Environmental education in times of catastrophes: the education response to the shipwreck of the Prestige

Abstract

In November 2002, the Prestige, an obsolete oil tanker, sank and spilled her cargo offshore Galicia (in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula). This accident originated a social experiment, unwanted but valuable to understand how the catastrophic experience of the "manufactured risks" is socially represented. The present article analyzes the response of the regional education system to the catastrophe from two viewpoints: a) of its comprehension in the context of the critical and proactive social response to the official intent of representing a "non-catastrophe", and b) of the role of Environmental Education (EE) as a pedagogical praxis whose political dimension is revealed as indispensable. The thesis we shall defend is that the political nature of EE, many times just implicit and others explicitly denied, is recognized here as the fundamental axis in the response of the education system and of other education agents. In this sense, the catastrophe has not been just ecological but also, and foremost, social and political by questioning the economic globalization - its profound cause - and by putting in evidence the vulnerability of the administrations, incapable of preventing or mitigating its impact on the environment and on the human communities. In this scenario, EE contributes to the reflection about the origin of the catastrophe as an unforeseen consequence of the "advanced modernity", in conformity with the analysis by Ulrich Beck of the "risk society", and of the politizing potential of the successive catastrophes - the tip of the iceberg - in which the new social ethos is manifested and constructed.