Ecosocial Literacy

Sofía Pérez Baeza y María del Buey Cañas 

Ecosocial literacy or ecoliteracy brings together a compendium of tools with an ecological, social, political and educational approach (see Ecosocial Education), oriented to the critical analysis of the global ecosocial crisis that we are going through and to promote forms of social organization compatible with planetary limits. 

In this sense, the 1970s represent a key date. On the one hand, this decade marks the beginning of the dynamics of planetary overreach, that is, the moment in which humanity exceeded the annual regeneration capacity of the biosphere in its consumption and generation of waste. Since then, despite the increase in scientific knowledge available about the different dimensions of the crisis, the deterioration of ecological and social conditions has continued to accelerate. And, on the other hand, this decade also marks the emergence of environmental education, one of the main precedents of ecosocial literacy. 

Environmental education appeared as an educational process that, despite representing an important advance in ecological awareness, largely maintained an instrumental vision of nature and social approaches focused on individual responsibility. This is why environmental education has traditionally promoted sustainable knowledge, behaviors and skills in a weak sense, compatible with the dominant ecocidal economic frameworks (see Ecocide). This limitation is due, in part, to the ambiguity of concepts such as sustainability and sustainable development. In fact, the ambiguity of the concept of development and the different approaches to which it refers have allowed the coexistence of profoundly different and even mutually incompatible proposals, including those that continue to consider unlimited economic growth possible with the care and preservation of the biosphere (see Green Capitalism).  

That is why ecosocial literacy collects the contributions of previous currents, but distances itself from weak sustainability approaches and the development perspectives of environmental education, proposing a critical review of the social imaginaries that perpetuate the socioecological crisis. Thus, the new vision proposed by the ecosocial perspective “denounces the subordination of ecology to the economy (to be more precise, to a predatory socio-economic organization) and its obsession with growth and the logic of domination and the submission of life (in its various expressions) to the logic of accumulation” (González Reyes, 2018, p. 81). In this way, it distances itself from anthropocentric perspectives (see Anthropocentrism) focused exclusively on the conservation of nature and the modification of individual habits. This critical position is articulated from the rejection of those proposals that still seek to make the care of nature compatible with models of unlimited economic growth. For many reasons, these proposals are insufficient to address the critical scenarios we face. 

In this sense, ecoliteracy incorporates the notions of biophysical limits, degrowth, metabolic fracture (see Social Metabolism) or ecosocial justice, among others, to point out the impossibility of sustaining socioeconomic models of intensive material and energy consumption. Likewise, it seeks to transcend formal education and promotes the construction of a set of ecosocial knowledge as a necessary precondition for fair and consensual processes of change. A precondition that by itself is not sufficient to achieve the transformation of our current civilizational models, but it does provide solid and critical foundations that are essential for it. 

The main objective of ecosocial literacy or ecoliteracy is to encourage and ingrain processes of collective transformation based on the generation and sharing of community knowledge, attitudes and skills committed to the construction of ecosocially just and responsible societies with the aforementioned biophysical limits of our world. Faced with the logic of accelerated planetary overreach, assuming limits implies a conscious use of biospheric assets that does not compromise the regeneration processes of ecosystems or the integrity of the human and non-human communities that depend on them. Along these lines, the critical analysis of the phenomena associated with the different dimensions of the ecosocial crisis shows that achieving a good fit with ecosystems (Riechmann 2014) is the most appropriate way to achieve a good life for the greatest possible number of living beings, human and non-human. 

Ecosocial literacy is based on the recognition that the current socioecological crisis cannot be understood outside of the dominant social imaginaries, and one of its main objectives is to overcome the maladaptive imaginaries that industrialized societies share, in addition to generating an interpretative framework of reality in balance with planetary biophysical limits. These imaginaries summarize the set of representations, symbols and relationships that make up the social reality of each society, giving rise to and being determined at the same time by its socio-historical characteristics (Castoriadis 2013, pp. 11-12), and which have led to the development of this type of societies outside ecosystems. In this sense, ecosocial literacy is not limited to promoting individual attitudes such as recycling, concern for climate change or the appreciation and care of natural spaces, but its proposal implies a deeper transformation of socioeconomic frameworks (Madorrán and Almazán, 2022) that reproduce and perpetuate ecocidal social imaginaries. 

