Cultivating the Ecological Conscience: Smith, Orr, and Bowers on Ecological Education Page: 30
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rationality." Sounding very much like Wendell Berry, who has made a useful distinction
between the "analytic mind" (calculating, unemotional, objective, atomistic) and the
"sympathetic mind" (subjective, spiritual, emotional, holistic), Orr believes that a fundamental
part of our problem is the general human habit, increasingly prominent since the scientific
revolution, of employing reason in an instrumental fashion that relegates qualities like
"creativity, humor, and wholeness" to the mental periphery.6 There is widespread preoccupation
with knowing how to do things and relatively little consideration given to why things happen or
ought to be done, which of course is highly problematic given that we "are capable of doing
many more things than intelligence would have us do." Unfortunately, Orr is correct in
observing that universities, which have misguidedly become (in Stan Rowe's words) "'know-
how'" rather than "'know-why'" institutions, regularly share the egregious but widely exhibited
"obsession to do whatever is possible regardless of whether it is desirable."7
Orr makes a helpful distinction between cleverness and intelligence. The former refers to
qualities of mind and character that enable us to figure out how to accomplish particular aims.
As "pure intellect" guided by no moral compass, cleverness, like reductionist thought, inclines
toward fragmenting things and chiefly focuses on the short term.8 It is typified by "the specialist
whose intellect and person have been shaped by the demands of a single function, what
Nietzsche once called an 'inverted cripple."'9 As, in Abraham Heschel's phraseology, "a
6 Ibid., p. 8.
7 Ibid., p. 49; David Orr, "Environmental Literacy: Education as if the Earth Mattered," in People, Land, and
Community: Collected E.F. Schumacher Society Lectures, ed. Hildegarde Hannum (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1997), p. 340; David W. Orr, "Reinventing Higher Education," in Greening the College Curriculum: A Guide
to Environmental Teaching in the Liberal Arts, ed. Jonathan Collett and Stephen Karakashian (Washington, D.C.:
Island Press, 1996), p. 12.
8Orr, Earth in Mind, pp. 11, 48, 49, 52; David W. Orr, interview in Listening to the Land. Conversations about
Nature, Culture, and Eros, ed. Derrick Jensen (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995), p. 25.
9 Orr, Earth in Mind, p. 30.30
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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/m1/35/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .