Environmental education should be helpful
Why objectivity matters more than politics in teaching environmental issues
Objectivity must be the focus of environmental education, and all normative science must be left as opinions where they belong.
I'm sitting at my desk during the COVID-19 lockdown, coffee in hand, eager to expand my environmental knowledge through two prestigious university courses. As a career scientist and former lecturer, I'm genuinely excited. Free learning from top institutions; what could go wrong?
Everything, as it turns out. But not for the reasons you might think.
What I discovered wasn't just about poor production values or wooden presenters (though there were plenty of both). The slow death of objectivity in environmental education was far more concerning. And this matters deeply to all of us trying to navigate today's complex environmental challenges.
If you've ever felt frustrated by environmental discussions that seem more about politics than solutions or wondered why it's so hard to get straight answers about sustainability, you're not alone. Whether you're studying ecology, teaching it, or simply trying to make sense of our planet's future, the way we teach and learn about environmental issues profoundly affects our ability to solve them.
In this week's exploration of mindful scepticism, I'll share what went wrong with these courses, why it matters, and, most importantly, how we can think more clearly about environmental education.
We’ll begin to learn…
How to spot when politics is masquerading as science
Why distinguishing between consequences and fault transforms our understanding
What objective environmental education actually looks like
Practical ways to apply critical thinking to environmental claims
Let's see why environmental education needs less preaching and more teaching and how being a mindful sceptic can help us find better ways forward.
MOOCs
Back in 2020, as preparation for writing the Mindful Sceptic Guides that take mindful sceptics into the real world of environmental issues, I decided to sample a few university sector MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), specifically on EdX, where 3,500 free online courses are available for anyone to enrol.
I had done this before and been informed if not inspired.
As a former university lecturer, I have a high bar for the structure, content and delivery of higher learning. Still, I tried again with two courses—one on sustainability and another on food supply.
This time, I was disappointed—the understatement of my COVID lockdown—as both classes were dreadful. The production was average, the sound quality patchy, and the presenters were more wooden than shaker furniture.
I reminded myself that this was material from the ivory towers where dynamism and communications skills are not on the list of talents required of staff. Despite the subsidy of access to recording studios and an interviewer stool, no doubt the smell of the oily rag passed for a production budget.
A sigh and lowered expectations kept me going into the second and third week's environmental education lessons with no improvement.
I was cringing all the time. But it wasn’t just the poor production quality. There was something else.
As any mindful sceptic would, I asked why I was so underwhelmed.
Was it the environmental education content?
What content?
There were plenty of words; only most needed explaining.
There were plenty of theories, but most were either impractical or untested.
One of the courses felt like a primer on the jargon without even providing definitions. There was no content worthy of the name.
Years ago, somebody wisely said that learning with examples was better. Whoever was responsible here didn’t get that memo.
I have worked in the ivory towers of five universities in my career. There is snobbery everywhere. Few academics would admit to it, but they are out of touch. The real world is ‘out there’ and shows in the lack of practicality in their learning.
In short, both courses had a catastrophic lack of relevant content.
What about the objective of environmental education?
The environmental education messaging in both the sustainability and the food supply course was consistently political—socialist, to be precise.
The theme was that capitalism is at fault for our sustainability and food supply troubles and woe betide us all if there isn’t redistribution of wealth to redress inequity. This is a laudable and probably correct assertion, but it is not objective environmental education.
It is also not the right question. These topics are about resource use that the social contract might facilitate, but they are also practical; they have a material reality—provisions made available to people who need them—and a philosophy.
And they are real.
Humans found and exploited a colossal energy pulse that was nearly free and came with extreme utility—amazingly, oil can be so energy dense and yet be safely transported at room temperature and pressure—would always have consequences.
Give any organism an accessible source of exogenous energy, and it will exploit that energy to make more. It is encoded in the most primal DNA. More making is how nature works. It’s not capitalism; it is life.
Circumstances and opportunity meant that capitalism was the most efficient and best-suited way to exploit free energy. Most humans like it because it promises opportunity, growth and wealth. That's why it persists.
Nobody could have stopped it, given that the majority benefitted.
Once embedded, there are consequences to resource exploitation and inequity from a quadrupling of the global population since 1920. And some of these are bad, very bad indeed. But they are a consequence, not necessarily a fault.
A consequence follows from any action or situation, regardless of fault. It's the outcome or result without inherent moral judgment. If someone misses an important meeting because they overslept, that's a consequence of not waking up on time, regardless of why they overslept.
A fault is typically something for which we assign blame or responsibility. Usually, it implies that someone or something is culpable or deficient. For instance, if someone forgets to set their alarm, that's a fault because they made a mistake or failed to take proper action.
Capitalism cannot take responsibility, so it cannot be at fault.
Only the people who allow it to persist can be blamed—and that is all of us who benefitted.
We should consider this carefully because blaming the system is a novice philosophy. We should be more mindful.
But I digress; we need to get back to the MOOCs.
A better question
Rather than blaming an inanimate process, the better question is, can capitalism, in its various flavours, keep humanity from calamitous collapse over the next 100 years?
The knee-jerk answer is yes, partly because history has shown growth and development for 100 years and partly because collapse is unthinkable.
But if some truths are factored in, such as the depletion of fossil fuel reserves and the ever-decreasing ‘energy return on energy invested’, not to mention impending shortages of raw materials necessary for an energy transition and the depletion of global soils, then the answer is a clear no.
Neo-liberal capitalism has had a good run but cannot continue without resources. And we can’t grow crops in the dirt, which is what agricultural soils are rapidly becoming.
None of this appeared as part of the environmental education narrative in the MOOC courses I followed. Only one interviewee was savvy enough to articulate the political element without party affiliation. Still, he was touted as a political economist, so he should know.
Most of the other academics were saying, “Oh my God, the sky is falling in, and it's all the fault of exploitation”, and, therefore, the solution is to trash the economic paradigm that is the cause of all our distress.
None of these learned folk seemed to realise such socialist-leaning plays into the hands of those at the other end of politics who would weaponise environmental issues for their political ends. George Monbiot hinted at something similar when he claimed that the left and the right easily swapped places.
All this naivety happens before politics gets stuck in to create an evidence-free zone around the issues.
Maybe it was this normative flavour that made the courses tasteless.
Normative science is about exploring and evaluating value-laden issues, aiming to prescribe or recommend what should be done based on ethical, moral, or societal considerations. Unlike descriptive or empirical sciences that focus on describing phenomena or explaining natural processes, normative science deals with subjective judgments and assessments. We need it to inform decision-making when scientific objectivity alone cannot choose the best action.
Normative science lacks objectivity because it is inherently subjective and prone to biases of value judgment, ethics, lack of consensus, and ideology. A fuzzyness also makes it hard to measure and evaluate.
A mindful sceptic accepts the definition of normative science where information—words such as ecosystem health, biological integrity, and environmental degradation—presuppose a policy preference and are, therefore, a type of policy advocacy.
Objective environmental education shouldn’t be normative, at least not in its foundation.
What about the objectivity benefits of environmental education?
It would be great if everyone were objective, dispassionate and pragmatic.
Only we can’t be. Human values and opinions get in the way, as do our emotional responses to any challenge to the worldview created by our particular value set.
Teachers are supposed to rise above this human instinct, but they couldn't in the MOOC courses I audited.
Yet the topics couldn't be more objective—just a reminder of the problem the courses addressed attests to this. Here is my summary question for the Feeding Everyone Well challenge beyond the obvious 22 trillion kilocalories per day needed in food energy for the global population
How do we get sufficient nutrients into people's bodies for a hundred years in a secure way that puts a lid on fear responses and stops people from fighting each other… when there are 8 billion people?
Intensive agriculture, regenerative agriculture, rewilding, green deals, technological supply chains, trade agreements, development aid, alternative finance, and others are like outfits in the naked emperor's walk-in wardrobe.
They are solutions that might look good but are begging for an objective makeover.
But they all should have been in both the courses.
Being a mindful sceptic on objective environmental education
Should you take a MOOC? Sure, go for it.
Naturally, we suggest a Mindful Sceptic Guide first, but there is nothing wrong with environmental education from all sources. Do as many courses as you have time and passion for completing—even the poor ones.
It will help your environmental awareness and develop a sense of the natural environment.
We learn in many diverse ways, and being critical is one of them.
I know from experience that many of my best ideas came when listening to a talk or reading an article that made me cringe. I would run with my agitation and then look for the irony. I have a shelf full of notebooks full of my agitation.
Here is what I noted for the MOOC courses I took on sustainability and food supply.
Sustainability is political and always has been.
Sustainability is all about values and opinions that people will debate endlessly, making everything about the environment, including food security and environmental protection, about politics.
Both sustainability and food supply are thousand years plus political issues.
And yet, to develop skills to protect the environment, biodiversity, and essential ecological processes, we have to begin with the basics.
All the more reason for the core environmental education to be relevant, objective and pragmatic.
Key Points
MOOCs from prestigious universities revealed a widespread issue in environmental education where political advocacy frequently overshadows objective analysis. Rather than focusing on evidence and scientific understanding, many courses prioritise ideological perspectives, undermining their educational effectiveness.
While sustainability and food security have critical political dimensions, treating them primarily as political issues obscures essential practical realities. The fundamental challenges of population growth, resource consumption, and environmental impacts require objective analysis before meaningful value-based discussions.
Environmental education often relies too heavily on normative science, where value judgments about what "should" be done precede evidence-based understanding. This approach, while well-intentioned, can hinder effective learning and problem-solving by starting with conclusions rather than evidence.
A mindfully sceptical approach to environmental education offers a more effective path forward. This combines rigorous critical thinking with open-minded awareness, allowing for objective analysis and practical wisdom in addressing environmental challenges. The key is maintaining scientific objectivity while acknowledging the role of values in decision-making.
Curiosity Corner
This issue of the newsletter is all about…
When two prestigious environmental courses left me cringing at their political bias, I discovered something crucial about education: we need less preaching about what should be and more objective understanding of what is.
Here are five better questions that came to mind…
1. Can capitalism in its various flavours keep humanity from calamitous collapse over the next 100 years?
This question avoids blame and focuses on system capabilities, timeframes and measurable outcomes—precisely what a mindful sceptic seeks when evaluating complex challenges.
2. How do we get sufficient nutrients into 8 billion people's bodies for a hundred years in a secure way that puts a lid on fear responses and stops people from fighting each other?
By framing food security in terms of practical needs, human behaviour and specific metrics, this question cuts through ideology to expose our real challenges.
3. What happens when we separate consequences from fault in our analysis of environmental challenges?
This reframing helps us move past the blame game to understand causation and system dynamics, which is essential for finding workable solutions rather than just feeling righteous.
4. What objective evidence would we need to properly evaluate proposed environmental solutions like regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and green deals?
Asking about specific evidence needs rather than debating merits shifts us toward testable hypotheses and away from wishful thinking.
5. How can we maintain scientific objectivity while acknowledging that human values inevitably influence environmental decisions?
This question embraces the tension between facts and values rather than pretending we can eliminate it, opening space for more nuanced understanding and practical progress.
I crafted these questions from my experience with those MOOCs, where I saw how even well-intentioned educators can miss asking the questions that matter. Each one strips away rhetorical flourishes to expose the core challenges we must address.
What questions do you have?
Mindful Momentum
Take any environmental claim you encounter this week and apply these three questions:
What's the evidence? (Not opinions or theories, but actual data)
Who benefits? (Follow both the money and the narrative)
What's being assumed? (Look for unstated premises)
Keep a small notebook or use your phone to track what you discover. You might be surprised how many "facts" rest on shaky foundations. I recently did this with claims about renewable energy and questioned statistics I'd previously accepted without thought.
In the next issue
The Curse of Only Three.
Why do only three people in a room of thirty typically engage with new ideas?
Next week, I'll take you inside a fascinating pattern I've observed across decades of presenting innovations from seven-year-olds to senior politicians.
Learn how this "rule of three" might hold back solutions to our most significant environmental challenges and how mindful scepticism offers a way forward.