Contact:Pablo Angel Meira CarteaUniversidad Santiago de CompostelaFacultad Ciencias da EducaciónCampus Universitário Sur, s/n.15782 – Sant. Compostela – ESPAÑAe-mail: hemeira@usc.es

Environmental Education in times of catastrophes:the education response to the shipwreck of thePrestige

Pablo Angel Meira CarteaUniversity of Santiago de Compostela

Abstract

In November 2002, the Prestige, an obsolete oil tanker, sank andspilled her cargo offshore Galicia (in the northwest of the IberianPeninsula). This accident originated a social experiment, unwantedbut valuable to understand how the catastrophic experience of the“manufactured risks” is socially represented. The present articleanalyzes the response of the regional education system to thecatastrophe from two viewpoints: a) of its comprehension in thecontext of the critical and proactive social response to the officialintent of representing a “non-catastrophe”, and b) of the role ofEnvironmental Education (EE) as a pedagogical praxis whosepolitical dimension is revealed as indispensable. The thesis we shalldefend is that the political nature of EE, many times just implicit andothers explicitly denied, is recognized here as the fundamental axisin the response of the education system and of other educationagents. In this sense, the catastrophe has not been just ecologicalbut also, and foremost, social and political by questioning theeconomic globalization – its profound cause – and by putting inevidence the vulnerability of the administrations, incapable ofpreventing or mitigating its impact on the environment and on thehuman communities. In this scenario, EE contributes to thereflection about the origin of the catastrophe as an unforeseenconsequence of the “advanced modernity”, in conformity with theanalysis by Ulrich Beck of the “risk society”, and of the politizingpotential of the successive catastrophes – the tip of the iceberg –in which the new social ethos is manifested and constructed.

Keywords

Environmental Education – Risk Society – Environmental catastrophe– Political education.

On November 19th 2002, after driftingfor a week from North to South, moving alongthe whole Atlantic coast of Galicia (part ofSpain, Northwestern region of the IberianPeninsula), the Prestige found her destiny morethan 3000 meters below the surface. As areminder, she left us more than 50,000 tons ofheavy fuel oil that washed the coast insuccessive waves, from the Portuguese borderto the French and Spanish shores of the Bay ofBiscay. The Galician coast was, by far, the mostaffected, receiving an estimated 30,000 to40,000 tons of oil. This is the starting point ofthis text, and also its point of arrival. It is,without a doubt, a maritime catastrophecomparable to others that feature in the annalsof modern environmentalism, such as that ofthe Torre Canyon (1967) or the more recentExxon Valdez (1989). But it has also been atragically enriching “experiment” offering keysto understand the perception, socialrepresentation and reaction of “advanced”societies to the catastrophic expression of the“manufactured risks” – to use the phrase coinedby Giddens (2000) – typical of thecontemporary world and that, in general,appear as fuzzy, invisible, hermetic threats tothe whole of society.

In the civic reaction of a large part ofthe Galician society, many social actors andagents have played a central role in identifyingand making visible the threat – like the child inthe famous H. C. Andersen story The Emperor’sNew Clothes – and in the proactive response toit: some of the communication media (hereincluded the intensive use of the Internet), alarge part of the local scientific community, theecologists and environmentalists, theprofessional and company interest groups moreclosely related to the sea, people from the artsand culture etc. From this assemblage ofmediators, the interest here is in exploring therole of Environmental Education and that ofenvironmental educators, particularly those thathave worked inside and from within theeducation system, in the collective task of

constructing a rational and democraticresponse to the catastrophe. We intend,furthermore, for this approximation to highlightsome of the identity problems that seem toaffect Environmental Education, problemsapparently overcome by what presents itself asa new frontier: the Education for SustainableDevelopment.

The political identity ofEnvironmental Education

In the first texts published in Spainabout the identity of an EnvironmentalEducation (EE) then still being gestated(Strohm, 1977, Cañal, García and Porlán, 1981)it can be seen that the political approach wasessential in the formulation of the pedagogicalstrategies whose conception was needed toface up to the “environmental issue”. That wasthe dimension, the content or the conceptionmost visible, sometimes in competition,sometimes seeking complementarity with theother important reference in those pioneeringessays of theoretical grounding: the recourse toEcology as a science of synthesis transcendingthe scientific-natural field to participate in thesocial representation of the imbalances in therelations with the surroundings, and whichcould contribute with “rational” keys to theirsolution. The state of the issue was not muchdifferent in Europe and, in fact, in the world.For instance, Allan Schmieder (1977: 25) in amonograph edited by UNESCO in 1977significantly entitled Trends in EnvironmentalEducation stated that “the philosophical beliefthat we have to pursue nothing less than afundamental reform in the way in which oursociety faces the problems and makes decisionsin inherent to any Environmental Education”.The careful reader shall not overlook the factthat, while it can be analyzed from aphilosophical perspective, this is essentially apolitical task and belief.

The political nature of EE has beendiluted to the point of being explicitly

questioned by those who defend anideologically neutral education, objective andfree from values, which would limit itself totranslate the “best available knowledge” abouthow nature works – a kind of Didactics ofEcology – into a mercenary and reductionistinterpretation of EE, which we have had littledoubt in qualifying as “neoliberal” (Meira,2001). The expression of this conception is aneducative practice explicitly apolitical inenvironmental issues, which must grant theindividual the “freedom” to act accordingly, inthe trust that his/her behavior will bereasonably pro-environment if he/she has themost appropriate information.

Nowadays, the discourse of EE focuseson the notion of sustainable development. Inthe official genesis of this concept, clearlypolitical, we find the Rio de Janeiro 1992Conference, the Earth Summit on Environmentand Development that took place in theBrazilian city, where the main world leadersgathered to negotiate a strategy to facesimultaneously the imbalances in developmentand the environmental crisis. Their deliberationswere consolidated in several documents, themost important from an education viewpointbeing the Rio Declaration, conceived tosupersede the supposedly obsolete Declarationof Stockholm, and the Agenda 21, a moreaction-oriented, strategic document. In parallelwith the main event the World Forum of NGOsand Social Movements also gathered. Althoughless publicized for obvious reasons, aroundthirty alternative programmatic documents wereapproved at this forum, among which theTreaty on EE for sustainable societies and forglobal responsibility, whose Fourth Principlestates forthrightly that “EnvironmentalEducation is not neutral, but ideological. It isa political act based on values for socialtransformation”. A clear position that contrastswith the ideological asepsis that characterizesthe official documents of the Earth Summit.

