All posts in category Environment

Hope springs eternal in our Garden of Earthly Delights

Today I was fortunate to attend a slide lecture by a truly talented photographer, Tanya Marcuse, an alum of Bard College at Simon’s Rock who has been teaching there for the past decade.  She showed images from her current project, “Earthly Delights,” and talked about her process of composing and selecting these images.

Photo credit Tanya Marcuse

Tanya explained how she drew her inspiration from the famous triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights“, in which images of love and beauty are juxtaposed with macabre scenes of suffering and death.

How strange that the odd, carefully painted fantasies of a medieval Dutchman should be the inspiration for the secular landscape portraits of a thoroughly modern contemporary photographer!

And yet as Tanya talked about her work, I understood her fascination with the strange contradictions of human existence, still so potent despite the five centuries between Bosch’s artistic vision and her own.

We are loving creatures, and yet no one can hate more powerfully than we can.

We worship beauty, and yet we create ugliness.

We wish to be admired, and yet we do shameful things.

We revere life, and yet we, like all living forms, are inexorably moving towards death.

The insight that Tanya offers us through her images is that even in death there is life.  Even in the ugliness of decay there is beauty.

Hers is a powerful message of hope, shared through beautiful art that cuts a blazing path through these dark times.

All things must pass, George Harrison crooned.  All things must pass away.

But in our Garden of Earthly Delights, our lovely, perishable, indestructible planet, all things will rise again, too.

Photo credit: Tanya Marcuse

There is hope and a shred of security in that knowledge.

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 8, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Environment, New stories, Resilience
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 8, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/02/08/hope-springs-eternal-in-our-garden-of-earthly-delights/

Climate Change Denial at the NY Times

I opened up Joe Nocera’s column in today’s NY Times, “The Poisoned Politics of the Keystone XL,” with anticipation, thinking that at last the Times was going to deliver a column roundly critiquing the pipeline and the oil-drenched politics from which it sprang.

My expectations could not have been more disappointed.

To put it mildly, Joe Nocera does not know what the hell he is talking about.  And I have to wonder whether some clumps of sticky tar-sandy dollars might have found their way into his pockets in return for the little PR gift he just gave, with flourishes, to the Canadian oil industry.

You will have to read Nocera’s column for yourself–I really can’t bear to summarize it.  Suffice it to say that he believes that:

  • 1) extracting the Canadian tar sands will make the US, and North America generally, “energy secure”;
  •  2) there is no point in pushing for energy conservation or a shift to renewable energy;
  • 3) Canadian tar sand oil “may be a little dirtier than the crude that pours forth from the Saudi Arabian desert…but is hardly the environmental disaster many suppose”;
  • 4) the US is foolish to cede our interest in this oil to the Chinese.

To which I (and some 300 other respondents to his column on NYT.com, as of this writing) have to say, Joe, are you out of your mind????  Or are you just being willfully blind?

Yesterday I was writing about the holocaust of harp seals in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where for the past decade global heating has been melting the ice at an alarming rate, leaving newly born seal pups at the mercy of thin, fragile ice floes.  I have also been thinking a great deal about the Little Ice Age that seems to be occurring in Europe this winter.  While we here in New England are enjoying springlike temperatures and a total lack of snowfall, Europe is getting dumped on with snow, and frigid temperatures to boot.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find solid information about this in the NY Times or other mainstream press outlets, but if you look hard enough, it’s there.  Climate scientists are pointing to the steadily melting Arctic ice cap as the culprit in the change in wind and weather patterns that are bringing more extreme weather to Europe–remember the 2010 hot spells that cost hundreds of lives?  This severe cold is also to blame for hundreds of deaths.

Let’s connect the dots.  Tar sands extraction can only be done by burning lots more fossil fuels.  That’s why environmentalists oppose it.  Not so much because of the destruction of millions of acres of pristine wildlife habitat, though that is generally acknowledged as sad collateral damage.

No, the main problem with extracting the Alberta tar sands is that doing so will speed the heating of the planet.  Heating the planet will lead to melting polar ice, rising sea levels, and ever more bizarre and destructive weather patterns.

Heating the planet will lead to death and destruction on a vast scale.

As the authors of a recent Royal Society special issue on climate change put it, if temperatures rise 4°C , “the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while the limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceeded throughout the world. Hence, the ecosystem services upon which human livelihoods depend would not be preserved.”

This is science-speak for a basic premise I think anyone could understand: if the temperatures continue to rise, human beings, and the ecosystems that have evolved alongside us, are TOAST (expletive deleted).

