April 21, 2015 - 08:40
On this chillier day, Nkechi is situating us in the Radnor Common Room
I. Coursekeeping
* review of what's ahead of us:
* @ 6:30 tomorrow, Env'l Studies Program is hosting a pizza party in Thomas 110,
followed by a screening, @ 7, of Terralismo, a documentary about an urban cooperative farm in Cuba,
followed by a discussion with the filmmaker, and one of the founders of the farm (event ends @ 9)
* on Thursday, Rosa will pick our gathering space
Celeste reported that it was "great to be outdoors on a beautiful day"
(re: our time in the Cloisters last Thursday)
Caleb, writing (belatedly) about the time he put us in the classroom,
suggested we take some time to register the sounds/silence in whatever space we're in
(and open the windows when inside?)
Ariel wanted everyone to be able to weigh in on this process
--any advice/suggestions/requests for Rosa?
* it's like the classroom has become a (roving) site sit!
there seemed more energy in the last set of these, this weekend:
Maddie's shrinking poem, "Endings."
Amala's poem, superimposed over a landscape losing color,
Caleb's "liberation," into carbon-carbon collision--
and communication with a fox!--
Teresa's downtown video, "Walk with Me,"
Tosin's unregulated, limitless "round and round,"
Ariel's "finale," reading all her postings @ her site sit,
recognizing her fear of confronting her imagination;
Abby's "restlessness," the freedom she found in "simple forward motion"...
* on Thursday, we'll discuss the last set of readings
I've selected for us to work through together:
two chapters from Joanna Macy's book, World as Lover,
World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal,
and two very short essays, Freyda Mathews's “On Desiring Nature,"
& Zadie Smith's "Elegy for a Country's Seasons."
* the following week (last week of classes) I've set aside for a "teach-in"
Marian: describe what this entails? teaching one another what you've learned;
think of it as an alternate final exam, only collaborative, and engaging a public!
get together and discuss: what are the key things
you've learned/key questions that have emerged?
how to invite others to go on thinking-and-doing along these lines?
(pedagogy's an important dimension here: how to share what you know?)
could involve re-working/live presentation of something you've already prepared:
with an explanation of how it is a summary/commentary/expansion of what we've done...
[take a little class time now/today or Thursday to hook up?]
I will need to know on Thursday not what'll you do, but who you'll be working with,
so I can figure out the timing (if 3 groups of 4, will only need 1 day...)
II. We spent our last class re-reading our site sits through the lens of TTWilliams,
who lamented that "we are forgetting what we are connected to.
We are losing our frame of reference....it's leading us to a place of
inconsolable loneliness....of 'unspoken hunger'" and claimed that
"the only thing that can bring us into a place of fullness is being out
in the land with others." My sense of the meeting is that
"we" weren't really buying that...but then Caleb wrote his
"Earthquake Aftermath," which I've used to structure today's class.
Let's read it aloud:
Our last class out in the cloisters caused earthquake in my heart/mind/being and I feel moved to add a bit more to the conversation we were/are having related to environmental education, place, connection, and humanity. These words are still clunky and awkward, but I hope they can stir up some conversation/controversy/clarification/contradiction. This is the earthquake's initial aftermath.
1) Many of us are fundamentally (though not irrevocably) disconnected from place.
Terry Tempest Williams resonates a whole hell of a lot here. I think we are deeply disconnected from the places we inhabit. There has been a growing rift between us and the places we inhabit, a rift that has significant consequences. This distancing causes us to further shift our attention away from the contexts we exist in relation to, away from other beings outside of the self, and towards our own needs and desires. It’s called anthropocentrism and self-centeredness. It’s called being unaware. When the same consequences are applied in interpersonal relationships, we call it being inconsiderate, irresponsible, inattentive. This relationship, I think, is the same kind many of us have with the land today (myself included).
Terry Tempest Williams, alongside Wendell Berry and others, remind us that we can’t love what we don’t know. We—as humans, animals, beings among other beings—need to be rooted in and to love a place. Human restlessness may very well exist in many—if not all—of us. But now we have also never traveled so fast, consumed and wasted so much, and been so distanced from the earth we are fundamentally dependent on.
With our hyper-mobile travel and advanced technology, it becomes easy to forget our dependency on the land. Food comes from the supermarket. We order computers from the internet. In reality, food comes from the land, which is likely forced into a monoculture state by corporation-hired farmers, who may hire and exploit a poor labor force. Computers come from the rocks, ores mined from regions plagued by violence. Our rift from the land—the mass-forgetting that we are undertaking in—causes us not just to drift from internal connection, but also from our essential dependent physical connection. We like to think we live on the land, not off it. Perhaps the biggest lie we tell ourselves today is not that we’re dis-connected from everything else, but that we are not wholly dependent on land and all that arises from it.
Insatiable desire—the unspoken hunger—is at the root of our being in this world today. It is at the root of our being, a cry out for meaning, for authenticity, for vulnerability, for (inter)dependency, for openness, for love.
2) Our site sits were not failures.
