Unleashing Blessed Unrest As the Heating Happens

Originally appears in the Fall 2011 issue

Californian environmentalist Paul Hawken coined the phrase ‘blessed unrest’. He uses it to describe the worldwide grassroots stirring of peoples—at best loosely organized and thinly networked—in defense of “the timeless ways of being human” now “threatened by global forces that do not consider people’s deepest longings”.(1) This movement, informed by social justice and environmental activism as well as indigenous cultural resistance to globalization, seems to us to be core to any meaningful response to runaway climate change. In this article we consider how learning spaces can help unleash the blessed unrest we hold to be vital if human society is to have any chance of escaping the worst scenarios now before us for the heating of the planet. (In using the word ‘heating’, our aim is to avoid the soothing connotations of ‘global warming’.)

There is almost universal consensus across the global scientific community that climate change is happening and that it is mostly human-induced.(2) And, as understanding of the amplifying and uncontrollable effects of so-called climate tipping points deepens, there is widening scientific conviction that, without radical and concerted U-turns now, global surface temperatures cannot be stabilized at the 2.0oC rise relative to pre-industrial levels that governments and the United Nations regard as livable with and ‘economically acceptable’. (We should note that one of the world’s leading climate scientists, James Hansen, perceives a 2.0oC rise as being nothing short of a “disaster scenario” and that a growing number of scientists think that holding the global temperature rise to 2.0oC will be an uphill, perhaps impossible, task anyway (3).)

As runaway climate change lurches forward, future scenarios look grim—a mix of ubiquitous environmental disaster (including a huge loss of biodiversity), ongoing and massive internal and external population displacement as a result of sea incursions, seasonally recurring wildfires and desertification (and resultant social dislocation), hunger, starvation, internecine strife, violent conflict, tribalism, aggressively defensive localism, as well as the ever-lurking danger of genocide.(4)

Not that the present is short of trauma and tragedy. A report on the human impact of climate change from the Global Humanitarian Forum describes the ‘silent crisis’ of climate change that is already upon us and that, on yearly average, is causing over 300,000 deaths, seriously affecting 325 million people and bringing about economic loses of US$125 billion per year.(5)

In the face of such a present condition and future prognosis, why is there such reluctance to wholeheartedly and comprehensively engage with the climate change threat? Looking back on the so-called ‘credit crunch’ of 2009, it is quite remarkable (but not really surprising) how much the reverberations from a failed banking system threatening to undermine the prosperity of a global minority so quickly eclipsed the ‘climate crunch’
threatening the very existence of the world as we know it. “This is a most dangerous state of affairs,”
writes Jess Worth. “It’s like finding out that you have got cancer, but then delaying going to the doctor’s for treatment for a few months because you want to repaint your house.”(6) This is but a particularly striking example of the ‘eyes wide shut’ syndrome that characterizes much of the response to climate change.(7) From government, media, the corporate sector, the world of education and the public comes a presenting accep- tance, oftentimes fulsome, of the severity of the looming crisis. This acceptance is coupled with an ill-preparedness to confront the deep personal change and societal transformation needed to have any chance of staving off the worst effects of global heating.

The Lost Key

But why are ‘eyes wide shut’?

First, as implied by the house painting analogy, we have become straitjacketed by economic growth fetishism. Across the mainstream political spectrum there is a deeply entrenched identification of progress with continued increase in Gross National Product. “To question growth is to oppose progress and those who do are immediately accused of wanting to take us back to the stone age, as if living in a mansion or cave were the only options.”(8) Hence, although it is clear that subjugating the planet to the demands of the market is rapidly devastating both ecosphere and ethnosphere, environmental advocates seeking influence often narrow their case to argue that renewable energy and green technology carry enormous growth potential. Collusion with the growth fetish in this way subordinates their environmental message to the earth-devouring development agenda. In schools and universities, the environmentalism that is most accept- able, often ‘education for sustainable development’ (ESD), embraces or stays mum about its stance on growth. Much ESD discourse has indeed become steeped in ‘business as usual’ assumptions by implicitly and sometimes explicitly interpreting development as connoting sustained economic growth. As such, it becomes part of the disease rather than part of the cure. If we accept the finiteness of the planet— that the planet is not an inexhaustible cornucopia—and if we interpret ‘sustainable development’ as ‘sustainable growth,’ then the ‘sustainable development’ label becomes oxymo- ronic, a contradiction in terms, a ‘self-contained non-sequitur between noun and modifier’.(9)

