Category Archives: Action Projects

A Reflection of My Reflection

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A Reflection of My Reflection

These past ten weeks have been quite fruitful and interesting as we touch on the different contents of the class.  I found the class to be interesting even before I registered for it. I was curious to learn and understand how our perception of death affects our society and our surrounding. In my culture death is scared and a taboo and its not a common topic that is touched on especially among young people. The class gave me the courage to participate and listen to the different discussions and perspectives about death and how it connects to our societies and cultures.

My group and action project were the highlight of the class. I was able to partner with the most amazing and hardworking people all quarter. The group action project we choose to participate in was with WASHPIRG, and we partnered with them on their “Beyond Plastic” campaign. Our project was focus on collaborating with greater community to reduce plastic waste, educate our peers on the devastating effects of plastic on the environment, and analyzing and evaluating the course content of the class to the real time human activities and experiences. WASHPIRG is one of the first independent activist organizations created by UW student back in 1976 to address and advocate for issues affecting students in higher education such as college affordability, environmental safety etc. One of the highlights of our project with WASHPIRG was our neighborhood clean-ups. We helped clean the U-district area to help reduce to plastic waste in the area. We were inspired by the Albatross documentary to execute our clean-up project with a cause to protect vulnerable species from plastic waste created by human activity, and to help do our part in protecting the ecosystem. Through our observation of plastic waste on campus, we were reminded of the negative impact of humans on the environment and beautiful living beings such as The Albatross movie.

Additionally, the contemplative practices were super helpful for me in the class. The quarter was very intense and the practices really helped in easing the tension a little bit. As a group we thought the contemplative practices will further help us to bond even more if we incorporated them in our group project routine. One of our group members was very helpful in leading the contemplative practices by reading out load poems and reflecting on how we were feeling. The poem that resonated to us the most was the one we shared with the class on our group presentation: “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now” by Matthew Olzmann. All in all I had a great learning experience in the class and will definitely relate the contents of the class as I continue to grow and live my life.

Course Synthesis: Leaning Into Fear

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I almost dropped this course a few times. Especially towards the beginning, it was deeply uncomfortable for me to spend such long periods of time thinking about death, dying, and environmental destruction. I was often overwhelmed by feelings of impending doom and sorrow.

And this was how I initially felt about my action project as well. Although I had worked somewhat with the Animal Rights Initiative before, the extensive research we were tasked with opened my eyes to the sheer scale of animal suffering on this planet. It was already painful for me to think about the plights of suffering humans. And, by intentionally expanding my circle of empathy to the roughly 60 billion land animals raised in factory farms each year, that pain greatly increased. It was depressing and infuriating to spend so much time doing research on such mass amounts of suffering. I became angry and disillusioned with the way in which society tolerated these mass amounts of violence. As author Timothy Pachirat writes in “Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse,” an interview with Avi Solomon, the globally affluent live in a system that requires the “active complicity in forms of exploitation and violence.”

However, I soon found calm in the contemplative practices. In these, I was purposefully leaning into the fear I felt instead of shying away from it. I learned to accept and embrace my anxiety, which in turn, calmed me. I experienced similar feelings of catharsis in the advocacy involved in my action project. Even though the problem of industrialized animal agriculture is unfathomably large, it felt good to have a part in helping address it, especially because I was working in a team of others who cared. Throughout the course, those two coping strategies became my lifeline while wading through difficult course content and dealing with death in my own life.

This image is a draft of the Animal Rights Initiative logo, which depicts a group of volunteers passing out literature on the animal rights and welfare movements. The underlaid image of the volunteers brings me so much joy because I think it encapsulates the feeling I had working with my group in the action project. It is a beautiful feeling to work on a team of passionate people, even against a seemingly insurmountable problem.

The Not So End of a Journey

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These past few weeks have been full of challenges, but also growth has emerged. Growth in knowledge and awareness. This quarter has flown by but this journey we collectively experienced is something that will live on. My group’s action project surrounding Terror Management was an enlightening experience. Being able to conduct a similar study of what the authors in The Worm at the Core but making it our own by using our own community and tying our own mortality to death in the Anthropocene was a great first-hand experience.

Our action project was the highlight of the quarter. It presented many challenges, but at the end of the day presented a piece of work that I believe was engaging and beneficial to the UW community. Even though I and my group were the ones that came up with the questions that were asked I found myself noticing, a different emotional response once hearing everyone’s answers. This video interview not only opened people’s awareness of their mortality intertwined with climate change but also mine in a deeper sense. It was exciting to hear everyone’s responses even on such a heavy topic as death. There were a lot of inspirational statements made that gave me a sense of hope. Hearing from people in my community about some of their actions in terms of achieving sustainability within their own lives was also intriguing. It reinforced my active hope and belief that everyone has their own way of being sustainably, but collectively we can make changes in collectively achieving sustainability on higher levels.

