RATIONALITIES IN QUESTION

In the search for ethical horizons that inspire the development of school processes relevant to the realities of Latin America and heeding the encouragement of the French philosopher Félix ^{Guattari (1996}) for the construction of new paradigms that are preferably inspired by ethics and aesthetics, we found the concept of Environmental Rationality, theorized by the Mexican environmentalist-economist Enrique Leff. Rationality that aims at a hopeful deconstruction of modernity, seeking the redefinition and the establishment of social relations (economic, techno-scientific, academic, spiritual) within the limits, possibilities, and characteristics of the ecological and cultural backgrounds of territories and communities (^{LEFF, 2009}).

Environmental Rationality shares some aspects of that ethical-aesthetic articulation that ^{Guattari (1996}) calls ecosophy, in which the ecological, social, and subjective registers are articulated to conveniently respond to the challenges of contemporaneity. The similarity between the two perspectives comes from their opposition to hegemonic Instrumental Rationality and rejection of economic, historicist, and ecologicist reductionisms and essentialisms. In both perspectives, ethics and aesthetics are vectors of articulation between the different aspects that make up a political and integral conception of the environment.^{Guattari (1992)}, analyzing the characteristics of contemporary societal crises, states that the survival of the human species on the planet is threatened

not only by ecological degradations, but also by the degeneration of the weave of social solidarities and psychic ways of life that must literally be reinvented. The re-foundation of the political must pass through the aesthetic and analytical dimensions that are implicated in the three ecologies: of nature, of socius, of psyche (^{GUATTARI, 1992}, p. 33, our translation).

In epistemological terms, in Environmental Rationality, knowledge is rooted in the Being, in its desiring, historical, symbolic, relational textures, as opposed to Instrumental Rationality, which seeks a transparent relationship between concepts and reality. An environmental rationality deconstructs the illusion of the modern project that sought a fixed and total identification of words with things (^{LEFF, 2010}). In this relational perspective, knowledge is conceived as a social production, historically situated, and, therefore, constituted by processes and results susceptible to critical use and understanding (^{RODRIGUES, 2014}).

Being, in this contemporary rationality, is understood as the expression of a plural, polyphonic, hybrid, relational subjectivity in which different semiotic registers concur and whose relations are not structured in fixed hierarchies (^{GUATTARI, 1992}). This hopeful rationality considers people and human groups as active agents that can subvert different types of determinism (geographical, cultural, genetic, ecological, technological, economic, historical, among others).

The axiological system that makes up environmental rationality can be summarized in the following values: ecological sustainability, social equity, cultural diversity, and community participation. This rationality would represent a contemporary ethical horizon or utopia that advocates for a distribution of wealth, power, and knowledge through economic decentralization, participatory management, responsible appropriation of technoscience, and democratization of ecosystem resources. In this way, every human being and every community could fully develop their affective, productive, and intellectual potentials, reaching satisfactory levels of quality of life, which is consistent with the premise that “the only acceptable end of human praxis is the production of a subjectivity that continuously enriches its relation to the world” (^{GUATTARI, 1992}, p. 33, our translation).

The economic aspect of environmental rationality is guided by non-market principles, such as ecological potential and trans-generational equity. We seek to deconstruct the modern mechanicism, foundation of the hegemonic economic model, as a requirement for generating epistemological and political conditions that allow the development of territorialized and humanized economies (^{LEFF, 2010}). One can infer that the target of questioning and radical attack of environmental rationality is the spirit that permeates the currently powerful instrumental rationality, foundation of modernity and the economic model, which considers itself essential, unique, eternal, and unlimited, tending to violate the ecological and cultural limits of peoples and territories.

The Instrumental Rationality that supports capitalism and the corresponding hegemonic subjectivity creates metaphysical and teleological hierarchies between knowledges and between beings and, in this way, justifies practices of extermination, exclusion, segregation, producing pain, social injustice, economic inequality, alienation, and ecological and cultural homogenization.

Capital crushes under its boot all other modes of valorization. The signifier silences the infinite virtualities of minor languages and partial expressions. Being is like an imprisonment that makes us blind and insensitive to the richness and multivalence of the universes of value that proliferate over our eyes (^{GUATTARI, 1992}, p. 42, our translation).

Instrumental rationality is supported by a legal code of private property, whose axis is modern positive law that conceives the human being as isolated individual and the nature as resource (^{LEFF, 2010}). This legal code seems to have reached a saturation point, which is expressed in the different types of contemporary environmental crises (ecological, climatic, migratory, war, health), becoming particularly evident in the huge fissures and psychosocial fragilities that are coming to the surface with the Covid-19 pandemic.