Going full-bore at the Alberta tar sands is signing the final death sentence for millions and millions of living beings on this planet, including millions of human beings.

Humans in heretofore privileged spots on the globe, like Europe and the USA, will not be excepted from the general ecocide.

Do you have any children or grandchildren, Joe?

Can you really in good conscience assure them that selling the Alberta tar sands, to the US or the Chinese, will contribute to their “energy security”?

If you answer yes, then my original hypothesis is confirmed.

You are out of your (expletive deleted) mind.

5 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 7, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Environment, Global warming, Politics
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 7, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/02/07/climate-change-denial-at-the-ny-times/

Dare to love

Like most people I know, I have just a very narrow sphere of knowledge that I’m willing to let penetrate my consciousness at any given time.

There’s so much I know but don’t want to know. So much I choose not to acknowledge.

It’s a form of self-preservation, because if I were to allow myself to really feel the unnecessary pain and suffering that floods our world like an endless terrorized scream into the night wind, all the time…I could not bear it.  I would go insane.

What prompts these reflections today is the news that hundreds of thousands of seal pups are drowning in the Gulf of St. Lawrence this season, after a straight run of disastrously warm winters where the pack ice on which harp seal moms give birth has been too thin to provide the shelter the pups need to survive.

Add to this the fact that the Canadian government, knowing full well that the harp seal populations are in dramatic decline due to global heating, is still going ahead with the annual seal pup hunt, allowing as many as 330,000 pups to be clubbed to death by hunters this season.

This despite the fact that Russia and the European Union, the principal clientele for seal fur, have banned imports this year.  Despite the fact, too, that a huge backlog of seal pelts is sitting in warehouses.

It’s one thing to kill animals for food. Human beings are carnivores, after all.  But killing for sport…killing for unnecessary furs…killing for no good reason makes me feel deeply ashamed of my species, and heartsick for the loss of life.

I don’t know what to do with these feelings.  Signing yet another online petition or sending yet another contribution to a Save the Seals campaign does not seem anywhere near adequate.

I am not capable of practicing tonglen, taking in the suffering and sending out lovingkindness to both the victims and the perpetrators, as Buddhists like Pema Chodrun recommend.  I can neither bear to take in the suffering, nor stomach sending anything akin to kindness to the perpetrators.

So I do what most people do.  I close my eyes.  I grow some kind of hard shell around my heart.  I choose, without even consciously realizing what I’m doing, to ignore news and information that will upset me.

I remember clearly that as a child, I was not yet capable of this degree of callousness.  I very rarely was exposed to any suffering, since I grew up in a very sheltered environment, but every so often something would manage to get through into my sweetly padded cocoon, and leave me gasping in empathetic pain.

Once I was standing outside on the lawn in front of the house, and a bird whizzed by me and flew straight into a window.  It fell to the ground, stunned.  I ran to it and picked it up, cradling its trembling body in my arms.  Its neck was probably broken…it died within an hour.  I held it and cried over it and mourned it so deeply that even now, so many years later, I still tear up thinking about the sorrow that small death called up in me.

I can’t live with that kind of sorrow all the time; I would be paralyzed with grief.  And so I compartmentalize.  I go about my business and actively avoid thinking about the thousands of seal pups dying today.  Or the wolf pups being poisoned by the Canadian government to clear out the boreal forest in preparation to extract oil.  Or the millions of songbirds and waterfowl killed each year by US federal government agencies because they get in the way of industrial agriculture or airplanes or golf courses.

Just for a moment, let’s dare to imagine what the world could be like if adults like me did not deliberately silence and smother our empathy for the creatures who need our help to survive.

Love might just be the most radical gift we could bring to the world.

What could be more potent than action fueled by love?  Do we dare?  Can we afford not to?

9 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 6, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Empathy, Environment, Social change, Spiritual growth
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 6, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/02/06/dare-to-love/

Planetary Superbowl

So it’s Superbowl Sunday in the US, a day that millions of Americans look forward to for months.  I am always amazed at the passion with which sports fans engage in following teams, and I often think: if only we could harness that energy, dedication and drive and put it towards more important things like saving the planet, why, we’d do just that, right away!

If even a fraction of the money spent on sports teams, sports telecasting, sports advertising and sports merchandise were put towards improving children’s education, nutrition and health worldwide, we’d make giant strides towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

If we could get fans to analyze climate and biodiversity statistics the way they analyze the minutia of sports wins and losses, what a brain trust we could call upon to solve the pressing environmental problems of our time!

