Regenerative Teaching for Oracular Futures - A Recent Proposal on Oracular Poems of Intersectional Climate Justice Futures: Ecotopia v Zombie Apocalypse

 Source: Deep Blutopia, San Diego 2121, Alan Marshall (Link)

I recently drafted this proposal for a 2022 International Poetic Inquiry conference. It relates to inviting people into playing a multi-day collaborative writing game I created called "Ecotopia Versus Zombie Apocalypse" (Game Guidelines here: https://www.earthregenerative.org/ecotopiavzombie/game ) 

 

Starting with a couple of motivating quotes by Kagawa and Selby (2009) and Haraway (2017):

“Wherever it takes place, climate change education needs to be a social and holistic process… Looming rampant climate change calls for flexible learning and emergent curriculum approaches that embed climate change learning and action within community contexts…. The threat is also too urgent to any longer continue with epistemologically under-dimensioned learning confined to rational, linear, classificatory, and mechanistic ways of knowing and seeking to effect change. Employed exclusively, even predominantly, such ways of knowing are tantamount to applying disease as remedy. There is a need for the complementary and recursive use of artistic, embodied, experiential, symbolic, spiritual, and relational learning, especially in the vital task of reconnecting learners to the earth while enabling them to discover their (connected) identity and realize their full potentials.”  

(2009, pp. 242-243, Fumiyo Kagawa & David Selby, “Climate Change Education: A Critical Agenda for Interesting Times”)

“We relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, and yearnings. So do all the critters of Terra, in all our bumptious diversity and category-breaking compositions and decompositions. Words for this might be materialism, evolution, ecology, sympoiesis, history, situated knowledges, animism, and science art activisms, complete with the contaminations and infections conjured by each of these terms. Critters are at stake in each other in every mixing and turning of the terran compost pile. We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist. Beings – human and not – become with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in earthly worlding and unworlding. All of us must become more ontologically inventive and sensible within the bumptious holobiome that earth turns out to be, whether called Gaia or a Thousand Other Names.” (Donna Haraway, 2017, p. M45)

Polychordal exuberance and post-apocalyptic incantation presage the way Anzaldúan queer-magical nepantlera poets (Anzaldua) cross the borderlands of transtemporal and transpatial climate justice to forge fresh futures. Macy (2020) asks, what might the future beings 200 years from now know about our contemporary acts of courage and bravery that help bring about their survivance? In the vicinity of Tsing’s monsters of the Anthropocene (2017) and Harawayian compostist future fictioning in the Cthulucene (2016), I explore the accounts incubated in graduate classrooms beyond the “zombie” wars, with intersectional ecofeminist, ecopsychological, climate justice, and queer ecological lenses. Using poetic inquiry methods, I share poems and intercepts from the struggles of the emergent future. Layering texts co-created with mythic beings, earth dwellers, and zombies, crafted by graduate students in intersectional ecofeminisms and sustainability innovation: fresh possibilities arise. How can we bust beyond binaries and imagine our way into the emergent unknown, leveraging patterns from biocultural and nature-based regeneration as templates for fresh possibilities? And how can the fruits of these fresh disjunctures and ethical rearrangements invite us into futures worth inhabiting? Listen, listen - a la Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “Evidence” (2015) and M Archive: After the End of the World (2018) -  to the voices of the future beings, breathing their blessings, offering their encouragements and clarifications. Can poetry and creative writing direct a kind of distributive justice? At the quickening sensefield matrix, the intersectional juncture, the ecotonal deltaflux, tuned to sensitive sensing through poetic entrainment, we time travel and inmerge to greater wholeness. 

 

Partial References

Ambrose, Don. “Utopian Visions: Promise and Pitfalls in the Global Awareness of the Gifted.” Roeper Review, 30:52-60, 2008. doi: 10.1080/02783190701836460

Bigelow, Bill, and Tim Swinehart, Editors. A People’s Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis. Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2014. 

Canty, Jeanine. “Seeing Clearly Through Cracked Lenses.” In Ecological and Social Healing: Multicultural Women’s Voices. Edited by Author, 23-44. New York: Routledge, 2017. 

Davies, Kate. Intrinsic Hope: Living Courageously in Troubled Times. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2018.

Gardiner, Stephen Mark. A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “Evidence.” In Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Edited by Walidah Marisha and adrienne maree brown, 34-41. Oakland: AK Press, 2015. 

