Education is not enough.
“To educate” is an easy/trope answer to the question what contributions and/or interventions the environmental humanities can make to address environmental issues. Education is important, no doubt but the knowledge about environmental issues is not enough. The knowledge so-to-say is out there and pretty much everyone is aware that we as human beings have an impact on the world we live in and that stewardship of the environment is important. Even people who deny the existence of climate change, usually under the guise of saying, there’s nothing to be done/doing something is too expensive, but they’ll admit, even if it is out of self-interest, that we should not destroy the environment. The difficulty arises when education is promoted as a straightforward answer, as if knowledge is the solution.
Creating compassion and empathy are the actual interventions the environmental humanities can make. As Bennett highlights in her piece on Vibrant Matter, everything is interconnected, and the most mundane items/objects are not just objects, they have a vibrant past, present and will persist in the future. The human subject stands in relation to them but is not superior to them. Therefore, the challenge of environmental humanities is to create compassion for the interconnectedness of matter. This means developing an understanding for even the things we actually cannot empathize with. The danger of this perspective of empathy might be that it still only values the environment from a human-centered perspective because that’s what we focalize human action through.
Highlighting only the impact that human action has on the environment would not go far enough, this might be a good start, but this once again would create a hierarchy that only values environmental issues in the way that it impacts humans, without focalizing the environment itself with all its constituting matter.
Highlighting the slow violence of environmental exploitation on the poor goes a step in the direction of creating empathy. Exporting waste to impoverished nations doesn’t get rid of said waste, it just puts it out of sight out of mind, where the poor have to deal with the consequences of the exploitation of others. The precarity comes from the fact that the poor seemingly “choose” to have slow violence exerted upon themselves. They decide to be exploited but because they do not really have a choice in the matter due to the dependence on the West, they are caught in a vicious circle, from which Nixon sees them emerging through environmentalism. They in his mind, emerge from the rubble of exploitation because they have no other choice. They see the impact that it has had on them and cannot but create and practice environmentalism.
Unfortunately, the third dimension of Nixon’s argument, the writer-activist seems to, once again, be founded in intellectualism rather than the environmentalism from the margins that he propagates. The writer-activist can certainly have an impact but their subject position seems to not come from within the ranks of the poor but an outsider position, in a way, once again, an educator, but educators who just transmit information, as heartfelt as they may be, are ineffective if they don’t create identification through empathy.
Martina
Martina, I was struck by your simple first sentence, “education is not enough.” This struck me because during the first week of class when we were talking about sustainability and how one could make a sustainable world, education was the first thing that came to my mind. Education continued to be on the forefront of my mind while answering the questions posed during the group work portion of the class.
Until reading your blog, I still thought that education was enough, however this quickly changed upon reading your blog. Your line “creating compassion and empathy” struck a chord with me and made it clear that culture(s) need to be changed via education in order to best address current problems that societies are facing. Your later points only highlighted the pitfalls of current education, stating that making humans aware of their actions and their slow violence will not be enough to change our current predicament.
If Martina’s statement about compassion and empathy didn’t bring to attention the fact that culture(s) needed to be changed, then hopefully our film from last week, Little Voices of Fukishima, and this week’s reading Precarious Japan by Anne Allison helped you reach this conclusion. Both works highlighted problems associated with school lunches in areas affected by radiation after the 3/11 disaster. Allison highlights this by stating that “there were charges of ‘un-Japaneseness,’ for example, against those in Fukushima who (not otherwise evacuated) chose to…make lunches for their children so they wouldn’t have to be exposed to the food made at the school” (18-19). It is hard for me to comprehend why someone would be labeled as ‘un-Japanese’ for trying to protect their children’s health and was a huge red flag for me while viewing the Film and reading Allison’s text. However, this culture problem is not only a problem in Japan, it is a problem here in the United States as well. When telling my roommate that my living habits would require 5.29 earths to sustain my current living habits, his response was “well that sucks” followed by him throwing an empty Gatorade bottle into the trash. These are two drastically different examples of how people are reacting to the current state of our environment and what we are doing to it. Similar examples can be found in every nation and culture around the planet.
Even though there are certainly countless examples of ‘doom and gloom’ associated with the environment and its problems, there are bright spots that can be found even in the most dreary situations. The “Ha-ha Rangers” from Little Voices of Fukishima and the promotion of ‘moral consumerism’ in Precarious Japan are two examples of bright spots even though they were completed in areas “where it is difficult to survive and difficult to muster up the kind of civic responsibility to sense beyond one’s own pain to that shared by others” (Allison 15).
What is causing this civic responsibility? According to Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos, Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution she would argue that the decisions by the “Ha-ha Rangers” and ‘moral consumers’ were strictly economic in nature. The work of the Rangers can be strictly seen as an investment in the futures of their children. Moral consumerism, like Japan Railways summer packages (Allison 183), is an opportunity for tourists to save money and feel good about it since at the very least they were supporting the local economy.
Taking these into consideration, educational initiatives that keep economic factors in mind need to be created in order to change the culture surrounding our one and only environment. It is clear that our current efforts will not help us achieve our ultimate goal, I believe that focusing on educating to change culture(s) is the solution. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. To add to Martina’s point about the writer-activist and their current ineffective attempts, perhaps it would be fruitful for them to create pieces that attempt to restructure culture, however one must be weary of simply trying to create cultural changes as well.