A Freirean ecopedagogy or an imposition of values? The pluriverse and the politics of environmental education

ABSTRACT

Ecopedagogy is a viable pathway towards a pluriversal education system that attends to both global ecological concerns and various local expressions of interests, working towards socioenvironmental justice and a Freirean critical (eco)pedagogy. Ethnographic examples of environmental education in rural Costa Rica emerging from my case study of Samuel, the creative, music educator in La Palma, demonstrate a variety of pedagogical tactics used to generate ecological awareness and create sustainability-minded citizens. Through lively and engaging activities with young students, ecopedagogy serves as a potential pathway between pluriversal education and normative environmentalism. This ethnographic analysis of ecopedagogy in practice within Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula illuminates the tension between an imposition of values and the generation of pluriversal education through dynamic pedagogical influence, structured play, embodied practice, and decentring the human.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecopedagogy
• pluriverse
• environmental education
• Costa Rica
• ethnography

Introduction

Peppered throughout posters, artwork, lesson plans, and pamphlets are messages like – ‘Yo también soy de Osa’ [I, too, am from the Osa (Peninsula)] – picturing personified animals and cartoonish representations of rainforest ecology. Such dynamic messaging embodies the classic strategy of the mainstream environmentalist narrative in the southwestern Costa Rican peninsula where the rural citizenry is facing a shifting agrarian economy towards one of (eco)tourism and conservation-minded land controls over 80% of the geography. Regional environmentalism proposes that animals and their habitat, as well, (Yo también soy de Osa) be incorporated into the instrumentalist logic of nearby residents; but closer examination of nuances in environmental education suggests something contrary: the human subject position is displaced and reconsidered.

Following Paulo Freire’s work (1970), scholars have taken a critical interest in the interaction between pedagogy, justice, and the political consequences of education. Concurrent with the rise of the international environmentalist movements in the United States and Latin America over recent decades, education equity and critical pedagogy have increased in status (Gadotti, 1996; Gutiérrez Pérez and Rojas, 2015; Hernandez and Mayur, 2000; Kahn, 2010). While conducting fieldwork among environmentalists in Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula the idea of ‘ecopedagogy’ – a critical pedagogy that includes environmental education – became increasingly relevant and compelling.

This article explores dynamic pedagogical practices that employ an embodied approach to involve more-than-human subjects and foster ecological awareness within student experiences. Samuel,¹ a public-school music teacher in rural La Palma nearby the famed Corcovado National Park, engages primary/secondary school students in song, dance, and regional lessons in ecological stewardship and socioenvironmental justice. Taken as a case study, this creative educator nuances our understanding of environmental education as neither simply patronizing and elitist nor completely empowering and representational of grassroots activism. Instead, looking at this type of pedagogy in practice reveals a more ambiguous phenomenon that oscillates between imperialistic impositions of knowledge to empowering modes of resistance – creating a phenomenon shaped by the politics of its practice. Exploring the ethical and political implications of environmental education – the complexity and the sociality involved in emphasizing certain values above others – requires viewing environmental education through a pluriversal lens.

To explain the significance of environmental education in rural southwestern Costa Rica, I take Samuel’s pedagogical methods as a case study within the Osa Peninsula to explore the possibilities of pluriversal education and ecopedagogy as well as the ethical and political consequences within the biodiversity-rich setting that elicits much attention. Focusing on the imposing values that inform everyday life in the Osa region and the way these impositions structure educational experience for residents, this article informs pluriversal education by providing an example of its pursuit through Freirean means and the limitations of ecopedagogy embedded within environmentalist curation. Failing to compel enough community trust for environmentalist events and their goals highlights some challenges proponents of ecopedagogy face and reinforces the importance of pluriversal education. Based upon the understandings discussed below, socioenvironmental justice is fostered though educational initiatives that account for democratizing education, challenging political hierarchies and elitism, and developing specific understandings of conflict regarding natural resource exploitation and management (Perreault et al. 2015). Looking through the lens of political ecology not only helps critique imperialism, elitism, and the imposition of values; but it also clarifies the need to incorporate multiple ways of knowing the environment into ecopedagogy.

Samuel’s ecopedagogy challenges and critiques ecological imperialism, educational elitism, and the imposition of values, while eliciting the need to incorporate multiple ways of knowing the environment. To create the ‘pluriversal’, a ‘multiplicity of possible worlds’ (Kothari et al. 2019, p. xvii), rather than the more homogenizing ‘universal’, learners are challenged with embodied approaches to the non-human; a relocalization of activities that engage local knowledge and intimate understandings of the surroundings, which reflect the history of land use; the emphasis on marginalized people and socioenvironmental justice through ecopedagogy; and, decentring the human while disturbing the modernist human/environment binary. The activities, songs, and dances explored below attest to a structured but enactive and spontaneous sense of play that opens the possibility for other ways of embodying the immediate surroundings – understanding socioenvironmental justice as praxis rather than the more familiar teleological logic. I argue that pedagogy in practice is a negotiation of historically situated political actors, and the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of strategies implemented is greatly informed by its embedded contexts. While environmental education is often a patronizing imposition of values, there are also liberating qualities in knowledge and learning that mirror developments in liberation pedagogy and Freire’s work. Recent research following pluriversal education similarly makes explicit the importance of knowledge as a human right (McCowan 2010). The ideology and practice of environmental education do inform a type of environmentality (Agrawal 2005), but as educators like Freire clarify, education can act as resistance (Hooks 1994), not merely an elitist imposition.

