As I think about our Environmental Studies curriculum (I’m Acting Director this semester) and start to think about my Nature and Culture course (which I’ll be teaching in January), I come around to the question of how to conceptualize the fraught relationship between humans and everything else.
The Nature and Culture course offers tools for thinking about this relationship, and challenges students to interrogate those tools, developing them in their own ways and to various ends (ethical, practical, political, etc.). One conceptual tool, among many, is the “good news—bad news” frame. Here’s a quick attempt to present things in this frame.
First, of course . . .
The bad news… is that industrial humanity, in its collective impacts, is putting very severe stresses on the ecological systems (atmospheric, marine, terrestrial) that it depends on for its own continuation, and that the best informed among us are increasingly convinced that these stresses will bring about large-scale calamity in the decades to come. (… cries and mutterings of “Humans, boo!” “Capitalism, boo!” etc.)
The good news is that we have a lot of great ideas and practicable means for mitigating those stresses and moving to a more sustainable society, including
- shifting from nonrenewable (fossil fuel and nuclear) to renewable energy systems;
- redesigning our cities and architectural and transportation infrastructures in ways that would incorporate the maintenance and restoration of viable and biodiverse ecosystems;
- redesigning our material objectscapes so as to fully incorporate the production of waste into the ecological systems underpinning the production and use of the objects themselves;
- promoting the distribution of wealth and sense of empowerment and ownership to those with the least of it, so as to build more equitable and less war-prone social systems (war being a primary devastator of landscapes and ecosystems) and to allow more people to make population choices consistent with a viable living standard.
The last bit — the population question — is perhaps the one with the least convincing answer, since feeding seven-plus billion people from shrinking soil and marine reserves will be a huge challenge. But there’s a strengthening consensus that we could move toward population stabilization (at perhaps 10-12 billion people) if the various other difficulties could be worked out. (Ingenuity, yay! Creativity, yay!)
The bad news is
- that progress to these goals is slowed down by the immense, systemic, and seemingly intransigent interests vested in maintaining present inequalities and eco-social relations;
- that even if progress was quicker, it would still mean the “sacrifice” of many individual (and beautiful, charismatic, awesome) species and ecosystems that have taken a long time evolving to their present (or recent) conditions,
- and that both of these facts are tragic and very frustrating and debilitating to confront. (Pass the … [drug of your choice], man.)
The good news is
- that there are many thousands of groups and millions of individuals working on one piece or another of this vision of change,
- and that we have a pretty good idea of how to make it all less frustrating and debilitating — of how to extend our individual and collective capacities for living with paradox, frustration, confusion, dramatic change, and tremendous uncertainty: through the cultivation of mindfulness (via meditative and psycho-spiritual techniques developed over centuries) and supportive and nurturing domestic and social environments. (Cool!)
The bad news is that there are no guarantees that the “transition” will succeed, and even if it does it will be very challenging and difficult. (Aw, c’mon, enough already… just tell me what to do.)
And it goes on.
The overall frame, as I hope you’ve sensed already, suggests a dialectic in which we ourselves are implicated and, to the extent that we feel capable, can choose to do the right thing by aligning our personal and professional lives with the appropriate kinds of change-making behaviors and practices. For beginning university students, this can be an awesome and liberating realization (good news!). But putting it into practice, or even just into theory (i.e., preaching it, which is always easier than practicing), can be very trying and difficult (bad news!).
So we do our best to make the good news bits more attainable, by linking the teaching to the practice in an evolving culture of eco-social sustainability. (And, fortunately, living in a place like Burlington, Vermont, helps to make that culture seem real. In a Jon Stewartish sorta way.)
two things, first might be helpful to compare these environmental struggles to other at the time overwhelming historical struggles so that they get a sense that this can and has been done (at least partially) before on lesser scales, second the idea that we already know how to organize modern communities, on a scale that will make a difference, and that these are easily tied into, come out of, meditative practices is pretty dubious. Dewey and others made token gestures towards such experiments in socialization but he quickly ran into the dilemmas of publics that Lippman and others pointed out to him. This is the reality principle that derailed Martin Luther King, and Liberation Theology in general, and I would suggest instead offer this as part of the work to be done as opposed to a settled matter. The tricky part of higher ed is that you have to deliver the bad news without first giving people the meditative practices and social supports that they need to take it in. Higher Ed as it is now practiced/incorporated is perhaps part of the problem, no?
dmf – Wonderful points. I completely agree that getting a sense of the history of successful social movements is very important.
As for Higher Ed being part of the problem: I would say that wherever we start — whether it’s in Higher Ed, Lower Ed, business, the state, or even families, churches, etc. — you’re already right in the middle of “the problem.” That means that facing up to the problem can occur anywhere, though it’s often easier to do that in Higher Ed (or while one is in Higher Ed) because it’s a kind of bubble allowing for critical thinking to evolve over the space of a handful of years… Of course the structure of Higher Ed is part of, or reflects different dimensions of, the problem, and the trend toward corporatization is not helpful. In this, students are often the best situated to critique it, since faculty and staff are so ingrained in it (which is why my faculty union activism involves cooperating with student groups when the opportunities arise).
I also agree that it’s all “work to be done” — figuring out the problems, the solutions, the ways to bring them about (mobilizing communities, etc.), and the individual and collective arts of living that support them (from meditation to art-making to hiking and snowboarding and whatever else).
very good, hard to imagine a more handy site for experimenting with communal learning practices than a college campus, just imagine if res-life, faculty, chaplains, phys-ed, healthcare/counseling, grounds/facilities,etc were all working together and with students on how to better live together with/in our surroundings.
We’ve made some inroads into the kinds of coordinated efforts you’re imagining… but there’s much, much, much more work to be done.
your students might enjoy Gendlin on attending the implicit:
http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/audio/gol_2178_audio.html