EcoJustice%20Education%20and%20Community-Based%20Learning%20The%20Southeast%20Michigan%20Stewardship%20Coalition

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EcoJustice Education and Community-Based
LearningThe Southeast Michigan Stewardship
Coalition
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EcoJustice Education A Crucial Kind of Change

• Because the assumptions that belong to a
• culture are often invisible in their fullest
• dimensions and consequences, one must make
• them visible before discerning change.
• The very process of seeing the structure of
• thought is itself a crucial kind of change and
• genesis.
• Susan Griffin, The Eros of
  Everyday Life

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An EcoJustice Framework

• Social and ecological justice are not separate.
• They share the same cultural roots.

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An EcoJustice Framework

• Ecology From the root Oikos meaning home
• A strong emphasis on relationships and
  interdependence
• Disrupts the managerial model introduced mid-20th
  C. where science is applied to manage and control
  problems out there.

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An EcoJustice Framework

• Two Primary Strands
• A deep analysis of the cultural foundations of
  socio-ecological violence
• A recognition of beliefs, behaviors, traditions,
  knowledge, and skills that lead to a smaller
  ecological footprint/sustainable communities

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An EcoJustice Framework

• Strand 1 A deep cultural analysis of how we
  think
• Examining
• Discursive roots of culture
• --Language matters
• How we come to think and behave in relation to
  each other as well as the natural world as
  created in our symbolic systems

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An EcoJustice Framework

• Centuries-Old Cultural Discourses
• Anthropocentrism
• Ethnocentrism
• Androcentrism
• Mechanism
• Individualism
• Progress and Growth
• Scientism

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Dualisms and Hierarchized Thinking in Western
Culture

• Basic hierarchized structure leading to
  hyper-separated consciousness and a logic of
  domination
• Culture/nature (anthropocentrism)
• Reason/ emotion
• Mind/body
• Man/woman (androcentrism)

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The Language of Mechanism

• My aim is to show that the celestial machine is
  to be likened not to a divine organism, but to a
  clockwork. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
• For what is the heart, but a spring and the
  nerves, but so may strings, and the joints but so
  many wheels, giving motion to the whole body.
  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
• Like the computer, the human mind takes in
  information, performs operations on it to change
  its form and content, stores information,
  retrieves it when needed, and generates responses
  to it. Anita Woolfolk, from Educational
  Psychology, 1993
• The machine that biologists have opened up is a
  creation of riveting beauty. At its heart are
  the nucleic acid codes
• which in a typical vertebrate animal may
  comprise
• 50,000 to 100,000 genes.

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The Language of Individualism

• The idea that humans are autonomous individuals
  with the independent capacity to reason outside
  of our relationship or shared language with
  others.
• Assumes that the most advanced societies are
  those that maximize the so-called inherent drive
  to accumulate individual wealth and power. Thus,
  competition is seen as normal, and hierarchized
  social relations are a natural outgrowth of
  rewards for individual merit.

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The Language of Individualism

• Examples
• Think for yourself!
• We all construct our own meaning.
• Social inequality is a result of inherent genetic
  or cultural deficits.

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The Language of Progress

• The idea that rapid social or technological
  change is inevitable and necessary to advance
  culture.

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The Language of Progress

• You cant stop progress!
• unimproved land
• developed vs underdeveloped
• growth
• innovation
• advanced vs backward

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What would you expect to see in a culture
organized by an anthropocentric world view?
It seems to me that in a culture organized
by an anthropocentric way of thinking, it would
be a short leap to treating some people like they
are inferior. Sabrina Clark, 12th grade
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Strand 2 Attention to local communities and
indigenous cultures

• Revitalizing the cultural and ecological
  commons
• Practices and traditions, relationships that have
  a smaller ecological footprint
• Shared without the need for monetary exchange

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Strand 2 Attention to local communities

• Attention to the relationship among biological,
  cultural, and linguistic diversity as the
  strength of any community.
• Problem of cultural, linguistic, and ecological
  destruction via economic and cultural
  globolization

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Strand 2 Attention to local communities

• Earth democracy recognizing the need for
  collective decision making by those who are most
  affected by the decision
• Recognizing the importance of decisions that take
  seriously the right of other living creatures to
  renew themselves.

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Strand 2 Attention to local communities

It is not quite imaginable that people will exert
themselves greatly to defend creatures and places
that they have dispassionately studied. It is
altogether imaginable that they will greatly
exert themselves to defend creatures and places
that they have involved their lives in.
Wendell Berry
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Developing Citizen Stewards EcoJustice and
Community-Based Education Southeast Michigan
Stewardship Coalition (SEMIS)
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Three Key Strategies

• Community-based Learning
• K-12 Professional Development
• Community Partnerships

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SEMIS Professional Development
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What does this all mean for what we need to do?

• Developing the habits of mind and heart
  necessary for stewardship and creation of
  sustainable communities.

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EcoJustice Habits of Heart Mind

• Guiding Questions
• What are root causes of the social and ecological
  crises we face?
• How are the projects we are working on
  contributing to alternatives (more sustainable
  alternatives)?
• How do we know if our thinking and actions (or
  their implications) support or undermine
  life/living systems?
• How do we reflectively listen/understand the
  messages/ communication/ Nature/living systems
  are sending?
• How do we become ethical participants in an
• Ecology of Mind?