There are a number of points that I wish to develop, I’m not sure in what order:
- The overall gist of what I want to say is that we can trace an evolution of changes in what it means to be ecologically conscious and that the direction points today toward societal scale social activism across different ways of knowing
- it’s beyond the scope of this writing to trace in detail all of the changes, but in the context of North America key changes include: the parks movement (both wilderness and urban parks), the professionalization and development of ecology as a discipline, the launch of mainstream environmentalism and Earth Day, the rise of climate science and the IPCC, the institutionalization of sustainability in higher education, government, the private sector and in NGOs, Greta Thunberg and the new environmental movements
- What emerges from this evolution is the necessity of a growing social analysis of power, agency, and collective action at the core of what it means to be and act in ecologically consciousness ways — by themselves, scientific, indigenous, and activist knowledges are not enough, they must be combined to create the people power strong enough to challenge institutionalized forms of consciousness created through capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy, and heteronormativity, push for social transformation. In other words, we (scholars, policy makers, scientists, activists) have underestimated the intertwined nature of power, consciousness, movement/action, space, authority, history, science, among other factors in the balanced tensions of working out social life’s role in addressing the global ecological crisis
- On the level of theory, there are important questions about the limits and interactions of different ways of knowing that require attention, as they affect how we are to understand what it means to be ecologically conscious today:
- systems science continues to be a leading approach to sustainability in many realms (research, policy, advocacy, analysis) — however when is systems science complicit in the reproduction of power relations driving climate change and how can it be used for transformative change? Versions of the same question must be asked about decolonial, feminist, queer, black, socialist, and other forms of knowledge that help challenge key drivers of anthropogenic climate change…
- So how do these knowledge interact — in what kind of subjects and how are these subjects multiplied, self-developed, collectivized, and where do you fit in?
- There are a few different entry points into these questions that I will examine — clearly there are many other entry points that I will have to leave for others to develop or come back to at a another time:
- systems science: what are the opportunities and limits when starting from the point of view of the ‘system’? Systems science has lent credibility to the fact that there are systems and structures that lie beyond the realm of the immediately observable empirical world that fundamentally organized how the observable phenomena take place — this has long been held by critical realists, and remains somewhat distorted in systems science, but then again systems science has been very effective (more effective than critical realist approaches) at mainstreaming a theory of sustainability and social action based on considering the whole system, upstream, downstream, and its evolutions in complexity; the limitation here is that theory always wants to start and finish with the system itself as if there was nothing else to theorize, act on, observe, learn from etc. We’re left as managers, bureaucrats, trying to tweak or intervene in the system — or just maintain our authority as experts — while the public, the corporations, the media, property owners, etc. actually battle it out for how the world will change. So in the end systems thinking offers a false totality as the systems historical origins in social struggle are not part of the analysis, thus leaving little room for any meaningful ecological conscious action as a solution
- indigenous ways of knowing and decolonization: these approaches have arguably made the most advancements in confronting the ecological crisis in the sense that here are groups of people disenfranchised by the state (the opposite of systems scientists) fighting for their survival which is directly part of fighting for the land; there are many tensions here within and across indigenous and non-indigenous actors, a lot of potential to go in different directions
- activist knowledge: there has been a resurgence of practices leading to radical alternatives to the status quo and important learning about social change, but without ways of systematizing and collectivizing these different knowledges, various social movements remain in a weakened state to confront the forces they are up against
- While critical versions of these approaches have advanced, they remain overshadowed by their mainstream versions that suck potential away from more radical politicization — so we all have to develop a role for ourselves in taking back ground from institutionalized bad habits, and breaking new ground in advancing our own ecologically conscious practices. Our collective human liberation and ecological survival depends on it.
ecologicalconsciousnessdotorg 