While our site sits may not have made us feel reconnected us to a place, I honestly believe the practice of getting to know a place by sticking with it through thick and thin and dullness is invaluable in itself. Perhaps what was lacking is movement and interaction that comes with it, rather than sitting in a mandated place for a long span of time? I think the site sit has given me a time to meditate on personal musings and integrate intellectual knowledge in a world outside of institutional walls.
I also want us to not forget that we belong to the land not out of an "emotional” connection but out of a very real dependency on it. Which leads me to my third assertion that fell on my head in clarity today…
3) Environmental education must push us to question what is “normal” and make us act on those questions.
Throughout this class we’ve rethought our identities, our perspectives, our ways of communicating, our ways of seeing the world. All of this has been incredibly valuable, and it will be something I carry throughout my life, whether or not I remember the posts I wrote for my site sit. The next step is entirely more difficult. We have to remake our ways of being.
Remaking an entire way of life is incredibly difficult. Paulo Freire tells us that we all become cemented in the normalcy of oppression: the oppressors convince themselves that it their natural right to oppress; the oppressed are taught to follow this ideology and stuck in this framework of thinking. Regardless of his anthropocentric/human-focused perspective, I think we need to be reminded of this normalization as well.
Why is living differently so difficult? Why, even when we recognize its problems, does it seem impossible to break out of “the system?” First, because it is incredibly difficult to think outside of what is “normal”. Once we start to pull on one thread of what is “normal” the entire framework of our tenuous existence begins to collapse. This process is also terrifying: we have a lot of stake in our current ways, and we are pressured in direct and indirect ways to continue them. When things are “normal”, it becomes harder and harder to imagine different ways of being in this world. It’s hard to swim upstream.
Trips into nature (i.e. camping trips & the like) are often effective in connecting someone to a place because they show us a different way of life. Camping isn’t a “normal” way of life: de-centering material wealth, not having constant access to entertainment technology, making/picking your own food, living communally, getting outside of your comfort zone—none of that is “normal”. Our site sits were a short haven from normal, but I didn’t feel that I fundamentally reimagined my ways of life when returning to that space.
Second, our classes in academic institutions feel a little like going to church on Sundays: there are so many powerful, moving, ecological thoughts, but in the end we all leave the building and go home. In this way, academia is a little like our echoed feelings about our site sits: we go in, we sit, we leave. There isn’t much space to make room for intellectual thought be brought into tangible practice. It’s not just the question of how we can effectively educate people, but also the question of how we can provide spaces and practices that embody thinking in doing. The Haverfarm might be one example of this, artistic projects another, but I’m curious about other ways we might reform/come up with enticing practices that do embody shifts in the way we live.
“People are starving,” screenwriter Charlie Kaufman tells us. “They may not know it because they’re being fed mass produced garbage. The packaging is colourful and loud, but it’s produced in the same factories that make Pop Tarts and iPads, by people sitting around thinking, ‘What can we do to get people to buy more of these?’” In our current situation, there is a lot of riskiness in truly feeling and thinking about who we are. Being materially content is dangerous. Thinking is dangerous. Patience is dangerous. Questioning is dangerous. Crying out is dangerous. Change is dangerous. Distribution and balance is dangerous. It is scary to be vulnerable and honest with ourselves and each other, and it is even more terrifying prospect in a society twisted by insincerity and placated by power. Because in doing so, we realize that we have so much to sacrifice and let go of.
In reality, I’m an echo to what people have said and done long before me. But I feel called to again remind us of these things, things which do require massive institutional and personal shifts in our way of thinking and being in this world.
Fundamentally, all of these thoughts come back to what it means to have a meaningful and joyful life—for ourselves, for our neighbors, and for our collective family of all things that make up our world.
——————
Please note that I am intentionally leaving “we” ambiguous. Though it is a loaded pronoun and inevitably has a lot of built-in assumptions, there are moments (I feel) when not speaking as “we” or “you”, we divide up responsibilities too neatly and too concretely based on perceived proximity from root causes, allowing us to think that “those people” can change without fundamental self-reflection.
I make a lot of big claims here, and I want to hear your thoughts.
[what do we hear....?]
III. All of this directly related, of course, to the four essays
I asked you to read for today: two chapters by Naomi Klein,
a review of her book by Elizabeth Kolbert, and an interview
with the historian-turned sci fi writer, Naomi Oreskes.
your reactions to this material varied:
Maddie: "tell me something I don't already know"
Theresa learned something she hadn't known,
about the correlation between emissions and the economy;
Abby asked about the relation between focusing on the personal
(what Klein calls "merely placating") and the need for large scale change;
Caleb: we need regeneration, "a big reawakening to what makes life worth living"
Amala: "for most, the situation isn't 'real' enough...where we stand is a fictional story
- like it's part of a story book... it isn't necessary for it to be on their mind
when the book isn't open." This gave me an idea: let's write an open book!
In her Intro and Conclusion to This Changes Everything:
Capitalism vs. The Climate, Naomi Klein says we must stop
deflecting our fear of what is happening; she offers the "wild idea"
of challenging the fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism;
in her review of the book, Elizabeth Kolbert says that Klein
"ends up telling a fable she hopes will do some good,"
and in an interview, the historian Naomi Oreskes says that
after getting lots of pushback for documenting
"The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,"
she turned to the genre of sci-fi, which gave her the freedom
to look back on the present, by extrapolating into the future.
