Teacher training -- some thoughts

 

I was just away at a workshop for college educators that plan to use community-based service learning projects in classes and coursework on climate change and water quality issues this coming fall. The sessions were organized by the three northern New England Campus Compact organizations (Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont), using $150,000 provided by the national Environmental Protection Agency. Five Unity College educators attended. It was a good experience and I was pleased with the things I learned and the people I met.

But, as is usual after any intense academic/social experience, my thoughts naturally come to reflect on things, usually beginning with the long drive home that we Unity College educators routinely expect after any conference travel. This "windshield time," one of the unsung benefits of living in rural Maine, making your car a kind of rolling decompression chamber, is very conducive to deeper thinking about just about anything.

Often the object of your reflection when you're driving home after a conference has little to do with the conference material, since the most intense experiences you have when socializing with academics are not necessarily those most directly related to the "official" meeting topic.

(One of these days I'll post or write for this blog or some other venue about how our crazy modern society makes it very difficult to think deeply and independently about just about anything. This, to my mind is one reason for our inability to fix large environmental, social and political problems. I'm currently reading E. P. Thompson's classic The Making of the English Working Class, and remembering, not for the first time, how the workers that led the (original) Reform Movement had occupations that were conducive to thinking for long hours, such as hand-loom weaving. )

In this case my muse was assisted by the fact that my chores on the way home involved visits to no less than three different Unity Amish families, a people who, at least as a community if not as individuals,  do think deeply and independently about lots of things. I was in search of both local, low-carbon building materials for our ongoing passive solar house extension project and some high quality cost-effective hay for our animals this coming winter, and our Amish are good sources for this kind of thing.

(They divested, long ago.)

There's nothing quite like a visit with the Amish to bring you back to the real world of human ecology -- studying how people solve the problems of providing food, water, and shelter. They are so expert in these things, and so adaptive. Of course, their approach blows all the stereotypes most people have about the Amish -- visit a Unity Amish farm and you won't just see plain clothing, horse power and electricity free homes. You'll see nail guns, cordless drills, and electric fences, what is altogether a very creative mix of modern and 19th century technology.

I was successful in both quests, but that's another blog post, or three.

What struck me most of all this time around, what was the main topic of my reflection, as I drove my three-hour drive home and meditated on the conference events, was just how many professional people there are working in environmentally-related areas that really don't yet grasp how damaging climate change is going to be to human economic life-support systems.

How can you live in an otherwise intellectually-rich world, read the newspaper every day, and still not really understand how bad it's going to be? I get why, for instance, a religious, evangelical Texas oil man doesn't understand how bad it's going to be. But I don't get this at all. There must be something like a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "someone else's problem" field involved here.

The other thing I slowly realized is that there has become a movement among climate academics who otherwise do understand the drastic nature of our climate problem to, essentially, sugar-coat the slow catastrophe we're experiencing, because some of our colleagues apparently feel that the "narrative" has become too "apocalyptic" for regular people to "consume."

I was vaguely aware of this movement, associated with what has come to be known as "climate communications" praxis, mostly through regularly reading Andrew Revkin's blog, among other outlets, where the "narrative" is routinely "deconstructed", but the full meaning of this politically correct labeling had never quite hit home before.

In this specific case I found myself, rather surprisingly, the recipient of some mild academic criticism from new colleagues around the conference table for using just such an "apocalyptic narrative", when what I thought I'd done was framed the problem realistically, using the two historical analogies I've propounded in this blog -- the eras of appeasement and emancipation, which I think are helpful to understanding why things are the way they are.

I was, to say the least, a little surprised.

It was very mild criticism, indirect, and quite polite, and I wasn't offended. But it did make me think.

Eventually I realized that this is just a new version of, and new purpose for, old-fashioned leftist-American political correctness.

I'm not now, never have been, and never will be "politically correct." As a British working class ex-serviceman and mechanic, a grumpy old part-hermit who builds his own buildings, fixes his own cars and other technology, raises and slaughters his own animals, and who helps run Maine Search and Rescue, my life routinely includes practical and physical realities, as well as emotional trauma, that run far beyond the normal routine encounters one experiences in the cushioned and closeted world of the middle and upper-middle class American intellectual leftist.

