Author Archives: kchen754

final blog post- Action project and course synthesis

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My primary takeaways from this course— while the enormity of the political ecology of death can be overwhelming and panic-inducing to contemplate, through community and following visionary paths, we can build a path forward for a future that includes all of us, starting with the communities most impacted by climate catastrophe. 

My group’s action project was monitoring the Institutional Climate Action (ICA)’s Divest from Fossil Fuels campaign for the UW.  The ICA’s divestment campaign was created after years of student-led efforts to push the UW Board of Regents and the UW Investment Management Company (UWINCO) to divest UW’s endowment from fossil fuels investment. For this project, I reviewed all of the financial documents made available through the Board of Regents agenda notes for the past year’s meetings, and made extensive notes, which were used to draft an email to the Board of Regents and UWINCO for further clarifications on their intentions for divestment following the passage of the ICA’s resolution by the Board. Medha and I were also responsible for the creation of the Decolonizing Climate Justice project, and I created the social media posts, included in the presentation recording.  As for the question— Are you inspired about the work you did? — I would say yes, but with the caveat that it is not really about me. I am proud of my creations, especially the social media posts about water conditions in Flint and currently, in Jackson, Mississippi, because it speaks to the urgency— what is conspicuously absent in mainstream conversations in the global north— about access to clean drinking water and plastic sustainability in this country. We need to apply a systems-thinking approach to this issue. Jackson is happening right now, and the only people I see talking about it online are those who are directly impacted, and they are Black and brown. The media neglect is another glaring piece of evidence that the organized abandonment of poor Black and brown communities in the U.S. is not only at the hands of the fiscal state, but also from the so-called movements for climate equity. Of course, my contribution is only a very small one. But I hope that future students can understand the importance and urgency of carving out spaces for these conversations, even if it means going against the grain of the academic culture they find themselves in. 

Systems thinking- From The Hunger Project. What if we applied this more holistically, to the water crisis in Jackson?

JACKSON, MS



A Neocolonial Critique of Contemplative Practices

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I do not feel that the contemplative practices in this class result in cognitive, emotional, and somatic self-awareness. I think taking a moment to rest in class is beneficial for the anti-capitalist refusal of grind-culture in academics, but not much beyond giving our eyes a much-needed break from sensory stimuli. 

Contemplative and mindfulness practices are often misinterpreted to be universal in essence. As Maria Ishikawa argues in her article, “Mindfulness in Western Contexts Perpetuates Oppressive Realities for Minority Cultures: The Consequences of Cultural Appropriation”, “knowledge appropriation, in the case of mindfulness practices of North American societies, fails to recognize the original and specific cultural purposes of mindfulness.” Beyond this, I think that a bare-bones acknowledgement of Buddhism, does not equate true recognition of the ways in which knowledge appropriation treats culturally-specific knowledge as terra nullius, or land without ownership and therefore available to be claimed and taken. 

Terra nullius can be extended to culturally specific practices. Knowledge that does not fall into western conceptualizations of productive or scientifically-sound reasoning is inherently invaluable, until western, or dominant forms of knowledge, add value to it through ‘modernization’, secularization, and other forms of cultural extraction and abstraction. As Ishikawa writes, “individualized mindfulness practices as appropriated by the dominant cultures of North America is a manifestation of knowledge as terra nullius because these practices are not presented as ‘of value’ in their original collectivist and holistic purpose”. Cultural concepts of who we are in connection to the surrounding world, like Daoist practices, are abstracted and appropriated to their symbols (yin-yang), which are capitalized upon and used for t-shirt logos and computer avatars. ‘Mindfulness’ is not an individualistic, momentary, or a periodic practice, as misinterpreted by the west. I disagree with the assumption that we can ‘become present’ and practice contemplative practices to fulfill some sort of purpose or outcome. As Suzuki Shunryu wrote in his book Zen Mind, “These forms are not a means of obtaining the right state of mind […] when you try to attain something, your mind starts to wander about somewhere else. When you do not try to attain anything, you have your own body and mind right here.”



“When We Feel Inadequate, We Consume the World Around Us Rapaciously”

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I agree with James Rowe’s article connecting terror management to capitalism’s endless consumption. When reminded of our temporariness, we double-down on our worldviews for some sort of safe purchase. If the pursuit of self-esteem defined by a Western capitalist worldview is conspicuous-consumption and power necessitated by the disenfranchisement and theft of resources from as many as possible, then the pursuit of symbolic immortality through the mythologization of endless wealth is clearly a reaction to the terror of mortality. 

But I don’t think that capitalistic greed and attempts to prove our own supremacy to ourselves— whether through cultural/racial supremacy or the supremacy of the human race— is the only possibility. It’s a far more human response (it’s much more appealing to our collective humanity) to recognize the sacredness of life and embrace radical empathy as a reaction to the terror of death. My disagreement with Solomon et. al’s statement that “we cling to our culture’s […]rituals to buttress our view of human life as uniquely significant and eternal” is summed up by Rowe— “but what if ritual [is] instead vital technology that has historically allowed some cultures to befriend death and impermanence?” Attaining symbolic immortality by gaining “imagined control” over death isn’t a universal pattern of thinking. 

Concerning Peck and Pachirat’s discussion of the ethics of animal consumption, I think the problem lies in the mass overconsumption of meat, and the wasteful ways Western societies package/discard meat and pathologize ways of meat-eating that use the whole animal, including the ‘undesirable’ bits. Peck completely misses a fundamental critique of Thoreau’s words—“I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized”. It’s the perfect ideological predecessor of evangelical white veganism, those who have colonized the moral high ground and have no problem ignoring the conditions of labor exploitation and Indigenous land dispossession needed for their “ethical” consumption. Thoreau lived an individualistic fantasy, completely removing himself from the genocide, land theft, and stolen labor producing his ‘secluded’ comforts. The sequestration of violence is needed to produce Thoreau’s Walden— that legacy continues in the modern-day slaughterhouse, where the “mechanisms of distance, concealment, and surveillance” neutralize and routinize violence.

Reframing the Climate Issue

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I’m taking this class with the firm belief that climate change, and by extension, climate justice, are inseparable from capitalism and the legacy of colonial and imperialist resource extraction. 

The Anthropocene documentary we watched in class got me thinking about the role of China as an eco-development state, coined by editors of the book Greening East Asia (Esarey et. al). Regions in East Asia are notorious for being some of the most polluted in the world, yet, paradoxically, within the last decade or so, East Asian countries have developed green energy, technology, and conservation, waste management, and urban design efforts at a scale that far surpasses developed Western countries. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that resource extraction has by and large happened within their own countries, so the costs of industrialization are borne by the domestic populations themselves. What would environmental policy look like in Western countries (including Scandinavia) if so much environmental destruction wasn’t externalized onto other parts of the world, or onto marginalized domestic populations?

A group of older Chinese ladies practicing taichi amidst heavy air pollution

I thought that the documentary presented a complicated history of Mao’s poor environmental policies as one of the single greatest contributors to climate change in order to attempt to lift the masses out of poverty. What would a documentary that centered Indigenous movements in North America look like? Would it discuss the impact of the near extinction of bison, hunted by white colonizers as part of their ‘Indian Removal Policy’, from 10 million to just over 300 within a couple decades (Phippen, 2021)?

A wall of stacked American bison skulls in the mid-1870s

Ultimate mass extinction might be inevitable unless radical change happens. Honestly, I can’t realistically foresee a timeline in our current reality past 2050, which is in 30 years. Who gets to live and who do the powerful let die? I have to believe that the earth will heal itself eventually, but what will happen between then and the more current future we are headed into?

 

Citations:

  • Bradshaw, S., Richards, J., Kyriacou, S., Gabbay, A., Ostby, M., Cassini, S., Steffen, W. L., Ellis, E., Zalasiewicz, J. A., Revkin, A., McNeil, J., Gonzalez, M. B., Odada, E. O., Vidas, D., Steffen, W. L. (William L. ., & Odada, E. O. (Eric O. (2016). Anthropocene. [Distributed by] Bullfrog Films.
  • Esarey, A., Haddad, M. A., Lewis, J. I., & Harrell, S. (2021). Greening East Asia: The rise of the eco-developmental State. University of Washington Press. 
  • Magazine, S. (2012, July 17). Where the Buffalo no longer roamed. Smithsonian.com. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/ 
  • Meyer, R. (2017, March 21). How climate change covered China in Smog. The Atlantic. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/how-climate-change-covered-china-in-smog/520197/ 
  • Phippen, J. W. (2021, June 7). “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone”. The Atlantic. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/