In the course of my research, I came across a really good source that didn’t actually pertain to an of my questions, but interested me nonetheless. It comes from a textbook called Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling, which covers how pedagogy can come in all sorts of forms and examines how the public engages in it’s own sort of pedagogy. There was a really cool article called Earthships as Public Pedagogy and Agents of Change, written by Mischa Hewitt, an architect who focuses on sustainable building practices, and Kevin Telfer, a journalist.

Architecture as Pedagogy

Something I naturally picked up while researching Earthships was that they are less scientific advancement and more political statement. Michael Reynolds, the creator of the entire concept, was attempting to put his green-anarchist principles into action. In that way, Earthships act as a attempt to signal where their builders stand in relation to society. In many ways, researching Earthships is a strong way of dipping your toes in to the bigger picture of sustainability philosophy. The Earthship Foundation runs actual weeks long programs to educate prospective builders/owners in the methods and reasons behind Earthship designs. They also tend to be very adaptable, meaning that every new builder can bring in their own perspectives, education, and philosophies and add them to the greater knowledge bank of the Earthship.

Another interesting tidbit about Earthships as pedagogy is many Earthship projects are extremely open about their practices and communities. Most of the ones I’ve come across attempt to do public outreach as a public activism, while also their existence standing as a passive activism. I am always interested in different methods of education, and I can’t think of many other projects that choose to quite literally build their curriculum or philosophy into the very stones (Or in this case, Tires) of their foundation.

Pedagogy in sustainability

Coming out of that, an interesting avenue to turn down is how we look at our pedagogy for the cause of sustainability. In my previous posts, I’ve criticized the sort of nationalized and top-down approach to sustainability activism. Too much of it is based on reaching as many people as possible, and I would say that a good amount of it seems to be focused less on education and more on politicization of the issues; less about teaching the opposition, more about rallying the base to get on the train we want them on. While this is important, I think we really have to look at how we use activism to educate the public. This Earthships example is a great idea of a very low level, grass roots approach. I am of the firm belief that good pedagogy requires the human touch; the communal relationships are just as important as the information being transferred in the process of education. When the educator is abstracted out of the human level (Say, a story on the news or a petition in a tweet) there’s a natural force exerted against people that don’t already have some engagement and agreement in the topic. It’s a much safer and productive learning environment among friends than amongst strangers.

There are some issues here, of course. Direct on the ground action is often a thankless job. This sort of grass-roots educational movement also generally can’t be enacted from the top-down; I don’t know why, but it seems like most of the time top-down organization of the local level often aren’t very productive. It’s also just a lot harder to foster local community in the modern world, where community is no longer locked by geography in the same way it was even fifty years ago. The best approach I can offer is that it requires people to feel empowered to reach out into their own local environments and give activist outreach a shot.

Where do the politics come in?

There is simultaneously a strange and popular idea that education is either inherently non-political or supposed to erase the bias of its context (Authors, times, etc). This is untrue in probably every single context imaginable. The very act of education is the imprint of your own biased experiences into the mind of others. We can’t escape the politics, but at the very least we should make them either readily apparent or easily digestible. Education, or at least the education I believe in, is built on a framework of compassion. It’s just as important to understand the student and meet their needs as it is to be correct.

Last week, metaphorically speaking, I wrote a post about Using Martin Buber’s I and Thou to better understand how we engage with both the environment and other people. There, I described the “I-it” relationship, where the I’s primary relation to the it is in terms of outcomes and experiences, taking from the it what it can without necessarily giving anything back. It is the very objectification of nature itself. The I-it relation, I argued, is unable to push the average person to giving up things that give their lives meaning and comfort for a more sustainable world.

What, then, is the I-Thou relationship? In it’s most extreme, impossible. The I-Thou is non-describable at it’s very heart, the relation in which I and Thou engage with each other, ignoring any contexts and knowledge from the outside and ignoring categorization of the Thou. In it’s very essence, it is a transcendental experience. The best way to sort of get close to the picture of what Buber is describing here is the flow state, in which thought itself erodes away in moments of great focus.

So, how does any of this make sense for us in the context of sustainability? It seems as though I’m grasping at straws. This is correct, but also, If Martin Luther King can invoke Buber in regards to segregation, I might as well try for sustainability.

The piece we read on Watershed as Common-place by Caroline Druschke is the one I think that highlights what I’m thinking of here. There, she describes the ambiguity of the watershed as a thing that can hold many symbolic meanings. This quote displays it excellently:

  As I suggest here, the watershed’s slipperiness (its ability to slip between
abstract community and particular place) marks it with the capacity to change rhetorics, selves, and, ultimately, landscapes

She spends the paper describing how the identification of farmers with the watershed improved the sense of community and interest in sustainable practices. The watershed, a nebulous concept that defines itself differently within each persons relation to it, becomes our Thou. The farmers are engaged with their environment at a direct level, unable to easily categorize their relation to it.