This is where I want us to step off from. Klein says that
""what gets me most are...the books I read to my two-year-old...
he might never see a moose...Will he ever see a bat?...
maybe it's better if he never sees a starfish..."
Now I try to feel [the fear]..."
IV. break into small groups: to begin imagining
a children's story that speaks to these concerns...
how might we teach children what the world is?
and how to invite them to intervene...?
----
Reading Notes from Klein
Introduction: "One Way or Another, Everything Changes"
irony that the burning of fossil fuels is so radically changing our clmiate that it is getting in the way of our capacity to burn fossil fuels
cognitive dissonance--> most of us engage in climae change denial; we look away (tend to our gardens)
we are right to fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything;
we deny how frightened we are: to change how we live, how our economies function, even the stories we tell about our place on earth
We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth: crisis treatment for climate change, treated as true planetary emergency,
not mitigating, adapting, outsourcing--but a catalyzing force for positive change, end grotesque levels of inequality
weave a coherent narrative of protection from savagely unjust economic system and destabilized climate system
"a people's shock": catalyst for range of forms of social, political, economic transformation--disperse power
leaders are not looking after us; we are on our own
risk of triggering nonlinear tipping elements, as gov'ts ignore commitments
4 degrees of warming "incompatible with any reasonable characterization of an organized, equitable, civlized global community"
difficult to imagine sustaining peaceful, ordered society (where it exists)
climate change an existential crisis (cf. slim possibility of nuclear holocaust)
what is wrong with us? incentives to do the right thing fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism
two defining processes in past 1/4 century of international negotiation: cliamte process and corporate globalization
(privitization of public shpehre, deregulation of corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation)
market fundamentalism has systematically sabotaged collective response to climate change: seem politically heretical
unfettered corporate power poses grave threat to habitability of planet
liberation of world markets powered by liberation of unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels
avoiding catastrophic warming conflicts with fund'l imperative of our economic model: grow or die
economic and planetary system are @ war: unfettered contraction or expansion?
laws of nature cannot be changed
no choice but dramatic action: challenges fetish of centrism
we need to think differently: market logic is paralyzing grand proect of mutual reinvention
in "Decade Zero," must challenge the fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism
roadblock is politics of human power: our right to "extractivism"
civilizational wake-up call: need to evolve new way of sharing the planet
polite incremental change has led to disastrous results; need to seek our radical responses
"what gets me most are...the books I read to my two-year-old...he might never see a moose...
Will he ever see a bat?...maybe it's better if he never sees a starfish..."
Now I try to feel it...we all owe it to..one another...But what should we do with this fear....?
use it. Fear is a survival response...nothing is inevitable.'
Conclusion: "The Leap Years"
"Is Earth F**ked?" global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid,
convenient, and barrier-free that "earth-human systems" are becoming dangerously unstable
one dynamic offering hope: "resistance": adopting dynamics that don't fit within capitalist culture
environmental direction action: "friction" to slow down out-of-control economic machine
"a geophysics problem"/Blockadia/economic alternatives, putting on the brakes
celebrated human rights movements more successful in legal, cultural than economic battles
abolition of slavery and Third World independence from colonialism challenged entrenched wealth
climate justic movement as "The New Abolitionism," with real costs ot he oil, gas, coal elites
economic demands as unfinished buisness of powerful liberation movements
wild idea: real equality means equal access to basic services of dignified life
Frantz Fanon: "What matters today...is a redistribution of wealth"
needs extaordianry levels of social mobilization,
to unlearn core tenets of stifling free-market ideology: broad battle of world-views
"shock therapy," "populism" to delegitimize current one
new stories can be told to replace the ones that have failed us
our inaction: because we are overwhelmed by how much we care
lack collective spaces to confront hte raw terror of ecocide
denial as testament to capacity for empathy, compassion, moral imperative
alternative world view: interdependence, reciprocity, cooperation
dream in public, unafraid of language of morality to alter public opinion
morally monstrous calculations, given intrinsic value of life
"the real surprise: we are so much more than we have been told we are:
we long for more and in that logning have company..."
what's politically realistic shifts with superstorms...
we are less isolated than we were
"History knocked on your door, did you answer?"
Kolbert's review: Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?
maddeningly optimistic: everything wrong with society can
be righted if/as we turn around emission trends in time
"truly plentary emergency...a galvanizing force for...
societies that are safer and fairer"
Blockadia (communities blocking extractive projects);
2000-Watt Society (us 12,000 watt, Bangladesh 300-watt)
Klein's "regeneration" avoids looking closely at what this would entail
my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take, they turn away
she ends up telling a fable she hopes will do some good
interview with Naomi Oreskes, who wrote
"The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,"
to show that the battle was not about science, but economics:
a belief in unfettered free market;
campaign of doubt-mongering to prevent regulation
how historian of the future might view today's decision:
genre of sci-fi gave freedom to extrapolate