Category Archives for uncategorized

Lessons from Feminism for Environmental Education

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Endeavors to create conditions that will develop an awareness of context, political consciousness and the potential for social action have a long history in adult education. The remarkable shifts in women’s rights in the late twentieth century were the results of over a century’s worth of struggle by feminists, a struggle that became institutionalised in universities in the 1970s with the emergence of women’s studies. This radical education transformed the daily lives and political realities of thousands of women. 

In a 1975 American nation-wide study of women’s education Jack Mezirow identified ten phases often encountered during consciousness-raising process within women’s education and developed the theory and practice of transformative learning. Transformative learning has now been developed into a practice that helps learners critically examine assumptions and as well as develop social capacities to put new perspectives into practice. This practice is a powerful tool with the potential to help learners cross the infamous value / action gap in environmental education. I recently presented a slideshow on transformative learning at the Design Research Society’s SkinDeep 2011 conference on experiential knowledge and multi-sensory communication. Continue reading →

Resistance to the Cuts: What Next? Part Two – On Big Society and People’s Assemblies

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Two friends have both written excellent blogs on propositional not just oppositional strategies. These suggest not just dissent and resistance to political processes that are fundamentally broken – but the creation of new processes that could feasibly help us build something more equitable and sustainable.

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Resistance to the Cuts: What Next? Part One

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In one turbulent week since the March 26th movements are consolidating and ideas and plans are emerging. There has been indignation about broken windows and violence in the press and while some have pointed out that the clash between tactics is neither new nor exclusive to the left, movements such as Ukuncut have shown ‘tactical respect’ and gracefully refused to condemn the actions of other protesters on the streets.

Today an article claimed that the dramatic drop in Tory popularity in polls this week demonstrates that big protests do make a difference in political opinion. Yet the real difference a gathering of half a million people makes is deeper than the opinion polls; the debate created by this demonstration is part of a broader social learning process that will inform an ongoing organizing process. 

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Just the Beginning: Resistance to the Cuts #26March

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Estimates of a half million people on the streets yesterday. The 26th of March was a great success but only the beginning if we hope to stop the destruction of decades worth of social progress, save education, social services and the NHS. Several hundred thousand are willing to stand up for what they believe and because of them today there is just a little more hope that our resistance to austerity measures will work. Continue reading →

Mapping Environmental Discourses

Having just finished writing a sub-chapter of my PhD I decided that a new model was needed to address certain problems. I am not going to publish the whole discussion yet. This new diagram attempts to reflect power dynamics and ideological positions of dominant environmental discourses.

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The model is premised on the idea that discourses that suit business interests are legitimized at the expense of discourses that more profoundly problematise current industrial practices. To a large extent, the market determines what information is publicly available because communications either take the form of marketing and/or are produced by industries that are dependent on advertising. Discursive discipline marginalizes critical positions. Furthermore, discourses are not always made explicit; vested interests will mask their intentions to influence policy that works in their favour. The green capitalism discourse is hegemonic but as crises continue to accelerate, a more coersive type of ‘disaster capitalism’ emerges (Klein, 2008).

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‘London Futures’ and a History of Social Change in London

London Futures by Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones.  London Futures

I visited the Museum of London today to visit London Futures, an exhibition about climate change by Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones. The highly sanitized version of London landscapes altered by dramatic climate change were picturesque and entertaining but also had an unfortunate tendency to make apocalyptic futures look glamorous.

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Decoding Visual Media: Representations of Nature in Popular Culture

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I am interested in how representations of Nature in the media and popular culture effect our attitudes towards Nature. I would like to study this phenomenon and could use some help from you, yes you reader. I need more examples. I am going to try and crowd source visual samples. Please help me out by visiting this new blog. Read the brief descriptions of the main themes under investigation. Think about it a bit and if you come up with some samples that reflect the themes, please send them in or let me know. I hope to make it worth your while in the end by writing something useful. Many thanks.

Above: Oil and Water – photoshot by Vogue summer 2010 on the theme of the Gulp Oil spill.

Narcissism normalised

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Recently a NYTimes article announced that narcissism is being deleted from the tomb for psychiatric disorders. Narcissism will not appear in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (due out in 2013, and known as DSM-5). What happens when what was once morally objectionable behaviour ( egotism, vanity, conceit, selfishness) is no longer a ‘legitimate’ social deviance? Is narcissism now so deeply embedded in the collective psyche that it is now ‘normal’? Is this the ultimate end of the neo-liberal exhalation of the individual, celebrity culture, a century’s worth of advertising and the corporatisation of everyday life?

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New Public Thinkers 2010

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Blogosphere debates on ‘New UK Public Thinkers‘ inspired some deliberation over the holidays about both the nature of public thinking and those who have contributed in 2010. While considering my options I developed my own criteria. Significant public thinkers must be: 1) doing as well as thinking, 2) developing significant new ideas, and 3) participating in public debate. The criteria are perhaps as interesting as the nominations: what kind of thinking really matters? 

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Climate or Cuts? The Same Problem!