Ecopedagogy in transition and the inclusion of the non-human

It is important to illuminate how ecopedagogy and pluriversal education differentiate themselves from other pedagogical styles or that of mainstream education more generally. Education as an object of study for social theorists and (later) social scientists has a long history from Rousseau (1762) to Dewey (1938) with an undercurrent of humanism and Enlightenment-infused rhetoric that supports the idea of a free-thinking, liberated individual. The individuality cultivated through active learning experience in Dewey’s progressive education model nurtures a sense of freedom within the individual. It is here, with the ideas of freedom and liberation as central concerns for education, that Freire’s work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), offers similarity and nuance through his discussion of colonialism and capitalism (De Genova 2005, p. 23–25). Freire identifies education, in its general and traditional sense, as an act of ‘depositing’ knowledge, or ‘the “banking” concept of education’ (1970, p. 72). Drawing on the distinction between individual and society, Freire argues, ‘Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator’ (1970, p. 75). Freire’s critique of education is meant to expose oppression and to offer a path to liberation – a more democratic form of pedagogy that will complicate the hierarchical relationship between the student and the teacher. Freire’s concept of student as ‘re-creator’ is central to my reading of pluriversal education and a decolonized form of ecopedagogy (Mignolo and Walsh 2018). When students are re-creators and no longer mere ‘spectators’ a pathway opens towards pluriversal education; one fostered, in the case explored below, through dynamic and interactive ecopedagogical engagement.

Liberation, for such scholars of pedagogy, is based upon a romantic and humanistic conception of the individual, someone whose potential should be realized within an ideal situation of more egalitarian power relations. The idea is to reject the echoes of imperialism within mainstream education and to create an active dialogue between students and teachers, breaking down the former authoritarian hierarchy of the banking concept, and fostering a sense of freedom for the students (Freire 1970, p. 79–80). Exercising consciousness and cognitive ability through interaction with the world leads to senses of liberation and individuality, which the education system that Freire critiques lacks. Freire’s critique draws contrast to an existing approach in education that did not empower all citizens but only members of the ruling class.

The matter of a liberating pedagogy, considering Freire’s critical work, has had some influence upon education policies, taking that work beyond its place as radical critique within political philosophy literature. Moacir Gadotti (1996, 2004, 2008), among the most prominent of Brazilian scholars to follow Freire, developed the concept ‘ecopedagogy’ to propose a critical education initiative aiming at sustainable development and the protection of Earth’s resources. Gadotti, as a member of both the Instituto Paulo Freire (IPF) and the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, advocated for ecopedagogy which grew from Rio de Janeiro’s Earth Charter (1992), including Agenda 21 (1992), and the Brundtland Report (1987). Gadotti used the occasion of the Earth Summit to advance his ideas regarding a new approach to education that both responds to Freire’s criticism of hierarchy and adds the concerns for sustainable development and the health of ecosystems. Perhaps no other author better encapsulates the interconnections between critical education theory and the practice of environmental education – shot through with socioenvironmental justice.

In addition to the Brazilian scholarship concerning ecopedagogy, Richard Kahn’s (2010) contribution is among the most valuable. Kahn interprets ecopedagogy as education that upholds activist principles of biodiversity, ecosystems, and landscape preservation along with community-led sustainability initiatives. Relocalizing, incorporating socio-economic justice into ecological concerns, and elevating the nonhuman in a manner that disturbs anthropocentrism are all elements of ecopedagogy, which present pathways towards pluriversal education. Understanding the practice of ecopedagogy in Costa Rica will help explain the implications of environmental politics for students, practitioners, families, and other community members as the following case study illuminates possibilities for pluriversal education.

The concept of ecopedagogy has an established history paralleling development policy studies, education studies, and a broad critique of capitalist industrialization and imperialist imaginaries. Ecopedagogical pursuits are meant to teach environmental stewardship, ecological sustainability, and critical learning methods with a nod to Freire that emphasizes equality and socio-economic justice. Pluriversal education encompasses a similar sentiment and intention, adds the important elements of decolonial thought (Fanon 2008), more-than-human subjectivities (de la Cadena and Blaser 2018), the aesthetic embodiment of environmental attachments, and an agenda that counters mainstream and elitist narratives that may echo a colonial past through the spread of capitalist empire, certain political hierarchies, and socio-economic marginalization (Dawson 2019). Both ecopedagogy and pluriversal education oppose global neoliberalism and imperialism in various ways; pluriversal education is intentionally broader; and, ecopedagogy is embedded within the environmental politics of Latin America and the debates regarding privileged access and control over everyday resources.

Situating Costa Rica within the anthropology of learning

Environmental education in Costa Rica has found the most success through the practice of methods like Dewey’s progressive education and Freire’s problem-posing pedagogy. Debates over a liberated education reflecting active cognitive practice in addition to the importance of the mind’s role in the science of everyday life inform the anthropology of learning (Lave 1988; Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998), where phenomenological concerns over learning as embodied practice are centralized. Echoing Bourdieu (1977), a successful ecopedagogy should constitute a ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991) that bolsters its own sense of community cohesion. Embodiment in this sense, alongside Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, is a helpful way to view the practice of Costa Rican environmentalism (Johnson and Clisby 2009), and to, more broadly, understand the interactions between inhabitants and their environment. Varela et al.’s approach to cognition considers the ‘embodied mind’ and ‘cognition as embodied action’ (1991, p. xx). The authors propose the term ‘enactive’ (1991) to describe the process by which the subject creates oneself through active engagement with the world. Such concerns with cognition and experience as mutually constituting processes inform this discussion of learning by refocusing our attention on how environmental education works. Escobar (2018) discusses Varela’s contributions regarding embodied mind in practice at length precisely because of the phenomenological framing that disturbs mind/body and human/environment dualisms that pluriversal education seeks to subvert. In this sense, pluriversal education is enactive; meaning that, within their ecopedagogical contexts, students re-create possible pathways towards achieving that pluriversal experience.

