American Education Studies Association Annual Conference, 2014 Addiction and agency during the ecological crisis Ramsey Affifi Ontario Institute for Studies in Education / UT Environmental educators often present the ecological crisis as something that humans are able to rectify (at least in principle) through consciously altering our goals, purposes and motivations. I argue that this assumption, that we are freely determining causal forces not absolutely integrated into the processes of rest of the natural world, is the same epistemological error that led to the crisis in the first place. It is only through surrendering this false and hubristic epistemology that we can hope to develop new relationships that lead to vitalizing and regenerative ecologies. But even this false epistemology cannot be surrendered "at will." Many environmentalists believe that such a conception of reduced agency is a fatalistic cop-out, and they actively work to re-charge people's sense of empowerment as an antidote. This approach is misguided. Our destructive habits and dependencies can be likened to an alcoholic's addiction. By employing a Batesonian (1972) analysis of our current crisis, this paper envisions what sort of epistemological reframing needs to be undertaken by environmental educators and attempts to outline some of their roles in this new framework. It is common nowadays to find scholars attempting to redefine causality in a way that does not privilege humans as actors or agents. On one side of this move, we find the reductive materialists, who insists that some bottom-up explanation of all phenomena is in principle possible, making us nothing but the effect of quarks and electrons bouncing around in the nethersphere (Churchland 1981; Churchland 1986). On the other side, we find new materialists and actor network theorists (such as Latour, 2005; Bennett, 2010), who, rather than removing agency from the world, redefine and redistribute it so that the soil, the hay, the cow, the tractor, the farmer, and the globalized economic system, are all agents brought into mutually constitutive relations with one another. This paper will explore a third de-privileging maneuver, one that sees agency as the process by which an organism, interacting with its environment, can flexibly redevelop habits in response to environmental changes. A lack of agency would be a corresponding incapacity to develop a novel response in spite of organism- environment relations that seemingly require it. To tread this third path, I build up an ecological perspective drawing on the insights of Bateson (1972), Dewey (1922; 1925), as well as more recent scholars exploring the relationship between stasis and dynamism in transactional relationships (e.g. Thompson 2007; Deacon 2011). According to Bateson (1972), the alcoholics' attitude towards drinking is pathological because they entertain the notion that controlling the addiction is possible through their own free will. One might say that they are suffering two addictions, the addiction to alcohol and the addiction to the notion that they have agency in directing the situation. The alcoholic, upon successfully resisting the drink for a couple days, decides to have "just one drink" in order to prove to him or herself that they still have control. The cycle continues. In the context of the ecological crisis, a parallel process occurs insofar as our addictions vast interlocking and life-destroying relationships is invading our experience while our language's grammar, our folk psychology, our pride, and our articulation of solutions are simultaneously demanding that we own up and take responsibility for our actions. We are faced with a building toxicity: our assumptions about our capacity to steer a novel course is increasingly opposed to the direct evidence we are confronted with, as we are increasingly engulfed in patterns of habit and dependency. For Bateson, Alcoholics Anonymous' (AA) exceptional record of success is because they advocate overcoming the false belief that controlling the addiction is possible. Though framed in theistic terminology, the program has the alcoholic recognize and continually re-affirm that he or she is actually part of something larger than they are. To develop approaches for dealing with the habits and