Although it may seem strange andparadoxical, the most important in the Rio

Declaration or in chapter 36 of Agenda 21 isnot what they say about a certain way ofunderstanding EE, but what they do not say:chapter 36, dedicated to education as aninstrument to build sustainable development,does not deal, in fact, with EE, but with it refersto as “education for sustainable development”.The only two direct mentions to EE in the textare made to cite the Tbilisi 1977 Declaration,which is noted as a remote antecedent. Indeed,it would be worth reading carefully thisDeclaration and the documents that supportedit, to capture the weight of the politicaldimension in the origins of EE, vividly presentin that foundational stage and actually evenwithin the United Nations.

Going back to the Rio Earth Summit, itshould be remarked that another significantdocument, the Rio Declaration, does not eveninclude the word ‘education’ in its text, whichrefers to communication and information butnot to education. This subtle effort of anofficial deconstruction of a trajectory, that ofEE, which in 1992 accumulated twenty years ofexperience, may be seen in a number ofdifferent ways, but from a contemporaryviewpoint it can only be understood asresulting from a confrontation, more tacit thanexplicit, between different conceptions of whatEE must be like, a confrontation set against anideological background and in which thedefinition of the type and depth of thechanges that the praxis of EE must aspire to isat play. A confrontation to which, sadly, manyenvironmental educators, perhaps the majorityof them, remain oblivious and also naïve.

In these last years many expressionshave been used to talk about EE: it has beenqualified or described as “education in values”,“education for coexistence”, “ecopedagogy”,“education for citizenship”, “civic education”,“global education” etc. We could ask ourselvesif behind this search for adjectives thatemphasize its identity, we are not simplyshunning before the field of action of politicaleducation. That is to say, that the central issue

is how to facilitate that citizens becomeconscious and active agents in society – whichnow is also the global society – so that theywill know their rights and learn to actaccordingly, giving them the abilities andcognitive, emotional, and social instruments toparticipate actively in public life and indecision-making in all levels. We talk genericallyof a political education, even though theobjects upon which we project and express itmay be gender equality, intragenerational equity,the respect for cultural diversity or enjoying aquality environment now and in the future.

In the decade since the Rio Summit, theshift from the United Nations system for EE tothe Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)has given rise to a few controversies about thetheoretical and strategic meaning of suchchange. Since the Earth Summit many of useducators have spent more than a decade likegreyhounds in the tracks chasing the hare ofSustainable Development. This is no gratuitousrhetorical figure. As we all know, the greyhoundsnever catch up with the hare, which by the wayis not even a real hare, despite looking like one.The greyhounds think they know what they arerunning for – to capture the hare – but in factthey do it to facilitate a gambling business,which, it is said, is far from negligible. The mainplayers never question this purpose, needless tosay that the greyhounds lack the faculty to doit, although the latter are the ones that carry thecan when they do not win (something that isbound to happen sooner or later). Neither dothey have the possibility of choosing a differentgame, or a different “playing field”, given thefact that they are not free to run or not. Theirworld is the racetracks, and they cannot evenknow if their world is just one among manypossible worlds.

I do not know if many players in EE seethemselves in this metaphor or at least seeelements in it that describe their role or the rolethat seems to be given to EE in the so-calledadvanced societies. I can see too manysimilarities.

To begin with, we have not chosen theplaying field created around SustainableDevelopment. Let truth be said, we haveaccepted, with no little enthusiasm, to play init. Even though after what happened — orrather, not happened — at the 2002Johannesburg Summit, and after only punctualsuccesses or apparently localized victories – asthe Prestige – maybe it is time to realize thatlittle can be expected from the hare ofSustainable Development. In fact, it can beeasily seen that the final recipe from the well-known Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987), whichmade the concept official, was more of thesame: a sustainable economic growth thatwould allow financial resources to be releasedin the North and in the South to facesimultaneously the environmental crisis and thatof development. The key therefore is thateverything hinges on – and hence SustainableDevelopment is accepted and applauded by theWorld Bank, the IMF, neoliberal governments,multinationals etc – deepening the deregulationof markets, and on what, often cynically, isreferred to as the “true democracy”.

The task of EE — or if we prefer, of ESD— looms in this scenario as extraordinarilydifficult, at least in the more developedcountries: how does one convince the Westernpopulation that their lifestyle and the economicmodel that supports it produce unwantedeffects that, paradoxically, threaten the levels ofwelfare achieved? How can the same fractionof the population, a little over 20% of theworld total, accept the changes necessary tooverturn the environmental risks and thosederived from the unfair distribution of theplanet’s resources? Except for naïve orneoliberal educators (and they exist), a greatdeal of the reason for the existence of EE inthe contemporary world hangs on thesequestions.

The first task, to raise the awareness ofthe relevance of environmental problems, ispartially completed. Public opinion polls showto what extent Western populations “identify”

and “are aware” of the importance of a wholeseries of environmental problems alreadyincorporated into the common culture of anycitizen (climate change, deforestation, ozonelayer etc) or reveal themselves to be concernedabout the “future” of the environment, but evenmore concerned with other, more daily threatssuch as the strike, health, or social security(Jodelet y Scipion, 1996). The levels ofknowledge and conscience are, in general,quite low, and do not translate into substantialchanges in lifestyles or in behaviors related tocollective decision making (the vote,participation in environmental groups, theactive demand for change in environmentalpolicies etc). The “environmental culture” of thevast majority of the population is still verysuperficial, despite the fact that the scientificinformation available and made public on theecological discontent grows exponentially.