It is no coincidence that the only centre for ecopedagogy outside of Brazil (which has three) is in Costa Rica,² demonstrating the republic’s pursuit of a greening national policy with education as a key component. To provide further detail for this greening national narrative it is perhaps best to highlight Costa Rican President Figueres Olsen (1994–1998) who established a unique set of priorities during the neoliberal excitement of the 1990s. President Figueres Olsen’s essay, ‘Sustainable Development: A New Challenge for Costa Rica’, asserts Costa Rica’s role as ‘a pilot project of sustainable development’, describing the nation as ‘offering itself to the world as a ‘laboratory’ for this new development paradigm – a laboratory in which we can, with help from the international community, design frameworks and mechanisms for a sustainable future’ (1996, p. 190). For the president, sustainable development means a balance between economic growth and ecological stewardship that complements growth, discourse that solidifies a bond between capitalism and conservation, optimistically declaring capitalism as both cause and cure for Costa Rica’s ecological challenges.

Understanding Costa Rican environmental education through the lens of ecopedagogy, contributions from the educators mentioned above, alongside the intersection of cognitive science and anthropology, produces better questions for the interpretation of Costa Rica’s greening republic (Evans 1999) and what it means to negotiate membership within its environmental education initiatives. As Samuel’s practice shows, the line between activism as imposition and activism as subversive resistance is very much blurred by the practice of ecopedagogy – especially when so much depends on what students themselves decide to do with the platforms they are offered.

The challenge for environmental activists seeking a pluriversal agenda, then, is to incorporate the nonhuman without reinforcing elitist political orderings that echo the very problems many environmental advocates critique. As the above review suggests, writings on progressive education have shifted focus from the individualist ‘ego’ to the pluriversal ‘eco’. For some environmental educators on the Osa Peninsula, who is included in this ‘eco’ and how the political ecology of environmental practices works to foster socioenvironmental justice, nonhuman aesthetics, and relocalizing the classroom determine the extent to which these ecopedagogical methods are pathways for pluriversal education.

Learning next to Corcovado National Park and the Golfo Dulce Forest Reserve

Costa Rica’s particular style of conservation governance has become increasingly entangled with widespread ideas of socio-economic ‘progress’, which tends to foreshadow sustainable development (de Castro et al. 2016). By the 1990s, Costa Rica had participated in debt-for-nature swaps, where foreign entities would buy discounted national debt for the ability to manage a protected area (Evans 1999, p. 158). The country has been a REDD+ pioneer, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and had developed a well-regarded national park system. Costa Rica’s payment for environmental services programme has become a model of environmental governance within communities, especially among agrarian-based societies in the (neo)tropics. There has been a longstanding promise by the state to be ‘carbon neutral’ and achieve 100% clean energy use by 2021 – the bicentennial anniversary of independence from Spain. With its strengthening environmental regulatory agency, Costa Rica ‘had pioneered concepts like ecotourism and biodiversity prospecting, [and] was home to hundreds of citizens’ environmental groups’ (Steinberg 2001, p. 3). The nation’s political leadership has historically centralized environmental policy – increasingly so, as the cash draw from (eco)tourism has become clearer. Detailed analysis of environmental governance in Costa Rica has shown the importance of engaging with local complexities in context, and the underlying and interwoven aspects of violent extractive industry and conservation (Fletcher 2012, 2014; Horton 2007, 2009; Vandermeer and Perfecto 1995).

As I have examined the politics of conservation and multiple forms of environmentalisms in practice elsewhere (Korsant 2018), here I focus on the imposing values that inform everyday life in the Osa region and the way these impositions structure educational experience for residents. The Osa Peninsula is famed for its biodiversity; and, the creation of the region’s most prominent protected areas, Corcovado National Park (PNC)³ and the Golfo Dulce Forest Reserve (RFGD), imposes land controls over 80% of the physical peninsula (Figure 1). In a country already famous for sheltering 5% of the world’s species biodiversity, the Osa has 2.5% of the world’s species biodiversity, making it among the most biodiverse places on the planet per unit area. The Osa is home to the only lowland rainforest on the Pacific Coast of Central America, one of the largest mangrove structures, and Golfo Dulce, a tropical fjord where whale and dolphin species frequent. Such qualities captured the attention of environmentalists and scientists who have been active in the area since the late sixties. As the protectionist movement developed, conservation became a form of governance and policing within everyday life, integral to the politics of land use (cf., West 2006).

Figure 1. Osa Peninsula with Corcovado National Park and Golfo Dulce Forest Reserve (2002 National Geographic); Costa Rica insert (2015 IFAM).