Second, people of the metaphorical North of the planet as well as elites in the South have become so immured in the myths we tell ourselves—not only the myth of unending growth but also the myth of ever upward progress, the myth of human centrality to existence (‘Our World’), the myth of separation from and dominance over nature – that runaway climate change threatens our very sense of who we are. It is too painful
to contemplate. Confronted by ever more dire accounts of a global climate lurching towards ever-deepening crisis and of the consequences for the human condition, we engage in cognitive dissonance—processes in which
the human psyche, while rationally acknowledging the threat we face, uses devices such as prevarication, pleasure seeking or quixotic hopefulness to avoid or slow an appropriate and proportionate response. Dissonance arises between the evidence we are presented with, and which part of ourselves accepts, and what the other part of us wants to be true as we cling to our individual and social identity. we then act like the man in the Sufi story who lost the key to his house:

He was found to be looking for it under a light. He looked and looked and couldn’t find it. Finally some- one asked where he had lost the key. He answered, “well, I did in fact lose it over there.” And when asked why he didn’t look for it over there, he said, “Well, it’s dark over there, but there is light here for me to look”.(10)

Avoiding looking in dark corners, we fall back on characterizing climate change as a technical problem that can be managed by a mix of technological innovation and policy solutions that avoid challenge to ‘business as usual,’ rather than as evidence of a profound crisis in the human condition calling for nothing less than complete and total transformation.

Our review of climate change educational materials supports this contention. In most teaching packs and learning resources, we find a preponderant focus on the science of global warming rather than ethics and values issues.

We find absorption with technical fixes in aid of climate change adaptation and mitigation (the former increasingly to the fore in that it falls in with ‘business as usual’). We find a reluctance to investigate the culpability of neo-liberal economic growth models and to explore slow growth or no growth alternatives. Overall, we find a tendency to characterize climate change in terms of an immediately presenting symptom; that is, as a CO2 problem curable within mainstream terms of reference.

On the obverse side of the same coin, there is a concomitant reluctance to explore climate change as a crisis of an ethically numb, inequitable and de-natured human condition. There is, too, an avoidance of envisioning and addressing personal and societal climate change scenarios that are likely to be played out in learners’ lifetimes. Current climate change education more often than not eschews the darkened corner.

Staying within the comfortable arc of the light, education addressing climate change also sidesteps root-and-branch scrutiny of consumerism, defined by Alastair McIntosh as “consumption beyond the level of dignified sufficiency”.(11) Fuelled by the advertising industry and its dream factory of images and desires, consumerism has become key to personal identity for millions and millions of people. what we buy shapes how we feel about ourselves. To borrow from Descartes, ‘I consume, therefore I am’. But the substitute gratification we enjoy is not authentic identity and the ‘I am’ requires regular purchasing replenishment. That is precisely what the global marketplace needs. A “constant feeling of dissatisfaction to sustain spending” is essential because “unhappiness sustains economic growth”.(12) For Sue MacGregor, consumerism is a form of structural violence exploiting the natural environment and sweatshop laborer and enslaving the consumer herself. “People behave as they do in a consumer society,” she writes, “because they are so indoctrinated into the logic of the market that they cannot “see” anything wrong with what they are doing. Because they do not critically challenge the market ideology, and what it means to live in a consumer society, they actually contribute to their own oppression”.(13) For McIntosh, consumerism and the spurious sense of identity it spawns “interrupts the very journey of life” towards mature self-realization.(14)

In addressing the environmental impact of mass consumerism, environmental and sustainable development educators often promote ‘green consumerism’ employing the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ legend. Not only does this fall short of a thorough unpacking of consumerism as such, it can inadvertently bolster a consumerist ethic. The recycling bin in most classrooms is a case in point. Often cited as evidence of the school’s commitment to sustainability, it can easily convey the subliminal message that consumerism approached responsibly can be benign. In terms of addressing the powerful structures fuelling runaway climate change, ‘green consumerism’ is also found wanting in that it tends to highlight individual responsibility and culpability and leaves forces driving the engine of the global market- place in the darkened, unexplored corner. A class of students working out their individual ‘ecological footprint’ on a dedicated website carries a barely camouflaged subtext of overpersonalizing responsibility.(15)