Two psychosocial processes help toexplain the difficulty in developing a “deepenvironmental culture”. In the first place, themost serious environmental threats have acounterfactual nature. We know a climatechange exists, for example, because science hastold it, mainly through the media. We acceptthere is an important problem almost as if itwas a question of faith, but we fail to identifyhow it could affect us in the long run, or howthe coming generations could be affected, andneither do we accept our share of the“responsibility” for its genesis. We lack thesensorial capacity to detect that the Earth’sclimate is changing, and we even get confusedwhen we attribute to this change theoccurrence of certain atypical atmosphericphenomena, which are part of themeteorological normality, mistaking weather forclimate.

Secondly, the social and technologicalcomplexity inherent to the processes ofmanipulation and transformation of nature inthe advanced societies prevents us from beingconscious of how our individual and collective– that is, of the social aggregate we belong to

– behaviors are related to the degradation ofthe biosphere. The environmental or socialgenealogy of the products and services weconsume and of the residues we produceremains largely hidden. We may be aware ofthe existence of environmental problems, butnot of their etiology or of our role, individualor collective, in their causes. Moreover, whenwe get a glimpse of such complexity it becomesdifficult to think that an individual action infavor of the environment might really alter theestablished order. Globalization has increasedthe opacity and complexity of problems,contributing to the feeling of impotence of themore conscious citizens. Thus, we are capableof showing genuine indignation for episodes ofcontamination such as the Prestige’s or othertanker ships, but we hardly recognize that ourenergy model, or equivalently the lifestyle ofany Western citizen, is based on the availabilityof crude oil transported in large scale throughthe oceans. It is easy to take on the role of thevictim, but extremely difficult to assume – evenif indirect – responsibility. Ulrich Beck puts itforcefully: “The race between perceptiblewealth and imperceptible risks cannot be wonby the latter (1998a: 51).

There is a third additional difficulty. Inpractically every document that marked thedevelopment of EE in a little over threedecades of history (Belgrade, Tbilisi, Moscow,Rio de Janeiro, Thessalonica etc) there is aninsistence on the fact that the social changerequired to meet the environmental crisis alsorequires a change a deep change of values.This can be another way of concealing thepolitical substance of EE behind an apparentlyethical controversy. When passing from thegeneric proposal of a change of values toidentifying which values must be changed andby what other values, the nature of theproposed change becomes evident. Nothing isclearly identified in those documents: one talksof respect for life, of protecting Nature and,from 1992 onwards, of sustainability as the newguiding value. But when working with a

minimum of coherence in any educative-environmental action, it is easy to clash againstthe functional values present in advancedsocieties and in the context of market economy:against parsimony in the use of naturalresources, the overt consumption imposes itselfas of the keys in the functioning of theeconomic machinery; against the need toredistribute environmental benefits andburdens, the selfish dynamics of the marketimposes itself; against the praise forparticipation and transparency in public affairs,the passivity of citizens and the opacity of theadministrations and economic agents imposethemselves etc.

In fact, the practice of EE, when ittranscends the more superficial approaches(naturalists, conservationists…), enters quiteeasily in conflict with reality, that is to say, withthe market, and with the culture and politicalframework that gives it institutional support.That is why we have characterized EE as aneminently civic and political education (Caridey Meira, 2002) to which, for example, thedemocratic govern of society is equally or evenmore relevant than the ecologicalunderstanding of the environmental crisis.

In an effort to give meaning andcontent to the discourse of Education forSustainable Development, two terms areemployed profusely in Anglo-Saxon pedagogyattempting to define two basic principles thatshould be kept in mind within this approach:“empowerment” – translated into Spanish,particularly in Latin America, as the grotesque“empoderamiento” –, which really talks about“taking over the power” or about the “ability toexert power over that which affects us”, and“ownership” – which means “incorporation”, inthe sense of incorporating reality in symbolicand material terms –, (Tilbury, 2001). Both areconcepts whose genealogy is political, andboth prescribe an educative action whosestrategic sense and objectives have a politicalcharacter. Their incorporation into thetheoretical-methodological arsenal of EE in the

1990s is due to some Anglo-Saxon authorscommitted to the Critical Pedagogy paradigm(Fien, Robotton, Sterling etc). It is not clear ifthey are newfangled ideas, either in thetheoretical field or in that of pedagogical praxis.It certainly is a bit of an extravagance ofhistory that these two terms have found specialfavor in Latin-American EE, precisely in thecradle of Popular Education which, bolsteredby the works of people such as Paulo Freire,advocated in the 1960s and 1970s –foundational years for EE – Education as aplatform and instrument for citizenlyconscientization (“incorporation”?) and politicalmobilization (“empowerment”?), viewing theemancipated subject as an agent that assumesand understands his/her reality and can actfreely to transform it.

The object of EE, as we understand it, isvery far from such perspective. The moststraightforward would be to defend that its mainpurpose, the one that gives it meaning as apraxical discipline, is to transform theenvironment. I do not believe it to be the case.We can also understand that it seeks to transformknowledges, values and behaviors relative to theenvironment. These are also purposes of EE, butnot exactly those that give it all its meaning andidentity. Going one step further, Lucie Sauvé(1999, 2004), even though presenting aparticularly critical discourse against the“neoliberal” bias embedded in the ESD project,understands that the purpose of EE is totransform the relations with the environment. I donot share this interpretation either.

The object and objective of EE are,respectively and from my point of view, thesocial relations and the transformation of socialrelations. Its direct object comprises the socialrelations; the knowledge of the environment,the behaviors and values are indirect objects ofthe main educative task, and its instruments.What we seek, or should seek, with EE, in animplicit or explicit manner, is to transformsociety, and to transform the social relations,because we know that they contain a distortion

that brings as its consequence the ecologicaldegradation of the world we live in. Our mate-rial as educators is ultimately the way in whichwe represent ourselves within the world – andnot just the world as surroundings or “external”medium – and the way we relate with eachother, as individuals and as communities, toincorporate it, to satisfy our needs, and todistribute the resources it gives us. The politicalsubstance of EE is expressed and manifestedinescapably in how we represent (cognitive,symbolic, ethical and cultural levels) andregulate (economic, legal-normative, productiveand reproductive levels) these relations.