The history of land use and resource extraction within the Osa, especially during the 1970s, shows conflict to be inseparable from land use, reflecting controversy that informs the resentful perception many residents share today regarding resource planning and control (van den Hombergh 2004). The creation of the two state reserves, PNC and RFGD, were initiated subsequently to the expropriation of the United States-based timber company, Osa Productos Forestales (OPF), which occupied much of the same territory. Many of the farmers, squatters, and gold miners in the Osa saw both the timber company and the state-sponsored conservation area as invasive, setting course for a pattern of antagonism between Osa residents and outsiders, whether state officials, foreigners making private investments, or environmentalists claiming to work for the interests of biodiversity. Paralleling the sceptical attitudes towards the state and other entities operating in the Osa, this OPF-to-PNC land deal illustrates the notion of Costa Rica as a ‘green republic’, while simultaneously displaying radical government moves to centralize environmentalism as a public concern (Evans 1999; Isla 2015). Conflict gained momentum, however, when hundreds of settlers were removed from what would become PNC and several hundred more consumed by new controls under RFGD while being denied historic land use permissions. This situation is similar to the contentious ‘green grabbing’ (Fairhead et al. 2012) made infamous in southwest Costa Rica (Christen 2008; Cuello et al. 1998; Ugalde 2008; Vaughan 2012). Although natural resource extraction by large companies differs in practice from either fortress conservation (Brockington 2002) or more integrated approaches, residents’ understanding of ‘control’ often conflates extraction and conservation because of who has sovereignty over the space in question, and because longtime residents are, in either case, the ones marginalized. Additionally, while fortress conservation has the power to marginalize competing interests and dispossess locals of their lands, initiatives based upon sustainable development strategies also employ the logic of globalization that can reproduce similar inequalities to those they seek to address.

The Osa Peninsula’s most dynamic environmental education initiatives, which I describe here as ecopedagogy, develop pathways towards pluriversal education by accounting for socioenvironmental justice and area-specific political ecology informed by several important experiences: (1) the expulsion of migrant farmers from the area that became Corcovado National Park; (2) overbearing government restrictions throughout the Golfo Dulce Forest Reserve, which overtook control of land from entire villages; (3) violent conflict between police and artisanal gold miners who also hunt for subsistence; and, (4) strained lines of trust and communication between environmental NGOs and locals. Environmental education, perhaps the most profound example of community outreach in the region, has been among the most effective strategies used by conservationists to disseminate ecological awareness and create young activists based upon the terms set by the environmentalist communities themselves (Blum 2009).

Methodology

This article develops data collected for my Ph.D. dissertation, Environmentalisms in Practice: From Grassroots Activism to National Policy in Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula (2018), and subsequent ethnographic documentary film, Lifting the Green Screen (2020), based upon my research. During 14 months of engaged ethnographic fieldwork in Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula (2013–2014), I employed qualitative methods that included informal and semi-structured interviews, participant observation, archival research, grey literature collections, participatory methods, and workshops. My return visit for filming in 2019 included two months of semi-structured and formal interviews, workshops, an updated visual archive, participant observation, and mixed visual participatory methods. Given the aesthetically engaging nature of Samuel’s pedagogical activities and the visually dynamic aspects of performance, mixed and flexible methods akin to sensory ethnography (Pink 2009) are attuned to the research subject.

Building upon the research gathered during those visits for the purposes of understanding the politics of environmental education and pedagogy in practice; I discuss what the following examples of ecopedagogy may offer the burgeoning postcolonial research field of pluriversal education. One overarching research question has been: how the intersection of conservationism and pedagogy creates both generative possibility for students, and yet, an imposing normative structure that parallels messaging from mainstream environmental initiatives in the area. My ethnographic work in the Osa region has included hundreds of research participants, nearly 200 hours of visual and audio recordings, and sustained contact with Costa Rican networks for eight years. I focus here on Samuel’s case of environmental education framed as ecopedagogy.

The case of Samuel’s pedagogical style is among the best examples of dynamic and engaged ecopedagogy in the area. Maintaining a strong relationship with Samuel was important for acquiring access to the La Palma school and other social gatherings where he has performed as a musician and innovative educator. To adequately engage through participant observation, focus groups, and semi-structured interviews I was mindful of my positionality as a white North American researcher, and thus found social bonding and extended conversations significant for maintaining relationships upon which the research would be based. This foreign positionality was exacerbated by my embedded presence within regional and international environmentalist networks but did not hinder my ability to create important social bonds over long-term fieldwork. In light of the reflexive or discursive turn in ethnographic practice (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and the reinforcement of the importance of ethnographic (mis)representation (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007); I follow power dynamics, socioenvironmental justice, questions on politics and ethics in their particular historical and political contexts, and situated knowledges (Haraway 1988).

Samuel’s dynamic and more-than-human pedagogy

During lengthy interviews, Samuel’s political views and desire for a Freirean-styled education became clear; especially evident through statements on politicians as ‘puppets controlled by corporate power’, critiques of the greenwashing neoliberal government, and sentiment for education as the best (or perhaps only) means for social change. His socio-political critiques of the state and special interests at all levels are aimed at corruption and the influence of money, which is a scepticism he maintains when speaking of greenwashing, neoliberalism, or mainstream environmentalism. Samuel supports interactive and engaged learning outside the classroom, creative alternatives like music, dance, costumes, and opportunities for students’ self-expression. For Samuel, children are change, and they act as young activists explaining to their parents why litter control, recycling, and reduced hunting are important pursuits. He advocates a ‘contextualized and integral education’ that focuses ‘on a curriculum that is particular to the Osa’, affording students a better understanding of where they live and what it means to be among 2.5% of the world’s species biodiversity. This eager educator attempts to relocalize and establish students as re-creators of their spaces using knowledge generated from being in the Osa rather than curricula sent from urban centres, suggesting a pathway towards pluriversal education. Samuel’s ecopedagogy is both a political tool for environmentalists and an empowering method towards decentring the human, promoting conservationist ecocultural identities, relocalizing ecological concerns, and embodying the nonhuman imaginary.

