Consciousness and social change are intimately linked. On the one hand, without a consciousness that actively pushes for the creation of new conditions, change becomes either accidental or magical, the result of something or someone else–but the notion of collectively steering our own workplaces, homes, and economies toward another kind of transformation is so far away it’s absurd. On the other hand, in the case of those working consciously on social change, there are important victories, examples of what is possible, such as the movement for Black Lives, which has achieved a shift in global consciousness of racism in the police and spurred efforts to actually shift funds away from policing as the only and best response to social issues. With the global ecological crisis, both forms of consciousness are prevalent: overall, there is an acceptance of anthropogenic climate change as the inevitable accompaniment to the world’s trajectory–a trajectory that is seen as necessary, under the management of the appropriate experts, or otherwise unchangeable despite devastating consequences. Against this dominant mindset, there is a powerful global and diverse movement building momentum for environmental justice, clean energy, and sustainable economies, to the point where the world’s still largest economy is ready to pass a two trillion dollar infrastructure bill for “A MODERN, SUSTAINABLE INFRASTRUCTURE AND AN EQUITABLE CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE.” The question is whether this evolving mix of different forms of consciousness is capable yet of achieving social change?
There is a camp of optimists, whose vision of the future includes hope that governments and businesses have turned a corner, away from climate change denial, toward taking action, whether in the form of carbon trading, clean energy technologies, or resilient infrastructure investment. They believe that new leaders will infiltrate key positions to drive the economy and the people toward prosperity. They are not entirely naive, they know inequities will persist in many ways, however they prefer to hold on to their current placement within a topdown strategy for change, in the hope that they can make a difference in improving the situation for all. In short, they recognize the failures of many forms of leadership and expertise but remain on the whole optimistic that iterative reforms are possible, gradually transforming the culture and systems that key decision-makers use to steer society.
There is a camp of free-market capitalists whose primary interest is free-market capitalism, and anything that gets in the way is either denied or approached as a commercialization problem/solution. The global ecological crisis, then, is both secondary to business as usual while presenting new business opportunities. This group has infiltrated thinking at the top tiers of society — the Koch brothers epitomize this — as well as middle management in the private and public sectors, in universities, and even a significant portion of the youth who idolize Elon Musk and other smart businessmen.
The third camp includes a big mix of Indigenous organizers, elements within a whole range of local justice movements, and a significant number of young people looking for answers and making their own analysis about the problems of inequitable distribution of power in society.
My research is in the organization of learning within and across these three camps, with a particular emphasis on the third one, where there is the most room to work intentionally on the re-organization of learning to change working conditions. The organization of learning is a critical battleground for the development of a collective consciousness capable of steering social change — without this, I think the chances for a prosperous future are close to non-existent. No one can totally control consciousness, and yet that is what hegemony amounts to, a totalizing control. Challenging this hegemony to open space for the different ways of knowing — ways that cannot be contained forever within the currently dominant trajectory — means learning how to reorganize our own learning conditions, starting in the third camp and then overtaking the other two — willingly for camp 1, and by force for camp 2, if needed — toward a new social organization and ecological consciousness.
Note that the typology of the three camps is in reality a lot messier, with blurring and overlap across them. There are some elements across the three camps that can be united, and others that are diametrically in opposition and will remain in tension. Overall what is needed is to overcome the feelings of being stuck, moving toward greater exercise of freedom. There are many contradictions and flat out false assumptions to confront along the way, remnants of privilege and incentive structures that steer individuals and whole collectives of people toward destructive patterns of behavior, to themselves and those around them, but which remain the normalized pathways of our inherited and current social relations. Learning to reorganize these so that other subjectivities and learning can (re)surface is the central focus of this book.
In a sense, the official narrative handed down to people suggests that life is about finding work, getting paid enough to afford decent housing, getting around (transportation) to care for loved ones and meet all other needs on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis — this is really all there is time and energy to do, at best. At worst, an increasingly significant proportion of the population is not even permitted to entertain this low standard version of “normal” expectations, as they are confronting new levels of poverty, incarceration, and deterioration of the basic social fabric of life. Adding “addressing the global climate crisis” to the to-do list is simply absurd in this context. Even if you felt morally convinced of the need for action, what could you do exactly? Most of the dominant messaging will tell you that it’s better to let the experts, the government, the tech companies, and all those nonprofits handle the environment–at best, what you can do is recycle and buy products that claim to be more environmentally friendly.
And yet: efforts to organize environmental work through everyday life struggles abound, as different communities confront the obstacles that restrict their activities to routines which, upon further examination, are themselves absurd in the way that they ultimately perpetuate and worsen living, working, caring, and environmental conditions. In short, communities everywhere are learning to build equitable and sustainable futures for themselves, through struggle. Working conditions, housing, transportation, healthcare, education, and food production are central issues in the global ecological crisis, which is now synonymous with a crisis of human social organization — and human social organization is our all of business, it’s what we do every day. Now, at first glance, changing this every day work may not seem any less daunting or feasible than fixing the global ecological crisis writ large, however, if environmental problems are first and foremost problems of social organization, then we all have multiple entry points into projects that we’re already connected to — the real issue is about how to organize action. How do you organize to lower the carbon emissions of your city’s transportation system? How do you organize to create local food options that are healthy and affordable? How do you organize to create new work opportunities that are socially meaningful and environmentally beneficial? These are still huge challenges, but they begin to take on a more tangible and doable aspect than the lack of options that first appear when thinking about the global ecological crisis.