In the risk society made real,Environmental Education ismade political

Paul Virilio offers us an illuminatingstatement: “A catastrophe is like a miracle, butreversed”. That is to say, it is a revealing factthat helps us to suddenly perceive andunderstand aspects of social reality thatnormally go unnoticed, and that are seen underthe light of an extraordinary event in a moredistinct, clear and manifest way. The analogywith a miracle as manifestation of somethingoccult, of that which is not easily accessible inthe plane of normal life is here particularlyappropriate.

During my lifetime I have directlyexperienced three black tides. Looking back atthe reaction they caused, both from me andfrom my surroundings – the Galician society –I find out that the community changed itsposition and perception about this kind ofevent. They were three very serious “incidents”,especially in ecosystems as productive as theVigo Estuary, which is largely responsible forthe sustenance of almost half a million people.This spot of the Galician coast suffered thewreck of a tanker, the Polycomander, in 1970,whose spill left marks that can still be noticed.I was about ten at the time, and I remembervividly seeing from the window of my house

the ship in flames near the Cies Islands, whichprotect the entrance to the estuary. But“nothing happened”, it was just anothermaritime accident, a regrettable and unpleasantevent whose ecological impact was ignored,and whose socioeconomic impact wasunderestimated. The sea, so goes a deep-rooted belief of the Galician maritimecommunities, “can cope with anything”.Indeed, the burnt up ship was made to floatagain and was kept in service for a few moreyears under a different name.

In 1992 I saw a second black tide: thespill of the Aegean Sea, grounded in the ACoruña Estuary in the northwestern tip ofGalicia. This incident already caused some so-cial complaint, stimulated by an ecologicalmovement that stretched beyond itspossibilities, and by the defensive reaction ofsome groups of fishermen already wary frompast experiences (Urquiola, Andros Patria etc),who manifested themselves, even if notmassively, to have the responsible pointed out,to demand preventive measures and to call forfinancial compensation. The motto Never Again,now converted into the banner of the socialmovement in response to the latest tragedy, wasborn at that moment.

And then the Prestige came at the end of2002, and an unexpected social response wastriggered with a mobilizing capacity inside theGalician society and with an influence outsidethe local context that astonished all, within andwithout, starting with those same mobilizedcitizens, and continuing with those responsiblefor dealing with the incident, especially thoseresponsible for preventing such incidents,dealing with them properly, and mitigating thedamage they cause once the black tides beginto sweep the shores. People that actedincompetently and that tried to distort whathad really happened, not to avoid spreadingunfounded panic, but to protect themselvesfrom the political costs that could be derivedfrom the blunders made when managing thiscrisis. It is worth recalling that the State

Government at that dreadful day was in thehands of José Maria Aznar, and that ManuelFraga Iribarne was in charge of the regionalGovernment, both politicians of the SpanishPopular Party.

Something must have changed to make thesocial reaction before those three events sosubstantially different. The catastrophe of thePrestige came at a moment when the Galiciansociety, or at least a significant fraction of it, hadalready achieved a certain degree of maturity inwhat we could qualify as “environmental culture”.Moreover, it has been a disaster that has impingedon the whole Galician coast. It has, directly orindirectly, threatened the livelihood of a good partof the population, whose microeconomics andeveryday life are intimately related to the sea. It isalso an event difficult to understand and assimilategiven its magnitude and the feeling of vulnerabilityand helplessness that the behavior of theauthorities responsible for the emergencyapparatus– at first erratic, then sly – has generated.

The feeling of threat, of being the victimof a catastrophe out of all control, grew andtransformed into collective indignation when thecover up maneuvers of the public institutions andauthorities whose mission and obligation wassupposedly of guaranteeing a certain degree ofprotection were exposed. It has also been anemotionally devastating event; one has to recallthat the sea has in Galicia, apart from a significanteconomic weight – is accounts for 12% of theregion’s IGP – a symbolic relevance that places itamong the identity traits of the Galician culturalimaginary.

The social intelligence had readilyunderstood that the administrations were doingnext to nothing to respond in an effective way tothe threats, that the accident with the tanker hadbeen managed very poorly, and that a series ofinappropriate or hasty decisions – devoid of anyrationality – had allowed the oil spill to hit thecoast heavily. From this point of view the Prestigeacted as a “heuristic detonator” that made animportant sector of the society appreciate clearlythe critical nature of the threat, notwithstanding

the general confusion and the illusion of “noproblem” or “no catastrophe” projected by theadministrations in charge of its management, andof the corresponding communication media.

In the face of the disaster, not onlyecological but also political, it was necessary toput in action all social, intellectual, cultural, andeducational resources that could help overcomingproactively the initial trauma; that created by thedisaster itself, and the one engendered by thepoor reaction of those who had the technical,economic and political means to avoid it ormitigate its effects. Some sociocultural keys canbe identified to help understand the activation ofthat social response (Meira, 2004):

• the identitary key: given the weight of thesingularity of the Galician country, a communityor nation integrated into the Spanish state withits own language and culture, and also given thesymbolic and cultural role that the sea has playedin the permanent construction of such identity;• the environmental key: one of the hypotheseswe have been working with is that the “third” ofthe Galician society mobilized in a more activeway is largely nourished by what we could callthe generations of Environmental Education.They are those cohorts that have been throughsocialization and schooling within the last thirtyyears, with access to a (formal, non-formal, andinformal) education in which environmentalissues have acquired a growing presence untilthey have become part of the common culture.They are generations with a certainenvironmental awareness, which was activated bythe catastrophe. The majority of teachers andeducators that have mobilized after the Prestigealso belong to these generations;• the socioeconomic key: it is no coincidencethat in the Lower Estuaries – in southernGalicia – the most critical and dynamic socialresponse to the catastrophe and itsmanagement was to be found, as it is also notby accident that the citizenly reaction was morefeeble and limited in the Death Coast. In theformer case we are dealing with the most