Samuel’s style

A musician and educator from San José, Samuel arrived in the Osa around 2004, employed by the state education system. Like most urbanite Costa Ricans who move to the Osa, Samuel drew comparisons between the city and the country; and it was the country, for him, that allowed rejuvenation after a painful breakup. As difficulty socializing has been a common experience for newcomers, Samuel created a bridge through his musical performance. Writing songs about the Osa and the history of gold mining artistically expressed a specific connection to place and helped him solidify relationships. His energetic, creative style incorporates music and dance into the learning experience – playing to the cuteness of animal aesthetics, giving students control over creating these impressions, contextualizing ecological examples, and including the human within the biodiversity expressions – and advances the idea of ecopedagogy as an embodied experience. Accomplished within various public celebrations, environmentalist gatherings, and the local public lower/middle school of La Palma, this educational model has worked well; students enjoy it, engage, and have room for unique interpretations.

With an admitted nod to Freire, Samuel pursues a liberated education model – a move towards ‘de-schooling’ (Illich 2013) or transgression (Hooks 1994). Of all the various approaches to environmental education in the Osa, his work stands out for his engaging use of songs and costumes. Samuel’s contribution to ecopedagogy reveals another side to the dynamic field of environmental education, unaffiliated with any NGO. While there are several Osa residents (state-salaried teachers included) pursuing environmental education and guiding fieldtrips, I focus on Samuel because of his revolutionary tactics, popularity, and consistent work: a desire to subvert the neoliberal mainstream approach to environmental advocacy or education through a more contextualized, liberated, and enactive approach. Additionally, the arrogance that so often accompanies neoliberal mainstream policies is complicated by the welcoming of more voices – perhaps the nonhuman. Convinced that adults are less susceptible to change but children are more malleable, and can, in turn, influence their parents, Samuel argues that working with children is the best means for social transformation. In a sense, children are enlisted as advocates and guided towards a particular type of citizenship within the greening republic – sustainability-minded ecoidentities that may be able to question the incorporation of conservation policies into a neoliberal apparatus.

Samuel is known for leading children in nature-themed song and dance with original music and costumes consisting of elaborate head-covering masks for dancers (Figure 2). He leads performances within schools and community events and plays music for children and adults nearly every day, always delivered with an undercurrent of an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and socioenvironmental agenda. Within these performances, there are six different masks, often called ‘the mascaraed of biodiversity:’ one former hunter named Revindicado [vindicated], one tapir called Danta Amaranta [Lovely Tapir], one tepezcuintle (lowland paca) called Chepezcuintle, Jorge Jaguar, Chancho de Monte Chester (a peccary/skunk pig), and a white-faced monkey. Each character represents a famed resident of the Osa’s nonhuman biodiversity, apart from the ‘reformed’ hunter, whose inclusion means to demonstrate that people, especially longtime residents, are part of the biodiversity and that local forms of subsistence should be honoured. As Samuel narrates, however, this hunter has learned that hunting tepezcuintle competes with the endangered jaguar’s source of protein and drives the large cats towards eating domesticated cattle. The ‘poacher’ has realized that hunting is not aligned with community interests, nor in the best interests of preserving regional biodiversity.

Figure 2. The Mascaraed of Biodiversity enters to Samuel’s music. 2020. Lifting the Green Screen.

Samuel explains, ‘my thesis on education is about using music and art as tools to deal with issues of identity and belonging among the inhabitants of the Osa Peninsula’. Speaking from the point of view of environmental advocate, nature lover, and socio-economic justice advocate, Samuel asserts,

I feel like we still need a real strategy to get to that point where we can bring our students and those families closer to a feeling of belonging; so that they feel that they really have to protect Corcovado [National Park] because Corcovado belongs to them.

While it may seem that promoting a sense of ownership over space and biodiversity is precisely in line with capitalist imaginaries rather than opposed to them, he is referring more to the resistance to mainstream resource exploitation and infusing democracy and egalitarian ethics into the debates over resource use. The educational proposal is to link biodiversity conservation to a sense of being and living within that same place – a move that is evident through his art.

The mascaraed of biodiversity

Before delving into an interpretation of the songs, their lyrics and intended meanings, I discuss the embodied aesthetics of the ‘mascaraed of biodiversity’ and dance. The mascaraed is not choreographed; it’s informal; spontaneous; there is no lesson plan. The students under the headdresses can move however they happen to be inspired to move, and the audience can interact within those same principles of spontaneous performativity. Baroque in this performance (Law and Ruppert 2016); there is a challenge to form that reflects pluriversal education. More, the nonhuman or more-than-human is on full display. Students embody the animal (or vindicated hunter) through costume performance and act out or play with that embodiment. While the song and dance spectacle could be read as an event promoting biodiversity conservation, the fact that there are no rules – a performative sense of biodiversity play – makes for an alternative space for learning.

Even if just for a matter of minutes, this pedagogical improvisation decolonizes the classroom by promoting play, liberated movements and possibilities for interaction, and the image of the nonhuman; untethered to any extractive purpose. The sing-along and dance-along atmosphere means that the experience is not performer-centred, and the audience reception is critical to making the events interactive, dynamic, and engaging.

