Unfinished Business – A Pedagogy for the Planet

It’s still Earth Day here along the the northern rim of the planet, near the eastern edge of the international date line. Spring is here at last; it is brown and muddy and beautiful without any snow. This was my 30th winter in Alaska, and I still look forward to the regular changes, no matter the season.

But there are other changes that don’t feel right. We haven’t gotten much snow for many winters now. Summers are drier. We choke on smoke from far-off fires, and fires that are not so far off. Some of the coastal communities have big erosion problems due to storm damage. With less sea ice, waves pound harder on the beaches and carry the land out from under houses and roads. Tara Kyle, blogger at Change.org, reminds us, “On Earth Day, it’s vital that we remember that one of the great injustices of climate change is that the first places impacted are in many cases communities already at the margins of societies.”

I’ve been listening all week to Democracy Now broadcasting from the World People’s Summit on Climate Change in Bolivia, where the President, Evo Morales, called for an end to capitalism:

We are here because in Copenhagen the so-called developed countries failed in their obligation to provide substantial commitments to reduce greenhouse gases. We have two paths: either Pachamama or death. We have two paths: either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies. Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives. Of course, brothers and sisters, we are here for life, for humanity and for the rights of Mother Earth. Long live the rights of Mother Earth! Death to capitalism!

As an Alaskan, living in a state that is completely dependent on tax revenues from oil extraction, it’s hard to jump on board an anti-capitalist bandwagon. But, that doesn’t mean we have to accept the status quo. The planet, and all that lives on it, is suffering. And this can’t continue for much longer before everything that belongs together starts to come apart. For starters, it would be good if we had more say in where and how resource development proceeded. So, maybe the wish for change to our economic infrastructure is not that far-fetched. Grace Lee Boggs, (again, on Democracy Now) the other day suggested that the path ahead will require us to redefine democracy, moving away from elected representative governance and building relationships rooted in community, caring for one another.

This sounds all abstract and idealistic until I remember that in the classroom this is what I aim for. Just that. It isn’t easy, but it is possible as long as the administration and the policy people don’t make too many irrelevant demands. The challenge is to maintain a righteous focus, to look critically at what I’m doing, and to be kind – especially that.

These are revolutionary times, no doubt. John Bellamy Foster is a writer whose work I’ve recently discovered. In an excerpt from his latest book, he says:

The goal of ecological revolution, as I shall present it here, has as its initial premise that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of such enormity that the web of life of the entire planet is threatened and with it the future of civilization.

What could be more serious? The recommended response, Foster’s “ecological-social revolution,” he tells us, would be

[O]rganized democratically from below, “community by community … region by region.” It must put the provision of basic human needs—clean air, unpolluted water, safe food, adequate sanitation, social transport, and universal health care and education, all of which require a sustainable relation to the earth—ahead of all other needs and wants. “An ecological dialectic” along these lines, Morrison insists, “rejects not struggle but the endless slaughter of industrial negation” in the interest of unlimited profits.[30]

Such a revolutionary turn in human affairs may seem improbable. But the continuation of the present capitalist system for any length of time will prove impossible—if human civilization and the web of life as we know it are to be sustained.

As it happens, this closely resembles the ideas of Richard Kahn, who has been writing about the need for a pedagogy that honors the rights of both human and non-human life forms. Two chapters of his book are online in pdf format. Chapter one takes us on a history lesson, going all the way back to ancient Athens, to look at the origins of democracy, which Kahn problematizes. For example:

In what sense, then, are we to analyze and make conclusions concerning the potentials left within paideia, when it has been the vehicle by which billions of people have become (relative to history) highly literate and immersed in the spoils of human culture, even as it has continued to leave billions beyond the realization of the same? Even if we accept the neoliberal leadership of the Bush administration at its word and believe that the full extension of American-led, corporate business and education into the “less cultured” regions of the globe represents a sort of final Alexandrian attempt at mass civilization, how are we to judge the results of this project if it comes at the cost of the irrational devastation of the natural planet?

Chapter three focuses on the work of Paulo Freire, and Ivan Illich who have much to say about contemporary society.

A quote by Freire was featured at the top of one of Kahn’s articles, Towards Ecopedagogy, that lead me to some excerpted material from Freire’s book, Pedagogy of Indignation. These essays by Freire were good to read – uplifting and hopeful at a time that often seems full of disappointment and discouragement for teachers. He emphatically insists on maintaining a positive outlook as a teacher, since the work of education is essentially ethical and idealistic. He writes, putting a thumb in the eye of the case-hardened “realists” who criticize his stance:

Our testimony, on the contrary, if we re progressive, if we dream of a less aggressive, less unjust, less violent, more human society, must be that of saying “no” to any impossibility determined the the “facts” and that of defending a human being’s capacity for evaluating, comparing, choosing, deciding, and finally intervening in the world.

It’s good stuff. Here’s the quote from Kahn’s article that drew me in:

It is urgent that we assume the duty of fighting for the fundamental ethical principles, like respect for the life of human beings, the life of other animals, the life of birds, the life of rivers and forests. I do not believe in love between men and women, between human beings, if we are not able to love the world. Ecology takes on fundamental importance at the end of the century. It has to be present in any radical critical or liberationist educational practice. For this reason, it seems to me a lamentable contradiction to engage in progressive, revolutionary discourse and have a practice which negates life. A practice which pollutes the sea, the water, the fields, devastates the forests, destroys the trees, threatens the birds and animals, does violence to the mountains, the cities, to our cultural and historical memories. – Paulo Freire

(note: url revised 4/23)