Engaging the Emotional Dimensions of Environmental Education (original) (raw)
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Recognising the Role Eco-grief Plays in Responding to Environmental Degradation
Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis, 2019
This article aims to highlight the importance of a growing need for social work to incorporate the natural environment within research, education and practice. It is becoming imperative that social workers have an understanding of how climate related events, such as environmental degradation and exploitation of natural resources, will impact on the people they work with. Communities worldwide are being affected by changing weather patterns and with constant news coverage available through technology, we are bearing witness to events taking place on a global level. Eco-grief is a term that has been used to describe feelings of helplessness, loss and frustration in an inability to make a difference within these changing times as related to the environment, as well as feelings that may emerge after going through one of these extreme events. This article will aim to link the research, values and behaviour associated with eco-grief with how we can respond to environmental depletion. Included will be a bringing awareness to the importance of social work having a more focused and intentional link to the natural environment in the light of the ever increasing evidence that we are in a period of climate change and the impact that has on communities and individuals. A discussion around encouraging and building positive relationships with the natural world, increasing the capacity to recognise the importance of sustainable livelihoods and ability to protect and care for the natural environment will also be present.
Conference Notes: Mourning as Adaptation to Ecological Loss
2013
Environmental ethics identifies the ultimate source of environmental loss in assumptions deeply embedded in modern culture, such as humanity's supremacy over nature, the pursuit of never-ending economic growth, and the very idea of progress as accumulation of material wealth. This socio-economic model is unsustainable and yet, challenging such basic tenets of modernity is difficult because of the common feeling of powerlessness that results from an inability to imagine possible alternatives. Here, I introduce the audience to Rosemary Randall's framework on mourning ecological loss and show how socially engaged literary writing provides an ideal framework allowing the individual to overcome powerlessness and denial. I show how stories about individuals grappling with environmental loss affect readers' psychology and provide models which reveal possible paths toward healing and change. Climate change epitomises humanity's dysfunctional relationship with nature and provides a framework through which I address all types of environmental concerns. Aitken et al. identify the main reason for the lack of meaningful action 1
The Process of Eco-Anxiety and Ecological Grief: A Narrative Review and a New Proposal
Sustainability, 2022
As the ecological crisis grows more intense, people experience many forms of eco-anxiety and ecological grief. This article explores the broad process of encountering eco-anxiety and ecological grief, and engages in the constructive task of building a new model of that process. Eco-anxiety and grief are here seen as fundamentally healthy reactions to threats and loss, and only the strongest forms of them are seen as problems. The aim is to help researchers, various professionals and the general public by providing a model which is (a) simple enough but (b) more nuanced than stage models which may give a false impression of linearity. The article uses an interdisciplinary method. The proposed new model includes both chronological and thematic aspects. The early phases of Unknowing and Semi-consciousness are followed potentially by some kind of Awakening and various kinds of Shock and possible trauma. A major feature of the model is the following complex phase of Coping and Changing, which is framed as consisting of three major dimensions: Action (pro-environmental behavior of many kinds), Grieving (including other emotional engagement), and Distancing (including both self-care and problematic disavowal). The model predicts that if there is trouble in any of these three dimensions, adjusting will be more difficult. The model thus helps in seeing, e.g., the importance of self-care for coping. The possibility of stronger eco-anxiety and/or eco-depression is always present, including the danger of burnout. The ethical and psychological aim is called Adjustment and Transformation, which includes elements of, e.g., meaning-finding and acceptance. The need for Coping and Changing continues, but there is more awareness and flexibility in a metaphase of Living with the Ecological Crisis, where the titles and subtitles of the three dimensions of coping are switched.
Facing loss: pedagogy of death
Environmental Education Research, 2018
Loss, impermanence, and death are facts of life difficult to face squarely. Our own mortality and that of loved ones feels painful and threatening, the mortality of the biosphere unthinkable. Consequently, we do our best to dodge these thoughts, and the current globalizing culture supports and colludes in our evasiveness. Even environmental educators tend to foreground 'sustainability' whilst sidelining the reality of decline, decay, and loss. And yet, human life and ecological health require experiencing 'unsustainability' too, and a pedagogy for life requires a pedagogy of death. In this paper we explore experiences of loss and dying in both human relationships and the natural world through four different types of death affording situations, the cemetery, caring-unto-death, sudden death, and personal mortality. We trace the confluence of death in nature and human life, and consider some pedagogical affordance within and between these experiences as an invitation to foster an honest relationship with the mortality of self, others, and nature. We end by suggesting art as an ally in this reconnaissance, which can scaffold teaching and learning and support us to courageously accept both the beauty and the ugliness that death delivers to life.
Ambio, 2023
Eco-anxiety, grief and despair are increasing, yet these emotions tend to remain private, rarely expressed in public. Why is it important and necessary to grieve for ecological loss? Why are we not-as individuals and societies-coming together to express and share our grief for ecological destruction? I address these questions from three angles. Firstly, I draw on recent literature on ecological grief and prior work on grief for human lives, to argue for the importance and urgency of grieving publicly for ecological loss. Building on this, I identify perceptual, cognitive, affective, ritual and political obstacles to ecological mourning; these obstacles point at critical intersections between emotions, practices, disciplines, public and private realms, which can turn into fruitful venues for further research, debate and action on ecological grief (and its absence). In closing, I propose a set of 'ecological skills' that might help us overcome these obstacles, and lead us to embrace ecological grief and mourning as acts of ethical responsibility and care for the planet.
Radical environmental and animal rights activists mourn nonhuman others in a variety of ways that express their kinship with these others and strengthen their commitments to radical causes. Grief is a central motivating factor in conversion and commitment to activism. It is both an expression of deeply felt kinship bonds with other species and a signicant factor in creating those bonds. Nearly all environmental and animal rights protests reference some kind of loss, including mass extinction. Activists' very participation in protests is part of an ongoing process of remembering the dead and disappearing, including those who were intimately known, as well as the more abstract dead of mass extinction and deforestation. For these reasons, radical environmental and animal rights protests themselves can be understood as rites of mourning, as they are so frequently motivated by loss and grief.
The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies, 2020
To exist in a state of communion is to be aware of the nature of existence. This is where ecology and social justice come together, with the knowledge that life is held in common. Whether we know it or not, we exist because we exchange, because we move the gift. And the knowledge of this is as crucial to the conditions of the soul as its practice to the body. (Griffin, 1996: 151) As an educator, writer and researcher in a time of ecological crisis, I am often overcome with guilt, hopelessness, panic, despair, misplaced hope in romantic ideals or techno-fixes. And yet, I remain mindful of how my various ill-measured responses may effectively perpetuate and exacerbate ecological destruction and social injustices. bell hooks , in an engaged, pluralistic and ethically oriented critical pedagogy, challenges educators to pay attention, 'to look and live and find or create the spaces of joy' (169). I wonder how a pedagogy oriented towards ethical ways of knowing and un-knowing, writing, and teaching that well up from within, 'not out of a sense of duty, but out of a sense of joy' (Foreman, in Jensen, 2002: 10), may heed bell hooks' call, and further extend this spiritual form of impassioned, engaged and loving attention beyond human communities out towards our biotic communities . As we re-story our human identity as beings-inrelation , and cultivate our not knowing, teachers may seek ways to open 'our heart-minds' (Macy, 2014: par. 6; see also hooks, 2003: 137) towards more generous, careful, imperfect, loving relations (Martusewicz, 2005) with human and more-than-human communities alike. Following the principles of ecological pedagogy, 1 which is not only a teaching philosophy, but also may be considered a social and political movement (Gadotti, 2003: 5, italics in original), I seek to respect the principles of the Earth Charter (2000) of respect and care for the community of life; ecological integrity; social and economic justice; and democracy, non-violence and peace (3-5). As I consider how it is possible to cultivate more measured (Gadamer, 2004), yet always imperfect responses in these 'ecologically sorrowful times' (Jardine, 2015: xv), I contemplate an ecological pedagogy of joy through a place-based narrative of Small-Town Stories, and a poetic remembering of A Record Year of climate change in my hometown of Merritt, British Columbia. I end with reflections regarding a heart-mind-ful and place-based pedagogy that is oriented towards pluralistic ways of knowing and connecting with others, an openness to the unknown, and to respectful relations with humans and our morethan-human kin.
Ecological Sorrow: Types of grief and loss in ecological grief
Preprints, 2023
Ecological changes evoke many felt losses and types of grief. These affect sustainability efforts in profound ways. Scholarship on the topic is growing, but the relationship between general grief research and ecological grief has received surprisingly little attention. This interdisciplinary article applies theories of grief, loss, and bereavement to ecological grief. Special attention is given to research about "non-death loss" and other broad frameworks about grief. Dynamics related to both local and global ecological grief are discussed. Kinds of potential losses arising out of ecological issues are clarified with the frameworks of tangible/intangible loss, ambiguous loss, nonfinite loss, and shattered assumptions. Various possible types of ecological grief are illuminated by discussing the frameworks of chronic sorrow and anticipatory grief/mourning. Earlier scholarship about disenfranchised ecological grief is augmented by further distinctions about various forms it may take. The difficulties in defining complicated or prolonged grief in ecological context are discussed, and four types of "complicated ecological grief" are explored. Based on the findings, three special forms of ecological loss and grief are named and discussed: transitional loss and grief, lifeworld loss, and shattered dreams. The implications of the results for ecological grief scholarship, counselling and coping are briefly discussed. The results can be used by psychological and healthcare professionals and researchers, but also by members of the public who wish to reflect on their eco-emotions.
Communicating in the Anthropocene, 2021
This interdisciplinary book series seeks original proposals that examine environmental communication scholarship. In the Anthropocene era, the period during which human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment, the need for highlighting and re-centering nature in our worldviews and policies is urgent, as collapsing ecosystems across the globe struggle to survive. Topics might include climate change, land use conflict, water rights, natural disasters, nonhuman animals, the culture of nature, ecotourism, wildlife management, human/nature relationships, food studies, sustainability, eco-pedagogy, mediated nature, eco-terrorism, environmental education, ecofeminism, international development, and environmental conflict. Ultimately, scholarship that addresses the general overarching question "how do individuals and societies make sense of and act against/within/out of nature?" is welcomed. This series is open to contributions from authors in environmental communication, environmental studies, media studies, rhetoric, political science, critical geography, critical/cultural studies, and other related fields. We also seek diverse and creative epistemological and methodological framings that might include ethnography, content analysis, narrative and/or rhetorical analysis, participant observation, and community-based participatory research, among others. Successful proposals will be accessible to a multidisciplinary audience.
Since the 1920s, when Alfred North Whitehead gave his accounts on the dire consequences of Cartesian body-mind bifurcation for modern philosophy and society, various philosophers in arts, morals, and sciences have given their various critiques on the ongoing collapses of Divine Qualities into reductive quantities (e.g., the reign of quantity (Rene Guenon), the disenchantment of the world (Max Weber), the disqualified universe (Lewis Mumford), one-dimensional man (Herbert Marcuse), the colonisation of art and morals by science (Jürgen Habermas), scientism (Wolfgang Smith), wasteland (Theodore Roszak), flatland (Ken Wilber), et al.). Thus, “the great nightmare of scientific materialism was upon us (Whitehead)”, in our various post-truth worlds in recent decades. Now, in the 2020s, our worlds continue to become ever more de-sacralized, de-natured, and dis-heartened. Verifications through measurements tend to be the only considerations in many settings. For many scientists, only their selected measurements count; for many economists, only their selected economic measures count; for many politicians, across the political spectrum from left to right, only their selected poll numbers count. Habitually, modern people forget that their common reductionisms undermine the Quality of Divine Qualities, like Beauty in Arts and Skills, Goodness in Persons, Interpersonal Relations and Shared Cultures, and Truth in Philosophy and Sciences, amongst Humanity’s Choirs of Heart-Centred Beings, and amidst Nature’s Orchestras of Living Beings. Since the 1970s, many people with neoliberal values have spent their lives focused on endless economic growth on our finite shared planet, pursuing profits with heartless greed, powering the wealth supremacies of economic elites, at local, national, and global scales, while degrading and undermining the development and wellbeing of billions of marginalised peoples, with the web of life on our planet paying shocking unsustainable prices. In other words, while accumulating their stores of financial wealth, many people with neoliberal values have externalized nature, individualized people, deregulated ethics, privatized public services, globalized local produce, efficiently turning many men and many women into mechanized, computerized, digitalized, robotized, insatiable “consumers”, dehumanising everybody within their toxic, all-consuming, degenerative, supposedly “free” markets. Now, wherever we live on our precious planet, we see life on earth struggling with various tipping points of human-induced traumas, as clean air, natural waters, and fertile soils continue to be deliberately turned into dirty air, polluted waters, and wasted soils, degrading, destroying, and undermining the habitats of many plants, many animals, and many human beings. Here we ask: Can we change out of our current common toxic habits in Cartesian body-mind heartlessness? Can we participate ever more fully in all-inclusive Heartfulness, inhabiting universal compassion and deep wisdom for all living beings, in our tripartite Kosmos (Pneuma/Nous-psyche-soma in Greek, Spiritus/Intellectus-anima-corpus in Latin, Rūḥ/‘Aql-nafs-jism in Arabic, and Heart-soul-body in English)? Said more simply, can human beings learn to love each other, to thrive with each other and with all living beings, at local, national and global scales, in relative harmony within “me”, in my life, with “us”, in our community, and with “all of life, altogether”, on our finite shared planet? To regenerate life beyond our various climate, biodiversity, and resources shocks on our finite shared planet, we need everybody to thrive in Heart-soul-body, in each person, in our inter-personal relations, and in our eco-social organisations, within the ecological thresholds of our planet’s various habitats and matrices, and we need to inhabit secure social foundations with fair social allocations for everybody with everybody in shared practices of inter-generational justice across all generations of all living beings. In sum, to participate ever more fully in our personal (intentions, arts, crafts, morals, behaviours, skills), inter-personal (relations, ethics, cultures), and eco-social (ecological, social, political, economic, technological) worlds, at local, national, and global scales, we need to become ever more fully centred in our common Heart-Centred Humanity. We hope, especially for the Wellbeing of Life in the lives of our young people in emerging generations in forthcoming years and decades, that we can regenerate Life in All of Us, Altogether, NOW.