In the 21st century, the same goes for video game aficionados.  When I hear teenage boys talking with such enthusiasm about the latest iteration of World of War or Grand Theft Auto, I think wistfully that if only they were as engaged with the real, natural world as they are with these violent artificial environments, their incredible warrior energy could be channeled to such positive purposes.

No amount of wishful thinking is going to change the fact that testosterone and aggressive energy go together.  But aggressive energy does not have to be used to hurt people or destroy animals and the environment. Aggressive energy does not have to be hierarchical, meaning that I can only raise myself up by pushing you down.

The truth is that the multiple crises that are staring us in the face right now need aggressive, bold tactics to solve.  Putting the brakes on global heating, shifting to renewable energy, ending our romance with biochemically engineered agriculture and halting the deforestation of the great lungs of our planet will take all the creativity, ingenuity and yes, aggressive, take-charge energy that we can muster as a species.

It will also take something that the testosterone-fueled among us are less proficient at: collaboration, negotiation, cooperation.  That’s where we women come in.

I recently noticed a tweet from Desmond Tutu to Nick Kristof, two men for whom I have the highest admiration, in which the archbishop said to the journalist that if women were given more political power, the world would be a safer, more peaceful place.

Absolutely.  But what is really needed is an androgynous fusion of the best of masculine and feminine attributes.

We need our menfolk to fight for our species, and indeed our entire planetary ecosystem, with the same kind of enthusiastic passion that they lavish on sports and video games.

And we need our womenfolk to insist on getting engaged at every level of politics, business and education, not as token men, but true to our own deepest, estrogen-driven instincts for nurturing communities and societies.

On this Superbowl Sunday, I call on Americans to think about the bigger picture.  How important will it be which team wins or loses once climate change starts taking us all down?

2 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 5, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Environment, New stories, Politics of Gender
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 5, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/02/05/planetary-superbowl/

Turn those pink ribbons green

I’m going to make a confession.  I never could stand those pink ribbons.  I’ve never done a “Walk for the Cure” or bought daffodils for cancer victims or even picked a cancer-cure-themed postage stamp.

I’m glad to hear that the Komen Foundation has bowed to pressure and is restoring funding to Planned Parenthood, a worthwhile organization if there ever was one.

But in general, the idea of putting the energy and effort of well-meaning citizens behind “the search for a cure for cancer” just irritates me, because let’s face it, we know what causes cancer, and therefore we can do better than cure it, we can prevent it!  Maybe not 100%, but we can take it back to the modest rates that previous generations of human beings enjoyed.

For my grandparents’ generation, a diagnosis of cancer was frightening because it was so often a death sentence, but it was rare. Not one of my four grandparents came down with cancer, and I don’t believe their parents did either.  This isn’t due to some genetic serendipity, it’s just a fact that cancer rates in the first half of the 20th century (and every century before that) were way lower than they are now.

Cancer rates are skyrocketing now thanks to the environmental toxins that humans have introduced into our air, soil and water, and thus our agricultural crops, drinking water and the very air we breathe.  Rachel Carson saw the effects of DDT on birds, and gave the warning just before she succumbed to cancer.  

We may have removed DDT from the US market, but it’s still being used in other countries, and here it has been replaced by a whole host of alphabet-soup chemicals, each one more potent and carcinogenic than the last.

If you really want to make a difference in the war against cancer, forget about those ridiculous pink ribbons.  Use the power of your wallet and your ballot to insist that the government step up and do its job in regulating the industrial agriculture sector.

Or better yet, let’s allow the specter of industrial agriculture to fade away into the dustbin of the 20th century, and start a real “green revolution,” dedicated to the health and well-being of our planet and all her denizens.

What color is your ribbon?  Mine is green.

13 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 3, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Environment, Health
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 3, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/02/03/turn-those-pink-ribbons-green/

Climate refugees–who’s next?

This week it was reported that thousands of people of the Tarahumara indigenous group, who live in the Sierra Madre range in northwest Mexico, have been coming down out of the mountains to seek food aid, because after two years of severe drought, coupled with unusual cold this winter, they are reaching their breaking point.  Faced with starvation, they have become climate refugees.

The Tarahumara are known in Mexico for their incredible endurance in long-distance running.  They are a proud people who have held themselves aloof from modernized Mexican culture, still keeping their ancient traditions of weaving, hunting and farming.  They still speak their ancestral language, and they have always been able to take care of themselves.

Until now.