In my life, sick sheep get slaughtered with a 30-30 rifle and buried or cut up with my own hands, chickens get their necks gently wrung with the same pair of hands, while sick humans (who, for instance, kidnap teenage girls) are the subject of what are, essentially, manhunts with my volunteer colleagues on search and rescue. I literally do still have friends and colleagues and students in uniform currently serving in Afghanistan or other places around the world, and I know from personal experience what that might be like. I own and use guns. And some of my most interesting friends and relatives are religious Americans who hate abortion and never use birth control, and despite this I know them well and still love and care for them.

None of this makes me a conservative. Nothing of the sort. I'm more of a throwback, genetically and politically, to older British forms of political thought -- diggers and levelers, round-heads and ranters, covenanters and dissenters. They don't make too many of these types any more, but there used to be a lot of us here in Maine's "Liberty Men" belt.

Consider me a kind of re-enactor, if it helps.

But I do think it makes me a different kind of thinker when it comes to climate change. There's no herd I have to follow.

I'm not afraid to look at what I see coming.

And if my narrative is apocalyptic, well, that's because we're heading for a real sh*t-storm here.

Not an "apocalypse" -- when you labeled my "narrative" as apocalyptic you were using the tried and true technique of politically correct or deconstructivist labeling, which is often a good way to avoid thinking, by separating acceptable opinion from unacceptable ones using subjective but-agreed upon political categories, a sort of herd mentality, and in much the same way that we use similar language labeling in the political debate over gun control or abortion.

Both sides do this. This is why we have a "marriage equality" movement versus a "gay agenda," or "pro-choice" versus "pro life."

In my case, apocalypse bad, two legs good.

Perhaps you were hoping I'd see the light and agree.

But, respectfully, I don't.

This is going to be bad, in fact it already is bad, and we need to explain to people just how bad it's going to be. We owe them that much respect. To do otherwise is to take away power, not give it to them.

And, in any case, the label is off-base.

If you read the thinking and writing I've done in this area, much of which is published on this blog, particularly in the Annex, you'll see that I don't think this is an apocalypse.

I think it's a very bad problem and a lot of bad things are going to happen, mostly to poorer, browner people elsewhere on the planet, but also to Americans caught in hurricanes, tornadoes and snowstorms, forced off farms or out of homes.

I think we need to tell it like it is, so that when the time comes, we're more ready than we otherwise may be, and so we become willing to give up on some of our middle-class values earlier and actually get out there and solve the problem, mostly, simply, by using less fossil fuel and more renewable energy (which is where those grumpy mechanics and home insulators come in to the picture).

The argument for removing "apocalyptic" language from the "narrative" is of course that people just don't want to listen to such a narrative and so political messages about climate change can't be successfully transmitted. But I think that notion assumes that we're looking at a normal environmentalist kind of project here, like saving the whales or protecting the wilderness, the kind of manageable problem where we just have to get the right message out there -- the right advertisment on the right TV show, or the right book at the right time, find another Rachel Carson or Iron-Eyes Cody, talk to the right politician at the right moment, and so on.

But we're not looking at a normal kind of environmental project here. We're looking at an epoch-changing event, that has the potential to sweep away large chunks of society as we know it. Including the environmental movement as we know it. We're going to get one or two or three degrees of global annual average temperature change and six to ten feet of sea-level rise by 2100 more or less whatever we do. We have to adapt to that. And we have to reduce emissions at the same time that we adapt so we don't get another six degrees and six meters the following century.

This is not an apocalypse. But it is very, very bad.

In fact, the only way we may get to keep the current environmental movement as-it-is, is if we are suddenly and unexpectedly successful in one of the "hail Mary" energy technology research projects currently underway (and underfunded), or if the divestment movement proceeds even faster than it is doing, accompanied by a vast program of renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Most importantly, we have to give up on those fossil fuel dividends.

We have to divest.

I like the cover of this summer's Unity College magazine:

No change. No future.