December 6, 2015 - 13:28
When we are babies we learn language by mimicking the sounds we hear our parents say. As children we are caricatures of the environment that we are growing up in. If as humans, we learn and grow by mimicking our environment it can be argued that by learning about and experiencing other cultures we are able to diversify our understanding of the world. Ecological Intelligence is about the world not just the environment, we must foster relationships between different cultures and environments in order to grow and diversify as a world community.
If you live in the city and do not have access to a vast amount of trees how do you learn about trees? In a Western Society like ours we would probably google it, or watch a documentary. As children we all watched The Magic School Bus and from that some of us developed an early interest in science. We are mimicking what we see on TV and the internet and sometimes that is a great thing. Where this becomes problematic is when there is no representation within the media. Junot Diaz makes an eloquent comment about representation in the media, “You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.” When People of color, People that fall on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, and people with disabilities are not represented in the media, or are represented negatively we -as a society- create them into monsters.As a result they are not only ashamed of their selves but we as a society are afraid of
them.This causes major problems for improving our ecological intelligence. Without diversity in the media how will people who are underrepresented ever going to have a voice.
Bruno Latour stresses the importance of knowing how to tell our common geostory. I think that if we are trying to tell this common geostory in the most accurate way we cannot let only a select set of people tell the story. An example of how letting a few people tell the story could be problematic is in Naomi Kline’s article about the Paris climate change conference. During this conference people were not allowed to protest due to the recent Paris attacks. Protesting is often the only outlet that people have access to. Without protests only the government officials have a platform in these official climate change conferences. This is not right. Not having the right to protest is in a way devaluing the common people’s opinions. This idea of a one sided story is not a new concept, the age old saying of “history is told by the winners,” did not start from nowhere. This is saying that if you are not a part of a certain group your voice and your story do not matter. Ecological Intelligence does not work when it is told from one point of view.
Paulo Frier talks about the importance of teaching people in a way they will understand. When Frier was a Portuguese school teacher he never taught students reading and writing with the syntactical charts utilized in most classrooms. Instead, Frier taught by using living experiences. This is not only more engaging for students, but also incredibly beneficial in the way that they view the world. There is an argument that learning in general should be interdisciplinary. If we talked about the environment in more ways than just regards to the environment we would reach more people with this cause. Too often the topic of the environment and climate change is
approached with the idea of economics in mind. Instead of focusing on topical issues as solitary problems we as a community need to be able to look at each as intertwined.