Toward a Post-Industrial Consciousness: Understanding the Linguistic Basis of Ecologically Sustainable Educational Reforms

Abstract

"The essays in this collection represent an effort to examine just one aspect of an exceedingly complex set of relationships that are at the center of the double bind that characterizes the globalization of the West's industrial consumer-dependent lifestyle during a period of rapid environmental degradation. The focus in the following chapters is on the different ways that language, which is now represented in most classrooms from the early grades through graduate school as a conduit in a sender/receiver process of communication, carries forward many of environmentally destructive misconceptions of the past. Each chapter examines, within the context of different discourses, how the layered metaphorical nature of the language/thought connection continues to reinforce the same mindset that underlies a number of key characteristics of Western culture that still are not being addressed-even by environmental thinkers."