Ours is not an
ecologically-attuned civilization. Despite the professed, fairly widespread
public acceptance of the need for environmental consciousness and action,
still the sense of separation between humans and their natural/artifactual
environments persists, in ignorance or denial of a co-evolutionary view
that would enable us to understand the dynamic interrelationships between
persons and contexts.
The media or communications
ecology presents the same sorts of blind spots to understanding and barriers
to responsive and responsible action. Our greatest technological faith
is in the saving grace of the ‘technological fix’. The notion acknowledges
that introducing and embracing technologies may create environmental problems
along with benefits and advantages; but the corollary is that any environmental
problems will be resolved by further developments of technologies to address
the difficulties.
Norbert Weiner’s
point involves a related, but often overlooked, point: that technological
environments are enabling but also constraining factors in the expression
of human freedom and agency. Philosopher William Barrett (1979) develops
the insight in this way:
What is the point of building the New Jerusalem, so far as the material [technological] environment is concerned, if the mankind [sic] you drag into it still carries the same old Adam with it? If you are to engineer everything else, why leave human beings out? (p. 232).
Remediation can incline
towards re-engineering, and re-engineering can threaten to shape humans
according to the environment of their machines rather than vice versa.
The most compelling insurance against this possibility that philosophers
of technology have derived is to continue developing a complex understanding
of humans as the language-creating species along with developing technological
environments that program language, sometimes in ways that can undermine
its creative character.
During the upcoming
semester, I will offer a recently-planned, graduate-level course, ESCI
572: Environmental Communications, for the second time. This sub-field
of communication is grounded in technical communication; and, given its
constituency, which consists of student-scientists in the Master of Environmental
Science Program, the course privileges modes of communication that convey
scientific arguments persuasively, efficiently, and effectively. At the
same time, I extend discussions of languages to include the way in which
technical language intersects with the languages of popular culture and
of personal life to convey a sense of what environmental science can offer
to human society. In addition, I introduce Jurgen Habermas’ theories of
dialogue to suggest how culture (the meanings we circulate), society (the
statuses we occupy), and personality (the identities we develop) all contribute
to our unfolding environmental destiny.
During this same
period, I have participated in two list-serves that focus on discussions
of environmental communication, as a field of study and as an applied professional
area. Through one of these subscriptions, I was able to enter into an e-conference
on environmental communications that drew participants from around the
globe, discussing international perspectives on the challenges facing environmental
communicators.
The conception of
the “language arts" that comes across in these theoretical and applied
presentations is certainly a university-level paradigm. I do believe it
is one that could interest educators at other levels, particularly those
who are interested in seeing where their students may someday be headed
in their studies. MITTEN has attracted school teachers of this quality
and should continue to do so. It is worth considering how the conversations
in which we engage together can cover a wider portion of the terrain of
contemporary education, including somewhat recondite areas of higher education.