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Measures such as ‘ethical AI’ and ‘good data’ will not bring about social justice, end racial capitalism or forestall climate disaster. How to channel discontent and counter-hegemony into an actual transfer of power in the late platform age?
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This chapter examines some of the challenges of unlearning anthropocentrism - i.e. the deep-seated cultural, psychological and enacted prejudices of human specialness - in nature-based early childhood education programs. We begin with a critical exploration of recent trends in environmental philosophy and the conservation sciences that seek to move beyond the so-called archaic notions of “wilderness” and “nature” towards more managerial models of human dominion over planetary “ecosystem services.” We suggest the trouble with these discursive moves is that they shirk from the courageous conversations required from environmental education in a time of ecological emergency. We conclude by drawing on research at nature-based schools in the Netherlands and Canada to illustrate the tenacity of anthropocentric “common-sense” and suggest the beginnings of pedagogy of childhoodnatures guided by notions of rewilding and ecological humility. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_40-1 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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The installation presents our ongoing investigation of feral ways of knowing, being, and living-with diverse more-than-human ecologies. On display are feral data artifacts such as woven sashes, multispecies tattoos, short dérive films, and an eel trap, all which speak of environmental knowledge and cosmologies in various more-than-human habitats including Colombian chagras, Bohemian forest, Croatian wetlands, and the Gunditjmara Country. Participants are invited to spend time with the artifacts and delve into the stories – of feral relationships and care as well as power and structural inequalities – that they weave together.
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The first part of this paper provides a series of conceptual critiques to illustrate how the recent move to inaugurate a “post-nature” world works to vindicate anthropocentric perspectives and a techno-managerial approach to the environmental crisis. We contend with this premise and suggest that troubling nature has profound implications for education. In the second part, we provide case studies from nature-based programs in The Netherlands and Canada to demonstrate how anthropocentric thinking can be reinscribed even as we work towards “sustainability”. Despite the tenacity of human hubris and the advent of the Anthropocene, we suggest these troubled times are also rich with emerging “post-anthropocentric” perspectives and practices. As such we offer “rewilding” as a means to think about education that moves beyond the romantic vestiges of “Nature” without lapsing into delusions of human exceptionalism. http://dx.doi.org/10.13135/2384-8677/2334 https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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Biodiversity, including entire habitats and ecosystems, is recognized to be of great social and economic value. Conserving biodiversity has therefore become a task of international NGO’s as well as grass-roots organisations. The ‘classical’ model of conservation has been characterised by creation of designated nature areas to allow biodiversity to recover from the effects of human activities. Typically, such areas prohibit entry other than through commercial ecotourism or necessary monitoring activities, but also often involve commodification nature. This classical conservation model has been criticized for limiting valuation of nature to its commercial worth and for being insensitive to local communities. Simultaneously, ‘new conservation’ approaches have emerged. Propagating openness of conservation approaches, ‘new conservation’ has counteracted the calls for strict measures of biodiversity protection as the only means of protecting biodiversity. In turn, the ’new conservation’ was criticised for being inadequate in protecting those species that are not instrumental for human welfare. The aim of this article is to inquire whether sustainable future for non-humans can be achieved based on commodification of nature and/or upon open approaches to conservation. It is argued that while economic development does not necessarily lead to greater environmental protection, strict regulation combined with economic interests can be effective. Thus, economic approaches by mainstream conservation institutions cannot be easily dismissed. However, ‘new conservation’ can also be useful in opening up alternatives, such as care-based and spiritual approaches to valuation of nature. Complementary to market-based approaches to conservation, alternative ontologies of the human development as empathic beings embedded in intimate ethical relations with non-humans are proposed. https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
Panarchy is the paradigm of transition and change. Panarchy is the paradigm where small actions can have major effects for better or worse. It is to expect the unexpected. Panarchy holds the promise of positively changing the Anthropocene. By being prepared we can anticipate upon unexpected emerging phenomena which can be used as leverage for creating change.rue change is by transformative learning which transforms our sets of assumptions and expectations, our frames of reference (mindsets, habits of mind and meaning perspectives) Art&Design, artists, designers and philosophers are, by there very nature, capable of changing our frames of reference and thereby create opportunities for true change and adaptation.