In what is sure to be a trend in the coming years, it is the people who live furthest out on the margins of Empire who are affected first and most harshly by climate change.  People living on South Sea atoll islands or on the Arctic tundra are already seeing the effects of the rising seas and thawing permafrost.  Mountain people who depend on glacial melt for their freshwater are coming up dry.

We here in the heart of modern Western civilization are still feeling no pain.  In fact, I can’t count how many people have grinned at me this week as they celebrated the lovely spring weather we’re having in January—in the fifties, Farenheit, in midwinter.

Yes, it’s just grand—until summer comes and we’re still 40 degrees above normal, roasting at 120 degrees F on a typical August day.

In Mexico, the severe drought has left some two million people without access to potable water and basic food supplies, and authorities say they expect the situation to worsen.

This is bad enough, but it gets worse:

“The drought, which has been compounded by freezing temperatures, has already pushed up the cost of some produce, including corn and beans….But government officials have said they do not expect the price of exports to be affected.”

I am sure all readers of that NY Times article were reassured to hear that the cost of their imported avocados, tomatoes and other vegetables will be unaffected.  Who cares that corn and beans, the staff of life for millions of Mexicans, will cost poor people more?  That’s their problem!

Until it becomes ours.  If corn and beans become unaffordable in Mexico, and sustenance farming is no longer an option in a drought-stricken landscape, what comes next?  You guessed it, illegal emigration al Norte.  What other choice do these people have but to take the risk of trying to cross the border?

Up here, anti-immigrant fervor continues to burn.  Just this week House Republicans passed a law seeking to deny cash refunds under the child tax credit to anyone filing tax returns using “individual taxpayer identification numbers” rather than Social Security numbers.

Most of the people filing taxes without Social Security numbers are hardworking Latino immigrants who are paying taxes even though their earnings are at or below the poverty level.  Their children, many of whom are American-born citizens, will pay the brunt of their parents’ loss of the child care tax credit.

But really–who cares? Who gives a good goddamn if the poor can eat?  Just so long as we can still buy gleaming fresh produce year-round, and no one messes with our electricity or gasoline, let the rest of the world go to hell.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m being sarcastic.  Seriously, this arrogant attitude is only going to be able to go so far.  Today’s climate refugees, tomorrow’s undocumented workers, are the harbinger of what may very well befall all of us as the climate keeps spinning out of control.

Just as in our forests, it is often the oldest, most majestic trees that are under the greatest strain from climate change, our oldest, proudest ethnic groups are also under tremendous strain now.  The Tarahumara managed to survive the Spanish Conquest, the Mexican Revolutionary War and the Industrial Revolution…but if they can no longer grow crops in their homeland, they must move or die.

Indigenous people like the Tarahumara have the best chance of actually surviving a catastrophic climate shift, because they still know how to live a low-consumption lifestyle, close to the earth.  We would do well to learn from them, and other indigenous groups worldwide, while their cultural traditions are still intact.

Those of us still enjoying the luxuries of Empire should be cognizant that for us too, it’s only a matter of time.

1 Comment
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 1, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Climate Change, Environment, Resilience
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 1, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/02/01/climate-refugees-whos-next/

Canaries in the Roundup Ready Fields

This morning I woke up with the phrase “canaries in the coal mine” playing over and over in my mind.

Maybe it’s because one of the last things I read before going to sleep last night was an article about the harmful effects of methylmercury in songbirds.  Methylmercury is the organic form of mercury, a biproduct of coal burning, which falls to the ground with rain, gets into the groundwater and begins to make its way through the food chain, starting with leaves, snails and worms, and going up into birds, fish and mammals.

Mercury poison is slow and insidious, showing up in erratic behavior and a kind of deadly dullness in birds and other animals.

“Songbirds with blood mercury levels of just 0.7 parts per million generally showed a 10 percent reduction in the rate at which eggs successfully hatched,” writes Anthony DePalma in the New York Times. “As mercury increases, reproduction decreases. At mercury levels of greater than 1.7 parts per million, the ability of eggs to hatch is reduced by more than 30 percent, according to the study.

“Over all, birds in contaminated sites were found to be three times as likely to abandon their nests or exhibit abnormal incubation or feeding behavior. In some nests, the chicks seemed to have been affected most; they vocalized less and did not beg as aggressively to be fed.

“Such consequences mimic the effects of mercury on humans whose primary contact with the toxin is through the consumption of fish. The contamination can be passed to children in the womb or while they are nursing, damaging their nervous systems and impairing their ability to learn.”

