Talk for Instituto McLaren de Pedagogía Crítica, Foro Académico Internacional: \"Crisis Sistémica y Medio Ambiente, la Alternativa Pedagógica\"
Descripción
Richard Kahn, Instituto McLaren de Pedagogica Critica Crisis Systemica y Medio Ambiente, July 2015
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Hello, Buenas Tardes. Me alegra estar aqui…I am very honored to be invited to participate in this important meeting and conversation, and to then offer some humble remarks of my own on the topic of ecosocialism, as relates to my work in the academy as a professor of critical ecopedagogy and as a movement intellectual and activist on matters of planetary sustainability. You will notice that I have quickly moved from Spanish to English. No hablo español muy bien. And so I apologize for having to speak and listen largely in translation, for which I rely thankfully upon the work of my new friend, Claudia Ball. It goes without saying that anything that I say that is wrong or bad is due entirely to me, and anything that sounds like it is good or right to you must be because of her. The apology for my English is sincere and relates to the topic of this conversation today. For the “eco” in ecosocialism denotes the idea of “home,” and suggests the ideas of ecology and economy or, in other words: the relationships and the management of the home. Now, on the one hand, where I will end up in my talk and what I think the political and educational project of ecosocialism seeks to achieve today is the social realization that my home is our home…”home” must be understood as a place we share responsibly in common as the collective loving relationships of Planet Earth! Yet, on the other hand, “home” for me means that I am a transplant to Los Angeles via New York, where I grew up and went to school…in a society (the United States) that did not (and still does not) particularly value Spanish as a legitimate language with much social value, or for that matter the cultural and other contributions of the majority of primarily Spanish speaking peoples, especially those who hail from Meso-‐ and South America. Indeed, it must be wrong that I can cross the border from the United States into Mexico (as I did yesterday), and then go back again (as I will do soon hereafter), all with relative ease, while I speak English (and, here in Ensenada, even economize in U.S. dollars). Meanwhile, the dominant culture in the U.S. works to teach the demonization of many Mexican and other Spanish speaking compeneras/os who live south of the border—this is evidenced in part by the militarization of the border, and the imposition of exploitative financial relationships across the border that especially favor those within the U.S., and the U.S. capitalist class in particular. All this demonstrates for me the conclusive reality that transnational relationships between the countries are in this way dehumanized. And as the ecologist Gregory Bateson said, “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds.” The border, then, largely represents a kind of capitalist ecology that does not favor healthy socialization and the necessity of my speaking English here, as a well schooled American of relative world privilege, symbolizes a problem in the home—both my little home (the United States) and my big home (the greater Earth community). But importantly, I think, it is through the production of critical dialogue on these matters and through the real generosity you extend to me in order to do so, so also through producing acts of friendship and solidarity that we take one step together towards managing to do better, to more humane relationships, and a more peaceful and just social order. And this might be so in whatever small part, not because of what I can say or teach per se, but rather mainly because of what I cannot say or teach…as well as because of what can be said and taught to me instead. In other words, while I must apologize to you for my need for English here and for being such a typical American tourist, please know that this
Richard Kahn, Instituto McLaren de Pedagogica Critica Crisis Systemica y Medio Ambiente, July 2015
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experience will be carried with me back “home” again, the experience here is important for me because it helps me to learn, and in turn I can draw upon it to help others to learn similarly in other communities of which I am a part. What are some of these other communities of which I am a part? Let me say a little more about this in the form of a self-‐introduction before returning more directly to the topic of ecosocialism. In Los Angeles, I am in charge of the Master of Arts in Education, Leadership & Change program at Antioch University (an institution that is well known for being a home to progressive and even radical students seeking social “alternatives” in their lives and work. My program hopes to create broad-‐based critical conversations between those working in and for schools and those working in community-‐based organizations, educational nonprofits, the media, and other forms of educational activism—all towards trying to build more diverse and powerful coalitions for social and ecological justice, or what I would say we dream of as a more “sustainable society.” I came to this position, in part, because of my work in so-‐called ecopedagogy (a name I uphold from Freirean colleagues in South America, and it is important to recognize that the famous revolutionary educator Paulo Freire himself was at work on a book of ecopedagogy when he passed away in the late 1990s). In North America, I am arguably the primary spokesperson and theorist for this movement, through works like Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement (2010), and I should add that an early influence for me in this regard was Peter McLaren, whom I had the honor of studying with from 2001-‐2007, and with whom I published a book, The Global Industrial Complex in 2011. My work in ecopedagogy, I think, has made a humble academic contribution to ecosocialism by, on the one hand, building transformative solidarities between scholars and other intellectuals interested in the field of critical pedagogy (who, especially in the U.S., have often focused upon the systemic injustices of urban schooling and community issues of race, class, and to some degree gender) and those involved in environmental education (who often have focused on facilitating better relationships with the land, so-‐ called nonhuman animals through outdoor experiences). Through ecopedagogy, then, a movement is further dedicated to the critique and dismantling of a matrix of globally exploitative systems and institutions that dehumanize society and dominate nature—via oppressions of class, race, gender, ability, species, and other forms of violence—with an understanding that there is a mutually conditioning relationship between the destruction of the land and the exploitation of peoples en masse. But then it also seeks hope in the form of a new planetary community of cultural and biodiversity, an inclusive cosmopolitan world society that honors and the many places of which it is composed and which functions through moral relationships between people and the land akin to the Ecuadorian Sumak Kawsay, or Un Buen Vivir, and the African indigenous vision of Ubuntu, or “because you are, I am.”