economically dynamic region of Galicia and thebest articulated one from a social viewpoint,with a rich network of autonomousentrepreneurs and small and medium-sizecompanies that live from the sea (seafood,aquaculture, fishing services etc); a collectionof productive sectors and social agents withmuch to lose. In the latter case, we have one ofthe more dejected areas of the Galician territory:demography in recession, emigration, a fraileconomy etc. In fact, people in the Death Coasthad little to lose, something that made theircommunities, including the ones most affectedby the disaster, more vulnerable to thegovernment strategies to contain the social andpolitical impact of the black tides (injection ofsubventions and economic aid, subsidies etc);• the solidarity key: there are no words toexpress the gratitude to the thousands ofpeople who came from other regions of Spainand from abroad to help removing, literallywith their own hands, the oil that cameashore. But it should also be said that twothirds of the volunteers involved wereGalician;• and the political key: many peoplediscovered themselves as citizens in and beforethe catastrophe. Recalling the Anglo-Saxonterminology previously mentioned, the Galiciancitizenry took part in an accelerated process of“empowerment”: of taking conscience of theneed to assume power, not that of the politicalparties, but the power – or counter-power – ofthe self-organized civil society. To this processof discovery and incorporation of reality theiniquitous role of the administrationscontributed as an antithesis.

The catastrophe of the Prestige made itpossible to distinguish clearly the mechanismsthat operate in a risk society profoundly market-driven in its economic and cultural spheres. TheGerman sociologist Ulrich Beck has examined thiskind of situations starting from the analysis ofother catastrophes (Chernobyl, Bhopal etc),affirming their “politizing potential” (1998a,1998b). In the face of a catastrophe, we have to

become more reflective, to explain it andposition ourselves preventively before it. The riskand the catastrophe turn the modern societiesreflective; they situate them before the mirror ofthe threats associated with the levels of wellbeing achieved. The catastrophe is anepiphenomenon of the risk: the risk can beignored or one can accept to live with it, thecatastrophe, and moreover the first personcatastrophe, no. In this process, the citizens andthe communities can begin to see themselves aspolitical subjects and not just as passivesubjects, victims or harmed. One of the mainvirtues of Never Again as a reactive and proactivesocial movement is that it has never asked forany compensation, but only demands rationality,the use of reason and political transparency inthe management of natural resources and of thehuman-generated threats and, more specifically,of those more closely related to Galicia and tothe sea. According to Beck, the catastrophesincrease the political awareness of societies, andthat was to a large extent what happened inGalicia: we decided that the citizens can alsomake politics, that we are subjects with capacityto take over and exert power, even though “thesystem” – the inertia of representative democracy– may tend to identify this field as the exclusiveprovince of the parties and of those who controlthem. More than a few members of the politicalapparatus of the party in power (“professionalpoliticians”) have complained about theinterference from other actors (citizens,scientists, teachers, artists etc) in a field theyregarded as uniquely theirs.

The active role of educatorsand of Environmental Education

To a large extent, the EE – both theformal and the non-formal – has helped torationalize the catastrophe. It has done thatfrom various perspectives, which we shall try toillustrate with excerpts from interventions ofdifferent teachers of secondary education whotook part in six discussion groups in an equal

number of secondary schools in the DeathCoast during the first semester of 2004, withinthe context of an ongoing study about theeducation and social response to thecatastrophe given by the school communities inthe district most heavily affected by the blacktide. All discussions have been recorded andthen transcribed.

Before scrutinizing the keys of theeducation response (see Figure 1) to reveal theireminently political nature, it is necessary toperform a brief contextualization. It all started,as in the whole of the Galician society, with anemotional snap. A teacher tells us in his ownwords about those first feelings of anger andimpotence from which the need arose toconstruct a more positive response: “In all theyears I’ve been working, I’ve never cried somuch as I did in the year of the disaster… (…)it was like… like a death… suddenly, suchatrocity. For me it contaminated everything (…),I recall many afternoons I just couldn’t stay athome, I went out to walk … I was sick with thenews, (…) I even left classes badly prepared…and I picked up the El País, the La Voz deGalicia… I recall sickness” (teacher of theCarnota Secondary School, discussion groupcarried out on 18th June 2004).

Some keys of the response to thePrestige “in” and “from” the education system:

• The revelation: the “power of the EE” or theEE generation in the vanguard.• The Prestige “does not come” in thecurriculum… the reality of out there… and itdemands urgent and innovative answers.• The Prestige questions the “symbolicdelocalization” with which the EE operates“within an order”.• In the face of EE “within an order” thereemerges the conflict (intra- and extra-school), the contradictions, the opposedpositions, the dialectics with reality… manycenters create “alternative public spheres”.• Many teachers become “criticalintellectuals” and social “activists”.• The “Administration” reveals its conceptionof EE: “the Circular”. The desirable valuesappear as counter-values.• EE changes into political education andpolitical action… or is it the other wayaround?

Such emotional experience was previousto, and one might say necessary to open theway and motivate a more reflective response.The emotivity that filled the environment inmany education centers is intimately related tothat manifested in the more sensitive sectors ofthe Galician society: they constitute reactionsthat cannot be seen separately. In a situation ofemergency, of defenselessness, the emotionalempathy of those affected was one of the ba-ses to create spontaneously a wide and tightsocial network where the subjects jumped fromone social field to another, from one mobilizedgroup to another, from one social role toanother, interchangeably. Many teachers andmany schools from all education levels cametogether in this social network, playing a moreactive role in the rural areas, where the“school’s” the “teacher’s” often were the onlyinstitution capable of generating a critical andalternative image of the situation.