Thus, ecosocial literacy proposes taking learning and deepening the knowledge of the ecosocial issue as the main tools to navigate our present. It does so by incorporating an ethical-political dimension with an ecocentric approach, that is, one that considers that the production of the objects of our society and the way we relate to them must always start from the principles of inter and eco-dependence that respect the regeneration cycles of the terrestrial biosphere. This implies the critical renunciation of the capitalist economic reason of unlimited growth, as well as the values ​​of human exceptionality, by which human beings believe that they possess unique capacities such as language, culture or technology, which separates them from nature; or human exemptionality, which describes the illusion derived from the previous one that the human being is separate and above nature and, therefore, exempt from complying with the laws of physics and biology. That is, it implies the rejection of these notions as the main reasons for the creation of sociohistorical worlds in favor of an ecocentric model. In this way, ecosocial literacy is committed to expanding our political and moral communities beyond the boundaries of humanity, without ignoring the differentiated capacities and responsibilities of each individual and society. 

Therefore, in the face of the modern fiction of an economic system that defends absolute technical domination over nature, ecosocial literacy proposes overcoming a mechanistic and instrumental framework in favour of a relational paradigm based on interdependence, highlighting how the action of human beings is integrated into the ecosystemic fabric. 

In this context, it is important to highlight that the way we perceive the world has direct consequences on the ways in which we relate to it. If our imaginaries reproduce the idea that the human being is separated from nature and is ontologically superior to it, the latter becomes a resource to be used for our benefit. However, we are nature and our survival depends on the habitable conditions of the planet. Therefore, we must question how they shape our beliefs and the narratives we tell ourselves about the planet we live on and the uses we make of it. 

The ecosocial crisis is not merely a techno-scientific problem, but also a cultural, ethical and imaginative one. For this reason, and with the aim of building an ecosocial consciousness, art can contribute to ecosocial literacy through the catalyzing of new non-anthropocentric forms of relationship with the world, as well as new forms of sensitivity and action. This is due to the possibilities that artistic proposals display for a critical experience of nature, as well as for reflection and the generation of alternative imaginaries of coexistence. Visual arts, literature, performance, cinema or sound art, among other practices, allow us to experience other points of view and other possible futures, as well as analyze the dominant cultural imaginaries and process scientific knowledge about the current ecological crisis. 

In this way, art becomes an important ally in raising awareness, expanding intergenerational and interspecies ethical recognition, and anticipating possible future situations. This enables the creation of alternative symbolic and affective fields that recognize the human being as another part of a rich system of interdependent relationships. It is this relational dimension that sustains the fabric of life on the planet, and its revaluation can contribute to the transformation of our epistemic and ethical practices. For example, ecocriticism serves as a complementary tool to ecosocial literacy, analyzing the relationship between culture and nature and studying the connections between the ecological crisis and the structural problems of our society. It does so through the stories we tell ourselves, that is, the interaction of human beings with the rest of non-human nature, our condition as interdependent beings and their representations from an ecocentric perspective. 

In conclusion, the knowledge promoted by ecosocial literacy seeks to include the development of a series of competencies, attitudes and values ​​that allow for a critical analysis of present and past reality, as well as facing the multidimensional crisis from a point of view of social and democratic justice, overcoming the anthropocentrism, androcentrism, ethnocentrism and eurocentrism prevailing in industrialized societies. These learnings pursue individual and collective transformation, highlighting that it is necessary to develop autonomy in interrelation. 

Therefore, rather than constituting a solely educational or pedagogical proposal for environmental awareness, we can speak of ecosocial literacy or ecoliteracy as a project for the transformation of industrialized societies that aims to reorient these societies towards models of coexistence that are respectful of ecological limits and compatible with the continuity of life on the planet to which we belong. In short, ecosocial literacy opens the possibility of building horizons of possibility of dignified lives in coexistence with the rest of the biosphere in a context of growing ecosocial uncertainty. 

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