December 19, 2014 - 08:43
Elizabeth Kolbert in her book called The Six Extinction, shows how the next mass extinction is being speeded up by the human beings. During chapter six, she reports a series of tests that proved the Coral Reefs would disappear thanks to something called Ocean Acidification, provoked by chemistry reactions of greenhouse gases we emit and the water. That was the first time I realized that our actions have such a negative impact. Kolbert give me the information, but that did not stop me from maintaining some bad habits and did not made that one of my priorities. So how exactly could we educate people in a way that the environment stop being the Scenery and start being part of the main characters on the Play of Life.
“Don’t litter!” I can clearly recall the day my father said that. “The trash you throw here ends up on the drains, what helps the flooding and makes that river water even dirtier.” I never considered myself an environmentalist for never littering after that, I just learned a habit after logic reasoning. Not because I cared about that damn river, but because I had that dirty water entering my house and damaging furniture. And that kind of technique is the one used by JONES whenever he is giving a speech to poor people. Green Jobs would be both sustainable and help poor people. But the environmental change is not Jones focus. Like me, he just killed two birds with one stone. However, when leading people on their American Dream of working hard and becoming rich, he did not considered that despite training, people may end up unemployed.
Just like The Ones Who Walks Away From Omelas, we believe our happiness depends on the pain of a child, or in our case, our planet. Do the people from Omelas actually grasp what is going on with that kid? Is the impact of that kid being felt by anyone, directly? How exactly are the ones who walk away different from the ones who stay? They are empathic with what the kid is going on and they run away from that hypocrite world. Maybe that’s why they don’t act. Cause empathy exists because of inequality. The kid is not a priority for them, because somehow they too believe the happiness of a whole town depends on the pain of that kid. That’s where the Ontological Education takes place, learning that the importance of each one is the same.
Bruno Latour puts the blame of the lack of connection with the Environment on the current human mindset and subversion of the sense of objectivity. Physics models, for instance, are accepted by the community due their applicability, an abstraction that of the world that subdues it to our needs, however, they are being taken as absolute truth and the Scientific Thinking is being linked to objectivity.“Purity is not what science is made of: behind the force, the wings of angels are still invisibly flapping”.
Even the estimated concept of Empathy, “Let’s save the World” shows how Anthropomorphism Theories tha How promote change from here?
Analyzing change under the Transtheoretical model, happens in 5 stages: Pre-contemplation, Contemplation, Preparation, Action, Maintenance. Starting by denial, then the realization of the advantages of changing and the other names are pretty much self-explanatory. Kolbert takes us out of pre-contemplation, by making us acknowledge the problem, but she doesn’t guide us through the whole changing process, this might have not been her objective, but I still think she wastes her opportunity to prompt us to act, by teaching us how to change. Preparation is Jones failure and his “change” is not directly on the environmental side, but on the social one. Even so, he fails because he doesn’t plan ahead. What thing may fail during my plane, is one of the things he should have asked himself.
Heidegger challenging the modern Education by a lack of understanding of paideia… (LINK THAT TO Latour)
The way to use such information to Educate people is start teaching ontologically at schools and adapting the change process to older people. Step by step. Changing is hard and needs to be a guided and collective process. First let’s show the problem, as Kolbert successfully did. Then let’s mimic Jones and present arguments that would be enough to convice anyone to change. Let’s prepare a change that involves more than jut the American dream. Let’s change the mindset. Let’s stop with empathy, living in the past. Then let’s act keeping in mind why we changed in the first place. It wasn’t because of the past, it wasn’t because of the future. It is because it is.