ABSTRACT
Freire’s blind spot was in not lending nature its due. Worried as we all were about achieving social justice, the Freirian pedagogic agenda was at first seen as developing the conceptual and methodological tools for the transformation of social relations that were at the very foundation of the social inequities. He neglected to reflect on the relations of domination by man over nature. Perhaps this neglect was in the very structure of our discourse. For modern man, nature is there to be transformed with a view to establishing the dominion of man over the Earth, not to converse with her. The dialogical discourse of emancipation was basically humanistic. The pedagogy of the oppressed was formulated as an instrument for the solution of social oppression, not for those concerned with the subjugation of nature, as if the solution to the ecological problem would emerge when humans stopped oppressing each other.
