Why the Theories of John Dewey and Paulo Freire Cannot Contribute to Revitalizing the Commons
C. A. BOWERS
University of Oregon

The growing awareness that the rate and nature of change in the world’s cultures is not sustainable by the Earth’s ecosystems now makes it possible to ask questions about the problematic nature of the ideas of John Dewey and Paulo Freire that were overlooked by earlier followers and critics. Indeed, the case can be made that the recent revival of interest in Dewey’s ideas is partly due to the assumption that he has been overlooked as an early environmental thinker (Light and Katz 1996). Just as this effort is characterized by theoretical arguments that do not take account of the knowledge systems of different cultures, the recent attempt by Moacir Gadotti, the Director of the Instituto Paulo Freire in Brazil, is making a similar attempt to represent Freire as a leading environmental educator (Gadotti 2002). He also commits the same error of ignoring the differences in cultural knowledge systems by trying to explain that Education can create a planetary consciousness. In particular, Gadotti argues that a planetary consciousnesssensitive to the Ecological Crisis is possible only if it does not degenerate into a process of cultural transmission—a hallmark of Freire’s arguments for an emancipatory pedagogy.

These efforts raise a basic question. To what extent do the cultural assumptions that both Dewey and Freire took-for-granted doom these efforts as useful means to understanding the ecological crisis? I will demonstrate in this essay that, in spite of their respective concern with rectifying unresolved social justice issues, both Dewey and Freiere shared a number of assumptions with today’s proponents of globalizing the industrial/consumer-based Culture that is increasing the rate of environmental degradation. Before turning to that critique, however, I need to summarize four major trends that are putting our collective future at risk. This summary is intended to serve as a reference point for assessing the pro-environmental interpretations of the core ideas of Dewey and Freire as useful sources for resistance to these destructive trends.


Trend 1: The Ecological Crisis
The ecological crisis has many elements: the depletion of fisheries beyond their capacity to renew themselves; the increasing shortage of potable water; global warming that is changing habits and threatening species; loss of topsoil now estimated at thirty-three percent on a world-wide basis; the increasing amount of toxins in the environment—including in the oceans. In short, the ability of the environment to sustain the life of humans and other species is being rapidly diminished.

Trend 2: Globalization of the West’s Technological, Consumer Dependent Culture
The continued expansion of the world’s population is being accompanied by the globalization of the West’s approach to a money-based economy, greater dependence upon consumerism and the adoption of new technologies—including technologies that contribute to outsourcing to regions where workers can be more easily exploited. These trends are undermining what remains of the intergenerational knowledge, both here and in other cultures that represent alternatives to a consumer dependent lifestyle. They are enforced by international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization—all of which are based on neo-liberal ideas and values that represent all aspects of human activity as well as the natural environment, as exploitable markets.

Trend 3: Loss of Cultural/Linguistic Diversity
The forces that promote a Western form of consciousness and consumer expectations—the media, computers, corporate advertising, Western universities, etc—are contributing to the loss of linguistic diversity. Of the approximately 6000 languages still spoken today (some by only a few members of the culture), it is estimated that a large number will disappear in the next few decades. The loss of these languages will contribute to the further loss of species, as it is now understood by some linguists that these languages encode the knowledge of the renewing cycle of plants and animals within the bioregion (Nettle and Romaine 2000; Muhlhausler 1996). Within many of these cultures, language carries forward the Intergenerational Knowledge of how to meet daily needs without degrading the ecosystems they depended upon, and thus is inextricably related to how the culture impacts the local environment. However, other languages, such as those based on Western assumptions, represent the rational process as being able to overcome the adverse impact of humans on the environment, and thus distort how to understand a sustainable relationship between cultural practices and the sustaining capacity of the environment.

Trend 4: Revitalization of the Cultural and Environmental Commons Represents Sites of Resistance to the Forces of Globalization
While the Enclosure of the environmental commons began well before the Industrial Revolution, both the cultural and environmental commons are now being monetized and integrated into industrial/consumer-oriented culture on a global scale. Every aspect of the cultural and environmental commons is now subject to being appropriated as private or corporation property, from the intergenerational knowledge and skills that enabled people to live less consumer dependent lives to the gene lines of humans, plants, and animals. Even the airwaves and the new commons of cyberspace are being monetized.

Resistance to the further enclosure of the commons can be found in many Third World cultures, including cultures in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, and India. There are individuals, groups, and institutions in so-called “developed” countries that are resisting the further enclosure of what were previously public lands. Resistance in these countries is also taking the form of living lives of voluntary simplicity, recovering the Tradition of slow food, and renewing networks of mutual support. These groups are attempting to conserve traditions that enable people to live less monetary dependent and environmentally destructive lives, and their mindful Conservatism stands in sharp contrast to what Jorge Ishizawa refers to as the “colonizing gaze” of the neo-liberals that equate Progress with the economic exploitation of the commons.

While the above summary of changes in cultures and natural systems does not adequately identify the unaddressed social justice issues in some of the world’s commons, it nevertheless foregrounds the key ideas and issues that will be used here to assess whether the ideas of John Dewey and Paulo Freire are complicit in promoting the global culture that can expand only as it further encloses the world’s cultural and environmental commons. The task here is to assess where these two theorists stand on the key issues summarized above: viewing change as linear and progressive in nature; promoting the assumptions and ways of thinking that gave conceptual direction and moral legitimacy to the development of the Industrial Revolution that is now in its digital phase of development—while reproducing the silences that characterized the thinking of classical liberal social theorists; failing to recognize that cultural/linguistic diversity contributes to conserving species diversity and sustainable habitats; and failing to recognize the nature and importance of the cultural commons as alternatives to the money-dependent lives required by the industrial culture. A fifth issue that needs to be part of the discussion of the relevance of the ideas of Dewey and Freire is their failure to recognize that Critical Inquiry is as important to determining what needs to be conserved as it is to determining what needs to be changed. For example, as fundamentalist Christians and market liberals in the White House and Congress are working to undermine the separation of church and state, an independent judiciary, and the gains in the labor movement and civil rights, conserving what remains of our degraded democratic system become even more urgent.