But, as many readers of Green Teacher are well aware, in the darkest corner of all is our radical disconnection from nature and the associated conceit of thinking humanity above nature. The prevailing view of nature, bred from modernism, is that of machine having instrumental value rather than of an organic whole having immanent purpose and intrinsic value. As such, we have taken unbounded license to exploit, but as exploiter have paved the way for the erosion of our inner life. It was during the time of Galileo (1564-1642) that T.S. Eliot says a “disassociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered”.(16) For McIntosh, it is this “breaking up of the ability to feel and relate to life” that “lies behind the mindlessness that underlies anthropogenic climate change”.(17) In this way, a vicious circle has been wrought in which the desiccation of the psyche has both fed from and fed into the destruction of the planet. Denial of the sacred, the “vast interconnected whole that is the totality of all the nested system or minds making up the living world” (18) fuels an anthropocentric and dominance-fixated ethic that is the harbinger of destruction. “If we learn, before it is too late, to make this move towards reverential relationship with the systemic and material world, we will be in a win-win situation,” writes Noel Charlton. “We will gain enormously in quality of life. we will cease to be a pathology within the systems of the living earth”.(19) And yet some of our most respected environmental advocates still speak in instrumental, desacralized lexicon about the importance of preserving ‘ecosystem services’ and of protecting and harnessing ‘natural resources’ and ‘natural capital’.(20)

They do so, we would suggest, because they know that this is the language of possibility within the corridors of power where they are looking for traction and influence. This is the rub. While government, corporations, and other sources of power are prepared to embrace a trimmed, reformist climate change agenda seeming to do something but maintaining ‘business as usual’, a transformative agenda in the face of oncoming planetary destabilization remains beyond the pale. educational institutions and systems are caught up in the same cultural pathology. The best hope, we hold, lies in helping foment ‘blessed unrest’ outside the constraints of those institutions and systems within infor- mal and non-formal community learning spaces but also by opportunistically availing of as many subversively fertile niches as possible within formal learning contexts. What might a learning program for unleashing ‘blessed unrest’ in a time of climate crisis encompass?

A Transformative Learning Agenda

Breaking Through Denial

It has become almost axiomatic amongst global and environmental educators to say that undiluted exposure to ‘gloom and doom’ is disabling and disempowering for the learner. That said, an honest education facing up to the onset of what Alastair McIntosh describes as “a great dying time of evolutionary history”(21) calls for an overturning of the comfortable delusion that major disruption of the Earth’s climate can be avoided or neutralized. Recognizing that present and future generations need hope, we have to ask what the hope is grounded in and what kind of hope it is. Is it spurious optimism, a comfortable fiction based on what we would prefer to see happen while keeping our ‘eyes wide shut’? Or, is it a pared down and realistically straitened optimism born of confronting the present and future earth condition? Is it cozy but inauthentic hope or hard-edged but more authentic hope? A program for ‘blessed unrest’ calls for what Martin Seligman calls “the courage to endure pessimism”.(22) Truly transformative learning, we submit, involves conscious, deep and sustained processes of engaging with pain, despair and grief over what we are losing, moving towards acceptance while searching for radically new meaning and values, and equipping ourselves for personal and collective empowerment and action; what have been called the stages of ‘Despair, Accept, Act’.(23)

Within such processes, it becomes vital that a careful processing of the ‘dying time’ takes place; an engagement with death and impermanence as core to existence, and an understanding that such engagement can lead to a deeper, non-materialistic appreciation of life that can be the harbinger of radical social renewal.(24) “We cannot address the future in a serious or comprehensive way,” writes Diarmuid O’Murchu, “without embracing the dark and perilous threat that hangs over us as a human and planetary species. …we are compelled to assert what seems initially to be an outrageous claim: a radical new future demands the death and destruction of the old reality. It is from the dying that new life sprouts forth”.(25) Joanna Macy’s despair and empowerment work provides a powerful canon of learning activities for breaking out of denial about what is happening to the world, working through despair and loss towards renewed commitment and purpose, and so being ready to embrace the activism of ‘blessed unrest’.(26) Future envisioning activities
are also important in this regard, opening the way to pre-empting the future by entering the future. Learners guided on visualization journeys into the dystopian futures that climate change future histories lay out (27) can also be facilitated through their despair and towards pre-emptive action.

