Cultivating the Ecological Conscience: Smith, Orr, and Bowers on Ecological Education Page: 32
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things that is ironically unskeptical, which is to say, unscientific, about science itself and the
larger social, political, economic, and ecological conditions that permit science to flourish in the
first place."' 4 It fosters the mistaken belief that technology is socially and ecologically neutral. 5
Orr notes George Woodwell's use of the word hyperobjectivity to name scientists' pretensions to
objectivity, which Woodwell calls "the epitome of unreasonableness," and the acceptance of
which contributes to environmental destruction and "destroys the credibility of science and
scientists as a source of simple common sense."16
One of the major tasks to which the educational establishment must contribute is what we
could call the humanization of science. The preservation of species and environments, Orr
writes, will require a wider notion of science and a comprehensive rationality that links empirical
knowledge with "the same emotions that make us love and sometimes fight." Philosopher Karl
Polanyi, Orr notes, called this "personal knowledge," or understanding that brings to bear a
broader "range of human perceptions, feelings, and intellectual powers than those presumed to
be narrowly 'objective.'""'7 Humanizing science necessitates linking it with the emotion of love.
Concerning doing so, Orr expresses an intriguing if debatable point of view. Wisdom, he argues
"is always motivated by love," which is "defined as much by what it doesn't do and will not do
as by what it does." But education largely neglects to discuss this point. "That concerns me.
We are unable to connect the most powerful human emotion, love, with our most powerful
activity, science. That's not a small part of the crisis around us."'8
14 Orr, Earth in Mind, p. 45.
15 David W. Orr, "The Limits of Nature and the Educational Nature of Limits," Conservation Biology 12 (1998):
747.
16 Orr, Earth in Mind, p. 72.
17 Ibid., p. 31.
18 Orr, Listening to the Land, p. 25.32
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Hoelscher, David W. Cultivating the Ecological Conscience: Smith, Orr, and Bowers on Ecological Education, thesis, December 2009; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12133/m1/37/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .