CREATING AN ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY Toward a Revolutionary Transformation by FRED MAGD OFF and CHRIS WILLIAMS MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS New York (original) (raw)
Related papers
Just Not Good Enough: Environmental Theorizing in 21st Century America
What follows is a book review I completed for Nature + Culture in 2011 (http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/nc/). The volumes included: The Big Picture: Reflections on Science, Humanity, and a Quickly Changing Planet, David Suzuki and David Robert Taylor Thriving Beyond Sustainability: Pathways to a Resilient Society, Andres R. Edwards Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature Osprey Orielle Lake Six themes inform my review, and I’ll use these themes as a matrix for the evaluation of each book: 1. Disappointment: Human communities—local, national, and global—are currently confronted with unprecedented, potentially catastrophic, environmental, political, and economic change. Yet while each author acknowledges the relevant facts, none offer a substantive, sustained analysis of the institutions—patriarchal, economic, social, religious, or political—responsible for this change. 2. The need for a critique of capitalism: The need for a critique of corporate, multi-national capitalism is sorely missing (in albeit different ways), from each of these works in a fashion unmistakable to those of us working in the political trenches of the environmental and social justice Left. The rhetoric of each remains squarely if implicitly located in a Neo-Liberal/Enlightenment model of social, economic, and political progress, arguably the model responsible for our current environmental dilemma. 3. The guts to talk about what conservation, environmental preservation, and human population growth really mean with respect to transformation of worldview: Each of these books leave the reader with the sense that we don’t have to do anything all that hard to prevent the potential environmental catastrophes associated with climate change, species extinction, deforestation, desertification, acid rain, industrial dumping, hydraulic fracturing, and other forms of pollution and resource depletion; we must be willing to do the inconvenient perhaps, but we’re not required to stomach the more difficult and transformative task of re-thinking our relationship to what lay beyond our institutions, our interests, our kin, or our skin. 4. An adequate awareness of the disproportionate effects of environmental erosion for women, girls, and indigenous peoples, especially in the “developing” world: Lip service paid to social injustice and economic exploitation—and the suffering it produces—is no substitute for a sustained analysis of the institutionalized status quo that underwrites both (often simultaneously). 5. An adequate account of suffering borne by nonhuman animals. 6. Any real hope for enduring change: lastly, by failing to demand more from their readers, each author must be read as an ultimately cynical assessment of human resolve. Lots of talk about “big pictures,” “thriving beyond sustainability,” and “reconnecting culture with nature” sans any meaningful expectation that we can undertake the transformation of worldview required to walk this walk leaves us at “talk.”
The Grave Disconnect: Aligning School Reform With Ecological Change
Since the soon-to-be outnumber the living, since the living have greater impact on the unborn than ever before thanks to depletion of natural systems, atmospheric disruption, toxic residue, burgeoning technology, global markets, genetic engineering, and sheer population numbers; since our scientific and historic understandings now comfortably examine processes embracing eons; and now that our plan-ahead horizon has shrunk to five years or less - it would seem that a grave disconnect is in process. Our ever hastier decisions and actions do not respond to our long-term understanding, or to the gravity of responsibility we bear.’ Brand, (1999) p.8 Contemporary economics just like contemporary education doesn’t deal very well with abstraction. The cause-and-effect reality of the modern world means that more than ever before we humans are producing outputs based on very short-term responses that are having an effect on our environment. The consequences of modern consumerism are not just being felt by the present planetary incumbents, but our actions will have consequences for the life-chances of those who will be born in the future. If we were to define our presence through our actions, then our commerce, food production, resource management, waste disposal, transportation, buildings and structures, water and energy systems, all have a net effect on present and future viability for life on earth. Recent recognition of this anthropomorphic fact has led to new forms of action which are attempting to rectify the consequences of our profligate lifestyles. These efforts are pursued to alleviate the harshest consequences of a warming planet and corresponding ecological collapse. Whilst primary success in this arena appropriately needs to be measured through a natural systems perspective, through evidence of enhanced and functional ecosystems, largely associated with fertility of biota, there is a secondary by-product resulting from this work which comes in the form of a re-alignment of human action within those natural ecosystemic functions. We might think of this as a change in human consciousness from an industrial to an ecologically guided mind (Clarke 2011). This change in consciousness comes as a result of learning the lessons of natural evolutionary intelligence which can be drawn from many millennia, as well as those lessons from the more recent narrative of progress from industrialization. The challenge lies in bringing this knowledge into the canon of daily life and defining through this knowledge a way for humanity to live in harmony with other life systems, for the benefit of all. The by-product of understanding the factors which comprise this knowledge, restorative knowledge and education, forms a prototype curriculum that can guide action and inform new practice. This learning is time-laden, as it is based upon observation of work in progress, and it is therefore somewhat counter-cultural to contemporary educational ‘impact’ and causality approaches. Instead, it is envisaged that restorative knowledge and education will arise as a result of a systematic effort, across many locations (UNREDD+ 2015), to determine the conditions and begin to foster the appropriate social, cultural, environmental and economic responses. A robust pedagogy based around restorative intervention by humans within ecosystems has beneficial potential for regenerating damaged environments, because many of the processes that are needed are replicable but need localised knowledge and action, the planetary-level action, and subsequent planetary-level healing potential of this work is immense. We know that early iterations of this work have already re-designed employment on a huge scale in regions of China, and have generated new learning on how to ensure a sustainable living environment for communities to thrive within. It is a salutary note that just as our mainstream systems and economies are waking up to this reality, the indigenous communities who have known and understood this relationship between people and planet and who have much to contribute as a result of learning over many millennia are themselves being hit the hardest by the consequences of modern global consumer culture, and are now teetering on the edge of extinction themselves. The urgency to learn more from them, to support and preserve their localized understanding and bring this into mainstream knowledge and practice is greater than ever.
Undeclared ambitions for the future notwithstanding, my current research profile is one that could qualify me as an "environmental historian" by only the most indulgent of standards. My contribution to this roundtable will thus be written less in the mode of a practicing researcher in the field and more from the perspective of a teacher (at a U.S. public land-grant university) currently in the process of trying to "environmentalize" two large survey courses in history. Here I must begin by confessing my motivations for this venture, which are of the most mundanely pragmatic sort. Like most universities in the United States, mine is in the midst of a severe fiscal crisis, and the humanities in particular are under mounting pressure both to increase enrollments and to make themselves "relevant." As a result, our faculty has been called to redesign all of its introductory-level courses according to a new set of "Liberal Education Themes," among which "the environment" figures particularly prominently. However, lest we pesky historians get the wrong idea about what this category of "environment" might actually imply, the official university guidelines include a stern warning that merely "raising issues about the environment" is not sufficient for certification. Instead, all qualifying courses must "explore solutions to environmental problems" that, most important of all, "must be based in science!" This is truly a tall order for a humanist-moreover, one for which my own professional training might be fairly judged more inadequate than most. After all, not only am I a nonscientist, but as a historian I suffer the particular foibles of my generation, having been nurtured as an undergraduate on healthy servings of Edward Said and shepherded through graduate school during the halcyon days of postcolonial studies. This has conditioned me, as a first impulse, to see "science" not as a solution but rather as a problem and to regard "scientific principles" not as objectives to be internalized and implemented but rather as objects to be critiqued and deconstructed. Nevertheless, because these are undoubtedly desperate times, I have done what I can to adopt correspondingly desperate measures. And, almost despite myself, after much trial and error, I have now seen one of my courses officially certified "environmental" by the powers that be. So what have I learned from the process so far? First and foremost, I have gained a new appreciation for the historical moment in which my students are coming of age and for the important and valuable ways in which their perspective consequently differs from my own. As I write these words, for example, tens of thousands of barrels of oil continue to spew from a hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, in what is now being referred to as "the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the United States." Meanwhile, closer to my home in Minnesota, we have just logged the warmest spring on record, pushing our much lauded "10,000 lakes" yet farther down a treacherous climatic path that, scientists tell us, will see them shrink from evaporation and, with great likelihood, vanish entirely in the decades to come. And of course, we ponder these present and future
Gaia. Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 2015
In June 1955, zoologist Marston Bates summarized a major interdisciplinary conference at Princeton University entitled Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. 70 participants from all continents had been invited to draw from their collective expertise to outline a better understanding of the human place in the natural world. “The sciences and the humanities form a false dichotomy,” Bates declared, “because science is one of the humanities. (…) If science itself is to survive, it looks as though we shall have to find some way of ‘humanizing’ it” (Bates 1956). Having spent many years in Colombia researching links between mosquito ecology, yellow fever and malaria, Bates knew the crucial importance of combining various pursuits of knowledge. 60 years later, the new field of environmental humanities (EH) is answering Bates’ plea to incorporate science within the humanities, while aiming to “humanize” it by combining insights from many different fields (Nye et al. 2013, Forêt et al. 2014). Environmental knowledge comes in many forms, with ecological, geological, and climatological understandings being forged alongside those that are historical, political, philosophical, ethical, literary, and artistic. The purpose of EH is to devise and implement an inclusive, ethical, sustainable, and equitable relationship with our planet (Forêt et al. 2014). Our goal in this paper is to show how the humanities can offer fundamental, applied, and immediate solutions to environmental problems.We begin by describing the state of EH in Switzerland, then suggest ways to strengthen this metadiscipline, before outlining four projects that illustrate the potential of the field. To conclude, we highlight the importance of integrated knowledge, while clarifying the scope of environmental problems.
The Role of Environmental Thought in the Twenty-First Century
Journal of Environmental Thought and Education, 2017
James Lovelock, the originator of the concept of Gaia, is more optimistic than he used to be. He now believes that with climate destabilization and ecological destruction the human population of the world will only be reduced by 80% at the end of the Twenty First Century. The majority of the world’s politicians, however, despite all the evidence, believe that the problems we face will be able to be addressed by a few technological fixes inspired by market signals tweaked to take into account externalities, in a world-order of free markets. If this view continues to prevail, we face disaster. To effectively challenge such thinking, the fragmentation of environmental thought has to be overcome. It is necessary to integrate history, science, economics, ethics and political thought. Environmental thought needs to provide people with an inspiring image of the future based on an integrated understanding of the world; that is, as part of a coherent world-view or world-orientation.
Rethinking the Normative Basis of Environmental Thought
The title of Steven Vogel's book is, of course, a play on Aldo Leopold's famous " Thinking like a Mountain. " The provocative title is part of the central aim of the book: to reorient environmental thinking away from nature as normative foundation and toward a practical engagement with our socially created, lived environment. The book explicitly rejects the obscurantism and mysticism of some environmentalist thinking, and offers a thorough-going materialist and dialectical account of the lived environment. It largely succeeds in making the case for reorienting our thinking, despite some criticisms I will offer in the second half of the review. The basic critical thesis of the book is that the concept of nature is not coherent, especially as a normative foundation for environmental thought. For, " nature " either means that which is not supernatural, in which case, human beings and their activities are included in the concept, or " nature " refers to those elements of the environment that have gone unshaped by human activities, in which case, we are literally talking about nothing, or at least nothing that has much relevance to thinking about what humans ought to do and ought not to do. The alternative, descriptively, to relying on a concept of nature to motivate environmental protection is a literal social constructionism; we materially create the world in which we live through our social practices. In the largely alienated form of this practice of building our world, we do not self-consciously decide what is valuable, but rather allow what is valuable to emerge as a side-effect of other forces like those of the market. Our current relationship with our built environment is alienated because we generally treat it as though it were a product of some natural force out of our control. But it is, in fact, largely the product of human activity and —at least potentially— human choice. The alternative normative basis for this view, then, rests on our standing as the linguistic (social) creatures par excellence. Vogel adopts a version of deliberative democracy: what is valuable is what all those concerned would agree is valuable under conditions in which the only force recognized is, as Habermas might say, the force of the better argument; the solution to our alienation from the environment is to take responsibility for our built environment both physically and politically. A compelling feature of Vogel's argument is his challenge to assumptions about " nature " that one finds in both environmental philosophy and in more popular environmental writing like that of Bill McKibben. This challenge takes up the first chapter, and is developed throughout the rest of the text. In advancing his argument, Vogel addresses much of the biocentric environmental literature, though he also engages critically with thinkers from outside this camp. Chapter 2 and 3 survey the history of Western philosophy with an eye toward clarifying both the epistemological and the physical respects in which the environment is socially constructed. This discussion reflects the Hegelian-Marxist roots of Vogel's project by arguing that environmental philosophy must come to terms with our active role in the construction of our natural environment. This involves both our conceptualizations and our physical structuring of the world through our practice. Chapter 4 gives the first clear practical implication of Vogel's view, while also setting the stage for titular chapter, " Thinking like a Mall. " Since the dualism between artifact and nature cannot be maintained, many arguments regarding the desirability of restored environments or problems
Introduction to 'The Ecological Future' Special Volume of Text Matters
Text Matters 12, 2022
BACK to the stone Age? This volume grew out of a collaboration between a literature scholar and a social scientist who discovered a rich common ground of concern about our planetary future and our terrestrial present. The specific topic was sparked by something that may seem trivial on the surface, but that rests on a bedrock of cultural assumptions that this volume aims at least in part to examine and dismantle-namely, the assumptions that generate the common reaction which greets almost any concrete proposal for changing today's society along ecological principles: "You want to take us back to the Stone Age!" The underlying fear, it seems, is that ecological concerns will lead to people being asked or forced to "give up" civilization itself, or at least "modernity." Thus, environmentalists are frequently described and dismissed as antimodern, naïve, and wanting to go "backward" in time, like adults wishing to be children once more. To those who react in this way, it feels as if the very meaning of being "human" is under siege; they seem to believe that a desolate future of returning to cave dwellings and bloodthirsty pagan rites is always lurking behind any talk of sustainability and ecological transition. This volume-starting with this Introductionintends to delve into these assumptions, fantasies and fears about socalled modernity, to contest and demystify them and to show how in response to the ecological crisis a range of artists, writers, philosophers and social scientists have been rethinking modernity's temporality, its deeply ingrained dualisms and the human/non-human split that lies at its very heart. While the initial impetus for the volume came from our perplexity about the assumption that thinking and acting ecologically necessarily implied some sort of historical regression or retreat, it is also true that the entire field of contemporary environmental humanities is shot through