Samuel’s songs enhance the decoloniality of this performance. The lyrics often use natural imagery, animal personification, appreciation for the nearby biodiversity, and calls for socioenvironmental justice. Songs like, ‘El Jaguar’, ‘La Danta Amaranta [The Lovely Tapir]’, and ‘Historia de Oreros y Mil Cuentos [The History of Gold Miners and a Thousand Stories]’, display local socio-economic history in the context of celebrating the Osa’s biodiversity. As we discuss ‘La Danta Amaranta’ and the song’s impact upon the children in the class, Samuel explains how the lyrical narrative and the personification of the tapir work to serve an environmentalist purpose:

She [Danta Amaranta] lives in the forest but, what forest? Any forest? No. She lives in Corcovado. And then the next question is: Where is Corcovado? My first-grade students, seven-year-olds, they know Corcovado is over there in the mountains, very close, and they’re its neighbors. So, the commitment starts there, saying: ‘Ah, you live in a very special place and you’re the neighbors of those animals that are very special, too. So, you also have to take care of Danta Amaranta and all of Danta Amaranta’s friends’.⁴

Enlisting and activating students in the fight to protect biodiversity symbolized by Corcovado National Park, the personification builds empathy and suggests the embodiment of the forest landscape – whether by human or tapir. The normative sense of nature’s romanticization, which appears to be mirrored here, is nuanced below as I review Samuel’s stance on mainstream education and conservation efforts that tend to support growth of capital. By generating awareness of natural beauty and biodiversity, in Samuel’s terms, he is careful to not hide broader problems of socio-economic injustices behind a green image. Still, the songs serve as rallying cries for conservation, echoing the normative cosmopolitan urbanite, intensified and made more fun by dancing, singing along, and the interactive aesthetic at play. The chorus of ‘La Danta Amaranta’ reads as follows:

Roaming the forest, there lives

La Danta Amaranta

Playing in the forest,

She lives, dreaming … 

Of becoming a star!

(“La Danta Amaranta,” 2012)

Not all caricatures or personifications of environmentalist iconography are decolonizing and pluriversal; but, here, these songs have become ritualized, and their spontaneity pulls the whole audience in for a few moments when biodiversity conservation is not about surrendering land and resource practices to government regulations.

During one performance, Samuel reverently describes gold miners as the Osa’s ‘first inhabitants, the grandparents of this land’, before launching a reggae song on the history of gold mining with lyrics meant to connect animals and people to the surrounding rainforest as well as the socio-political history of the region. Then, one great-granddaughter of gold miners leads in singing Danta Amaranta. In ‘Historia de Oreros y Mil Cuentos [The History of gold miners and a thousand stories]’, he describes the miners with machetes, being ‘brave’ [valiente], ‘tired’, living in the mountainous rainforest, and extoling them as ‘the grandfathers of this land [los abuelos de esta tierra]’. Linking people to place does not only create a nostalgic imaginary for early pioneers within a so-called ‘untamed’ space, but it has a direct political meaning towards elevating the status of gold miners who have been marginalized by both industrial activity and environmental regulations. For the link between ecological understanding of biodiversity and the inhabitants’ experience of place and belonging to work, Samuel uses playful ways to incorporate placenames within the experience of being in the Osa:

After Chacarita, I go up to Mogos, I’m on my way to Rincón

Where once traveled Jacques Cousteau,

I’m arriving at La Palma, I’m taking the sunny route.

We live, we have fun, here on the Osa Peninsula!

(“Historia de Oreros y Mil Cuentos,” 2012)

Importantly, the song emphasizes the joy of travelling and knowing the landscapes of the Osa underneath the sun; and the placename repetition along with the implied familiarity reinforces the idea that those families and longtime inhabitants are a community, the regional stewards of the (entire) Osa Peninsula. When he sings, ‘historias de oreros, sí, mi cuento … abuelos de esta tierra [histories of the gold miners, yes, my story … grandfathers (or ancestors) of this land]’, Samuel is making a socio-political point to promote the status of marginalized people who represent those that were forced from their lands and livelihood practices to make way for private interests, resource extraction, and government-sanctioned environmental regulations.

Like other activists with an eye on socioenvironmental justice, Samuel recognizes gold miners as part of the biodiversity and ecology of the area, representative of historical livelihood practices, marginalized early settlers, and representative of a common practice like hunting, one of which many rural families have intimate knowledge and experience. The attachment of the gold miners to pedagogy represents a path towards pluriversal education, as it both relocates important ecological lessons to include the gold miners and celebrates familial bonds to artisanal gold mining practice to amplify a more egalitarian ethics and politics. By stating that artisanal gold mining is important for who and where Osa residents are, Samuel reinforces the need for an environmental movement that acknowledges socio-economic concerns and histories of marginalization regarding land use. Constructing an ecocultural identity (Milstein and Castro-Sotomayor 2020) for these gold miners serves a similar purpose to that of the ‘vindicated’ hunter: social concerns must be integrated into those of biodiversity conservation, and the symbolic and generative celebrations that parallel those concerns. Additionally, Samuel’s song and his broader socio-political agenda within which it fits reinscribes an ecocultural identity to gold miners, as it seems they have been erased from the history of the place.

OSA: Organismos Sociales Ambientales

Integration between practical needs of regional communities and an environmentalist understanding of biodiversity that advocates for protectionism and sustainability (Hopkins and McKeown 2001; Huckle 1999) is a clear indication of pluriversal politics and ecopedagogy at play. Samuel invented an acronym for the Osa Peninsula that speaks to his views on the interactions between individuals and their environment: Organismos Sociales Ambientales (OSA) [socioenvironmental organisms]. The acronym disturbs both the human/environment binary and the notion that the debate between conservation and exploitation of resources refers to a reified sense of nature. Similarly, by making livelihoods like hunting for subsistence or artisanal gold mining part of ecological awareness and deemphasizing the role of the human, OSA proposes a notion of the environment as beyond instrumentalist exploitation and acknowledges nonhuman agency.

