Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
2-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Psychology
Advisor
Michelle Fine
Advisor
David Chapin
Committee Members
Tomoaki Imamichi
Rebio Diaz-Cardona
Subject Categories
Environmental Education | Psychology | Sustainability
Keywords
Sustainability Science, Environmental Education, Radical Ecology, Permaculture, Bioregionalism
Abstract
This study explores how different approaches to fostering ecological consciousness can impact community engagement, social cohesion, and commitment to social and environmental care through a series of in-depth interviews and focus group sessions with environmental educators and activists in The Hudson Valley of New York.
Within the academic field of Sustainability Science, educational curricula often promote technocratic solutions, individual achievement, and industrial-capital worldviews that tend to normalize alienated social and environmental relationships. In response, outside of scientific and academic institutions, countercultural educators engaged with Radical Ecology movements work towards promoting an ethic of interdependence with community, nature, and place by integrating social, environmental, and health sciences within Ecological Design training programs focused on fostering ecologically sustainable subsistence cultures.
Through the process of (1) mapping and tracking natural resources and ecological systems in the local environment, (2) imagining and planning alternative economies, landscapes, and cultural practices in alignment with local ecologies, and (3) engaging in practical hands-on work building structures, gardening, restoring local ecologies, and organizing community labor, environmental educators and activists associated with countercultural movements like Permaculture Design and Bioregionalism focus on promoting a deeper sense of relatedness to community, nature, and place as a means of fostering an ethic of social and environmental care. However, in recent years, deep shifts in social cohesion within these movements due to increased online learning, political polarization, and economic precarity increasingly threaten these efforts.
Through the process of collaboratively developing an environmental education curriculum based on insights gathered from a series of interviews and focus groups sessions this study explores the worldviews and practices that motivate radical countercultural environmental educators and activists alongside the challenges they commonly encounter in the process of communicating their perspectives and eliciting community support. This study is specifically concerned with how environmental educators and activists are navigating efforts to promote an ethic of social and environmental care within a cultural context of hopelessness and existential concern stemming from the perceived collapse of ecologies, economies, communities, and cultures.
Exploratory field research for this project, beginning in 2019, focused on the social and psychological significance of regional Permaculture community gatherings alongside the social, political, and economic tensions within communities that were increasingly disrupting efforts to organize gatherings, however these research efforts were derailed by COVID-19 when all large social gatherings ––like the one I had been collaborating in planning–– were impossible for several years. Formal research for this project involving interviews and focus groups sessions exploring the general decline in social cohesion within the Permaculture movement began in 2025.
First, through a series of in-depth interviews with educators involved in Permaculture Design and Bioregional development initiatives, research for this project began by exploring the desires that initiate and sustain engagement in sustainable culture, how different environmental education interventions are contributing to change in people’s environmental worldviews, the challenges commonly encountered when communicating and enacting lifestyles inspired by radical environmental worldviews, and the educational interventions and institutional support structures that might benefit emerging subsistence cultures.
After engaging in a series of interviews with established environmental educators throughout the Hudson Valley of New York, a series of focus groups including interviewees alongside a group of local environmental educators and activists was assembled for the purpose of developing a curriculum for the emerging Bioregional movement within the Catskill-Hudson Valley region of New York.
In an effort to safeguard against being coopted by larger government and corporate forces, Bioregional education efforts tend to focus on developing place-based initiatives concerned with specific local issues rather than developing a formalized curricula articulating its rich political, economic, and environmental perspectives that tend to challenge conventional institutional cultures and ideologies, directly, through anarchist philosophy. Currently, a standardized Bioregional curriculum does not seem to exist, despite growing cross-cultural interest in the subject.
Through the process of developing a Bioregional education curriculum, collaboratively, this study focuses on better understanding what Radical Ecologists feel may be necessary to bring together disparate environmental initiatives to form more cohesive networks of Bioregional educators and practitioners for the purpose of effecting greater social and environmental change in society.
Recommended Citation
Devine, Matthew J., "Fostering Ecological Consciousness in An Era of Collapse: Reimagining the Purpose of Environmental Education through Collaborative Curriculum Development with Radical Environmental Educators and Activists in the Hudson Valley of New York" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6568
