From the Block to the Bay: Understanding the role of Scale and Power in Environmental Education in Baltimore City

Abstract

Environmental education (EE) works to address socioenvironmental crises by promoting particular values and actions. Pedagogical perspectives warn that universalizing discourses often inform the identification of problems and solutions, and can deepen environmental inequities through normative understandings of nature and place. This work investigates the relationship between power, scale, and discourse in EE in Baltimore City, Maryland, USA using a combination of semi-structured interviews, ethnographic accompaniment, and document analysis. Overall, I found that the Chesapeake Bay watershed scale is the predominant structure guiding environmental discourse in Baltimore and that the size of an organization influences the discourses they employ–particularly in the identification of problems, solutions, and responsibility. The watershed scale represents a space of engagement and the context in which EE is developed. Larger organizations frequently promoted individual responsibility for broadscale problems and prioritized deploying unpaid labor of volunteers towards prescribed solutions. Broad-scale approaches reproduce universalizing discourses by erasing cultural complexity and geographic unevenness, and preventing accountability. Universalizing discourses render people and places malleable and force them into what I call the normative mold. The normative mold is cast at the watershed scale and is reflected to varying degrees across scales. Smaller organizations resist the normative mold by prioritizing the provision of services to their communities over volunteerism; but they are often dependent upon institutional funding and forced to participate. While larger organizations have power to reproduce normative molds, they also advocate for policy and funding that allows smaller organizations to operate. This relationship complicates the scalar assessment of EE.