Richard Kahn, Instituto McLaren de Pedagogica Critica Crisis Systemica y Medio Ambiente, July 2015
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Academically speaking, the advance of ecopedagogy has allowed for the field of critical pedagogy to understand that one cannot achieve lasting and meaningful social change on issues of class, race, gender, etc., unless one situates one’s curricular work within a demand for decolonizing structural relationships to the land, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the two-‐fold movement of silencing but then also exploitatively appropriating their knowledge of the world whenever possible. By contrast, it has allowed for environmental educators to understand that the domination of nature exists also because of the dehumanization of society and that unless one understands and responds to structural forces behind planetary dehumanization, such as global industrial capitalism and militarism, there is little reason to be hopeful that teaching people to be respectful of the land will have a meaningful educational or political outcome. As Pope Francis said in his recent Encyclical: “Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” Ecopedagogy attempts to do this within communities of educational research, and in doing so, it has given rise to new voices, new audiences, and helped to reconstruct the organizations empowered to shepherd the conversations on these matters such that these communities themselves better “walk the talk” of decolonization and anti-‐oppression in how they function, who leads them, and why. But as Freire himself said, “I myself am an academic and I won’t say academics are the problem. No ‘academicization’ is the problem,” or the hard division of labor between academic theorists and other activists, teachers, or citizens who symbolically represent practice to the scholars’ theory—this is the problem. Academics thus need to learn from the people and the movements and take action with them, even as the latter recognize that academics conserve forms of knowledge and other resources that can make them useful partners in the wider struggle for justice and peace. To this end, I have worked primarily as a spokesperson and critical educator for the North American movements for earth and animal liberation, raising the profile of such work within academic discourse, while serving as a popular educator with the activists to help them better understand the theoretical and historical bases of their advocacy and the need for them to forge alliances and solidarities with each other and other movements for social justice as part of what I call a “total liberation” vision, of the kind that I think ecosocialism now requires. My efforts on behalf of animal and earth liberation then led to my further work as a teacher with youth leaders for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the sustainability-‐oriented Powershift movement, folks involved in organizing Occupy Wallstreet, the 2011 general strike that attempted to shut down the state of Wisconsin, and other movements. Especially after 9/11 in the United States, when seemingly every major critical cause was possibly brandished as “terrorist,” unsurprisingly earth and animal liberation politics was called not “ecosocialist” but instead “ecoterrorist” by corporate-‐state opponents. And as I have written about to some degree, while I have never been formally questioned (to my knowledge) by state authorities because of my critical pedagogical work, nor have I been jailed, I do know that I have been actively monitored by the authorities and my career has itself has been penalized for my politics. But they do not reward you with vacations on tropical beaches for doing critical pedagogy, this happy invitation to Ensenada aside!