Overall, this class wasn’t as disheartening, or dreary as expected. I see myself consciously thinking in new ways about my mortality and death in the Anthropocene, that I wouldn’t have foreseen. Personal decisions such as, if I want to bare children or be turned into the soil instead of being put in a casket are all thoughts that have emerged from the material in this course. The fear of death is less prevalent as I continue to learn to connect myself, to the universe in a way that gives hope to future generations and our planet.

Terror Management Theory and the Afterlife – BahaiTeachings.org

 

Hope in Life and Death

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My group and I were paired with the University of Washington WashPIRG chapter. We were able to dedicate our project to their – Break Free From Plastics Campaign. Navigating our action project while also engaging in the course material, helped my group and I to determine what exactly we wanted to get out of our project and how we would achieve that. We centered our project around holding multiple clean-ups near the University District. We felt as if the area itself was so highly targeted for littering due to how many students and people populate this area. By taking the time to pick each piece of trash up, I felt frustrated and reminded that collectively we all contribute to the waste we see before our eyes. My group and I felt that the implementation of contemplative practices would help us to feel more grounded and in tune with ourselves and the project we took on. 

For our group, these practices were experiments at first. We had just met in person for the first time and were asked to sit, breathe, and feel the weight of the world upon our shoulders. However, in the end, we all benefited from taking this time and feeling this shared sense of responsibility and collective action towards change. Throughout this course, I personally struggled with discussing the ecology of death. I had never before faced head-on my feelings and acceptance of death. It was until I had read Joan Halifax, Being with Dying, that discussing this topic became easier to wrap my mind around. She recalls that “accepting impermanence and our shared mortality requires loosening the story knot: letting go of our concepts, ideas, and expectations around how we think dying ought to be.” I felt so strongly tied to the idea that I should avoid discussing death, that I myself was afraid to accept that change is inevitable. 

And through this group project, I could share in the mortality of others, and see firsthand the waste we have accumulated in our neighborhoods. Our fear of death should be intertwined with the ecological crises we face in the near future. Instead of choosing to build characters and cultures that shield ourselves from our helplessness, we should consciously choose to break this cycle and be driven to protect what is left of this Earth. 

Final Reflection of This Journey!

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What I learned during the quarter is more of the details of the Anthropocene and the aspects of death as a big concept to politics, society, and the future. I have learned more about the idea of death and realized how society utilizes death and immorality as a personal gain and a political gain. For example, the food and the laws on death and immortality projects. The one that I learned the most is how the concept of ecology and the earth is dying due to the innovations of humans. How everything we do has a feedback loop of systems. And the hardest lesson from this class that I learned is to accept our death and the earth is dying. Beforehand, I always thought death and the end of everything shrugged off negative things as “oh, we are changing for the better.” But that whole concept was not the truth, and I faced it. Besides cultural differences or religious differences, we are dying, and the earth is dying. As for the project itself, I learned that having your trauma can overshadow the more considerable collective trauma but adversely affects individuals. Therefore, many conflicts within our personal lives can intertwine with more significant aspects with people like climate change or covid.

What I gave in my action projects was my experience with trauma and relating it to collective trauma and the aspects of factors that can connect to a collective trauma like racial injustice and personal hardships related to trauma. As for the class, I will be honest and say that I wish I gave frank discussions, but the topic of death in this class hits home to me because I lost someone this year, so in a way, it was terrible timing. But I tried my best to participate in the zoom chat discussions on my thoughts and experiences. 

How does this whole experience relate to ecology, death, and the Anthropocene? The class helped me connect with my death and others, the realization of the immortality project discussions. Those discussions made my peace with death instead of fearing the concept and the afterlife due to religious constraints.

I can take away from this class because I accepted Anthropocene and death. It was a challenging course for me with the readings and the discussion, but I realize this was a great class to learn from and change perspectives.

