ESSENCE March 2010 PAGE_06_07
Transcript of ESSENCE March 2010 PAGE_06_07
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6 ESSENCE March 17, 2010
Building the New WorldAcademia and Activism from UVics
IMAGES CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: JESSE HOWARDSON: GUERRILA
GARDENING; MARK WORTHING:MATT LOEWEN IN ACTION; KELSEY COLLINS:
CASEY ROCKWELL IN CONTEMPLATION; MILA CZEMERYS: SPEAKING OUT
FOR FARMERS
MARK WORTHING
On these surprisingly warm spring days,
with crocuses exploding out of grassy
patches, one can feel the loosely frayed
edges of the day blooming into the almost
touchable tapestry of the future.
Te School of Environmental Studies
is interwoven with a strong activist com-
munity. Te interdisciplinary nature of the
department brings together a diversity of
ideas and tactics. Among many things, En-
vironmental Studies students are writers,
biologists, political scientists, engineers,
anarchists, and business students, mak-
ing for a broad base of theory and experi-
ence.
Te faculty is a safe-haven for progressive
environmental thought. While the major-
ity of students involved in the department
are empowered with unique, valuable and
politically challenging perspectives, those
who choose to transplant that knowledge
into the public domain often find them-
selves cultivating a garden more radical
than anticipated.
Students are often forced to make a
choice: sacrifice a portion of academic suc-
cess for their politics or sacrifice their poli-
tics for their studies. Another challenge,
then, is to deal with the reality of being
highly invested in society while having
dwindling faith in its sustainability.
For many student activists, i ts a constant
struggle to find a way of living that does
not further perpetuate environmental and
social injustices. Te challenge is defining
ones political stance, when pragmatically,
Academia and Activism are sometimes
mutually exclusive.
In Planet U by Justine Starke and
UVics professor Michael MGonigle, the
authors note: a gap exists between what
we learn for tomorrow and what tomor-
row needs from us today. And what of
this gap? What does it limit?
From Library, to Street, to Forest
Recognizing the downfalls resulting
from the constituency of UVic as an up-
per-class institution, the School of Envi-
ronmental Studies is and can continue to
be a laboratory for progressive environ-
mental thought. o construct of a conduit
between experimentalism on the page, and
experimentalism in the public domain is
our greatest challenge.
Michael MGonigle, the Eco-Research
chair of Environmental Law and Policy
at Uvic, co-founder of Greenpeace In-
ternational, says Im lucky because Im
an academic. Its part of your job to be
thinking all the time about stuff that is
not necessarily practical or going to hap-
pen tomorrow.
He smiles as we sit in his offi ce, En-
vironmental Studies students are the best
students on campus as far as Im con-
cerned. UVic is a luxury school, but teach-
ing ES students is the best deal around. ES
students are doing stuff not because they
want to be credential-ized, but because
they want to learn why things are the way
they are, and they care about how things
could be. Tat is so unusual! Te mix of
academic and activist work in the faculty
is great.
Matt Loewen, Political Science and
Environmental Studies undergraduate
student, and activist explains, You could
be the nicest person in the world, but if
youre living in accordance with capital-
ism, if youre a business manager for ex-
ample, then you have a tendency to act in
certain ways that are inherently violent.
You have to be able to change those struc-
tures to ones that espouse and nudge you
towards sociality and away from coercion.
It means not thinking individualistically
about solutions. Individualistic solutions
like recycling, buying organic, green con-
sumption, or shorter showers, arent nec-
essarily solutions because they dont alter
systemic hierarchies.
Maintaining a connection to the realities
of learned knowledge is diffi cult to do in a
culture where we are so far removed from
the basic ecological processes that dictate
our lives. And as a result it is very hard to
internalize the implications of Norwegian
fish farms degrading the wild salmon of
BC, for example. Uninformed activism
can be a pollutant for a social movement,
but informed and inactive is equally as
toxic.
MGonigle notes, Tere must be an at-
tachment to those changes you want to see
in order to make them happen.
Cross-pollinating Activism and Aca-
demia can be a challenging ecology.
Prefgure this Decade
An applied method of direct action
that works to immediately create a new
social fabric, without having to wait for a
revolution or reformed social institutions,
is called prefigurative politics. Gandhi
would likely agree this is a fancy term for
being the change you want to see in the
world.
A prefigurative political approach to
imagining the future would try to draw
the threads of the present toward the fabric
of the future. And in certain niche com-
munities these threads are being mended,
sewed, darned, and knitted together giving
us a present composed of future.
Re-imagining the future aught not only
be a forward projection, but also an active
synthesis of reality. In our daily lives we
should act in ways that do not perpetuate
the injustices, hierarchies, and harmful ab-
stractions in our own systemic actions.
Fortunately, addressing injustices has no
bounds. Garments are stitched and knit-
ted, one thread at a time and social change
is created in the same fashion.