Learning-by-doing includes necessarily making mistakes — but when there is room given to analyze these, to provide support for another attempt, learning that includes real changes in consciousness and collective capacity can emerge. To break the issue down further, there are a few key ingredients that you need to organize new actions. One is research, or a way of finding things out. Access to the Internet helps a lot, but so does having people you can ask questions to, whether friends, family, neighbors, librarians, city officials, university experts, and local business owners and workers. Another key ingredient is a meeting space. Under conditions of the coronavirus pandemic, physical meeting is limited to socially distanced and preferably outdoor events — this still can include some excellent options, but virtual (online) meeting spaces may be vital to your organizing efforts. Finally, you need a core group of people (two to eight is probably about right), since working alone is too limiting for the purposes of social change.
But even with these basic ingredients, there is something further needed to confronting the obstacles that get in the way of working on the global ecological crisis: a pedagogy of ecological consciousness. Before explaining what this means, consider how housing, transportation, work, education — all of these issues — already have a dominant organizing logic: they all have a workforce, a set of rules and laws and guidelines and practices and a structure that supports them. So any attempt to reorganize these logics requires a different strategy for working together. Insiders are rewarded for following the rules, so changing those rules is not simple — there are competing incentives pushing in different directions, requiring a compass to orient your organizing work to stay focused on a particular direction of change. Changing the rules goes hand in hand with changing the structure. The pedagogy of ecological consciousness is about finding this orientation while moving through a process of reorganizing what and how you know things.
At its core, the pedagogy of ecological consciousness is about practices of life and death. There was a story on the radio about a scientist studying forests, guided by a new understanding of collaboration among trees. Against the more established view that trees compete with each other for nutrients and water, her research was showing how trees could actually communicate with each other through underground fungal networks of collaboration. For example, if one tree was not getting enough nutrients, a signal was sent through the soil to nearby trees, and in response, the surrounding trees would actually take fewer nutrients for themselves and direct more for the tree in need (see Dr. Suzanne Simard). Human social organization is also made up of networks of communication and collaboration, but while sustaining life at one level (for the richest people on the planet), the overall effect of these forms of social organization is producing anthropogenic climate change, while simultaneously widening the gap between rich and poor. My argument is that this social organization rests on the systematic suppression of the diversity of human ways of knowing, especially women’s knowledges, the knowledges of the global majority of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and African, Latinx, Asian, Arab and Native American (ALAANA) as well as the knowledges of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer (LGBTQ+) communities. Pedagogies of ecological consciousness are about building capacity for transforming social relations through interventions into dominant forms of social organization. Or to put it another way, we’re talking about using practices that encourage life, rather than shutting life down in a process of acceleration towards death.
Logics of acceleration towards death have become dominant in frightening and insidious ways. Free trade zones explicitly set up without labor or environmental laws, massive land grabbing, the accelerated destruction of the Amazon, the Canadian tar sands, pipeline expansion, fracking, ocean pollution from the shipping industry to the fishing industry, and so on — all of this activity is organized in top down board room decision making spaces, where white, heteropatriarchal, colonial, racist logics organize who is in the room, who speaks, and what they say. It has long passed the point of absurdity, where feeding one’s family and being successful in life actually means becoming more and more part of the infrastructure of global capitalism. The effect is to deaden ourselves, to oppress others and to become part of the dominant logic of human and ecological sacrifice. (Stan Goff describes this as exterminism, which means “the tacit or open acceptance of the necessity for mass extinctions or die-offs (often beginning with mass displacements) as the price for continued accumulation and the political dominance of a ruling class.” This, as Goff argues, is calculated neglect, where the elite keep adequate resources from lower income individuals, leaving them to be “inevitable casualties” in the event of “poverty, disease, malnutrition, and ‘natural’ disasters.”)
And yet–as soon as you begin to organize spaces consciously using practices that intentionally encourage freedom of expression, especially in ways that center oppressed knowledges, the obstacles that push us to accept dominant logics begin to lift and transform. It is not easy work but it can be incredibly fulfilling, and it has become a logical necessity for confronting the global ecological crisis. In this book, I document numerous projects for their work in reversing the dominant logic of sacrificial death, towards developing a wide range of pedagogies of ecological consciousness. I further connect the insights emerging from these projects to theories of learning and freedom, advancing the framework of ecological consciousness as the practice of different ways of knowing.
The Case Study Projects
I grouped these into three categories.
- Students, staff, and faculty at ASU. This includes two groups I’m helping to coordinate — the undergraduate Student Advisory Group (SAG) and the Transformative Learning (TL) working group (grad students and faculty). The SAG is made up of undergraduate students (with support from staff and faculty) working to build a community of peer learning and support, centering student knowledge in a time of pandemic and online learning. The TL is made up of a core group of about 5 graduate students and faculty, with another 15 people expressing interest or having attended once. We are organizing ourselves in three ways, I would say: as a large meeting group for updates and general interest brainstorming; as a subgroup or task force on supporting movement causes through event planning for consciousness-raising; and as a pedagogical practice group interested in decolonial and transformative teaching and learning. My course on the Future of the Environment could also contribute here, as well as my work with UCW.
