In environmental education, there are many attempts to posit theoretical and practical villains and angels. By this, I mean that it is often asserted that if only we did or did not think a certain way, or did or did not practice a certain kind of pedagogy, that a solution to the ecological crisis could be reached. Many of those who question the ‘efficacy’ of education will tacitly agree with such positing, because for them there are practical measures that can be taken (say at a policy level, etc.) and it is simply the case that the angels and villains lie outside the domain of curriculum or pedagogy.
One strategy I employ to refuse such dualistic thinking is to show how an exploration of either the angel side or the villain side of the binary shows contradictions within itself. It is my belief that attending to these contradictions is important, not to try and achieve some larger noncontradictory position, which I consider impossible, but rather to look for opportunities, transformations, and invite cautious humility. While my position may be seen as dangerous from a dualistic point of view, insofar as it seems to take the fuel out of the engines of the activist, I argue this ambiguity is necessary to avoid reproducing the very issues we are concerned with under a different guise. Most obviously, many environmental educators call out ‘dualism’ itself as the major theoretical ’cause’ of the ecological crisis, but seem unconcerned about the way the very same logic frames their diagnoses and prescriptions.
For example, let’s consider the argument that nature reveals itself through direct encounters in lived experience, but is obscured through other modes of interaction such the sciences. One version of this idea holds that pure science focuses on abstract generalities that occlude the ongoing and unique arising of nature, while applied sciences assume a predictable world that can be manipulated in predictable ways and therefore occlude the ways in which people and nature both change and are changed by reciprocal interaction. The idea is that the more we treat the world in these ways, the more we will continue to see only generalities and generic applications, whereas if we spent more time engaging with nature through encounters in lived experience, the more tutorage we would have on its ways which would be a corrective to this trend.
However, both pure and applied science implode from within, just as the solution of lived experience is revealed as unstable when itself interrogated. When considering science, we see that the harder its advocates attempt to concoct general claims about phenomena and their applications, the more nature shows itself as defying them. This shows up in outliers, exceptions, probability, side effects, mutations, wobbly planets, phenotypic plasticity, and many other violations of presumedly determinate understanding. However, on the side of lived experience, we see the very tendencies called out as problematic to be tacitly at work. Consider how even the artist and improviser of the most subtle relations with the more-than-human must nevertheless inductively generate pattern recognition, deduce possible implications, and use these to guide actions, as part of they interact. They are baked into perception, thinking, and action itself, not as the opposite of responsiveness but as risky yet potent conditions for its possibility. We also see inklings of such ‘scientific’ thinking in the desire to pin down certain scientific practices or beliefs as ‘the’ cause, and to ‘apply’ a solution to it (see Affifi 2023 ). And so, while I certainly believe we should spend more time perceiving and participating in nature in the rich multisensory space called ‘lived experience’, I argue this is only one of several domains in which environmental educators should orient their work.
When we interrogate an angel vs villain narrative, we often find that (despite itself) there is a hidden angel in the cracks of the villain’s power, just as there is (again despite itself) furtive villains surrounding the angel’s motivations. From an ecological point of view, these internal contradictions are not permanently and comprehensibly resolvable because internal tensions are constitutive of all ecological processes. Stability is itself a feature of internal tensions, such as arises in ‘dynamic equilibrium’, but is never assured nor permanent (Levins and Lewontin, 1987). Recognising the contradictions within each side of the alleged dualism might change the way in which we attend to our opponents, work on ourselves, dialogue with others, and look out for new angels and villains (as ever it seems we must) as our conditions change or our understanding of the situation develops. This dialectical lesson is expressed elegantly by McGowan (2019), who states that “[t]hose we imagine as enemies most often turn out to be versions of ourselves (which doesn’t eliminate the need for fighting them but just changes the conditions of the fight)” (p. 13).
One shift it entails is to realise that if we choose to adopt a dualism, that it is strategic rather than ontological. Realising this also confronts us with the fact that such strategies require sustaining an awareness of how the dualism may be leading us astray in our politics and ethics. It means not taking it so seriously when one rallies behind it, but instead seeing it as a limited and potentially dangerous tool – one that blinds us to shortcomings on one side and opportunities on the other. But it also means asking whether this strategic deployment is even appropriate and what circumstances instead call us to sit in the space of contradiction and open to what it can teach.
I suppose when different people consider these matters, they may make different judgements about the relative appropriateness of different positions. Although the ecologising perspective I advocate would insist (at a meta-level) that any position may play a role, which is to be determined by how it interacts with other roles and concrete contexts, this does not mean that I don’t think there is a place to hedge a bet in a specific way. And so my own non-metalevel approach (as the meta-level can only take us so far until its truths also obfuscate us) is that the awareness that positions are intrinsically contradictory leads to erring on the side of nonviolent approaches to relationships with others. I think this follows from the realisation that those we villainise may have aspects of value we can learn from, while those we identify with as good have hidden harms. This attitude aligns with the approach advocated in the Sermon on the Mount, by Tolstoy, by Gandhi, by Buddhists, and MLK, amongst countless others, that we focus on loving others and working on ourselves insofar as we have obstacles preventing such love. (for more on [[dialectics and nonviolence]])
One obvious objection is that while it might be beneficial to love other humans, it makes sense to separate them from their acts. We can villainise an act and it is dangerous not to. The view taken here, however, maintains that as long as those acts have occurred, they are part of the world, and we need to retroactively learn from them. This includes not only recognising their harm, which we are after all fighting against, but also what unintended or unanticipated side effects those acts may have that can be recognised and rendered a positive ground for our next steps. Note that this retroactive reconciliation does not make any claims about the future and does not justify sustaining past harm. Because the past is given and the future is indeterminate, we must have different attitudes towards how we make sense of them [[making sense of the future vs the past]]. When we treat the past as something we would like to change, and the future as inevitable, we mix things up. The result can be very deactivating. But this too, for reasons that are obvious by now, is not a blanket proclamation because making it so is to treat out future interactions with the future and the past in a determinate way, and there may be times when regret towards the past occurs and needs to be contended with to orient towards the future.
It is also my view that getting beyond angels and villains is what restores the ‘educational’ to education. If there are stable and specifiable good and bad approaches, the solution ends up focusing on ‘how to’ achieve the good and avoid the bad. But this is not just ecologically naive, in the sense that it does not recognise the dialectics within entities just discussed. It is also educationally problematic because it forecloses the freedom of the teacher and the student in their relation. More specifically, it risks reducing education to indoctrination by instrumentalising the educational relationship for ends extrinsic to the encounter itself. Luckily, such instrumentalisation is bound to show its own contradictions, which teachers can be on the lookout for, expose, play with and build upon (see Affifi and Hensley 2024).
References.
Affifi, R. (2025). Dialectics and nonviolence. Ecologising Education blog. [forthcoming]
Affifi, R. (2025). Confusing how we treat the future and the past. Ecologising Education blog. [forthcoming]
Affifi, R. & Hensley, N. (2024) Trickster teaching and the Anthropocene: Disrupting the explicitification of pedagogy, people and planet’, Environmental Education Research, pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2024.2434608
Affifi, R. (2023) Ecologising education beyond angels and villains. Environmental Education Research. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504622.2022.2108768
Levins, R. & Lewontin, R. (1987). The dialectical biologist. Harvard University Press https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674202832.
McGowan, T. (2019). Emancipation after Hegel: Achieving a contradictory revolution. MIT Press.
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