The first element of connection betweenthe EE and the social response to thecatastrophe has already been seen: the EEgenerations have placed themselves in thevanguard. The environmental culture of theGalician society has changed in the last decades.When facing up to the complex reality of thecontemporary world, the younger populationincorporate among their main values andrepresentations a certain sensitivity andconscience of the threats derived from thedeterioration of an environment subjected tohuman overpressure. It is, certainly, an incipientand still not very articulated and profoundculture, but it constitutes a social and culturalasset activated by the Prestige. A teacher, whenreflecting about the reason for such anunexpected reaction, points out this generationalvariable: “Maybe it has to do with thegenerations [of teachers] that are working rightnow at the centers. I have the feeling that webegin to see in the centers a certain prevalenceof people in their thirties, and, you see, we arepeople that, knowing much, knowing little,knowing what we know, we are very keen ondoing things right, and on learning how to dothem right, and on improving on everything wecan, not just the education for teenagers, but ifwe can help with a grain of sand to make betterthe world we live in, let us do it (…) And inprevious generations, of people now in theirfifties (…) that was not so present” (Teacherfrom a secondary school in Carnota, discussiongroup carried out on 18th June 2004).

The Prestige does not come in thecurriculum, but many centers and teachersreacted immediately putting in practice anemergency pedagogical action in response to areality that spilled over the classes, that wasimpossible to ignore, that was just there:

“I don’t think it was immediate, when thePrestige happened, I remember I waslistening to the radio, it was Sunday (…) Iheard it was nothing, that the trickle [agovernment official actually described in

such words the fuel that flowed out of thePrestige to downplay it], and what else …And you could see it all, and you wentcrazy, the youngsters were here, verynervous. Then I believe that it justhappened in the class, we were having aclass on visual language [says the Imageteacher] and everybody was talking aboutthe Prestige and I thought: - Well, how canI give a class on visual language and justtalk about something else, and not makethe subject coincide with everybody’sconcerns, and then we began to think of away to use visual language to express thatpreoccupation …” (Teacher from aSecondary School in Carnota, discussiongroup carried out on 18th June 2004).

In the immediate pedagogical responsegiven by the teachers and centers of primaryand secondary education there are threepedagogical-didactical elements that should bestressed:

• the main source of information, includingscientific information, about the catastrophewas the communication media, both thosethat tried to be thorough and accurate, andthose that worked as instruments ofdisinformation and occultation of the truth;most of the original material for work inclassrooms came from those sources: texts,information, opinions, scientific data andexplanations, charts, photographs etc. Thecomparison of points of view between mediawith distinct “versions” of the catastrophewas a widely employed didactic strategy.• additionally, many teachers put in practicethe same journalistic techniques used byconventional communication media – press,television and radio – as part of their didacticinstruments: interviewing the people affected,contrasting information, writing opinionarticles, publishing school journals and maga-zines dedicated exclusively to the issue,carrying out photographic reports etc.

• the use of the NTIC to collect and exchangeinformation, and to communicate with otherschools in Galicia and abroad, to exchangespecific didactic materials and to plan anddevelop common tasks and projects.

The Prestige questions the symbolicdelocalization with which EE operates within anorder. In EE there are more and more actionsand experiences that are the pedagogicalequivalent of the “no places” of anthropologistMarc Auge (2002): these contemporary spaceswith no identity (airports, hypermarkets, stations,museums…), interchangeable and anonymous,“where the individual feels as a spectator andthe nature of the spectacle does not reallymatter” (p. 91). Transporting this idea to theeducational-environmental field there are many“no programs” (activities, equipment, didacticmaterials etc) that talk about generic problems,that trivialize and fragment them, that placethem nowhere and that are interchangeable toany social scenario, that do not express indefinite the local or global connection of therecipients with the problems. They constitutedelocalized education practices and, for thisreason, stripped of their strategic meaning. Aclear example is given by the educative programsaimed at forming and informing the populationon selective collection of domestic waste: theyare interchangeable, they tend to reproduce thesame model everywhere, and have all incommon the fact that they do not question themodel of society that produces the waste; theysimply aim at the citizens being able toassociate the color of a basket to a certainfraction of domestic waste so as to avoid errorsin the separation process. All political meaningof taking conscience and all purposes oftransformation of the social reality are lost. Inthe case of the Prestige both those dimensionscould be clearly seen: the local one – we werethe victims, it was happening here – and theglobal – it was a perverse manifestation of theglobalization. We had and still have it clear thatit was a catastrophe of globalization, of the

global market, of which we are all victims butalso beneficiaries.

The Areanegra [black sand] group ofteachers collected and channeled a major part ofthe response of the teachers’ community to thecatastrophe. A peculiar fact is that the groupdefines itself more along the lines of the anti-globalization movements than as part of the“classic” movements of pedagogical renewal,which in Spain played a very important role in theinnovations of formal education during thetransition to democracy in the 1970s and 1980s.The group’s civic-political vocation was clear fromthe beginning, as was the transcendence of itspedagogical proposals beyond the overwhelmingoccurrence. In fact, it started working on thePrestige, but moved on to oppose the war againstIraq, and then to the inclusion in the curriculumof the struggle against gender violence etc.Areanegra is a movement largely integrated byteachers who work for the school community,creating in a few weeks a tight network ofresponse. The network is not just of groups andschools, but also of people, people that act as thenodes of the network: “Differently from othergroups of teaching, Areanegra intends to have aglobal line of action around contemporarythemes, starting from the maxim that nothing thatis human is alien to us, particularly if we aretalking about the education of people, of futuresociety. Personally, I would include Areanegra inthe worldwide anti-globalization movement,within this growing number of people that believethat a different world is possible, that stand upagainst neoliberalism and its consequences: thedestruction of the planet, the destitution of thecountries, and the growing inequalities, thefeminization of poverty (…). We are not apedagogical renewal movement, but a movementof response to the aggressions inflicted againstthese values or against human rights (…)”(interview carried out with a teacher member ofthe Areanegra, 4th April 2004).

In the face of EE “within an order” – thatorder conceived avoiding any ethical, political,social or cultural questioning of the established

reality – there emerge the conflict, thecontradictions and the opposed interests. Thedialectics that emerges in a social scenario shockedby the black tides allows many teaching groups toconstitute “alternative public spheres”. Giroux(1997: 36) uses this expression in the context ofwhat he calls “postcolonial pedagogies” todesignate those places that stimulate people toeducate themselves “in the Gramscian sense of theword, of governing themselves as agents that canlocate themselves in history, at the same time thatthey determine the present as part of a discourseand a practice that allow people to imagine anddesire beyond the existing limitations and practicesin society”. There were also important internalconflicts in those education centers and groups ofteachers that exercised their autonomy, which isalways relative, but with which we have to play:conflicts between teachers, betweens teachers andstudents, between teachers and parents, betweencenters and administrations etc.

