Author Archives: medhag

Remembering Political Ecology

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As I attempted to write my final paper, I was struck by the sheer difficulty; never once in my time at UW had I created five full drafts just to scrap them all. It felt like there was no way I could analyze all the aspects, conversations, and reflections I wished to in one comprehensive paper. The sheer complexity of the takeaways this class has provided me with made synthesizing them into essay feel impossible. In fact, the sheer frustration I felt in trying led me to abandon the essay in favor of completing the blog post multiple times, only for me to hit the same wall that I had hit in attempting to write my essay. 

After pacing around my living room and two sleepless nights, I’m still unsure whether my essay does justice to the takeaways I gained from this class. But I am sure that it does justice in expressing how impactful my action project was to me.

My group’s action project was the culmination of our work with the ICA, a group at the UW dedicated to creating institutional climate change. In the beginning, the minimal guidance and emphasis on creativity by our NGO representative, Peter, left me grappling with how I wanted to participate in creating institutional climate change or how I could even contribute to it.

At the time, I was struggling much in the same way as I was this week to find a way to synthesize what we were learning in class into something meaningful I could contribute. Ultimately it was through our group’s interactions with and research into the Board of Regents that it became obvious to us how pervasive systems such as capitalism were in the determination of the Board’s decisions. Through discussion in class concerning how capitalism was based on colonialism, we knew that by not addressing climate justice as part of the ICA attempts to change UW’s impact on the climate crisis, we were failing to create comprehensive change. Thus “Decolonizing Climate Change” was born. 

“Decolonizing Climate Change” was as much an effort to highlight the need for understanding the climate crisis as an issue of climate change as it was in implementing the principles of political ecology. Something that, despite being within our course title, has received little attention but provides an important perspective in understanding justice in conversation with the environment.

A Critique of Contemplative Practices in Academia

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Often when participating in our class’s contemplative practices, I find myself in a state of dissonance. For me participating in guided contemplative practices feels alienating. Through reflection and research concerning contemplative practices, I sought to understand why contemplative exercises feel so foreign and distasteful to me. In organizing my research and personal opinions concerning contemplative practices in academia, I will first break down how contemplative practices are a form of cultural appropriation and exploitation and then parse through the nuances in my perspective on contemplative practices in education. 

Contemplative practices in western education systems are forms of cultural appropriation of Asian religion, culture, and spirituality from Buddhist and Hindu philosophies (Morgan, 2015). However, these contemplative practices in the west have very little in common with these longstanding religious, spiritual, and cultural practices. Rather, they are an imitation that redesigns and capitalizes upon these concepts for “use in Western settings with individuals who may have little interest in Buddhist belief systems or traditions.” (Baer & Huss, 2008, p.123). Contemplative practices, as they are used in western educational systems, simply “reflect the cultural appropriation in the form of exploitation since the benefits to the appropriators are put above the harms caused to the community from whom the knowledge is taken [from]”  (Lalonde, 2018).  And while it may be the case that certain practices “may appear to be self-evidently good and their underlying assumptions obviously true (Brown, 2019)”, I argue that these assumptions are not necessarily inherently good or true, as they are the result of cultural conditioning and conflicts with worldviews that are not normed for white communities, and therefore fail to be true or good from specifically for people of color (Black, 2017). Moreover, when analyzing what contemplative practices are adopted by western societies, it is worth noting that western society has systematically chosen only to practice contemplation in a method that aligns with their worldview. Contemplative practices have existed in BIPOC communities for centuries, “but the ideology of white supremacy has rendered them inferior to European knowledge systems” (Mehta & Talwar, 2022). Thus, in perpetuating contemplative practices that appropriate Asian culture in a way that caters to the western worldview, contemplative practices fail to be truly contemplative and ultimately are simply perpetuating a thinly veiled western worldview.  

Despite my distaste for contemplative practices in academia and dissonance when attempting to participate in these practices, I believe that the idea of incorporating mindfulness into academia is not inherently wrong or bad. I believe that if mindfulness or contemplation is introduced into a classroom setting, individuals should be allowed to choose their own form of mindfulness or reflection and should not be guided through the experience. Cultural imperialism in education, specifically when education attempts to parse through the harm that colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation have had on the degradation of the planet, has no place being part of the discussion or given any weight.

 

References: 

Mehta, Naisargi (Ness) and Talwar, Gitika (2022) “Recognizing Roots and Not Just Leaves: The Use of Integrative Mindfulness in Education, Research, and Practice,” Psychology from the Margins: Vol. 4, Article 6. 

Morgan, Patricia. (2015). A Brief History of the Current Reemergence of Contemplative Education. Journal of Transformative Education. 13. 197-218. 10.1177/1541344614564875.