Still mulling this information over, thinking about the mysteriously rising rates of autism, Asberger’s and other neurological disorders in our children, I poured myself a cup of coffee and opened up Facebook, often a good source of information about what is on people’s minds on any given morning.

At the top of my news feed, I found several glaring stories about Monsanto, the biggest and baddest of the industrial agriculture corporations.  Much has been written about the evils of GMO crops, terminator seeds, and the effects of Roundup on the environment.  But now, as with mercury poisoning, we’re beginning to realize how glyphosate, one of the main ingredients of Roundup, is infiltrating water and food and making its way up the food chain—to us.

Glyphosate is being blamed for infertility, mental illness, decreases in beneficial gut bacteria, and cancer.  Of course, it’s hard to find large-scale, reliable studies documenting these side effects, because no one spends more money than Monsanto in discouraging research that might affect its sales.

And Big Pharma is also along for the ride, since the more sick people, the merrier the cash register rings.

Yesterday I went for a walk on the golf course that sits in one of the most beautiful pieces of land in my neighborhood, a flat plain with the Housatonic River looping through it.  As always, I was struck by the complete absence of broadleaved plants in the thick grass of the course.  Not a dandelion; not a plantain; nada.  And nary a bird, either, except for a few stray chickadees chirping in one of the few thickets remaining by the river.  A microcosm of the Roundup Ready world we live in.

It strikes me that we are far beyond the canary in the coal mine moment now.  The canaries have died…but we are still advancing into the darkness, taking our chances, going on a toxic mixture of blind faith, naïve optimism and sheer stupidity.

The politicians have been paid to keep their eyes shut, and the rest of us don’t want to see what’s right in front of us.  Most of us who do see don’t act.

Until now.  Tomorrow there will be a big protest in lower Manhattan, in front of the Courthouse on Foley Square, where a major lawsuit has been brought against Monsanto by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA).

It’s no secret that Monsanto has used harsh bullying tactics to force farmers to use its expensive artificial seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides—the rash of farmer suicides in places like India and South Korea have borne mute testimony to the despair that comes of the resulting debt bondage.

European farmers have been more savvy about keeping Monsanto and its GMO crops at bay, and although we in the U.S. have been fairly passive until now, the times they are a’changing.

Listen to the combative tone in OSGATA President Jim Gerritsen’s voice as he rallies his 300,000 members to stand up for their rights:

“Today is Independence Day for America.  Today we are seeking protection from the Court and putting Monsanto on notice.  Monsanto’s threats and abuse of family farmers stops here.  Monsanto’s genetic contamination of organic seed and organic crops ends now.  Americans have the right to choice in the marketplace – to decide what kind of food they will feed their families – and we are taking this action on their behalf to protect that right to choose.  Organic farmers have the right to raise our organic crops for our families and our customers on our farms without the threat of invasion by Monsanto’s genetic contamination and without harassment by a reckless polluter. Beginning today, America asserts her right to justice and pure food.”

A bus for farmers and allies from Columbia County will be leaving for New York at 6 a.m. tomorrow morning (meeting at the old Walmart parking lot at 351 Fairview Ave in Hudson) to join the protest in front of the federal courthouse.  I’ll be in my classroom tomorrow, but my heart will be at Foley Square.

How many canaries have to die before we wake up?

2 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on January 30, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Environment, Health
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on January 30, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/01/30/canaries-in-the-roundup-ready-fields/

Green Teaching: What the World Needs Now

In President Obama’s speech last night, he talked a fair amount about the importance of making higher education affordable for all Americans, and about how essential a highly skilled workforce is to America’s future.

I felt like I was in some kind of time warp.  Wasn’t Bill Clinton talking about just the same things, almost generation ago? Not only has insufficient progress been made, but while we’ve been fiddling and squabbling amongst ourselves, the whole landscape behind us has shifted radically.

It reminds me of one of those cartoon scenes where the mice are fighting amongst themselves and don’t even notice the huge cat face looming over them licking its chops.

The huge cat face, today, is the drastic heating of the planet.  Obama went on and on last night about manufacturing—we need a skilled workforce to support American manufacturing, we need to bring outsourced manufacturing back home, we need to adjust the tax code to benefit workers and manufacturers.

All the while, looming above the statehouse, is the runaway monster of climate change, which is at on the one hand fattened by all this manufacturing, while at the same time threatening to blow it all away.

I quite agree with Obama that we need to be pouring resources into education.  The question is, what kind of education is going to be most valuable for today’s children, tomorrow?