But such tension is an inseparable andunavoidable component of an educationalapproach that questions and intends to transformestablished reality. These conflicts reveal, in fact,that the values defended by EE are actuallycounter-values, and are not, therefore, thedominant values in the society and market. Thiskey goes unnoticed and does not manifest itselfwhen one puts in practice an EE delocalized anddepolitized, a “no places” EE for “no citizens”. Ananecdote told in one of the discussion groupscarried out with teachers illustrates thissituation: “In addition to the fact that the centerwas involved in the mobilization in this case, itgot involved in many other things (…) Manyactivities were carried out in the center, ithoused the Never Again platform and also otheractivity groups, then, just to mention, in one ofthe discussion forums the mayor of the city saidthat we were converting him, as if it was aninsult! ...” [another teacher continues] “… thiswas a personal conversation with me over thephone…(…) after the 24 hours closed-doorsmeeting with the participants, well… after lots ofactivities, the mayor of the city tells me: - But R.,

look at what you are doing, you are turning theInstitute into a forum of debates… That was an“insult”, because he said it as an insult…unconsciously, because if he had thought aboutit he wouldn’t have said it… it was a slip of thetongue”. (Teachers of the Muxía SecondarySchool, discussion group carried out on the 15thJune 2004).

In this social scenario many teachersbegan to play the role of critical intellectuals andsocial activists. Without giving up theirprofessional roles and the ethical boundariesthat come with them, the teachers morecommitted with “the reality” changed from“managers” or “mediators” of the curriculum to“intellectuals” in the sense given to this word bysociologists such as Giroux (1990) or Bourdieu(2001). To the French sociologist a criticalintellectual is “someone who brings in to thepolitical struggle his specific competence andauthority, and the values associated to theexercise of his profession, such as values oftruth or of selflessness, or, to put it in anotherway, someone who steps into the political fieldwithout leaving behind his demands andcompetencies of investigator”; and he adds: “inso intervening, she is prone to disappoint, orbetter said, to clash in her own universe withthose who see in the commitment a violation ofaxiological neutrality, and in the political worldwith those who see in her a threat to theirmonopoly, and in general with all those to whomher intervention is a nuisance” (Bourdieu, 2001,p. 38). A teacher expressed in his own wordshow it was to take up this position: “I believe itwas essential, the participation… I believe that thekey manifestation of this was the Human Chain1;it seems to me that it was a most notable

1. The Human Chain was one of the main activities of conscientization andmobilization of the education world organized by Areanegra. It consisted ofa human chain formed by secondary school pupils from all over Galiciajoining two points in the Death Coast most affected by the catastrophe. Itwas celebrated on the 12th March 2003 and had the participation of morethan 45,000 students and 3,000 teachers, despite the efforts of the GalicianSchool Administration to set hurdles and prevent it from happening. Moreinformation about this activity and about Areanegra can be found atwww.areanegra.org.

phenomenon, of much more relevance than wasattributed to it (…) but in the pedagogical sphereit was already at that time castrated, subtractedof its power. Then, I think the first to react wasthe education community (…) in this, let us say,sociological level… afterwards, in the economiclevel the Guilds [reacted] etc. But in terms ofconscience, of the critique… I believe the onlysector that moved in Galicia was the education.(…) To the teachers, it was the trigger that mademany people who were paralyzed wake up… thatwoke up in them this idea that educating is notjust teaching equations… that is, it is somethingelse, it goes beyond that”. (Teacher of theSecondary School of Muxía, discussion groupcarried out on 15th June 2004).

When the values had revealed themselvesas counter-values, when the “official version”already laid dejected at the feet of the “sociallyconstructed truth” in many alternative, critical andinterconnected spaces and social networks, theeducation Administration revealed itself bysending a “circular” to the centers. “The Circular”is a document several pages long containing,only apparently, a legal and normative statement.Its purpose was to demonstrate that the teachers,as civil servants, and the education centerssubordinated to the Administration had theobligation of being “objective” and “neutral”,threatening with disciplinary sanctions those thatunderstood it otherwise. Among other legalsubterfuges, it qualified the activities and didacticmaterials about the catastrophe and the socialresponse to it produced by the centers as“publicity and propaganda”, their production andpublic display being therefore forbidden in theteaching centers. The objective was, of course,different: to provoke self-censorship for fear ofpenalties, and to give support to the teachers andother directing teams and centers that hadremained loyal to the official “truth”, propagatingit in their classes and, particularly, excluding fromthem everything that had to do with thecatastrophe.

Paradoxically, “The Circular” encouragedeven further, if that was indeed possible, the

political sense of those teachers and membersof the education community more committedwith the citizenly mobilization. A few statementsby Don Manuel Fraga Iribarbe, President of theGovernment of the Community, about “TheCircular” and its “meaning”, taken from a pressrelease distributed by Europa Press speak bythemselves: “At the press conference followingthe meeting of the Counsel of la Xunta, ManuelFraga recognized that issues like the violationsor the beating of children ‘drive him crazy’, buthe warned that ‘if there is a grave violation itis to the pupils’ consciences perpetrated bysome teachers. I do not have to say whichpolitical group they belong to’. Fraga indicatedthat the Education had forbidden publicity andpropaganda at the education centers through acircular after receiving ‘numerous calls fromparents, teachers and even principals asking forand end to the use of schools as protestplatforms against the war and for the crisis ofthe Prestige. ‘That’s a shame, an absolute lackof respect for the children, for the parents andfor Galicia’, warned Fraga, who explained thathe had asked for ‘the complete collection’ ofnotices displayed at the centers, and that it isclear that they ‘suggest the use of lots ofmoney. It has nothing to do with freedom ofexpression’, he affirmed (Europa Press, 20thMarch 2003).