We, humans have our roots in pre-Anthropocene eras where we gathered skills for survival and establishing our culture. The cumulated tacit knowledge, the skills, ideas and experiences that can only be shared by personal contact and mutual trust, is evolved and cumulated during this pre-Anthropocene era. This tacit knowledge is geared to our existence and to local circumstances, it isthe indigenous knowledge necessary for local adaptation and for (cultural) perseverance. The Anthropocene era however, is characterized by rapid changes with respect to environment, climate, food sovereignty, culture and more. Our tacit knowledge needs to evolve and adapt at the same pace as changes happen in our environment and culture. Changes in the Anthropocene era are fastand disruptive thereby challenging concomitant evolution of our tacit knowledge
As many in society work towards global sustainability, we live at a time when efforts to conserve biodiversity and geodiversity, and combat climate change, take place simultaneously with land grabs by large corporations, food insecurity, and human displacement through an ecological breakdown. Many of us seek to reconcile more-than-human nature and human nature and to balance intrinsic value and the current human expansion phase. These and other challenges will fundamentally alter the way people, depending on their worldview and ethics, relate to communities and the environment. While environmental problems cannot be seen as purely ecological because they always involve people, who bring to the environmental table their different assumptions about nature and culture, so are social problems connected to environmental constraints. Similarly, social problems are fundamentally connected to environmental constraints and ecological health. While nonhumans cannot bring anything to this negotiating table, the distinct perspective of this book is that there is a need to consider the role of nonhumans as equally important stakeholders – albeit without a voice. This book develops an argument that human-environmental relationships are set within ecological reality and ecological ethics. Rather than being mutually constitutive processes, humans have obligate dependence on nature, not vice versa. We argue that over-arching ecological ethics is necessary to underpin conservation in the long-term. This requires a holistic ‘justice’, where both social justice (for humans) and ecological justice (for nature) are entwined. However, given the escalating environmental crisis and major extinction event we face, and given that social justice has been dominant for centuries, we believe that in many cases ecojustice will need to be prioritized. This will depend on the situation, but we feel that under ecological ethics, holistic ethics cannot always allow social justice to dominate, hence there is an urgent need to prioritize ecojustice today. Accordingly, this book will deal with questions of both social and ecological justice, putting forth the idea that justice for both humans and nonhumans and their habitats can only be achieved simultaneously. This book will explore the following questions: What is the relationship between social and ecological justice? How might we integrate social and ecological justice? What are the major barriers to achieving this simultaneous justice? How can these barriers be overcome? What are the major debates in conservation relevant to this? doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-13905-6 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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We, humans have our roots in pre-Anthropocene eras where we gathered skills for survival and establishing our culture. The cumulated tacit knowledge, the skills, ideas and experiences that can only be shared by personal contact and mutual trust, is evolved and cumulated during this pre-Anthropocene era. This tacit knowledge is geared to our existence and to local circumstances, it is the indigenous knowledge necessary for local adaptation and for (cultural) perseverance. The Anthropocene era however, is characterized by rapid changes with respect to environment, climate, food sovereignty, culture and more. Our tacit knowledge needs to evolve and adapt at the same pace as changes happen in our environment and culture. Changes in the Anthropocene era are fast and disruptive thereby challenging concomitant evolution of our tacit knowledge. Urban communities are embedded in the artificial world fostering learning and adaptation of new tacit knowledge geared to artificial environments. Remote communities, living in a more natural world, are especially vulnerable to effects of the Anthropocene because they are hampered in their access to other communities and/or environments to learn from and have limited access to (new) resources to live from. are typical for interacting complex adaptive systems. The famous butterfly in Brazil causing hurricanes and disaster in Texas. Small initial events can lead to large effects, small events can also lead to effects not anticipated upon because our (explicit) knowledge is incomplete and our imagination is bounded. Panarchy, a new paradigm originating from ecological science describes and tries to explain these phenomena. Panarchy is the evolution of multiple nested complex adaptive systems inter-acting on different space and time scales into different states of self-organisation3. A nice example of panarchy is the introduction of a few couples of grey wolves in 1995in Yellowstone park who, through different cascading events including beavers, birches, grizzly and elk, eventually changed the hydrology and pattern of Yellowstone river4.Complex adaptive system and panarchy after Holling cs.Remote communities in polar areas are especially affected by changes the Anthropocene. Global environmental pollution is eventually transported by long range atmospheric and oceanic circulation to polar areas where they cumulate in glacier ice and accumulates in trophic chains. Climate change causes melting of glacier ice thereby releasing over years cumulated pollutants instantly in the environment thereby increasing exposure levels dramatically. Local communities still depending on traditional food supply are exposed to elevated levels of organic micropollutants compared to other populations monitored globally. (Gibson et al 20161).The artic area was long considered as pristine environment not touched by human environmental pollution. The unexpected effect of long range global circulation transports is accumulation of micropollutants in artic environment and biota. Unexpected effects are typical in the Anthropocene because we cannot foresee or predict effects of human actions