Nicole Arsenault and her son, Miles (photo credit: Nick Wilkinson)
What do we owe each other? It’s a question that I’ve grappled with in different ways at different times, since childhood. And I’ve been circling around this question a lot lately, struggling my way through this crazy year of compounding crises, feeling like my heart would surely burst from so many overwhelming emotions. I’m certainly not alone – 2020 has brought multiple oppressive social and environmental realities into stark focus for more people than ever before, and the cry for change is growing into a roar.
For this final blog, I’ll reflect on how I’ve derived insight through contemplating this question at various life stages, how it led me back to academia in mid-life, and how it is helping me to make meaning and find direction during this time of crisis.
Empathy and an Ethic of Care
As a sensitive child, I was distressed that too many children suffered the cruelties of poverty, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression, while other children like me enjoyed comfort and security. These early seeds of empathy were cultivated by my kind and thoughtful parents. Then, under the guidance of a very progressive elementary school teacher, I learned more about injustice and inequity while at the same time learning about climate change and species extinction. I learned that the grown-ups in power were not safeguarding my future and did not value non-human life the way I did. I began to understand that the exploitation of nature and people were not flaws in our political and economic systems; rather, they were there by design. Ours is a system that is intentionally exploitative and oppressive in service of profit, and so-called “progress”, as Chris White wrote about so beautifully in his blog about degrowth.
I feel such a debt of gratitude to this teacher. In a tiny rural school, in a tiny New Brunswick village, she challenged me to see the world as it is and taught me to channel my feelings of empathy and care into action. She taught me that I had a voice, and that I had a responsibility to use it.
I believe that effective action for change is driven by empathy and by an ethic of care for others. In these polarized times, I’ve come to believe that we need to embrace a radical form of empathy for true change to happen. If we are able to extend our empathy outward, beyond ourselves, our family, our community, our cultural groups – if we are able even to include non-human nature within our sphere of empathy – then we cannot help but see the suffering and destruction that exists, and we must naturally feel a sense of care and responsibility.
We owe it to each other to create better narratives about progress and well-being that align with planetary boundaries and an ethic of loving care for others.
Seeing our World As It Is, and Creating A Better Vision for the Future We Want
Resisting the inertia of the status quo, creating better stories and visions for the future, and plotting a course towards the future we want takes a lot of energy and commitment. It also requires a nuanced understanding of the complexity of how and why our current systems are unjust and unsustainable – we need to see human systems as they are, in order to see how we want to change them. I’m grateful to a number of thinkers who have deepened my understanding the intersectional nature of all forms of dominance. With their work in mind, I position my sustainability scholarship within a larger context of undoing all forms of oppression and a commitment to caring. I am especially indebted to social ecologists (in particular, this foundational book), and ecological feminists.
Social ecological and ecofeminist theories have at their core the assertion that the global ecological crisis is a symptom of deeply rooted social problems. They argue that the historical roots of the domination and exploitation of nature by some human cultures (Western, patriarchal, capitalist, colonial cultures are the obvious example) lie in the hierarchical structures of dominance and oppression that we constructed to subordinate each other.
Social ecologists argue that the nature/culture dualism (the position that human society and culture are not embedded within nature) sustains a hierarchical system wherein humanity is believed to have transcended nature and is therefore justified in dominating it. This dichotomy also sustains socially constructed hierarchies within human society. Ecofeminist theory further expands this understanding of the interconnectedness of our ecological and social crises through a feminist lens, demonstrating that the feminization of nature and the naturalization of women have been used to rationalise the twin oppressions of nature and women. Just as women have been considered inferior because they are identified more closely with nature, nature has been considered inferior in part because of its identification with the feminine. Thus, for social ecologists and ecofeminists, naturist, racist, sexist classist, ableist and other oppressive ideologies are mutually justifying and sustaining. These ideologies are linked together in a web consisting of many distinct oppressed groups within a larger system of domination, referred to by ecofeminists as an oppressive conceptual framework. In the most ecologically destructive and exploitative cultures in the world, we can identify capitalist patriarchy as the oppressive conceptual framework.