Today in the House of Commons MPs vote for education cuts in the form of new £9000 a year tuition fees. Today in a courtroom in Nottingham the case against the climate activists who conspired to shut down Ratcliffe Power Station sums up and the jury retires to deliberate. What have they got in common?

These two events are part of the same problem. This is why: our economic system is structurally reliant on growth – and when growth hits geo-physical barriers, or social barriers, or cultural barriers it does whatever it has to do to abolish these barriers. Growth occurs through a process of turning our ecological, social and cultural space into economic space i.e. into commodities to be traded.  The economy needs to do this to grow, and it needs to grow to survive – so yes, as Thatcher might say, within the current set of conditions, ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA).  But there absolutely are alternatives to this way of organizing society. TINA serves elite interests and keeps us from demanding structural change.

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Tim Jackson (Prosperity Without Growth) vs. Stoneleigh (The Automatic Earth)

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend two events in one day presented by two significant economic analysts. Stoneleigh runs The Automatic Earth, now the 7th largest global website on finance, did a presentation in the afternoon at the new economics foundation. Later I attended a public debate – ‘Economic growth, prosperity and sustainability: a contradiction?’ in Westminster with Paul Ekins and Tim Jackson, hosted by the Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester.  I have a lot of respect for Tim Jackson, his analysis and the fact that he has been able to bring sensible and radical positions into government working with the now becoming defunct Sustainable Development Commission. Nevertheless, it does appear to me that the Stoneleigh has a more important story to tell at the moment.

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Stoneleigh’s analysis is based the relationship between financial systems and energy systems. We are facing an economic contraction on a scale greater than that of the great depression. If those in charge of the economy had paid attention to the critiques of the economic model based on endless quantitative growth earlier, we might not be facing such a dire economic predictions. As it is, shifting policy to reflect geo-physical realities (such as the fact that the earth’s resources are finite and that climate change threatens civilization) would be smart, but it will not save us from more immediate dangers that will now be an inevitable consequence of the failure to manage financial sector responsibly combined with the failure to plan adequately for the advent of peak oil. 

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Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom

I just posted a reply to David McCandless on his blog ‘Information is Beautiful’ on the subject of the difference between data, information, knowledge and wisdom. David made a graphic based on this heirarchy of information, and also helpfully pointed out that these ideas have been around for a while. Here is his graphic:
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I responded with some thoughts and an excerpt from Robert Logan, a Canadian physicist who has just written a book called ‘What is information?’ I have not actually read it yet but intend to soon (it is not yet available). Here is an excerpt from this book that breaks down these four categories: Continue reading →

The Students are Revolting!

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50,000 students took to the streets today to protest the dramatic cuts in higher education and increasing tuition fees. While most did not invade Tory HQ, several hundred stormed the towerblock in Millbank. These students did us all a service. The cuts to the public sector and education are an assault on the poor and middle classes in this country – as well as the environment. The student protesters are especially admirable as they will not likely to have to pay the increased fees, which come in after 2012 – it will be those who are slightly younger who will suffer. The financial industry must be held accountable for the financial and now the social crisis it created. Corporations must pay their taxes. Hopefully these young people will inspire others who are more directly effected by the cuts to stand up to this assault on public services and the environment.

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The Environment is a Feminist Issue

  

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Response to Channel 4

 

Last night’s ‘What the Green Movement Got Wrong’ documentary launched a Twitter storm of protests to the one-sided misinformation calculated to discredit traditional green values and political projects. The debate on Twitter was entertaining yet unfortunately most viewers will not have been sitting at their computers and will have been subjected less critically to the one-sided polemic that hit the airwaves. Towards the end of the two-part programme the dismal lack of female voices on the Channel Four documentary became apparent and a new sub-theme emerged on Twitter regarding the exclusion of women from the debate.


Channel Four editors claim they could not find any women and that those that they asked refused. I can certainly understand why a woman would refuse to allow herself to have her position misrepresented, ruthlessly discredited through biased, severely selective, and ill-informed journalism. If women environmentalists were enabled to make a document about ‘What the Green Movement Got Right’ we would have a fair platform. Unfortunately, what Channel Four wanted was a few environmentalists to argue their positions in a mosh-pit debate in a little post-documentary forum. By fabricating an illusion of fairness they attempt to escape properly presenting the green arguments. Although some debaters did an excellent job at debunking Channel Four’s corporate green spin – the show still managed to disseminate some deeply anti-green ideas as described by George Monbiot this morning in this blog post ‘Deep Peace in Techno-Utopia.’

 

The women vs. men issue is not about tick boxing. It is about presenting powerful and dominant political positions as the only perspective in town. It’s about recognizing that power inequalities exist due to historical exclusion of women’s voices from public debate. Ultimately, the environment is a feminist issue.

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War Against Nature in an Age of Austerity

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My October started with the ‘Science and Environment Communication’ section at ECREA (European Communications Research and Education Association) conference in Hamburg. Four days of research presentations mostly focused on our abysm failure to protect the ecological health of this planet and to communicate to the public the scope of the problem left me completely deflated. One possible good outcome could be the formation of an International Association of Environmental Communicators, which could function as a body to expose the avalanche of misinformation and deception practiced by corporate entities who have an interest in a certain mis-representation of nature.

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