter, ed. 1977. Karl Marx ber Formen vorkapitalistischer Produktion.
Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.
Hudis, Peter. 2000a. Can Capital Be Controlled? News and Letters Online,
http://www.newsandletters.org/4.00_essay.htm
. 2000b. The Dialectical Structure of Marxs Concept of Revolution in Permanence, Capital and Class 70:127142.
. 2003a. The Future of Dialectical Marxism: Towards a New Relation of Theory and
Practice. Paper presented at Rethinking Marxism Conference. Presented at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on November 6, 2003.
. 2003b. Organizational Responsibility for MarxistHumanism in Light of War,
Resistance, and the Need for a New Alternative. Report to National Plenum of News
and Letters Committees.
. Forthcoming. Marx Among the Muslims. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
Kahn, Richard. 2003. Paulo Freire and Eco-Justice: Updating Critical Pedagogy for the
Age of Ecology Calamity. http://www.paulofreireinstitute.org/freireonline/volume1/
kahn1.html
Kuletz, Valerie. 1998. The Tainted Desert: Social and Environmental Ruin in the American
West. New York: Routledge.
Low, Nicholas, and Brendan Gleeson. 1998. Justice, Society and Nature: An Exploration in
Political Ecology. London: Routledge.
Marsh, George Perkins. [1864] 1965. Man and Nature, edited by David Lowenthal. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.
McLaren, Peter and Donna Houston. 2004. Revolutionary Ecologies: Critical Pedagogy
and Ecosocialism. Educational Studies 36:2744.
Mszros, Istvan. 1986. Philosophy, Ideology and Social Science: Essays in Negation and
Affirmation. New York: St. Martins Press.
Peluso, Nancy Lee, and Michael Watts. 2001. Violent Environments. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press.
Pulido, Laura. 1996. Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in
the Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

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Rose, Deborah Bird. 2003. Decolonizing the Discourse of Environmental Knowledge in

Settler Societies. In Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, edited
by Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke, 5372. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield,
Soper, Kate. 1996. Greening Prometheus: Marxism and Ecology. In The Greening of
Marxism, edited by Ted Benton, 81102. New York: Guildford.

Correspondence should be addressed to Peter McLaren, Division of Urban

Schooling, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies; University of
California, Los Angeles; Los Angeles, California. E-mail: mclaren@gseis.ucla.edu

More Than One Profound Truth:

Making Sense of Divergent Criticalities
DAVID A. GRUENEWALD
Washington State University

As someone who deeply respects the critical work of both Chet Bowers and Peter McLaren, I am saddened to see them insulting each other once again in print.
This is especially disappointing for me because I, along with guest coeditor Kate
Wayne, invited Bowers and McLaren to submit articles for publication in the special issue of Educational Studies on Education and Eco-Justice (vol. 36, no. 1).
Our hope, then, and I still hold onto it today, was that engaging both Bowers and
McLaren in the task of articulating an emerging pedagogyan eco-justice pedagogy that is responsive to the expanded notion of justice demanded by the recognition of the interrelationship among culture, economics, and environmentwould
help move the conversation about environment, culture, and education more toward the forefront of our field. As they had skirmished before (Bowers, 1991; McLaren, 1991), we knew that inviting McLaren and Bowers to the same party was
risky. The tension between them was sure to be dynamic, possibly even creative of
some new ideas. Seeing enormous value and even much common ground in both
authors groundbreaking work, we hoped that placing their ideas side by side
would show readers new to eco-justice just how complex, imminent, and all-encompassing the issues are. We wanted to urge readers to pay attention to ideas that
are too often ignored.
Too often ignored in educationand in all of academeis the fact that culture
and environment, or humans and nature, are inextricably connected and that our
educational policies, structures, practices, theories, traditions, and academic
journals1 continue to operate as if this were not the case. Bowerss vast body of
work can be read as the seminal attempt in education to correct the silence toward