The vulnerabilities of humanity have gained visibility, in these pandemic times, in the great technical and scientific distances between countries and population segments, in the unequal access to vaccines, in the absolute lack of social protection suffered by large contingents of human beings, in the precariousness of health systems that affects most countries, in the existential voids produced by the accelerated and insipid social routines framed in productivism and capitalist consumerism, in the ease with which false information is constructed, disseminated and consolidated in social networks, as well as in the latent danger of activation of viruses alien to the human species due to climate change and unregulated interactions between civilization and nature.

For ^{Guattari (1996}), in contemporaneity, there is an exacerbation of the production of material and immaterial goods, at the expense of the consistency of existential territories, which generates an immense emptiness in subjectivity, which tends to become increasingly absurd and without support. An ecosophy would try, by all possible means, “[...] to conjure up the entropic growth of the dominant subjectivity” (^{GUATTARI, 1996}, p. 77, our translation).

The capitalist system cannot continue to exploit natural resources, as it has been doing, for much longer without collapsing. However creative and expansive capitalism may be, there is a concrete ecological limit, and this limit is already showing its signs (^{REIGOTA, 2011}, p. 156, our translation).

Aiming at other horizons, the principles and values that permeate environmental rationality transform and enrich modern law, configuring a new field of cultural, ecological, and collective rights that respond to alternative forms of socialization with nature (^{LEFF, 2010}). In the opinion of Enrique ^{Leff (2010}), to overcome the individual-centered perspective that characterizes the codes of modern law, and to give culture and ecosystems a prominent place in the construction of new legal systems, is to understand that representation, language, and communication are not individual properties of an isolated and self-centered person. The consciousness of the individual arises from a communal source, from the original sociability of the human being and his symbiosis with his ecological substrates.

According to the epistemological and axiological precepts presented, we can deduce that this political horizon is constructed from an infinite variety of substrates and diversity of styles, indicating that there is no single and omnipotent Environmental Rationality. Instead, there would be multiple Environmental Rationalities. In this sense, we consider insufficient the great semiotic effort with which Enrique ^{Leff (2010}) tries to clarify the distance and even the opposition that the content of the term Rationality has, in his political-epistemological proposal, in relation to modern rationalism that reduces life, society, human beings, and nature to the narrowness of the insipid game of Cartesian reason. We consider that the insurgent political and educational proposals, worked out from the Latin American senti-thinking environmentalisms, cannot be satisfied with interpretations in which the affective, spiritual, passionate components seem to be diminished, denied, or eliminated.

Taken by these feelings, and remembering that language, more than describing the world, helps to organize the world, being, therefore, the seed of the future, we consider more adequate to use the term Environmental Weavings. The weavings express this diversity of practices, processes, social and political movements, as well as their correlated theoretical, affective, epistemological, pedagogical networks that are woven in Nuestra América, in which the sciences, the biosphere, symbols, affections, history, and emancipation are linked. At the same time, the Weavings give recognition to these beautiful ancestral practices, through which, in different weaves (hair, wool, cotton, fibers, seeds, etc.), the cultures of Nuestra América give life and color to their existences and project their dreams, paths, and futures.

By way of summary, three characteristics of Environmental Weavings can be highlighted: 1. They are based on an expanded, complex, Latin American conception of environment, which we will call here InSURgent Environment. 2. They are developed through strategies of fair, respectful, and supportive intercultural dialogues. 3. The concept of territory and the communal vision derived from this category are the axes of his socioeconomic, technological, and theoretical constructions. We will go further in this argument, deepening the presentation of these characteristics and commenting on their implications for the educational field.

HISTORY OF A HOPEFUL CONCEPT-PERCEPT-AFFECT

Before detailing the characteristics of the Environmental Weavings, it is important to fly over the set of paths that led to the construction of the concept Environment, which “links the material and the symbolic, the entity and the being, the economic and the ecological, the internal and the external, the objective and the subjective, the already seen and the yet to come” (^{LEFF, 2010}, p. 334, our translation).

For this, it is necessary to remember that the environmental field has emerged and been configured from subsidies that came in a double track, encompassing the theoretical-abstract realm and the practical-concrete realm. In the theoretical, when the 20th century was born, there were different scientific advances: Quantum Mechanics, Theory of Relativity, Uncertainty Principle, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, General Systems Theory; and in philosophy, the germ of the linguistic turn in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which radically destabilized the hegemonic mechanistic paradigm, which was most clearly expressed in the naive realist perspectives of early positivism.