on environment or on fellow people and communities. Another example of an unexpected effect is the emergence of a cold-war secret military base “Camp Century” out of the Greenlandic ice shelf due to decreasing snow fall caused by climate change. This exposure was not reckoned upon at the time of discarding the base in the mid-sixties. The base is full of waste including gasoline, organic micropollutants and nuclear coolants, waiting to be melted out of the ice2. The release of this waste into the environment puts another burden on the arctic communities.Unexpected phenomena Complex adaptive systems (left) consist of phases of exploitation characterized by fast exponential growth (r-phase) , followed by consolidation and conservation characterized by balanced forces and networks (K-phase) whose energy and information is released after system disruption (Ω-phase) entering the phase of reorganisation (α-phase) which initiates a new phase of exploitation again. Panarchy (right) is the cross scale nested set of adaptive systems acting on different space and time scales.Panarchy is the paradigm of transition and change. Panarchy is interaction of countless interconnected and nested complex adaptive systems. Panarchy is the paradigm where small actions can have major effects for better or worse. It is to expect the unexpected. Panarchy holds the promise of positively changing the Anthropocene. By being prepared we can anticipate upon unexpected emerging phenomena which can be used as leverage for creating change.Panarchy holds the promise that small individual actions may lead to major positive changes in environment and society. Panarchy is the promise of empowerment of the individual or local community to initiate change for reaching a new state-of-art.The constant factor in human panarchy systems is knowledge, the skills, ideas and experiences necessary for coping different phases of the adaptive cycle. Codified knowledge, the theoretical knowledge has shown to be only partial effective for predicting adaptive cycles or panarchy change events. Tacit knowledge has that capacity neither but create skills for recognizing and seizing opportunities and to be prepared upon unexpected events, for better or worse. Tacit knowledge is shared by learning by doing, by gaming, by following examples, by learning from each other in contextual settings of mutual trust.The power of art with the perspective of the artist is within this setting of mutual trust. We believe that art, when approaching challenges, can evoke chains of thoughts and (cascading) events which through tacit learning will eventually affect systems. This results not only in innovative sustainable social and industrial products but also in change of systems.We have experimented this approach within the context of SDG-labs. SDG-labs are living labs for developing new practices fostering the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG-labs)5.SDG-labs are the environment where we can experiment and create new resilient concepts for adaptation to the Anthropocene. SDG-Labs have two aspects, the first is creation of concepts for change within the lab-setting, its content; the second is the process of organisation of the lab within its environmental and societal context. The Lab itself can be regarded as a complex adaptive system while the organisation of the SDG-Lab is within panarchy, acting on multiple levels and on different scales. Both faces, content and context, of the SDG lab have their own emerging properties.For facilitation of the SDG-lab we organised workshops where creative methods based upon TRIZ ("Theory of inventive problem solving") and CPS (Creative Problem Solving) were applied. TRIZ makes use of pre-established thinking patterns and proven abstract solutions to sets of abstract problems. TRIZ provides a toolbox for solving complex (wicked) problems. TRIZ uses the heuristics of intrinsic technological and societal evolution once a concept emerges. CPS is used for application of the TRIZ toolbox, by making concrete problems abstract and abstract solutions, concrete. TRIZ and CPS makes use of analytical and design thinking. Results of these workshops are emerged pre-concepts which have the potential to create change.Contextual settings of the SDG-lab determine its rate of success. Many good ideas perish in the “valley of death”, before they can realise their full potential. The contextual setting determines acceptance and hence increases probability of idea realisation. The action of organising SDG-labs generates curiosity, enthusiasm, resistance and other emotions with people and organisations. This lead to disturbances in panarchy, which is rendered in emerging opportunities that can be seized by imaginative people.Sarasvathy and Simon (2000) coined for this approach the concept of effectuation as an entrepreneurial principle for seizing opportunities which emerge from entrepreneurial actions in contrast to causation where managerial thinking obscures seeing opportunities. Effectuation is actor dependent where given specific means, choice of effect is driven by characteristics of the actor and his or her ability to discover and use contingencies. This approach is also recognised in innovation theory where the concept of “exaptation” is explored. Exaptation is the attribution of a new functionality to an existing artefact (or organization, scientific achievement, or cultural model) (Bonifati, 2010). Once recognised, effectuation and exaptation are major change drivers based upon emergence of contingencies in existing systems.Our SDG-lab has discovered by accident the power of effectuation and exaptation for creating impact and change by using content and context of the SDG labs at the same time. Our SDG-lab has resulted in tangible results in our community. Back to the arctic pollution and its effect on people. We cannot solve this problem, however there are communities who have suffered similar problems in the past and they have found practical solutions for coping with their difficulties. People are eager to help each other as is demonstrated by the simple phenomena that when a stranger asks for directions, in most cases he will be helped by friendly people. Additionally, theoretical knowledge offers us insight into processes and opportunities we are not aware of and from which we can learn together to create new (tacit) practices. Bringing together these people in a trusted environment may lead to new insights and practices which might be worth to follow.Exploring the paradigm of panarchy as principle of change and transition has opened up our minds for seeing and seizing emerging opportunities as change drivers and this to our surprise seems very promising.