Richard Kahn, Instituto McLaren de Pedagogica Critica Crisis Systemica y Medio Ambiente, July 2015
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Still, I do not tell you of the work I have done because I am trying to impress you. No, rather I want to share that I think ecopedagogy, and hence ecosocialism, has to go on by any means necessary in every place possible—in the academy, in the K-‐12 schools, in the movements, and in the communities. And this work proceeds humbly and often with great difficulty, now in many ways like never before. Each one of us is only a part in a larger whole, and it is the whole which can and must change in order to realize social sustainability and planetary humanity. Until this happens, each one us—no matter how much we do or how great we do it—will feel challenged, limited, and blocked in our work…like we cannot do what needs to be done. The space between the freedom of our theory and the injustices of our practice, Freire called the “zone of untested feasibility” and I would invite us to think of ecosocialism as such. It is a place we need to take curious risks together on behalf of, to see what more we can do towards it than we currently manage. And it is important to remember again that whatever we feasibly manage will not seem like it is enough. Indeed, in a planetary era, where global systems of oppression now bear down on all of our lives in unprecedentedly powerful ways, the damage they have produced is of globally catastrophic levels. So, yes, we need to take action on these growing catastrophes—because in some ways they are THE hidden curricula of our lives together on earth now. But not because we are going to “save the earth” through new educational solutions. When it comes to planetary catastrophes, the truth is that it may be too late for a technical solution. Still, by posing a problem for the systems that produce these catastrophes, by questioning the way global society would like to function, by interrogating the unsustainability of our institutions, we announce together that life goes on and that the “humanization of the world” continues yet. This is real hope, and it teaches us to love and trust in one another more and more, even if there are no easy answers to our problems. So: global climate destabilization, which is a better name than global warming, which is a better name still than climate change. We’re now over 400 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 and increasing some 2 parts per million every year as we hurtle onwards to a level now expected for this generation of beyond 450 parts per million (a level where even conservative scientists suggest there is very likely no solution). This year is not only the hottest year on record, it has smashed previous records, and there is climatological reason to expect 2016 to do the same. Meanwhile, new research has just been released by major climate scientists radically revising even the dire predictions of the 2013 IPCC report on climate destabilization, that suggests that stabilizing climate at an additional 2 degrees centrigrade (the current UN hope) will itself lead to massive sea-‐level rise and terrible social outcomes. There may not be a solution for this. But, in the United States, there has been very large and sustained support for the 350.org movement (named after the need to reduce CO2 emissions to 350 parts per million) and 350.org’s numbers and protests have had significant effects in blocking a major transnational oil and gas pipeline. This has not only raised popular conscience about global climate as an issue, but it has done so through an actual ecosocialist check upon Big Oil’s hopes to drill and profit domestically. Perhaps because of this, the U.K. paper, The Guardian, increased its own coverage on climate and went so far as to encourage economic
Richard Kahn, Instituto McLaren de Pedagogica Critica Crisis Systemica y Medio Ambiente, July 2015
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divestment from the fossil fuel industries. Meanwhile, as the activist David Suzuki has written, there are other hopeful signs of people mobilizing for a new planetary community based on climate justice: [There were] 400,000 at the largest climate march in history in New York in September, with 2,646 simultaneous marches in 162 countries; an unprecedented gathering of 25,000 in Quebec City in advance of a premiers' climate change summit in April; and more than 10,000 in Toronto on July 5 for the March for Jobs, Justice and the Climate in advance of the Climate Summit of the Americas. [Further] When Pope Francis reached beyond the world's 1.2 billion Catholics to call for action on climate change, his message was endorsed by other religious leaders and organizations, including the Dalai Lama, the Islamic Society of North America, an influential group of Jewish rabbis and the Church of England. I might add that the Encyclical has also now entered into the U.S. Presidential debates, with candidates commenting upon and endorsing its message, like Senator Bernie Sanders. Another planetary ecocrisis that we must explore: the staggering and ever-‐evolving loss of biodiversity across the world. Named the “Sixth Extinction” of life on earth by the famed paleontologist Richard Leakey, science has now confirmed what has long been suspected— that there is a mass extinction event of unprecedented proportions taking place across the planet right now as I speak with you. The last such similar event took place 65 million years ago at the end of the age of the dinosaurs, when upwards of 90% of life perished (likely as the result of an asteroid collision). But this event appears to be taking place much more rapidly still, and the cause is not extraterrestrial but rather sociopolitical and economic. Indeed, if one places graphs of the global GDP of advanced capitalist nations since industrialization in the late 18th century against graphs of the rise of greenhouse gases (those responsible for climate destabilization) and the mass extinction of species, one finds they all look dangerously similar over the last 200+ years, with exponential increases in all three graphs taking place especially over the last 50 years or so. Thus, global industry foments monocultures, habitat destruction, and the eradication of species diversity and per Millennium Development Goal and other reports’ figures there is serious reason to believe that this generation of global economic activity may effectively wipe out the major ocean fisheries, the coral reefs, the mangroves, huge percentages of amphibians, reptiles, mammals and so forth. And yet: we are beginning to see large-‐scale social action and education on this matter. A number of films have come forth to support it, including the documentary A Call to Life. A commons movement that opposes industrialized society and, as mentioned before, movements across South and Meso-‐America into the Global North like Un Buen Vivir are fomenting the emergence of new types of ecosocialist imagination and community-‐based change. And pro-‐animal movements like the Vegan movement, of which I am a proud member, can now find educators and representatives all over the world. Even here in Ensenada there is apparently now a vegan restaurant!