Later, in the mid-twentieth century, the development of the environmental issue took shape from concrete situations that were emerging in a worldwide context of ecological, pacifist, countercultural, anti-colonial, national liberation, and anti-system movements. The strength of these movements highlighted a growing disenchantment with the unfulfilled promises of modernity, with the cruelty of colonialism, with the extractive dynamics derived from it, and with the tragedies of the great wars that devastated humanity, reflecting concerns about the ecological and ethical unsustainability of the current socioeconomic model.

The environmental issue emerges as a ‘rebel daughter’ of the contradictions and breaches of the instrumental rational thinking style, of the wear of the idea of linear and infinite progress and its disappointing consequences on ecosystems and social relations (^{RODRIGUES, 2014}). It is possible to state that the environmental field stems from a social and epistemological malaise related to a type of Benjaminian discomfort and distrust in relation to the idea of infinite progress.

Walter Benjamin, in his theorizations, launched structural criticisms to developmentalist perspectives, including those proposed by orthodox Marxism, for being anchored in evolutionary and hierarchical concepts of history and culture, in which the development of productive forces and the accumulation of wealth based, in turn, on positivist and mechanistic conceptions of nature and on an instrumental and corrupted representation of labor were the only legitimate ways to reach the different ideological paradises.

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel can be seen in it, apparently at the moment of turning away from something he is staring at. His eyes are bulging, his mouth and wings are open. The angel of the history must be like this. Its face is turned toward the past. In what seems to us to be a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe, throwing ruin upon ruin at his feet, piling it on endlessly. The angel would like to stop, awaken the dead, and rebuild what has been destroyed. But a hurricane blows from heaven and spins on its wings, and it is so strong that the angel can no longer fold them. This hurricane irresistibly drags him into the future, to which he turns his back, while the pile of ruins in front of him grows into the sky. This hurricane is what we call progress (^{BENJAMIN, 2013}, p. 22, our translation).

These disappointments, contradictions, and rebellions took shape in what ^{Reigota (2011}) calls 1968 thinking, which was maturing in a two-decade process along the environmental paths of the South. The concept of environment was thus being woven in those space-times of the Global South where geographies became verb in the practices and struggles of indigenous and quilombolas peoples, of the rural and the urban periphery communities. There where territories are perceived as constituents of social being, and land and nature as systems of representations and affectivities, and not only as means of production or sources of material resources (^{LEFF, 2009}).

From the above, it follows that hopeful environmentalism finds arguments and bases in the most diverse ontological and epistemological fields, ranging from polytheistic and monotheistic religious cosmovision’s with a deeply humanistic character, to philosophical constructions anchored in the different possibilities of critical theories, decolonial currents, and post-structuralist and anarchist views, to some scientific narratives of a complex, organizational, systemic, and ecological type.

It is at the intersection of heterogeneous machinic universes, of different dimensions, of strange ontological texture, with radical innovations, signs of ancestral machineries once forgotten and then reactivated, that singularize the movement of history (^{GUATTARI, 1992}, p. 53, our translation).

This conjunction of contemporary philosophies with decolonial and intersectional struggles gave birth in 1992 to the Global Alternative Forum, in Rio de Janeiro, an event that represented a deep and radical questioning of the hegemonic development model, proposing actions, mobilizations, educations, and public policies that promote economic structures rooted in cultural and ecological substrates of social relations (^{SÁNCHEZ, 2016}).

According to ^{Leff (2010}), the Latin American perspective on the environmental issue and its political challenges expressed at Rio-92 represented a renewal of hope. Latin American environmentalism projected itself at a moment of paralysis for humanity, after the collapse of the Soviet Union’s attempt at socialism and the subsequent implosion of theoretical and axiological referents.

In that decade when neoliberalism predicted the end of history, critical thinking found itself disarmed in the face of uncertainty and powerless in the face of the chaotic strategies of globalization that penetrated the vital tissue of humanity, annihilating its diversity and transformative action.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is a shift from the East-West strategic axis that characterized the Cold War to the North-South axis, where the environmental problem becomes of fundamental strategic, political, military and economic importance (^{REIGOTA, 2011}, p. 38, our translation).

In the face of this change, in the last three decades, the concept of environment that we claim has been gradually inserted into progressive public and educational policies, within the institutional framework of the Nation-State of some Latin American countries and of some intergovernmental organizations of global order; and, in turn, it has been consolidated in the praxis of social movements in Nuestra America.