The Interconnectedness of Political Ecology: Utopia, Terror Management Theory, and Being Deeper in the Moment

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In working on the action projects, it was a curious challenge and quite an interesting experience trying to come up with an ideal utopia. We spent so much time brainstorming and discussing various ideas—which often clashed with each other. Eventually, we choose to make our own utopian concepts. That way, we could better establish simpler utopias, that later would become more complex through the synthesis of our utopias. My utopia, in particular, inspired me to delve deeper into the idea that we, as a society, should have a greater emphasis on the arts and culture rather than economic gain. How we could also change our relation to the planet through the Half-Earth Project, making half the Earth protected in the form of national parks and protected regions, including the sea. And through the lens of political ecology, we can see how our interrelation with the Earth’s systems echos with similarity to how we interact in society. Whereby our capitalist desires are destroying the planet, separating what is useful and not, similar to how we treat people who do not partake in the capitalist system, labeling them as poor, crazy, or not worth our care. 

In thinking back about this class, I had skimmed over a key aspect of the class, “Death.” I had learned about terror management theory, never imagining that our conscious and unconscious fear of death could affect every facet of our lives. How it fuels capitalism and nationalism, or creates desires for literal and symbolic immortality. Personally, I don’t think terror management theory changes my personal outlook of the world that much, but I do believe that it changes my political perspective, and how I view the interactions and decisions of the people I hope to one day win over. 

Looking back to my first blog post, I had desired to have a better understanding of why the issues of the Anthropocene were important and worth my attention. And honestly, I didn’t know if this class would be able to answer that desire. But it was—through a process I was initially quite resistant to: the contemplative practice. After a few of these practices, I began to realize that living in the moment is one thing, but striving to live further and deeper into the moment is another. They showed me how to care for all the Earth’s systems being affected by the Anthropocene, beyond just climate change. 

https://media.itsnicethat.com/images/nat_geo_double_cover.width-1440_SKNGANTs5lcnrGZm.jpg

The Crisis of Complacency

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  I find the plethora of plastics in our surrounding environment ironic. We as humans crave significance, we want people to remember who we were and what we did. This is how we cope with fear and death. Yet, many people choose to disregard the current climate crisis and the buildup of waste that surrounds us. Throughout this course, I have been reflecting on the impact I hope to have on the world. This course has taught me that I play a vital role in the earth system, and my action project allowed me to explore what this role means. I believe that recognizing and accepting the important role we possess as humans in The Anthropocene is key to mitigating the potentially horrific impacts of climate change.

The work of my Action Project allowed me to feel a deeper connection to the earth. For our Action Project, my group worked with WASHPIRG and organized various plastic cleanups around campus. To connect more deeply to the earth, my group chose to engage in a contemplative practice and read a poem prior to our cleanups. This practice allowed me to bring myself back to the present moment and reflect on the gratitude I have for the earth and my group mates. I was able to stop and appreciate the feeling of sunshine on my face and grass beneath my feet. As I sat with my group mates and the earth, one specific quote from the poem “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years From Now” struck a chord. It states, “it must seem like we sought to leave you nothing but benzene, mercury, the stomachs of seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic.” I want to leave our future generation with the beautiful earth I have gotten to experience, not a mess they must clean up. 

Through the work of my Action Project, I discovered how easy it is to reconnect with nature. This reconnection greatly impacted my perspective on the potential impact we as humans can have on the earth. We can leave future generations with a better earth, but we must first accept the important role we hold as humans living in The Anthropocene. 

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2019/december/humans-are-causing-life-on-earth-to-vanish.html
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2019/08/31/commentary/world-commentary/humans-will-remembered-mess/

Power-With: Citizenship in the Anthropocene

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The most impactful theme for me this quarter has been practicing new ways of thinking. Engaging with both the action project and course material, contemplative practices led me to a more relational point of view, which helped me to manage feelings of frustration or stagnation. When I perceive disfunction, my response is more effective when I can let go of the impulse to “overcome” and instead consider how I want to relate to a challenge. Thinking in systems, I can develop a stronger sense of identity as a citizen to find inspiration rather than depletion in the face of the Anthropocene.

My group’s project was focused on the concept of collective climate trauma. In reviewing the literature on the topic, I noticed a consensus among the authors on the importance of reflective witnessing in one form or another. Rather than overcoming or moving beyond the trauma, authors emphasized practices designed to honor and reflect upon it- thereby opening space for new collective stories in relation to the traumatizing phenomena. This reminded me of an argument presented in The Worm at the Core ­­– human beings cannot overcome the terror of death, so should instead remain mindful of how it impacts our lives (221). In both cases, as with my own experience in the class, there is a chance for renewed energy through a relational reframing.

In Active Hope, Macy and Johnstone parallel this with their distinction between “power-over” and “power-with” (106-108). While the exercise of “power-over” is a zero-sum resource game, “power-with” is a model wherein power is a practice, generated by action in relationships. Instinctively, I can see this “power-with” when I imagine an ecosystem, but it has been harder to conceive of in political systems. As an individual, grief and frustration regarding the Anthropocene deplete me, and “overcoming” the emotions, much less the global phenomenon, feels impossible.

With practice, I can lean into a “power-with” identity, working with the emotions and as a citizen – (a node in a human-system response) to guide my orientation to anthropogenic crisis. In this framing, a citizen mindset provides an opportunity to respond to Death and the Anthropocene from a place of diffuse and renewable strength. I look forward to a “power-with” relationship between the human and natural world, and the reciprocal healing that will facilitate. I am grateful for the tools this course has provided to support that vision.

Image source: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2020/01/22/life-as-an-emergent-property-and-rocks/

Hope and Action

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Though our time frame and scale were limited, my group’s action project gave me insight into the process of collective deliberation and action and it inspired me to dream of a healthier world. The challenge of coordinating our schedules to meet outside of class and the extra time it took to create plans for a project which we were all excited about, rather than making decisions autonomously, gave me a small taste of what it would be like to organize action in a larger group. Though consensus-seeking and cooperation are fulfilling, I have a better understanding now of why it is so challenging to organize people around issues like sustainability and climate justice. Still, this did not dash my hopes for a movement towards a society with less environmental impact. In fact, my group’s action project combined with readings like Active Hope made me want to adopt a more optimistic and grateful attitude. Like the authors of Active Hope, I believe that this type of mindset will help us find peace in the face of our mortality; and following the tenets of terror management theory and the arguments Oelschlager presents in “History, Ecology, and the Denial of Death,” this peace would help us lessen our environmental impact (as we would not feel so compelled to dominate the Earth) and to be more open-minded towards people with different belief systems, making our interpersonal relationships healthier.

I leave our course content and my group’s action project with the takeaway that rekindling community relationships will be an important factor in our ability to respond effectively to the ecological destruction we are causing. In a less individualistic society, people will feel more secure and grateful, and they will feel more responsible for people other than themselves. This will motivate people to change their individual behaviors to be more sustainable. Also, scaling down our industries and supply chains, giving greater support to local small operations, would reduce emissions. It would also reduce consumption and cultivate a more circular economy overall because people would be more careful with their resources if they were in close proximity to both the “inputs” (plants, animals, etc) consumed and the waste generated by their consumption.

Though our generation may be less religious, terror management still influences our choices. We can turn that into positive action. Let’s take advantage of this peak of systemic unsustainability to make a change.

It was hard to choose a photo that represented everything I talked about here, but I settled on this image of a piece of a sustainable city. I love the idea of community gardens for several reasons–to scale down the food supply chain, to provide a space for community interactions (and just a place to be in public for free), and to bring us nearer to the cycle of life and death.

Utopian societies and symbolic immortality

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The Worm at the Core discusses symbolic immortality as an aspect of terror management. When confronted with the knowledge that they will one day dies, one of the methods individuals use to mitigate the resultant terror is to attempt to either construct something they consider part of their identity which will outlive them or integrate themselves into a larger system and to integrate this system into their identity.

If one were to examine the actions of Otto von Bismarck, his actions in pursuit of establishing a unified German nation could be viewed as a form of symbolic immortality pursued resultant of his interpretation of Russia as an existential threat to the German states, and thereby part of his identity. In this sense, Bismarck wanted Germany, as a nation and a culture, to outlive him.

With this understanding of symbolic immortality, it is easy to interpret the Utopian Futures project as strongly related to symbolic immortality. Within the construction of a society unhindered by economic, moral, strategic, and military issues/interests, the components of that society emphasized withing the group are likely the aspects of society we would seek to utilize as a symbolic immortality project. Whether by establishing a more efficient and efficacious method of enforcing social norms or establishing equitable access to resources, these are aspects of society which, though they may not be considered possible to implement, are aspects of our individual utopianism we would see outlive us.

Given the limited time available for the action project presentations, it was not feasible to include more than a handful of the elements we consider essential to a utopia. Whether selected because we viewed them as the most important, whether personally or to our imagined society, or the most feasible, re-examination of our choices is doubtless to lead to introspective analysis of what we consider important and how we determine this worth. What, for instance, does it reveal about us if we choose to present a normative shift away from the use of relative gains as a metric of benefit instead of addressing a source of inequality such as the protectionism within trade, which, unaddressed, may continue to affect our imagined society?

Otto von Bismarck-Schönhausen after his resignation in 1890