I think this is the approach needed more in our outreach. Last post, I complained about the outcome-based approach most mainstream sustainabilty projects aim to meet: Look, they say, and see what the future looks like. We objectify nature as a tool for human proliferation, categorizing it as a thing that must be protected only in relation to it’s ability to keep our society afloat. Boiled down to this admittedly over-simplified terms, there’s no difference between sustainability campaigns and oil company propaganda about human innovation.

How should we speak about nature then? I’ve already admitted that the I-Thou relation is functionally indescribable, broken with even the slightest hint of classification or experience. I really think that we need to break away from an outcomes based approach and enter an approach of co-relationship. To get the masses to see that nature is a thing worth changing their lives for, we need to get them engaged with nature on a more even level. There is a feeling when being in the woods for long enough that one gets whence their brain becomes tired of thoughts, when the knowledge of what the woods are is overshadowed by the feeling of what they are. I think that is the state of mind that will make people choose sustainability over comfort.

How do we do it?

I have no good answers here. The best idea I can come up with is to copy what the government agencies Druschke wrote about did; create a communal relation between one’s local surroundings and oneself. This most likely requires grass-root advocacy and engagement, rather than top-down approaches. It can’t be done on twitter or at the Whitehouse; the engagement requires personally reaching each and every person willing to engage. Creating community around local parks or gardens might be a great way to accomplish this. Unlikely, but perhaps restructuring political boundaries to reflect the natural world might get people thinking in that sort of way. The fundamental idea remains roughly the same, either way: People care about things they are engaged with on a deep and personal level. They must connect with nature as the thou, a partner who stands in relation, rather than the it which is only to be experienced and used.

Recently, I’ve read a good bit of the philosophical poem-essay hybrid I and Thou by Martin Buber. The basic gist is that Buber believes relationships are what make human existence meaningful, and he organizes those relationships into two word-pairs: I-It and I-Thou. I thought I’d take some of these concepts for a spin and apply them to the focuses of our class. In some ways, I am most definitely misunderstanding Buber’s work, but he’ll have to forgive me here; besides, he’s dead and will never read this blog post anyway.

What, then, is an I-it relationship? It is the relationship form that inhabits the entirety of the modern world, actually. It is cold and calculating, even in the acts of love. It is detached and one way, even in the transactions of two. Buber, being both philosopher and theologian, basically never gives us a concrete simple definition. I’ll use this quote from the book to try and make it clear: “The man who experiences has no part in the world. For it is “in him” and not between him and the world that experience arises.” (Pg 5) The I-It is defined by experience: the extraction of knowledge and material benefit from the world around him, whether “inner” or “outer” experiences. The I-it relationship experiences the world, but only in sense that the world and his experience belongs to him.

So how doe this relate to sustainability? In fact, this is the key issue of sustainability. So much of the messaging is about how us, the collective humanity, must turn towards more sustainable means for the benefit of ourselves. We talk about the ramifications of our actions in very much the same way our fathers before spoke about the effects of their colonial and imperialistic usage of the world around them. The message is more hip, perhaps, but the message still asserts the I, humans, and the it, the world. I don’t want to make it seem like all of this is a bad thing. It’s rhetoric, and in the world of rhetoric we take unclean positions, stretching the truth just enough to only slightly lie in the hopes that we can achieve something above ourselves.

But it is nonetheless shallow; half stuck between the relationships of the old world and the the holistic world. For what reason should the auto-mechanic on the ford production line put down his tools and agree with us that his entire livelihood is a relic of the past and harmful to our future? Why should the farmer support vertical farming or artificial meat, when those very fields will not make room in their stuffy intelligentsia offices for him? Must we really expect the coal miner, stuck impoverished in the corpse of coal country, to move on from the tradition that his father and his father before that fed their families with?

This is the fundamental issue with many of the ways we try and build the world of the sustainable future, and why enemies of common sense and reason are able to coax so many to their side. You can warn all you want about water wars and climate catastrophe, but why should any of those I’ve already mentioned care? The very things that will save the world will destroy there’s. The truth is this: You cannot superimpose your It relationship onto your opposites It relationship.

What’s the answer? Maybe, or maybe not, the I-Thou. What’s that? a topic for the next blog post. I need to read more of the book and figure out what in god’s name he’s actually saying.