At the very least, we need an education that does not have its “eyes wide shut” about the fact of global heating and the impact this will have on us all in the near future.

I was encouraged this week when I picked up a print copy of the journal Green Teacher, and found an article by David Selby and Fumiyo Kagawa entitled “Unleashing Blessed Unrest as the Heating Happens.”  In it, the authors offer concrete curricular suggestions for how to introduce students in grades 5-12 to the reality of climate change, without sugar-coating it but also without leaving them so devastated that they lapse into denial or despair.  Since the article is not available online, I’m going to quote from it liberally in what follows, because this is news we can use.

The authors quote Jess Worth, who likens climate change denial to “finding out that you have cancer, but then delaying going to the doctor’s for treatment for a few months because you want to repaint your house.”

Selby and Kagawa speculate that because the “ever more dire accounts of a global climate lurching towards ever-deepening crisis” are so frightening, we tend to practice a kind of avoidance, which in education takes the form of “characterizing climate change as a technical problem that can be managed by a mix of technological innovation and policy solutions that avoid challenge to ‘business as usual.’”

For example, they say, “the recycling bin in most classrooms is…often cited as evidence of the school’s commitment to sustainability,” but “it can easily convey the subliminal message that consumerism approached responsibly can be benign.”

Reviewing American curricular materials for K-12, the authors found “a reluctance to investigate the culpability of neo-liberal economic growth models and to explore slow growth or no growth alternatives…. There is, too, an avoidance of envisioning and addressing personal and societal climate change scenarios that are likely to be played out in the learner’s lifetimes.”

This is certainly the kind of education I see my own son getting in his American public middle school.  The focus in his social studies, English and science classes has so far been squarely on the distant past.  There has been no discussion that I’m aware of about the fact that here we are at the end of January, and we are still seeing green grass outside.  NASA has just confirmed that nine of the ten warmest winters on record have occurred since the year 2000, and 2011 was the 9th warmest since 1880. Excuse me, shouldn’t we talk about that?

Selby and Kagawa say that instead of maintaining an “eyes wide shut” avoidance pattern with our youngsters, we need to engage in “an honest education facing up to the onset of what Alastair McIntosh describes as ‘a great dying time of evolutionary history’” and “overturning…the comfortable delusion that major disruption of Earth’s climate can be avoided or neutralized.

“Recognizing that present and future generations need hope, we have to ask what the hope is grounded in and what kind of hope it is.  Is it a spurious optimism, a comfortable fiction based on what we would prefer to see happen while keeping our ‘eyes wide shut’?  Or is it a pared down and realistically straitened optimism born of confronting the present and future earth condition?”

We have a responsibility as educators, parents, and elders to tell our children the truth about where we are as a global civilization, and where we are likely headed.  Wouldn’t you rather be forewarned, rather than bowled over by surprise when the shocks start coming?  Don’t you see it as the responsible thing to do to start preparing for those shocks now, both emotionally and practically?

The educators brought together in Selby and Kagawa’s new anthology Education and Climate Change advocate for a transformative learning agenda, involving “conscious, deep and sustained processes of engaging with pain, despair and grief over what we are losing, moving towards acceptance while searching for radically new meaning and values, and equipping ourselves for personal and collective empowerment and action.”

Concretely, they offer classroom exercises to guide students through these stages, including some pretty heavy-duty visioning of possible future scenarios that we may all have to live through.  The goal is not to depress students, but to empower them by moving from the disaster scenarios to hopeful plans of action to stave off the worst effects of climate change, or adapt successfully to whatever comes.

“A citizenship education for “blessed unrest” in a time of rampant climate change,” the authors say, “needs to be shaped by engagement in community-based action that creates, resists and transgresses in the name of sustainability.”

The time to start talking about these issues with our students and children is now, while we still have options as to how to confront the changes that are coming.  To do any less is to fail in our responsibility as the adults who should be out blazing the trail for the kids following behind us.  If we know there’s white water up ahead, let’s at least give those behind us a heads-up and see what we can do to ride out the rapids safely, together.

4 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on January 25, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Education, Environment
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on January 25, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/01/25/green-teaching-what-the-world-needs-now/

State of the Union or State of the Planet?

Tonight is President Obama’s State of the Union.  I love to watch that man orate, but I just can’t summon much enthusiasm this time.  It’s so obvious that he will be reciting lines that have been scripted for him, after much vetting by all the stakeholders.  So I don’t expect any surprises or delights in tonight’s speech.