- The Phoenix environmental justice community. This is made up largely of my involvement with Chispa Arizona, where I am a promoter/volunteer participating in campaigns and action groups. I have the photovoice project that started and stopped. I have new work I’m engaged in planning. Another project/group here is the Nature’s Cooling Systems projects, where I have been part of the heat action planning process and ongoing follow up meetings. I also conducted some brief interviews with team members about learning through collaboration. Finally, I would like to be working to support Indigenous campaigns (e.g. Oak Flat, Black Mesa, and others).
- Global South-North collaboration community. This includes my work with Smart and Connected Communities in Miami, San Juan, and Baltimore, on opening dialogue spaces for integrating data visualization technologies into people-centered planning processes for extreme weather events and coastal resilience; I would also see my work with the Early Career Symposium series going here, focused on changing how we train ourselves for holistic green infrastructure implementation, including the spin off group focused on online pedagogy; the Urban Informality Working Group as part of the nature based solutions work of the Natura Network, where I support the coordination of the group and co-lead a publication on radical resilience from the perspective of informality; and finally my work with Frente Colibrí and Ecohealth, including the article of health knowledge productions in the neoliberal university across north-south relations and the data we collected about our own learning in the group over the past 5 years.
The question that ties all this work together — how my own personal inquiry has been weaved across these projects — is about forms of organizing learning and capacity building for confronting the Anthropocene across academic, grassroots, and international collaborations. When I talk about “organizing learning” I’m talking about the ways we become more deliberate in how we organize meetings, research projects, action research process, workshops, events, planning meetings etc., to humanize and collectivize ourselves, our institutions, and societies at large — to resist the dominant logics of heteropatriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, racism, and so on. My project of ecological consciousness posits that at the core of sustainability lies the dynamic work of community organizing in the context of power relations, and within this community organizing work there is a need for developing appropriate pedagogical practices. Of course, campaign victories, research results, and coalition building are indispensable — but even these at their core require a pedagogical practice. What happens now is that this practice is sometimes spot on, organically, intuitively, or for some other more conscious reason but it is often undermined, weakened, or thwarted completely by a lack of attention to pedagogical logic. What is this logic, or perhaps better to say what are these logics — the effective ones that lead to capacity building and transformative learning, as well as the dominant ones that inhibit our collective capacity? That is what I want to name and better understand, to find ways of applying learning more intentionally in a wide range of contexts, across different ways of knowing and organizing ourselves.
Methods
Participant observation: I need to take notes and write reflections about my observations — I have not been doing enough of this, perhaps, though I do have some notes from my students if FIS201 and I started a different blog post with some general observations about town halls and faculty meetings — what about Chispa organizing meetings, what about my first impressions of Aliento, what about reactions to the Early Career Symposium series? I would like to not just document the things that frustrate me the most, but also the interventions that really impress me (such as Kiki’s interjections, Lauren’s way of posing questions, Marta’s too, and the way a healthy group process steers the pedagogy in more productive directions, overcoming my limitations (perhaps I should comment on how frustrating and rewarding this process can be, think of Frente Colibrí and how I was ready to give up on ECS at times). Should I include observations about my personal life, my anger about not have control over where I can bike with the kids, my slow awareness and practice of steering myself in more conscious ways around achieving better spousal relations, peer relations, organizing relations, committee work relations? I want to say ‘yes’ so long as I can be very clear about the point — the central argumentative thread that connects everything back to my main idea, I really do want this to be coherent and a useful contribution to changing theory and practice.
Literature: Speaking of contributing to theory and practice, I would like to organize this book/project as a response to a question that resonates clearly with a specific group of thinkers — I want to build on existing ideas to break some new ground. I need to dedicate room for a literature review, not the boring detached kind of survey, but a bit more engaged with the texts that really challenge and move me. I also need to define the parameters of my field, not just around my favorite authors but around a set of debates and ideas relevant to my topic — the pedagogy of organizational logics for freedom?
Action research process: The process of starting a conversation with a group and organizing some options for what the group wants to accomplish together, that is core to how I conceive of action research. That way, you end up with collective ownership of the activities, but there are challenges in organizing the process, in balancing the need for distributed contributions versus coordination leadership and extra time from one or two people to help the whole group — that was a key to my work with peer groups when I was at IDRC, and that is something I’ve struggled with the TL group, as I can’t make all the time needed to keep the process moving ahead in a satisfying direction for all. I ran into this issue with photovoice and with Frente Colibri, but I’ve also seen how others step up to push things forward. The ECS has been a huge success in the end, at least from what I’m hearing now from participants, and that was the result of having a group of us engaged — 7 is a great group number to bring in a lot of different skills, and Marissa’s leadership has been really key to the process.
To be continued…
ecologicalconsciousnessdotorg 