Ecofeminists argue that we cannot solve our ecological and social crises without first rejecting all systems that employ a logic of domination, and I agree. A non-oppressive conception of difference is not possible within a system that rationalizes domination. For social ecologists, ‘renaturing’ human society – deconstructing the nature/culture dualism and situating human consciousness and society within nature as the products of our organic evolution – will reunite the social with the ecological, creating social structures wherein well-being is necessarily linked with the freedom of all living things, humans included, to realise their evolutionary potential in relation to each other. An ecofeminist and social ecological vision for the future would see human societies built around a strong ecological understanding of human and non-human life and an ethic of care.
There is so much work to draw on when looking for inspirational visions of what such a future could look like, and how we get there. Lately, I’ve been returning to bell hooks and Paulo Freire to imagine a world without oppression, and for reminders about how my work as a public scholar and communicator can be part of a critical anti-oppression dialogue. I’m also everyday inspired by the writing of Mary Annaïse Heglar, whose clear thinking and emotional calls to action on climate justice help me to stay motivated. And I’m learning from Dr. Pam Palmeter and Dr. Ingrid Waldron about what decolonization and environmental justice can look like in Canada. As a mom, I am motivated by the future vision of the global #FridaysforFuture youth movement. As much as it saddens me that the world’s children are having to fight for their future, I also feel strongly that I have to demonstrate to these children, including my own son, that I’m fighting for a better future right alongside them. This is just the tip of the iceberg – there is so much to explore when imagining alternative social and environmental futures.
When it comes to figuring out the nuts and bolts of how we re-imagine human economies and see a path to environmental sustainability, I am most drawn to the work of ecological economists and others working to get a handle on the global scale of human-caused environmental impacts, and to identify the biggest levers that we can pull to mitigate those impacts and ensure the flourishing of the planet, and therefore its people. I’m spending a lot of time with the work to quantify human encroachment on, and surpassing of, the planetary biophysical boundaries that define a safe operating space for humanity. Relatedly, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics presents a better model for human economies that focuses on achieving well-being for all within planetary boundaries. Finally, the work demonstrating the incredible gains in equity and environmental impact reduction that can be made when we curtail growth, affluence, and consumption gives me real encouragement. A better future may be within our grasp, if we have the courage to choose to work for a better future for all (human and non-human), instead of a few. And if we choose to act now.
Ambitious Action, Emotion, and Community
So far, I’ve talked about empathy, care, and having a clear vision of how the world is now and how we want it to be in the future. I believe we owe each other all of these things, especially empathy and care, but none of these alone will get us where we want to go. We must also act, and we must be ambitious when we act. Compromise is inevitable, sometimes, but we don’t have to compromise on our vision of the future we want, and we should also allow ourselves to act as though we can get there.
So that brings me here, having answered an internal desire to act more ambitiously, to be part of the solution, by making mid-life a leap of faith back into academia. I’m trying to act in a way that I know how, in a way that I think uses my strengths. Two years into this PhD, I’m experiencing one of the most disrupted, scary, chaotic years of my life . . . as are many, many others. And I am, in every way, one of the lucky ones.
It is a vast understatement to say that I’m having a lot of emotions. And I’m learning some important lessons about emotions. I am learning that sometimes, they can’t be held back, and nor should they be. Why shouldn’t I be sad? Why not be anxious? How could I not be angry? Truth is, I’m grieving for the now we could be living, if only those adults in power when I was a child had acted with more caring. If they’d acted in the interests of our future well-being. I’m anxious about the future that my child faces, if today’s leaders don’t act with caring and in the interests of generations to come. And I’m angry about all of it, and I’m coming to feel that this rage is healthy and necessary (but don’t take my word for it, read more on rage from Amy Westervelt, and my fellow OpenThinker Tari Ajadi).
These are difficult emotions, but there is comfort in them as well. These feelings mean that I care, that I haven’t given up or become desensitized. They mean that I still feel a sense of responsibility, and that I will continue to act. These feelings cause me to reach out, to grow my community of people who care, so that we can take action together. Thinking about what may lie ahead for my son causes me real, daily anguish. But I know that whatever happens he’ll look back and know that I worked hard for his future, and that his father and I were part of a larger community of people doing the same. He’ll see that we had what Thomas Homer Dixon calls commanding hope, rooted in an understanding of harsh realities but never succumbing to doomist nihilism and inaction. I hope that this will equip him with the strength to face his own battles, and to succeed.