ENVIRONMENTAL WEAVINGS IN EDUCATION

Different rationalities, ethical frameworks, political and economic interests configure different representations of the environment and, in turn, different types of Environmental Education. ^{Sampaio and Wortmann (2014}) think of EA as a multiple political and conceptual territory in which a variety of discourses compete penetrating people’s lives and acting in the manufacture of subjects with certain values.

Some training programs highlight technologicist and economicist perspectives, in which technoscience and the internal dynamics of the market could remedy the ecological imbalances produced by economic growth. There are also ethical-normative perspectives that encourage, through punishments and rewards, changes in individual behavior as a mitigation of human impact on the planet. These utilitarian and short-term approaches tend to neglect and ignore the role of a comprehensive approach to the environmental issue as a fundamental basis for building collective capacities to move us towards sustainability.

If the mechanistic understanding of the world is generating the entropic death of the planet, any proposal for a merely technocratic management of the environment would be founded on a fallacy and doomed to failure (^{LEFF, 2009}). According to ^{Leff (2010}), understanding that the environment is not something natural, but a complex social construction in which processes of different orders intervene, allows us to think of education as a promising praxis space to contribute to the reorientation of human cultural paths in dialogue with the planet’s ecological substrates.

Based on the proposal for paradigmatic change that we have explained, it is possible to project the Environmental Weavings as bridges that facilitate connections between different cultures, rationalities, epistemologies, and human dimensions, thus producing knowledge that does not renounce to reason, but that irrigates and expands it with sensibilities and senses (^{LEFF, 2009}). The inSURgent environmental educations promote the dialogue between the most diverse subjects of the curriculum to find alternatives and solutions to different types of problems, especially issues of daily school and community (^{REIGOTA, 2012b}.). In this perspective, EA could be considered as a frontier thought, as a new epistemological space in the curriculum, in which the disciplinary thought remains in reference, but submitted to constant swallowings through other epistemes.

The Environmental Weavings would provoke answers and paths to ^{Guattari’s (1992}) uneasiness, when he asks about “what could become the life (...) in schools (...) if, instead of conceiving them in the form of empty repetition, we strove to reorient their purpose in the sense of a permanent internal recreation” (p. 189, our translation). It also answers the criticism exposed by ^{Sato, Silva, and Jaber (2018}), when they state that the school curriculum is out of the students’ lives, distant from the contexts in which they live or perceive. According to these authors, culture and nature are essential dimensions to be considered, since they bring the school curriculum closer to the curriculum of life.

In these Weavings or InSURgences, we find the call for interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and transversality in EA, which allow respectful border crossings, in which no discipline has absolute hegemony or is determined by another. Environmental interdisciplinarity is considered in a political sense. Not simply as a neutral methodology for the contact and production of ever broader sciences, disciplines, and teachings, functional for capitalism.

Environmental interdisciplinarity also avoids ecologicist or biologicist reductionisms that, through an integrative and holistic vision, leave out the specificities of the material, historical, and symbolic processes that constitute the different styles of school subjects and social relations. “The various levels of practice not only do not need to be homogenised, connected to each other under a transcendent tutelage, but it is convenient that they enter into processes of heterogenesis” (^{GUATTARI, 1996}, p. 48, our translation).

Moreover, the Environmental Weaving, in school practices, generates tools that “allow us to perceive the multicausality and the interdependence of phenomena” (^{LEFF, 2010}, p. 259, our translation). The environmental challenges and problems are analyzed and understood as integrations of interdependent processes; not as isolated events, predetermined and closed unilaterally by history, biology, the market, or technology (^{LEFF, 2010}). The sign of difference of environmental interdisciplinarity prevents the closing of the signifying chain into a dogma.

The InSURgences of Environmental Education recognize the contributions of science and technology, but also their limitations in fully addressing the complexity of environmental problems. Moreover, they perceive the insufficiency of the aesthetic strategies of conservationism aimed at raising romantic awareness about some ecological aspects. In this sense, ^{Reigota (2012b}) warns us so that “the biological conservatism that conservationism usually proposes does not turn into political conservatism, characterized by the biologizing view of society and human beings” (p. 51, our translation).

^{Guattari’s (1996}) social aspect of ecosophy is in open conflict with this kind of conservatism, because the Environmental Weavings would always be open to reinvent and respect the various forms of affective relationships, promoting alternative forms of family, labor, and demographic organization. Weaving the environment implies perceiving reality as a problematic and disputed space-time, under permanent construction, as a challenge in which citizens must act in search of new perspectives and experiences, in which nature and culture are articulated in the establishment of a world where many worlds fit.