Brown, Candy  Gunther. “Why I Do Not Use Contemplative Pedagogy in the Public University Classroom.” Why I Do Not Use Contemplative Pedagogy in the Public University Classroom | Religious Studies News, 18 June 2019, https://rsn.aarweb.org/spotlight-on/teaching/contemplative-pedagogy/why-i-do-not-use-contemplative-pedagogy-public-university-classroom.

Death, Institutions, Capitalism, and Climate Change

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This week in class we began with a reading of James Rowe’s article “Is a Fear of Death at the Heart of Capitalism?”. The article reflects and derives its thesis from Ernest Brecker’s work. Brecker theorized that humans act reactively to their mortality in the sense that they create structures and cultures that allow them to redirect their fear of their own death or the feelings of impermanence and smallness that accompany their understanding of death. The fear that our death is inevitable and thus out of our control leads us, as a species, to try to create structures that we feel can immortalize us. This leads to us creating systems such as capitalism allows us to determine a way to value one’s existence in a tangible way. These systems allow us to act to win within these systems in order to immortalize ourselves in these assumably immortal structures. Thus, such structures have contributed to the incredible innovation but also to the destabilization of the conditions needed to allow life to flourish. Rowe believes that the solution to reconstructing capitalism and other such detrimental systems is by understanding and changing how our fears of death enforce our desire for permanence in the form of these institutions. Through discussion concerning these pieces, I find that though there is value in this approach in the long run it doesn’t seem to address any of the problems we face in the short term, specifically that of our climate crisis. However, a potentially more suitable solution for our current situation is one that Mark Hertsgaard posits in his piece the God Species. Hertsgaard claims that humans should posit that we should also understand our role in death and rather than use that to shift the foundations of our destructive activities refine them with our current capabilities that though the byproduct of destructive practices gives us a godlike power to positively shift or minimize our impact on our planet to sustain our current systems simply not at the cost of the planet. Ultimately, I believe that the idea of explaining these generally exploitative and oppressive systems, as a result of our discordant relationship with death as a species, does very little in changing the very damning impact of them on the state of our planet. Realistically if we want to address the climate crisis we must question if we have the time to reconstruct institutions that will then adequately address the pressing crises we face now or whether we must learn to work within the constraints of our current institutions.

The false choice between capitalism and saving the planetPhoto: David Cliff / NurPhoto via Getty Images- The general discontentment with systems such as capitalism by climate activists Climate Change And Global Pollution To Be Discussed At Copenhagen SummitJANSCHWALDE, GERMANY – NOVEMBER 24: A loan wind turbine spins as exhaust plumes from cooling towers at the Jaenschwalde lignite coal-fired power station, which is owned by Vatenfall, on November 24, 2009 in Janschwalde, Germany. The CO2 emission will be one top of the agenda and will be discussed at the summit in December in Copenhagen. (Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images)

 

Understanding Death and the Anthropocene

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Death has long been the focus and scope we as a species have used to frame how we live. Most humans understand death as something inevitable, ultimately no matter what action we take we will all be faced with the same fate. I have always wondered what the true impact of that understanding means. How has the very understanding that we will one day cease to exist shaped our species and why has it led us to this point?

It’s hard to understand how we as humans following our innate desire and instinct to survive created some of the most complex and interwoven systems and societies that this planet has ever known and even harder to understand how our relationship to death impacted our path as a species. Yet, it’s intriguing to think that the very drive to survive that once allowed us to embark on the path of creating these complex civilizations has resulted in us creating civilizations that are ultimately risking the future of our survival as a species. If civilization was our response to death then why is it that we have allowed our civilizations to become so dangerous to our own survival?

Geologists and social scientists have dubbed this era of civilization in which humans have the ability to threaten their own existence as the Anthropocene. The term attempts to express that the earth itself has entered a new geological era under the influence of humans with humans being the driving force of change in the environment. With the introduction of this term has come a new way of studying human society, Systems Thinking. Systems thinking seeks to understand the impact of humans on the earth and how this has ultimately impacted humans and how that has shifted the way naturally occurring phenomena have changed, including death.

Perhaps the most profound statement I came across while trying to grasp how Anthropocene relates to death comes from author Roy Scranton who writes on learning to die in the Anthropocene. He claims that perhaps our civilization is already dead. This is an interesting concept perhaps we as a society has begun to understand our systems and civilizations as an intrinsic part of our existence and as such we insist that they must continue to exist so long as we as do and maybe that is where we as a species went wrong. Perhaps moving forward our species may learn to live with death rather than in opposition to it.characteristic vegetation pattern following high-severity fire in the Klamath region Despite the tree’s the pillars of a forest dying within the forest, the new regrowth is healthy and able to use the nutrients to grow a new forest

(https://nationalzoo.si.edu/news/smithsonian-scientists-examine-impact-high-severity-fires-conifer-forests)