A critical reflection on environmental education during the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper problematizes the current conception and purview of environmental education (EE), seeing it as part and parcel of the modernist western worldview that normalizes and valourizes human domination and exploitation of nature in the name of progress. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a lens through which to examine and expose the modernist western blueprint of EE, this paper suggests another way of reconsidering EE: the Zen way of ‘becoming one with ten thousand things.’ Paradoxically, the Zen way, to be true to itself, must transcend itself, and this paper invites the reader to see environmental education in the same light. To go further than just arguing for a Zen inspired EE, this paper includes a section that offers three practices for the reader to try.