Like a racehorse, Obama has many owners, and he has to answer to all of them.  The only thing they care about is that he wins.

The problem is that winning, in today’s terms, means ignoring what’s really important.  If we were going to focus on what is urgently needed right now, we would start with a massive push to shift from fossil-fuel energy to renewable energy.

This is starting to sound so old-news, and yet—hello!  It’s not being done!  Instead we’re still expending energy on fighting over the Keystone XL pipeline, which is so clearly a 20th century dinosaur that SHOULD NOT BE BUILT.

Rather than pour billions of dollars into thousands of miles of pipeline for dirty crude, we need to be drastically ramping up our manufacturing output of solar panels.  I have mixed feelings about wind power, but solar seems to be a no-brainer.  Put solar panels on rooftops across the USA, as so many in Europe are doing, and away we go to a brave new world of energy autonomy.

President Obama is not going to talk about solar power tonight.  His handlers won’t let him.

And so, he will continue to lead us down the daisy path of delusion—what David Selby and Fumiyo Kagawa, the editors of the new volume Education and Climate Change  (Routledge, 2010), call the  “eyes wide shut” approach to “global heating.”

If we were bring truthful, Selby and Kagaway say, we would admit that “future scenarios look grim: a mix of ubiquitous environmental disaster (including a huge loss of biodiversity), ongoing and massive internal and external population displacement as a result of sea incursions, seasonally recurring wildfires and desertification (and resultant social dislocation), hunger, starvation, internecine strife, violent conflict, tribalism, aggressively defensive localism, as well as the ever-lurking danger of genocide.”

Do you think Obama is going to address this stark scenario?

Not on your life!

He will talk about jobs creation and economic improvement as though we were living in a world divorced from our planetary base.

Most of us exist in this delusional sphere.  Plugged in, it’s hard for us to imagine that there could come a time when the physical disruptions of the planet could actually interfere with our digitized lifestyles.

Could there be a time when food from all the corners of the globe is not available in our grocery store?  Could there come a time when electricity is not either flowing freely, or about to be restored?

No one wants to hear this, but I have to say it anyway.  It is very possible, even probable, that there will be interruptions of food supplies and electricity  in the foreseeable future.

You won’t find any politician willing to talk about this.

For all politicians, and for most of us ordinary citizens, it is akin to heresy to suggest that sometime in the near future, the corporate capitalist economic model, based on endless growth and endless extraction of resources, is going to take a nosedive off the nearest cliff.

Neither the State of the Union, nor any political speech that will make prime time in the next year, will honestly engage with the reality of climate change.

Birmingham, Alabama, Jan. 24, 2012

That means that when storms hit, as they did just this week in Alabama, we will still be interpreting them through the conventional frame of “freak storms,” rather than as the steadily advancing harbingers of a future we don’t want to see.

We have such a limited window to prepare for the deep systemic planetary changes that are heading our way.  The difference between us and the dinosaurs is that we know what’s coming.

Are we going to squander this knowledge with shortsighted power struggles motivated by greed? Or are we going to use our superior intelligence to help our species, and countless others, avoid the fate of the dinosaurs?

It remains to be seen, but this much is certain: tonight’s State of the Union address, being just so much more smoke and mirrors, is not going to provide any answers.

4 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on January 24, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Environment, Politics
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on January 24, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/01/24/state-of-the-union-or-state-of-the-planet/

A new generation rises, and with them, our hopes

Today I gave the keynote address at the regional Model UN student conference sponsored by Bard College at Simon’s Rock.

On the one hand, it was heart-warming to look out and see that crowded lecture hall filled with bright, eager young faces, ready to step on to the world stage, if only in theory, and play leadership roles.

On the other hand, it was sobering to have to be the bearer of such grim tidings.

I started out by taking them back to a choral Ode in the Antigone that has always haunted me, the one where the Chorus sings the praises of human technological prowess, while at the same time sounding a warning note about how mankind’s “cunning…is the fertile skill which brings him, now to evil, now to good.

“When he honors the laws of the land, and that justice which he has sworn by the gods to uphold, proudly stands his city: no city has he who, for his rashness, dwells with sin.”

In other words, I told the students, we humans can do all kinds of amazing things with our great intelligence, but we will only prosper if we keep our moral compass and use our powers for good.

The Ode is basically a list of areas in which human beings have excelled, and that list is as valid today as it was in the 5th century B.C.: our power of navigation and transportation; agriculture; our dominion over other animals, wild and domestic; our ability to withstand the elements by building shelter and creating fire; our medical arts; our facility with language and “wind-swift thought.”