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. M Archive: After the End of the World. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Haraway, Donna. “Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble.” In Arts of living on a damaged planet: Monsters of the Anthropocene. Edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Eds.), pp. M25-M50. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Hauk, Marna. “Ecotopia Versus Zombie Apocalypse: A Collaborative Writing Game: Game Guidelines.” Portland: Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies, 2018. Retrieved from earthregenerative.org/ecotopiavzombie/game

Hauk, Marna. “‘Resilient Patterns Within a Vaster Web of Knowing’ – Hope, Agentic Sustainabilities, and Regenerative Integration in Educational Encounters.” (Manuscript in revision). Portland: Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies, 2020. 

Hauk, Marna. “Ecotopia versus Zombie Apocalypse: Existential and Emotional Regeneration Through Collaborative Writing and Imagination.” Climate Justice Existential Toolkit. Edited by Jennifer Atkinson & Sarah J. Ray. In revision. 

Holmes, Christina. “Theorizing Ecofeminist Intersectionalities and Their Implications for Feminist Teachers.” In Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. Edited by K. Melchor Quick Hall & Gwyn Kirk, 61-76. Lanham Maryland: Lexington Books, 2021.

Judson, G. “Re-imagining sustainability education: Emotional and imaginative engagement in learning.” Sustainability Frontiers, 205-220. Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 2015.

Kagawa, Fumiyo, and David Selby. “Climate Change Education: A Critical Agenda for Interesting Times.” In Education and Climate Change: Living and Learning in Interesting Times. Edited by David Selby and Fumiyo Kagawa, 241-243. Florence, Kentucky: Routledge, 2009.     

Krall, Florence. Ecotone: Wayfaring on the Margins. Albany: SUNY, 1994.

Leetch, Mandy. The​ ​Prophetesses​ ​at​ ​Play: Collaborative​ ​Storytelling,​ ​Mythic​ ​Justice,​ ​and​ ​Visioning​ ​Regenerative​ ​Futures [Conference Paper]. Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, 2018. 

Macy, Joanna, and Christopher Johnstone. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re In with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power (Rev. ed.). Novato, CA: New World Library, 2020. 

Macy, Joanna, and Molly Young Brown. Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work that Reconnects (Rev. ed.). Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2014.

Olsen, Andrea. Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2020. 

Sameshima, Pauline, Alexandra Fidyk, Kedrick James, and Carl Leggo. (Editors). Poetic Inquiry: Enchantment of Place. Wilmington, Delaware: Vernon Press, 2017. 

Selby, David, and Fumiyo Kagawa. “Drawing Threads Together: Transformative Agenda for Sustainability Education. In Sustainability Frontiers: Critical and Transformative Voices from the Borderlands of Sustainability Volume edited by the article authors, 277-280. Toronto: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2015.

Sobel, David. “Climate Change Meets Ecophobia.” Connect, 2007(Nov/Dec), 14-21. 

Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Editors.).  Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

A response to Heather A. Swanson's "The Banality of the Anthropocene"

This article really reminds me of the a Sustainability Theory and Practice commodity lifecycle assignment, as well as the way that just sustainabilities suggests an inclusive turn to both understand the roots, in the way of environmental racism, the grandmother of just sustainabilities, via environmental justice, as well as inviting us into the future. Just sustainabilities directs our attention and hones our skill at touching in both ways - in the Macyian language, to see both the historical and futurity, the ancestors and the future beings. Agyeman, Bullard, and Evans (2003) argued for this important dimension, noting that “sustainable development requires that we give consideration to our own developmental needs, as well as those of generations still to come" (p. 188).

So when the author Swanson (2017) suggested:

"Donna Haraway has called for curiosity as both scholarly method and political practice, as an antidote to these learned blindnesses. In her book When Species Meet (Haraway 2008), she becomes curious about who and what she touches when she reaches out to pet her dog. That curiosity becomes a radical practice of tracing and inheriting histories, such as the dog-herding practices of livestock-based Australian colonization efforts and the making of purebred dogs. But in a world of structural blindness, such kinds of curiosity do not come naturally. They must be cultivated. But how? How, in the words of Joseph Dumit (2014), do we wake up to connections?

