Category Archives: Group 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.

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.

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/

The Benefits of a Walk in the Park (While the World Ends)

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As humans, we have created remarkable things while simultaneously manufacturing horrors that scar the land itself. Oceans and mountains of garbage will long outlive us. To combat the plastics that plague us, we must feel the connections between us and Earth and each other. Especially, in today’s world, with pandemics and polarization pulling us apart, we must hold on to our humanity.

My group’s action project dealt with the practical and political part of the plastics problem. Working with WashPIRG, we had a petition for people to sign, but my action project group decided that we wanted to get a little more hands-on with our work. To engage our community, we organized two plastics clean-ups around campus, taking paper bags and gloves to the streets for a couple hours at a time to pick up the plastics and other litter we found. By also including people outside of our class on these clean-ups, we were able to introduce the idea of contemplative practices and mindfulness to those who had not previously done it with a leader in a quiet classroom. Trading the hum of the air conditioning system for the breeze and glimpses into strangers’ conversations as we walked by, we reflected on our intentions for the clean-up that day.

Through my reflections, I thought about how in a pandemic, our collective fear has certainly been heightened – this is the largest and most communal death experience I have lived through. Though I have been beyond fortunate not to experience anyone very close to me passing away from Covid-19, the constant news of climbing death tolls has certainly been a weight on my mind. When confronted with the fear of death, people tend to become more insular, more tribal, and more isolated – and I felt those urges as the pandemic polarized public health. But our in-person meetings and connections have encouraged me to reach out more and soften my boundaries, accepting others’ limits and being more open with mine. The only way forwards is together, and my action project has shown me that it is possible to make progress when we connect with each other. Though the fear of disease and death remains a background noise to my daily life, neighborhood walks with bags of trash and sunshine help hold it at bay.

My action project group on one of our clean-ups!