Actively trying to create the desired
future can be something as simple as a
smile in the elevator. It can be squatting
on property owned by Concord-Pacific
in Vancouvers downtown east side, con-
sciously using non-violent language, or
establishing a tree-sit near Jordan River
instead of passively writing letters to
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on the Shell of the Old:School of Environmental Studies
IMAGES CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JESSE HOWARDSON: BARK
(HE)ART; MILA CZEMERYS: CAMAS AND A BUTTERCUP BLOOM, JESSE
HOWARDSON: DISCLAIMER FROM THE FREE FOO D COLLECTIVE ; JESSE
HOWARDSON: SOUP LABELS FROM THE FREE FOOD COLLECTI VE AT UVIC
members of parliament. It can also be in-
tegrating ones research with the subjects
or objects of that research, and internal-
izing the implications of that research in
relation to communities it relates to.
Prefigurative politics is actualizing the
future you want to see, while also work-
ing to improve institutions that may be
failing to achieve desired ends.
Te sun lights a poster of BCs Stein Val-
ley as I s it in MGonigles offi ce.
his decade is going to be the one
that forces a lot of people to make some
choices between being good little partici-
pants in the liberal public policy game and
incremental, agreeable change or very
much the opposite. We need to rethink
this, he says.
Needles that Knit and Darn, Bit by Bit
An outstanding example of prefigura-
tive politics is one of the many achieve-
ments of the Black Panther Party (BPP):
the Free Breakfast for Children Program.
Te program, beginning in Oakland, but
spreading across the country, had Black
Panthers cooking and serving food for
poor inner city youth.
Within one year of the programs con-
ception, the organization was feeding
10,000 children daily before school.
Not only did the program adhere to the
organizations radically established hopes
for a more egalitarian society, but also it
exposed the inadequacy of the American
welfare system while creating a solution.
In Planet U, Ingmar Lee, a UVic
Alumni and long time environmentalist
writes, We have to learn to overcome the
forces of destruction, and we have to do it
right here. When we work to bridge the
gap MGonigle and Starke identified ear-
lier, we should connect learned knowledge
with an envisioned objective. By putting
it into action, we give full allegiance and
loyalty to learned knowledge.
Wherever we tread, we should be an em-
bassy for our imagined future.
MGonigle explains: if you are an activ-
ist who is frustrated by the loss of some-
thing, like the subdivision of a wetland
or if you want to see better treatment of
homeless people, then you must do things.
You will want to do things. And you cant
choose not to deal with the nitty-gritty as-
pects of getting those things done.
O.U.R Eco-Village, situated on a 25-
acre property near Shawnigan Lake went
through a seven-phase development
process that resulted in one of the most
progressive examples of community sus-
tainability. Phases began with visioning
exercises, and went through land purchase,
rezoning, the establishment of the associa-
tion, to cooperatives, and building alterna-
tive land ownership structures.
If it werent for a prefigurative attitude
aimed at directly creating an imagined
future, it would have been illegal and un-
achievable for this project to go ahead un-
der current zoning, taxation, architectural,
and property laws.
Get to know your surroundings. As
you walk by a sidewalk patch of nicely
trimmed grass, try placing your hand on
the grass to acknowledge there is noth-
ing between you and that piece of land.
Nothing prevents you from digging up
that patch, planting leek, garlic, kale, or
radishes with a sign saying, Pick me, eat
me, water, me weed me!
Dive in to a patch of salal berries, make
some licorice root tea, eat some maple
buds, dry out some seaweed or cut up that
dead deer that would have gone rotten in
the municipality of Saanichs dump-yard
(its called venison!).
At UVic, were on ground zero with re-
gards to food security issues the CJVI
lands on the far side of Mystic Vale from
Ring road is a prime location to mix Aca-
demia and Activism. o apply the collec-
tive scale version of prefigurative politics
here can be raw and enlightening because
we can join people to establish commu-
nity-binding relationships. Real commu-
nity is created through this actualization
with others.
MGonigle reflects, Movement building
is a really big part of it. Te number one
thing that is the most important for UVic
is making the CJVI lands an agricultural
landscape. If we lose that we never get it
back. Its a perfect place to do it. How-
ever, there are so many obstacles for that:
legal, managerial, administrative, zoning,
and financial, so youve got to build a
movement. Be bold and willing to make
mistakes, willing to be marginalized. You
have to be single minded.
Remember the Future
he inclusiveness, accessibility and
positive implications of a prefigurative
approach to social, economic, and envi-
ronmental change are encouraging.
Before MGonigle leaves for a depart-
ment meeting, he finishes with, Tings
you should do are things that are catalysts
or metaphors for larger change. If it is
making an urban garden in Victoria, its
about restructuring the city in more fun-
damental ways. Your small actions are part
of a larger vision. It is diffi cult because we
dont just need bike paths in Victoria, we
need to get the cars out of here.
Similarly, Matt Loewen concludes, Tis
is where prefiguration comes in. Having a
vision of the future, means that you can
show people that this isnt the way it has to
be. Youre not just tearing peoples value-
blankets away leaving them with nothing.
You can take that blanket, like the Black
Panthers were doing, and start weaving a
new social fabric out of the decaying old
fabric.
Just as the crocus remains where it is,
the threads of the future are where theyve
always been: in our hands. We should all
hold the fabric of the future in mind, and
keep those knitting needles sharp. Perhaps
a prefigurative politics is the way to weave
Academia and Activism together at UVic.
And perhaps actualizing our knowledge is
the best way to learn it.
March 17, 2010 ESSENCE 7