Strengthening of collective local autonomies is central to create pluriversal pathways, and Samuel’s OSA complicates consumerist logic, supports more-than-human agency, and disturbs Anglophone human/environmental binaries. The ecopedagogical activities described above not only present the uniqueness of the Osa based on its 2.5% of global species biodiversity, but also function as concerted attempts at community empowerment, social integration among inhabitants, customs, and traditions. For Samuel, conservation must be implemented respecting the history and politics of locals, achieving ‘equilibrium with the inhabitants’. Too much prohibition and perceived insincerity is antagonizing; or, in Samuel’s description of greenwashing, ‘there are environmentalists and there are environmentalists … Some put up a green flag with their name; and alongside it, businesses and other interests’. Samuel’s sense of greenwashing is more than the familiar rhetoric of sustainable development or marketing campaigns; his ‘green flag’ is inseparable from the structural adjustment programmes and neoliberal excitement of the 90s when environmentalist interest grew exponentially nationwide.

Despite the reflection of pluriversal ethics within the OSA acronym, Samuel discusses the ecological wealth of the Osa in familiar capitalist terminology:

over here, there’s so much richness, but that’s also where we get to the most important part: how do we make it so the same people that live in this place can take advantage of those same riches? Here comes the keyword: education.

By ‘take advantage’, he means to preserve and continue to exploit, whether through tourism or personal enjoyment, as examples. Words such as ‘take advantage’, ‘exploit’, or ‘richness’, reflect the idea of ecological wealth in modernist and materialist terms, also suggesting an anthropocentric relation to the environment – something to be used or preserved for human benefits. This presents limitations for Samuel’s style in terms of aligning with pluriversal tenets that radically challenge human-centred notions of the environment, as we see the difficulty in decolonizing this rhetoric.

Subversive or elitist?

Samuel’s telling comment on distinct types of environmentalism alludes to greenwashing and less sincere mixtures of interests on one hand, and an environmentalist of the poor (Martinez-Alier and Guha 1997; Martinez-Alier 2002) or liberating ethos (Peet and Watts 2004) on the other. Realizing calls towards activism and ecological awareness, the pathways offered towards pluriversal education are more obscure and subtle but are suggested through enactivist methods of non-human embodiment, problem-posing pedagogical technique, and relocalizing concerns to emphasize local historical experience of the immediate environment. Despite the interactive work and integrated approaches, Samuel’s style is not a pure embodiment of Freire’s liberation pedagogy. His ecopedagogy remains a concerted effort to impose social change, proposed by an outsider from San José, creating a type of environmentality, based upon biological and modernist understandings of environmental values and political understandings of conservation’s importance. Samuel laments:

I feel, after many years of living here, that people still feel resentment toward conservation … it [regional environmentalism] is a model of conservation with standards that are very far from the reality lived by my students and their families.

Contending with contested forms of conservation is a challenge for the urbanite and newcomer but has not dissuaded Samuel from attempting a new form of ecopedagogy.

Most urban-born Costa Rican environmentalists in the Osa use the loaded modernist rhetoric of backwardness or ‘behind [atrasado]’ to describe residents – especially campesinos (farmers/peasants) and oreros (gold miners) – and Samuel’s word choice, ‘humble’ and ‘simple’, is no exception. The approach to environmentalism in the Osa, therefore, as it inevitably acts upon people’s lives, must be ‘delicate’, as he realizes. Additionally, he states that an activist must be careful when confronting greenwashing, over-development, and other forms of business that provide work for some but meet unsatisfactory standards according to many environmentalists. This speaks to the difficulty of decolonizing the materialist and anthropocentric rhetoric where there is evident socio-economic disparity and political marginalization. Ideally for Samuel, regional ecopedagogy would bring a relocalizing ‘model of education that also conserves the livelihoods and customs of people who have lived in the Osa their whole lives’. However, through his ecopedagogical methods, Samuel’s style remains one of the best regional examples of an interactive pedagogy and subversive resistance to both mainstream education and what he has identified as the greenwashing neoliberal state (through his political ideology and understanding of ‘good’ environmentalists). Through such attempts at relocalizing alongside spontaneous embodiment of the nonhuman – appeal to student emotions to provoke empathetic responses to nonhuman agency, alongside structured play, and aesthetic embodiment of animal representatives of regional biodiversity – there is possibility for pluriversal education.

Conclusions: ecopedagogy as a pathway towards pluriversal education

Environmental educators like Samuel constantly identify socio-political and economic challenges, relocating pedagogical practice to attend to local political and historical contexts and disturb the human/environmental binary problem as essential to advance socioenvironmental justice. I examine pathways towards a pluriversal education that considers educators’ pedagogical pursuits and the limitations they face. As Samuel’s case shows, a more pluriversal perspective would improve commitment to socio-economic disparities, expand pedagogical thinking beyond materialist and anthropocentric terminology, and advance the dynamic spontaneity of an education otherwise. A pluriversal perspective addresses the reproduction of mainstream environmental education by nurturing the student as re-creator while disturbing human/environmental binaries – complicating the adversarial forms of neoliberal elitism. As pluriversal education seeks to elevate local interests, a more nuanced and critical pedagogical practice – like ecopedagogy – is warranted to strengthen causes for socioenvironmental justice, incorporating topics relevant to families and communities and in translatable terms to the various local experiences of the environment.