From our point of view the Prestige hasput in evidence that EE is an essentially politicalplaying field, even – and particularly – whendefined as apolitical and ideologically neutral. Ifthe ultimate aim is that citizens take part in thetransformation of society along principles andvalues of equity, democracy, and sustainability, wemust accept the field in which the game takesplace. If, as educators, we wish to participate inthe social change, we have to accept that theenvironment is the indirect object of our actions,and that our raw materials are the social relationsand representations that those same people andhuman communities establish about theenvironment. Whilst accepting this strategicobjective, it is necessary to question the visions

of EE that intend to define it as a field free ofvalues and ideologically aseptic whose mission isto transfer “scientific” information about what thebio-physical environment is like and how itworks, such as suggested, for example, in recentproposals of “eco-literacy” (Capra, 2003:290-295) or in readings of EE of clearly neoliberalinspiration (Sanera and Shaw, 1996); regrettably,this is and shall be an increasingly commonalternative.

In a scenario of social and ecologicalcatastrophe it is more likely that EE willtransmute into civic and political education, orperhaps one should say that it is civic andpolitical education that will transmute into EE.This has happened in Galicia at the teachingcenters and in other social spaces. In fact, theboundary between the “formal education” andthe “non-formal education” has become mostlydiffuse. Never Again is a civic movement but itis also educative. When reading its manifestosand in its public actions, one of the foremostlines of action is the permanent interpretationand reinterpretation of reality: the official me-dia tell us it is this, but we can understand itin a different way; they tell us we must staypassive and trust the specialized institutions,but we can take initiative and be proactive.Ulrich Beck (2002: 232) states clearly thestarting proposition, which for us is thereaching point: “But why the political can onlyfinds its place and develop within the politicalsystem? Who says that politics is only possibleunder the forms and bounds of thegovernmental, parliamentary or party politics?Perhaps the authentically political disappears inthe political system and reappears, transformedand generalized, in a form that must still beunderstood and developed, as subpolitics, in allother social fields”.

Closing Remarks

The sociology of risk, such as formulatedby Beck (1998a, 1998b, 2002) or Giddens(1993, 2000), uncovers that the main feature

of the threats afflicting contemporary societiesis that these threats emerge to a large extent asunexpected and undesirable effects ofmodernity’s civilizing success. The degradationof the environment is one of these threats. Theappearance of these new threats clashes withthe aspiration of controlling all the contingentfactors that generate insecurity, an essentialpart of the modern ethos, from the naturalphenomena, for which we have equippedourselves with a full administrative andtechnical-scientific apparatus of prediction,control and civil protection, to theimponderables that threaten a person’sexistence – to which respond, in developedsocieties, the social systems (sanitation, socialassistance, education etc).

The new threats, the environmental andothers that are being derived from globalization(the economic instability, the North-Southimbalances, the migration flows, the internationalterrorism, the religious clashes etc), open a chinkin the feeling of security of the “welfare societies”.It is a “perceived risk” of low intensity that bringspreoccupation and disquiet, but that seldommotivates to action, either because there are noalternatives in sight, because it is seen as a threatin the long-term, or because the costs of anychanges are assessed as intolerable. In themeantime, it is the problems of daily life, of thepresent, that concentrate most of the effectiveattention of the citizens (the employment, thesecurity of the citizens, the economic stability etc).That is what explains that at the apex of thePrestige crisis in December 2002 the event, with28% of citations, did not rank better than a thirdplace in the list of the main problems worryingthe Spaniards, according to the Center forSociological Research, the Spanish government’sdemography institute (CIS, 2003a), topped by“the unemployment” (64.9%) and by “ETA’sterrorism” (46.6%). Only a month after that, inJanuary 2003, and still in the full wake of thecatastrophe, the same question (CIS, 2003b) putthe event in fifth place (14.0%), below theproblems of “unemployment” (62.3%), “the ETA’s

terrorism” (51.6%), “the citizen’s insecurity”(27.0%), and “the immigration” (14.2%). In thesocial barometer of July of that same year “thePrestige disaster” already received only 0.1% ofcitations, occupying the 24th place among thecitizens’ concerns (CIS, 2003c). These data referto the whole of the public opinion in Spain; itwould be interesting to have specific results forthe Galician population to allow a betterjudgment.

The doubt raised by these data is if thePrestige is the tree that does not let us see thewood, or if it is the tree that shows us that thereis a wood beyond. That is: if society is capableof rationalizing the catastrophe as theexpression of a more global and invisible threat,or if it will simply see it as a contingent anddecontextualized phenomenon. We could say,for instance, that the Prestige is not, actually, “thecatastrophe”, but that it is a local manifestationof the “true catastrophe”: it is estimated in 5million tons the amount of oil and its derivativesaccidentally spilled into the oceans, which is

equivalent to saying that the amount spilled bythe Prestige corresponds to roughly 1% of thatamount (Murado, 2003). Indeed, it is estimatedthat the main source of sea contamination byhydrocarbons are the emissions by the industryand the urban concentrations (37%), followed bythe “normal” discharge resulting from the trafficof tanker ships (33%, due to the washing oftanks, cargo transfers, minor spills etc), and onlythen, in third place with 12%, the spills fromaccidents such as that involving the Prestige.This is, therefore, an insidious and imperceptiblecatastrophe: a part of the background noise thatconstitutes the new awareness of the risk. It is,above all, the most difficult catastrophe toconstruct and represent in the educative proces-ses: we cannot face a problem and seeksolutions to it if we do not even perceive it, andif its real threat is ignored or sufficiently fuzzyto prevent the triggering of the defensemechanisms activated by the Prestige. This isundoubtedly the big challenge faced byEnvironmental Education in a risk society.

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Received: 9th May 2005

Approved: 9th June 2005

Pablo Ángel Meira Cartea holds a Doctorate in Education Sciences and is Professor of Environmental Education at theUniversity of Santiago de Compostela (Galicia, Spain). He has published articles and monographs in various languages on thehistorical evolution of EE. Currently he investigates the social representations of the global environmental problems and theirimplications for education.