Richard Kahn, Instituto McLaren de Pedagogica Critica Crisis Systemica y Medio Ambiente, July 2015
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These are hopeful signs of light in our dark night of the soul. They raise conscience on the issue of animals, but in so doing, also challenge the economics responsible for equally unprecedented levels of global dehumanization, poverty, and victimization by war. As the activist Van Jones has remarked in a recent TED talk, the destruction of all species (including our own) appears to be a symptomatic outcome of the ideological operationalization of an economy based upon mass disposability: Global industrial capitalism demands that we consume more and more, and the more we consume, the more we waste. In fact, consumption itself is a type of wasting. And so behind all this manufacture of the global consumer society writ large we have, he thinks (and so do I), a type of dialectical formula working: Learn to trash the planet, and you learn to trash the people on it; trash the people and you feel you can trash the planet. This raises a key ecopedagogical question necessary for ecosocialist futures: How should we become disposed to the structural and symbolic violence of the global disposability economy and its mass consumer culture? Of course there may be, and in fact must be, many responses—responses born of the actual people working on testing the feasibility of their responses in their places based on their needs and available knowledge at any given time. But for me, one positive predisposition is to recognize that the global industrial capitalist consumer society, like the mass extinction event, and global climate destabilization can be named as planetary ecocrises, not just catastrophes. For while we often use the term “crisis” as a synonym for “threat,” in fact “crisis” is related to “critical”—it speaks to an act of diagnosis and the need for our judgment. Historically speaking, “crisis” originated as a medical term—as if a patient lay dying on the operating table, will s/he live or die? What will we do as the diagnosing physician to ensure a healthier disposition? This is where the critical pedagogical project becomes absolutely necessary. As the science fiction writer, H.G. Wells once remarked, “History is a race between education and catastrophe.” Thus, we (the people!!!) need to learn to generate our own crises as forms of democratic, humane, and educational responses to the planetary catastrophes we find ourselves learning to live and die within as our social curricula. In other words, I think critical ecopedagogy is necessary to help transform peoples’ imaginaries from ones that are oblivious to planetary ecocrises to those that are concerned about ecocrises as if the peoples’ own lives depended upon naming such concern for themselves. But then, it is additionally important for ecopedagogy to help people learn that our human problem is not so much (at the end of the day) that there are planetary ecocrises, but instead that there may not be enough of them, or enough of the democratic, just, and sustainability-‐oriented variety! Who are we? How do we understand the relationship between the local and the global? How are we decolonizing our places, reconciling to the land inhabitants and historical land-‐ based Indigenous relationships that often serve as the deep history of our places, and then
Richard Kahn, Instituto McLaren de Pedagogica Critica Crisis Systemica y Medio Ambiente, July 2015
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actively reinhabiting our world towards the evolving organization of a diverse and inclusive planetary community? This is an exciting time to be alive despite the threat level being incredibly high. There is the global industrial complex and reasons to suspect that capitalism is potentially moving into a new global fascist order—even in the United States the other day, Gen. Wesley Clark (a former Presidential candidate and the NATO commander behind the Serbian war in the 1990s) said on MSNBC (our mainstream “left” news channel) that he thinks it may be necessary to put “self-‐radicalizing” American citizens in concentration camps for the duration of the War on Terror, and he suggested that the same is probably true of America’s allies. There is no way to sugarcoat this. There are extremely dangerous signs afoot. But there is also a growing movement of movements that are learning how to work and come together in common to make another type of world a possible dream. Nothing is guaranteed, but we should draw strength from what we are doing and achieving. As long as we knowingly act for the possible dream (an ecosocialist dream), then that dream remains alive. Still, as I remarked, at the end of the day I am not even entirely sure that it is important whether we can have any reasonable assurance of success in this dream. For what socialism wanted, and here I think of Che Guevara, was a new human being. Ecosocialism wants the humanization of the world. And that is achieved not through technical management schemes and “green” solutions, but rather through humane educational responses to the conditions of our lives as we come to know them. We are not gods, and we should not strive to be as them. We should find solace in suffering our difficulties, mourning our losses, and in championing our mortality. The dead speak, and we should listen to them with prayer. And then, as the famous radical Mother Jones declared, “We should fight like hell for the living.” Thank you for listening to me. I look forward to learning and struggling with you in the future. Muchas Gracias.
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