Moving towards socioenvironmental justice in the Osa entails a nuanced look at turtle egg poaching, hunting done for subsistence while gold mining, and marginalized communities without land titles. Many residents feel that there is a political need for widespread attention to everyday uses of natural resources and general respect for local practices if environmentalism is to be successful in rural Costa Rica (and perhaps elsewhere) (Vandermeer and Perfecto 1995; Vivanco 2006). This process must include education – as many residents state – especially considering the shift towards an (eco)tourism-dominated economy and the power that flows through what it means to know the forest and its inhabitants. A pluriversal education, like that pursued by ecopedagogy, mirrors some of the goals chased by proponents of sustainable development (McKeown 2007). Democracy in the age of the pluriverse (Escobar 2018, 2020; Kothari et al. 2019) may include critical pedagogy, the nonhuman, and a more serious engagement with socio-economic and political justice. That said, blanket regulations that would prohibit all forms of hunting may not make sense and nuancing such regulations may in fact decrease the stigma of environmental regulations imposed upon rural spaces – simultaneously allowing for a variety of ways to know the forest.

Interactive, dynamic, and engaging activities foster student creativity and spontaneity, which are steps towards pluriversal education. Embodied practices that build links to the nonhuman and advance ecopedagogy have demonstrated more success in the Osa region than lectures or mainstream approaches featuring less familiar environmental concepts. When the activities turn to an acknowledgement of socio-political and economic contexts among marginalized farmers and gold miners, something additional is conjured: a change in the conversation so that socioenvironmental justice is paramount amongst the socioenvironmental organisms, or OSA (Organismos Sociales Ambientales).

Given the focus on more-than-human and ecocultural identity, it is expected that pluriversal politics and education will find themselves entangled within the politics of conservation. There are different ways to know nature; and science-based activism that serves the aims of state biodiversity preserves and various environmental NGOs reflects those interests. Farmers who were raised in the area, gold miners, and various other workers know and relate to nature in different ways, cultivating and/or exploiting surroundings in a manner that is often in conflict with proposed controls over land use. These inhabitants each negotiate differing types of ecocultural identities as those identities reflect particular relationships with the more-than-human world (that is, ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ externally defined). While other regional environmental education activities are more formalized and fit within the larger agenda of an environmental NGO, government regulatory outreach, or an ecolodge gaining certification; Samuel’s work is a more improvised and ad hoc expression of place, but also shares environmentalist ethos.

Environmental education is arguably most effective outdoors, incorporating games, engaging students, and eliciting participation, rather than depending on a classroom presentation (Blum 2009). Environmental Education’s aim is to nurture, from a young age, an ecological steward that understands the importance of environmentalism not only as ethically charged information, but also as a passionate social movement – appealing to emotions in motivating political choices based upon a shared notion of care. Environmental education, when performed considering the pluriversal model, is not about passive knowledge transfer from teacher to student or the strength of curriculum planning; rather, it is an active and embodied practice informed by particular socio-political, egalitarian, and more-than-human relations.

From Freire’s critical pedagogy to the nuances of ecopedagogy, growing out of the institutionalized concerns for sustainability and learning, the trajectory of nuanced approaches to education throughout Latin America finds common ground with environmental education. Cases situated in a ‘marginalized’ zone within the greening Costa Rican republic, like the one presented here, illuminate the stakes for students – new recruits into the eco-mentality proposed nationwide. How pedagogy operates as a strategy of conservation politics, beyond practical notions of success or failure, demonstrates what environmentalism in practice means to communities in the Osa Peninsula. In one sense, activism becomes more democratic by opening channels of dialogue and engagement, and in another sense, the education initiatives reinforce the power of conservationist ideology. The young Costa Rican mind is the target of environmental education; hence, activism with a certain definition of ecological awareness is vital as it is meant to create the type of consciousness necessary for the imagined future and place environmentalists seek to create. Importantly, this is not a matter of the ‘dynamic’ NGO or state acting upon the ‘static’ student body, as students and other community members actively negotiate, accept, and reject the proposed education – re-creating a nuanced and embodied experience of place.

Ecopedagogy exists within this tension between a Freirean liberation pedagogy and the mainstream state or NGO education model that imposes the logic of conservationism and fortress biodiversity protection, and sustainable development rhetoric. As a type of environmentalism in practice, Samuel’s ecopedagogy transverses environmentality, imperialism, and the expression of capital embodied by the pedagogical ethos that supports nature as a commodity. It informs the use of knowledge as a tool for certain interest groups, and knowledge as resistance, or subversion to big interests – what Samuel intends by supporting sustainability and community wellbeing in the face of marginalization. Even the Freirean model, however, should not be taken at face value as a panacea but critically analysed and drained of any patronizing rhetoric that echoes a colonial past. Scholars, educators, and practitioners of environmentalism do not need, perhaps, to personify the subjects of biodiversity, imposing environmentalist rhetoric like the ‘Yo También Soy de Osa’ model. A more radical and empowering option is to look towards a more ambitious goal, as slippery and ambiguous as it may seem, towards pluriversal education via a subversive praxis of ecopedagogy.

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Notes on contributors

Clate Korsant

Clate Korsant, a New York City-based cultural anthropologist, teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York. He has also taught at the Bard Prison Initiative and at Goldsmiths, University of London where he completed a PhD. Clate's work has focused on socioenvironmental justice, political ecology, and environmentalism in Costa Rica.

Notes

1 A pseudonym is used.

2 Centered within the United Nations’ University for Peace, near San José, the proposed aims were decided during the UN Charter (1980) that established the university.

3 Acronyms appear in Spanish.

4 Translations from original Spanish by author.