Synthesis on Richard Kahn's Piece

Synthesis on Richard Kahn’s “Towards Ecopedagogy”

Ecopedagogy is a concept many of us young scholars may be unfamiliar with. Prior to reading Richard Kahn’s “Towards Ecopedagogy”, I myself, had to look up the definition in order to fully grasp the concepts Kahn introduces in his work. I found that ecopedagogy refers to a movement striving to educate the globe about the environment and the importance of maintaining sustainability. The article includes excerpts and the thoughts of several other environmentalists, as the author pieces them together with his response to the works he chose to include in his composition. The main point Kahn is trying to make is that in order to attain sustainability and conservation of the environment, the globe must be aware of just how serious the conditions are and methods humans can adapt to mend the damage we have done. His view is that without being educated about the environment, how are we supposed to save our planet from being completely destroyed?

            Richard Kahn brings several points to attention with statistics to back his facts up. He emphasizes the severity of the global environmental state by touching on Richard Leakey’s idea of “the Sixth Extinction”, which includes the disappearance of species over the last thirty years that the earth has not experienced in its previous sixty-five million years of existence. He highlights that the poor condition of the environment is trickling down and affecting impoverished regions of the world by having them withstand conditions of mass starvation, homelessness, slave-labor, and global sex trade. My first thoughts were, how can issues with the environment lead to sex trafficking? The fact is that due to overdeveloped regions, (such as the U.S. and other capitalist countries in the north), poorer regions are now suffering more than ever. Statistics show that “the divide between rich and poor has been gravely exacerbated, with the gap between the two nearly doubling itself from an outrageous factor of 44:1 in 1973 to about 72:1 as of the year 2000” (Kahn 4). This separation between the rich and poor is absurd – “the top 20% of people living in advanced capitalist nations have 86% of the world’s gross domestic product, control 82% of the world’s export markets, initiate 86% of all foreign direct investments, and possess 74% of the communication wires” (Kahn 4). In a nutshell, the wealthier nations of the world are dominating the world’s resources and the  less fortunate and deprived countries don’t have the money, power, or resources to do anything about it.

            Although Kahn included vital observations in his piece, I was very frustrated while reading it. He jumps from one topic to another and back to his original topic, on more than one occassion. He does not make his points clear and he namedrops other philosophers and muddles their thoughts with his own. Aside from this, Kahn’s usage of complex sentences does not make him sound educated or professional – he merely comes off as not knowing what he is writing about. Many of his reflections are dragged out and written in so much detail that he ends up just running around in circles and repeating himself so that by the time his point is “made”, the reader has forgotten what he was getting at in the first place.

The first eight and a half pages of Kahn’s article are solely about his push for pedagogy and the need for education about conservation of the environment. He writes “tree consumption for paper products has doubled over the last forty years, resulting in about half of the planet’s forests disappearing” (Kahn 2). The way I see it, Richard Kahn could have easily written his work in less than half the words he chose to use – when he is preaching about how much paper we humans waste, he himself is contributing to it by making his points so extravagant that eight pages of his explanation could have easily been made in two to three paragraphs.