Truly we are a “wondrous” species.  And yet the fact that this list is recited in the tragedy of Antigone bears witness to the fact that our great “cunning” does not always guide us well.

In Antigone, Creon is a proud, vindictive tyrant who demands absolute allegiance from his subjects, including his niece Antigone.  When Antigone defies his order to let her brother’s remains be left in the open for the crows to feast on, and goes out alone to bury him, Creon goes into a fury and orders her arrested and sentenced to death.

It’s clear that the Chorus in this play believes Creon’s action is wrong.  Antigone was obeying her own moral judgement, putting her filial and religious obligations before her allegiance to the King. And just as the Chorus predicted in the initial Ode, because he is not using his power wisely and ethically, in the end Creon’s house will fall.

In our time, I told the students, the same kinds of battles rage, of good people standing up for their beliefs against oppressive tyrants, who don’t hesitate to imprison and even execute any who defy their power.

The Arab Spring showed us what can happen when enough people dare to speak truth to power and defy an authoritarian state  In the United States, the Occupy movements are now standing up, not so much against the state, as against the corporate capitalist elites—who often are the power behind the thrones of the various nations.

Even in our own country, the price of defying the status quo can be high.

But, I told the students, given the perilous state of the world today, the price of staying quiet and going along with the flow is inevitably going to be much higher.

I reminded them of the many dangers that face us today, including:

  • the homogenization of media and the reduction of education to multiple choice tests, instead of a media that stands strong in its watchdog role and an educational system that focuses on teaching students how to think creatively and question authority;
  • the tremendous militarization of police and national forces, with most countries fairly bristling with lethal weapons, from handguns to bombs;
  • environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity, including the contamination of our air, soils and waters with toxic chemicals caused by the very agriculture celebrated in the Antigone Ode;
  • serious health problems caused by environmental toxins and chemical additives in our food supply;
  • and above all, the looming menace of anthropogenic global warming.

These will be familiar themes to anyone who has been reading my blog these past few months.  But it was good to speak these ideas out loud this time, to the young people who are going to have to bear the brunt of the problems.

I quoted U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who told negotiators from 200 nations gathered at the recent COP17 climate conference in Durban that the situation was so urgent that they could not afford to wait for unified global action.

“Don’t wait for a binding agreement,” he said. “It could take years. All member states should take their own measures,” before it’s too late.

“Last year we saw the highest emissions ever,” Mr. Ban said. “If we carry on as though it is business as usual we will be out of business.”

Those are pretty stark, unequivocal words from the leader of the closest thing we have to a global government.

Given the need for drastic change in the way we do business as a civilization, I challenged the students to dare to think outside the box.

I encouraged them to let Antigone be their guide as they began their Model UN negotiations. “If you know that a policy is wrong, don’t be afraid to say so, and to fight for what you believe,” I told them.

I urged them not to let artificial boundaries like nation, race, class, religion or gender cloud their vision of what is needed to succeed in the goal of making human society safer, more nurturing, and more sustainable for us all.

“It is a deeply flawed, damaged world you will all soon be stepping out into as young adults,” I said.  “We live in a time of accelerated change and unprecedented transition.  None of us knows what lies around the bend.  But we do know that no matter what, we will be better off if we work proactively to overcome narrow national self-interests and begin to think in planetary terms—and not just about human interests, but in terms of the good of the entire web of life of which we are a part.”

Our only chance at changing the way we do business as a civilization, I said,  rests with our ability to successfully communicate with one another–to use the powers of “speech and wind-swift thought” commended by the Chorus of Antigone. 

What we need are not the stylized battles of debate, but the true, open-hearted communication of consensus building, where all viewpoints are listened to respectfully, and all positions are judged both on their own merits and on how well they’ll contribute to the collective goal of making the world a better place.

As I stepped away from the podium, I felt sad that I had to lay such a heavy burden on these bright young people, who through no fault of their own have inherited a planet in such disarray.

But I also felt the surge of hope that always rises again with each new generation.  Maybe this generation will be the one to turn off the beaten path and forge a new relationship with our planetary home.  Perhaps they will be able to resist the centripetal pull towards conformity.

As they all filed out of the room to take up their places at the Model UN negotiating tables, my heart went with them.  They are our last best hope.

 

2 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on January 20, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Education, Environment, Politics, Social change
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on January 20, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/01/20/a-new-generation-rises-and-with-them-our-hopes/

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