Environmental Weavings project explicitly political educations, inviting us to think of them, according to ^{Tristão (2013}), as forces that will shape dynamic curricula, conceived as scenarios of cultural encounters and political struggles. These curricula would be under permanent construction, representing the transience of knowledge and the fluid substance of everyday knowledge and issues on which they are built. In turn, they would drive processes that involve the empowerment of the vilified populations, their capacity for self-management, and the strengthening of resistance to distinct types of oppression. This promotes, in this way, in school actresses, a commitment to the expansion of citizenship and direct and collective intervention in the search for alternatives for a life inspired by the common good (^{CARVALHO, 2006}).

The Environmental Weavings stimulate the problematization in schools and communities of the meaning of being and living on the planet, thus re-signifying the existential territories. In this way, reconstitutions of identities that promote unprecedented multiplicities and solidary identifications are stimulated. For ^{Guattari (1996}), individuals and collectives must become solidary and increasingly different.

The axiological and epistemological foundations of Environmental Weaving have the potential to have direct repercussions on the daily lives of public schools in Latin America. These principles call for the breaking down of some current walls and boundaries in teacher training, educational research, and in public policies that support cross-cutting school projects, in which the political potential that an inSURgent representation of the concept of environment could bring is castrated.

The current separation and radical fragmentation of the environment, health, democracy, technologies, culture, gender, sexuality, among others, resulting from a narrow and reductionist representation of the environment, produces a saturation and dispersion of efforts, wear, overlapping and disqualification of activities, eroding and hindering transdisciplinary dialogues in school practices.

An environmental approach to school projects and practices focused on health, for example, would conceive that the deterioration of public health is related to ecological degradation and its social impacts. It would emphasize the understanding that many diseases are facilitated by conditions of poverty caused by a development model that favors capital maximization by putting economic growth ahead of human well-being.

Thus, from this perspective of Environmental Education, possibilities open to reflect on and understand the gestation of political subjects, who think of themselves as incomplete, in a feverish and constant openness. The main objective of this environmental education is to enable and expand the informed and judicious political and social participation of all the subjects of the educational process (^{REIGOTA, 2012b}).

Understanding education as a political act legitimizes us to direct the pedagogical work, aiming at this profile of a utopian citizen. To walk with passion day by day, amid the gigantic emotional intensities and the structural limitations of public schools in Latin America, and to maintain hope and candor, requires a lot of breath, a challenging dream, a living utopia, in which a sensual conception of the world, of society, and of the human being is reflected. Thus, the proposed environmental subject would be able to embody the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas established by the societal crises, guaranteeing the preservation and the collective character of the planet and being co-author of a sustainable society project (^{CARVALHO, 2012}).

OPENINGS

We open the discussion around an inSURgent conceptualization of the environmental issue from which new meanings may emerge that provide a sensual and dialogical redefinition of life and a democratic reconstruction of the world. This conceptualization is driven by the winds of self-management and autonomy, providing us with a colorful ethical horizon for the development of environmental educations politically projected from the communities and their territories.

The environmental educations thus constructed would work as sophisticated bridges for interdisciplinary and intercultural transits in school practices, through which hybridization, diversification and sociocultural relevance of knowledge would be promoted, allowing a constant reinvention of the Latin American school. A school that would address in an integral way the contemporary societal challenges, stimulating the understanding of the planet’s collective character and the defense of its ecological and cultural diversity.

Specifically, the theoretical network we presented allowed us to glimpse the challenges and the political and cognitive potential underlying the School Science Fairs, if worked from an environmental perspective. In the cartography of urban periphery schools (^{SÁNCHEZ, 2020}) the Science Fairs presented themselves as processes that transcend punctual activities, managing to establish dialogues between different disciplines and cultures based on the daily problems of the school and the community and through the mobilization of a great density of affections.

To enrich these theoretical contributions, it remains for us to critically analyze the current regulatory frameworks, public policies, and structuring projects in the educational and environmental fields. Likewise, it is necessary to cartograph and rethink teacher training programs and courses. But, above all, we must walk through the school settings, get to know the environmental education practices and processes that are developed, especially in quilombola, indigenous, rural, urban periphery, and migrant communities. In these social sectors that have settled on the margins and frontiers of modernity shine potent signs of the future. Listening to its actresses and authors, promoting dialogues, weaving networks, contrasting, and discussing what is thought, what is written, what is said and what is done is a commitment. After all, it is in the daily lives of the Wretched of the Earth that we can find and weave the most valuable lessons of life and resistance.