The word ‘reductionist’ is used pejoratively in environmental education research, and often. It is often paired, or used synonymously with ‘mechanistic’, and taken to refer to approaches that treat life as sufficiently or relevantly explained or accounted for by physical sciences. In practice, this usually involve a spatial ‘reduction’ in the account of the causal interaction. Small molecules causing big effects, intricate neural pathways causing global organismic consciousness, and so on.
Even from this rather limited view of it means to be reductionistic, there are already a number of different philosophical possibilities not usually accounted for in environmental education. For example, one might be an epistemological reductionist, believing that knowledge must avert to these lower causal levels, while stlll an ontological nonreductionist (the world itself is always more than such accounts). One might even be an ontological reductionist but an epistemological nonreductionist, say if one believes ultimately physicochemistry causes everything but that knowing is the process of forming simplified heuristics at many different levels and scales that ‘work’,
It is also worth mentioning in passing that one can be a reductionist but not a mechanist, or the other way around: for example, one can believe that quantum physics ultimately causes everything but that it is itself nonmechanistic in any ordinary sense of the world. And one can also believe that mechanical explanations are adequate but not reductionistic, insofar as a key part of mechanistic reasoning is in understanding how the parts work together to form the ‘machine’, which is to that extent relational and rejects the idea that it can be reduced to its components.
I want, however to draw environmental education researchers to the fact that reductionism is much more pervasive that what has been suggested, and comes in many different flavours. I will define reductionism as a stance that treats life as sufficiently or relevantly explained or accounted for by appeal to any one theory, view, level, process, or phenomenon. Relatedly, reductionistic ethics and politics would seek to find sufficient or relevant accounts on what to do by an appeal to one ultimate thing or another. From this perspective, most uses of the term ‘reductionistic’ are themselves reductionistic about reductionism.
I will give a few examples:
1) Ecocentrism is reductionistic because it places priority on the level of the ecosystem. This reduces individual organisms to being replaceable components of a larger process and risks leaning towards kinds of holism associated with totalitarian politics. Unlike common conceptions of reductionism in environmental education, this is an example of reducing to a higher level rather than a lower one (such as genes or molecules)
2) Phenomenological approaches are reductionistic because of the foundational (and often narrow) position they give to immediate lived experience over other modalities. It leads some scholars to think for example that our encounter with Nature only really shows up through direct sensory encounters and that science by contrast silences something fundamental to Nature through overmediating and abstraction. This is an example of reducing to the ‘mesolevel’.
3) The ‘flat ontology’ common in ‘New Materialism’ is reductionistic in how it de-emphasises differences in agency across living and nonliving things in an attempt to overcome Anthropocentrism. But the act of doing this shades out the different and important ways in which living organisms interact with their environments differently than the kinds of causal relations that chairs engage in. This is an example of how metaphysical approaches are reductionistic (“It is all one” and “It is all plural” are other examples of metaphysical reductionism).
4) ‘Nature connection’ is reductionistic because it does not account for how being alienated from nature is necessary as well. In specific, does not acknowledge how a separation from the environment is the condition for the possibility of encountering it (and therefore ‘connecting’ with it), and something all living organisms partake in to varying extents. It also does not acknowledge that a feeling of being disconnected can be ethically and politically essential through injecting doubt and uncertainty, and therefore subjectivity into the relation (see Nature connection and alienation). This is an example of how noncognitive, affective solutions can be reductionistic.
5) Finally, engaging with art is reductionist, because while one is creating or contemplating (say) a painting, all else is backgrounded. The frame introduces spatial and/or temporal contours to attention, and emphasises something crucial about perception as well (going back to example 1, above). Even if we ignore other ways we might encounter things and only focus on ‘lived experience’, there is already something reductionistic about the structure of perception itself. It already and always shows up as a field with some thing foreground against a context that is backgrounded.
Even nonreductionistic approaches that seek to embrace radical pluralism are reductionist. This is because pluralism discounts approaches that place emphasis on one level or causal locus over another (‘its all interconnected’ blinds us to how things are not all interconnected equally, and how that matters).
It would seem, then that we are left with nothing but different kinds of reductionism, and the choice is to distinguish what kinds are good from those which are dangerous. But this too would be reductionist, and probably in the bad kind of way. For example, one might suppose a bad kind is one that reduces by demoting highly relevant things, whereas a good kind instead keeps what is most relevant. But this is itself a very reductionistic way of treating relevance.
An ‘ecologising’ perspective acknowledges that every perspective, level, position may have its place, but does not settle on a simple ‘birds eye view’. Instead, it poses the concrete question of how the different perspectives actually interact (see Affifi 2023, 2024). There are times we hold onto one kind of reduction too long, other times we don’t dwell in one for long enough. There are key shifts between types of reduction, rhythms established between them, and so on, and these lead, arise from and interact with concrete conditions in the actual world. What is sustained and what is changed through the field of interactions across time? That is the issue, rather than arguing about what one or the other is the ‘best’ in general, or for some specifically delineated conditions. Part of the ecologising perspective entails that even this view, where one takes a step back and looks at how different partial views interact with each other and the world across time, is itself reductionistic. We would miss an awful lot of life if we were able to constantly engage at that level. Luckily we can’t and we find ourselves submerged back into this or that view all the time.
One reason this approach is ‘ecologising’ is because this is, in a way, how actual ecologies ‘work’. In living systems, each individual organism repeats a very narrow range of what its molecules are capable of doing, as they are trapped in the metabolic constraints. And each organism’s behaviour is in turn constrained by those it interacts with. So the behaviour of the physicochemical world is severely reduced in its degrees of possibility. But changes do occur, and what those transformations in material conditions actually are across time and relationships is what actually matters. Again the question is what is sustained and what is not. In the forest just as in the mind, the question is: what is the quality of relations enabled and sustained?
Of course, you will reply that I have just been reductionistic in my account of ‘actual’ ecologies. So be it. Let’s see what that account does, and wish it well when it needs to go.
References
Affifi, R. (2023) Ecologising education beyond angels and villains. Environmental Education Research.
Affifi, R. (2024). Aesthetic knowing and ecology: Cultivating perception and participation during the ecological crisis. Environmental Education Research.
Affifi, R. (2025). Nature connection and ‘alienation‘. Ecologising Education blog.
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