"Can we imagine corollaries to Bible study meetings or consciousness-raising groups in which people would be encouraged to trace the histories of the landscapes they inhabit, a process that might draw them into new ways of seeing themselves and their worlds? I imagine such practices as a multispecies analogue to Foucauldian genealogy (see Foucault 1970). Might exploring the genealogies of Iowa cornfields, for example, denaturalize them and counter the power of their banality? Might they enable Iowans and all of us to become more curious about the conditions of our own subjectivities and, in turn, how we might transform the landscapes with which they are entangled? This is the important work of making curiosity more common, of troubling the Anthropocene." (para. 15-16)

I imagine something extra, too. Thinking of the active hope practices (Macy & Johnstone, 2012), I imagine we can cultivate a way of touching the dog and turn both ways, virtually, in the way the present contains the past AND the future. I can conduct the kind of "multispecies ...Foucauldian geneology" that Swanson suggested (para. 16) as well as touch out and sweep forward, into a potentially regenerative future, how this being, this moment of connection, contact, and conscious shift, how my gaze can become a dedicated glance (in the spirit of Casey, 2007), including a prophetic touching out towards the future beings. Macy and Johnstone described "learning to reinhabit time" (2012, p. 117). Deep time is expansive and invitational.

"Could future generations, for example, discover a way to communicate with us? And if so, what might they say? Perhaps they could only do this if we play our part too by extending ourselves forward in time to meet them. We can do this through our imagination. We don't know whether the communications we would receive this way would be real or imagined -- and we don't really need to know. They still offer useful guidance....By giving future beings a voice, we bring them closer in a way that helps us be guided by their perspective. Hearing ourselves reply to them also helps us to step into a larger view of time" (pp. 158-159).

In this way, I would suggest sustainability and regenerative education invite us to to both/and geneological and futurecasting, future-sensing connectivity and relationality. This sensitization can be sustaining and opening. As Macy and Johnstone suggested,

"We can bring deep time to mind as we go about our daily lives. Even as we wash the dishes, pay the bills, go to meetings, and so on, we can school ourselves to be aware, now and then, of the hosts of ancestral and future beings  surrounding us like a cloud of witnesses. We can remember the vaster story of our planet and let it imbue the most ordinary acts with meaning and purpose. Each of us is an intrinsic part of that story, like a cell in a larger organism. And in this story, each of us has a role to play." (p. 160)

I wish for us each this recombinant and life-giving inclusion of the future beings as well, to sustain us for the work we are called to do, "a cloud of witnesses" (p. 160) and encouragers as we become re-imbricated, re-woven into awareness of the flourishing of the universe in and through us.

This might well help us embody Swanson's invitation, to "become more curious about the conditions of our own subjectivities and, in turn, how we might transform the landscapes with which they are entangled" (2017, para. 16). We might sense that part of this invitation is not only how we might transform these landscapes; it might also be a matter of how these landscapes themselves are transforming us. In a futurecasting of the disintegration of theme parks and the resurging Earth, I imagined a terrapsychological resurgence, "Gaia Taking Back Disneyland" (Hauk, 2016). This involves a collaborative, co-creative re-animation of the living Earth as a co-imaginer of the regenerative possibilities also rippling out from touching the dog. With the land in and through us, with our polychrest capacity to touch out and connect in temporally with what has been wrought and what the future beings are summoning us to, I ask: What stories of the regenerative future are you touching into, carrying, and birthing?

References

Agyeman, Julian, Bullard, Robert D., & Evans, Bob. (Eds.). (2003). Just sustainabilities: Development in an unequal world. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Casey, Ed. (2007). The world at a glance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hauk, Marna. (2016). Gaia taking back Disneyland. In Julie C. Garlen & Jennifer A. Sandlin (Eds.), Teaching with Disney (pp. 149-160). Counterpoints, 477. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Macy, Joanna, & Johnstone, Chris. (2012). Active hope: How to face the mess we're in without going crazy. Novato, CA: New World Library.
Swanson, Heather A. (2017, February 22). The banality of the Anthropocene. Dispatches. Cultural Anthropology. Retrieved from https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1074-the-banality-of-the-anthropocene

Image Reference 
Morrison, Geoffrey. (2014, February 11). Hobbiton, New Zealand. CNET. Retrieved from https://www.cnet.com/pictures/take-a-tour-of-hobbiton-pictures/37/