April 26, 2015 - 19:20
In reading Mathew’s “On Desiring Nature,” I was reminded of an article we had read a few months back in the Multicultural Ed class Rosa and I are taking this semester – “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities” by Eve Tuck. In the article she talks about revising education frameworks to be less damage-based (seeing marginalized communities as broken, depleted) and more desire-based. I hadn’t actually translated this before to thinking about the environment and how we teach about the environment and work to improve our relationship with it. But it feels like Mathew’s article did exactly that. I was struck at the very beginning of the article when she says:
“’Fitting into nature’ then means more than merely not harming it, minimizing our impact on it; rather it means actively replenishing it, actively reconstituting the biosphere in everything we do. Ultimately this is a matter of wanting what the biosphere needs us to want.”
I had never really thought about this before. Again, I suppose another moment of me (and most other humans) still thinking very anthropocentrically about being “environmentally friendly” instead of thinking about sustainability as a give and take relationship, where we not only have to stop being awful to the environment, but we need to actively replenish and help it. It’s also another aspect of us as humans feeling detached, separate from the environment instead of having “a sense of involvement with these existences” as Mathews says. The way I have been conditioned, not just by society, but by most of my environmental-type classes or experiences, to view environmental and sustainability work is to look at the environment as damaged, broken, depleted, and that sort of mindset I suppose fosters this idea that we simply have to minimize our negative effects and try to cut back on our desires or control our desires to just barely get the environment back to a better place. But that kind of thinking in itself is not sustainable. Just as Tuck talks about in her article in relation to education, we need to rework our entire framework of thinking about the environment and being sustainable – we need to completely shift not just our actions and our lifestyles, but our desires and wants so that they do not just not affect the environment negatively, but actively replenish and benefit it. That kind of thinking is beautiful and ideally, that truly is the way for humans to get back on track and “fit into nature.” The trouble is, how the hell do we actually do that??
Is it too late for people of our age to have our desires be so radically altered? How, in reality, can I personally work to alter my desires so that they replenish and restore the environment around me? Many of my desires such as homemade chocolate cookies, Netflix, a soft bed, bowties, guitars – none of those work to restore the environment. Even some of my deepest “passions,” such as queer theater – which I ideally want to use as a way of empowering a marginalized community and creating small social change – even that is considered irrelevant in relation to the environment. But if someone were to tell me that, that one of my greatest passions is actually useless from a sustainability standpoint, I don’t know if I could accept that. I’m asking myself these questions now and I still don’t know if I can accept that. Partially because that also then, in this situation and other similar situations, puts sustainable practices above social justice work, and I refuse to accept that kind of hierarchy of causes. But so what does that mean for me and everyone who has passions either alongside or instead of passions for environmentalism? And what does that mean for social justice work? How can we possibly make true change then? Does that mean the way we always tell people to “follow their passions” is actually completely unhelpful in the big picture? How can we expect people to give up things that are personally emotionally fulfilling to save an environment that they may feel no connection to? Are there ways to make those emotionally fulfilling things restorative to the environment as well?
I actually really loved reading this paper – it was so hopeful and inspiring. But at the same time, it feels very idealistic. Yes, the ideas are great and I am totally on board, but realistically, I feel like completely altering desires like this, getting people to connect to nature in such a deep spiritual way that the meaning of material things and presentation in social settings will dissolve completely, is just not possible on the large scale. At least for the next few hundred years of human existence, and god knows if humans will still be alive then. What this paper is talking about is complete revolution and evolution of the deepest parts of humanity, and that just can’t happen on the timescale we need it to. So what then?