Alternative Conceptions of a ‘Good Life’

So ubiquitous is the myth of never-ending economic growth and the view that growth is essential to personal and collective wellbeing that we are living with dangerously delusional ‘no alternative’ assumptions.(28) It is instructive that while schools commit to offering a multiplicity of perspective allied with critical rigor, the growth economy and its environmental and social impacts are rarely scrutinized. Taking up such scrutiny, learning programs for ‘blessed unrest’ need to offer an antidote by making available age-appropriate learning windows for considering ideas for transition to slow growth, no growth and steady state economies, concretizing those ideas through learning-in-community experimentation and practice. “Climate change means we have no choice,” says Peter Victor, author of Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design not Disaster. “We can either design a slower-growth economy over the next few decades, or we’ll get there suddenly through environmental disaster”.(29)

In the project of subverting the ‘no alternative to growth’ worldview, a root-and-branch critique of consumerism is key. We term what we have in mind ‘anti-consumerism education’, distinguishing it from ‘consumer awareness education’ with its subliminal agenda that consumerism can be made benign, just as, given the exigencies of structural racism, liberal ‘race awareness education’ had to give way to a more radical ‘anti-racist education’. Anti-consumerism education has the twin goals of protecting environments and exploited peoples while liberating individuals from the thrall of identity-distorting consumerism for a journey of autonomous (but interconnected) self-discovery.

One counter to the idée fixe of neo-liberal growth, as proposed by a succession of transformative educators who have published in Green Teacher, is that of living and learning informed by ‘voluntary simplicity’, the term connoting frugal consumption, ecological awareness, connectedness, conviviality, community and personal growth based on the harmonization of physical, psychological and spiritual needs. The pain of transition to voluntary simplicity, its originator argues, is more than compensated for through the quality of revitalized community experience and the cultivation of “conscious watchfulness”, i.e. the ability to behold the close-at-hand world through an intimate eye.(30)

A visualization exercise leads Toronto Montessori teachers towards creative expression of their concerns for the future, the interrelationship of all things and the undercurrents of climate change

Poetizing Intimacy with Nature

Intimacy with nature is crucial to fomenting ‘blessed unrest’. The intimacy we have in mind walks the interface of science and spirituality as it cultivates resistance to forces destroying cultural and natural environments. In a time of violation of flora and peoples occasioned by the English land enclosures and agrarian ‘modernization’ of the 1820s, the laborer-poet John Clare conveyed a sense of loss through

a finely-detailed depiction of flower species under threat, images that in their detail also betokened a sense of oneness between flowers and laborers “as fellow members of the great commonwealth of the fields,” now sharing a common fate in their eviction.(31) His radicalism and expansiveness were bred of a nature intimacy in which were folded together science, spirituality and social justice. In a time of present and looming runaway climate change eroding environments, cultures, social relations and livelihoods, it is profoundly important to enable learners to cultivate a sense of enfoldment in nature and a disposition to hold onto what is being lost by fostering scientific intimacy as well as poetic and spiritual ways of knowing such as attunement, awe, celebration, enchantment, intuition, reverence, wonder and the oceanic sense of the oneness of being. This is another reason why ESD gives cause for concern. As a field, it but rarely gives space to honing poetic and numinous insight, relying instead on scientific rationality. “At the heart of the matter,” writes Michael Bonnett, “is the question of the adequacy of rationality to resolve issues in an area as complex, subtle and multidimensional …as environmental concern,” especially, he adds, given how rationality has proved so effective a tool in the exploitation of the environment.32 To borrow the title of Eban Goodstein’s fine book, the calling to blessed unrest is one of Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction.(33)

Learning in the Democracy of Denizenship

“Conservation of the earth’s resources and creation of sustainable livelihood,” writes Vandana Shiva, “are most caringly, creatively, efficiently and equitably achieved at the local level. Localization of economies is a social and ecological imperative”.(34) For Shiva, localism invokes a “living democracy” integrated with a “sustenance economy”. “In living democracies, people can influence the decisions over food we eat, the water we drink, and the healthcare and education we have. Living democracy grows like a tree, from the bottom up.”(35) Turning globalization on its head, Shiva envisages a sustainable future in which the “most intense relationships are at local level and the thinnest interactions at the international level” with decisions being taken “at the level closest to where the impact is felt”.(36) Such a conception speaks to a reorientation of citizenship and citizenship education away from a primary focus on arms-length representative democracy towards close-at-hand participatory democracy grounded in a keener, immediately experienced, appreciation of the “interdependence between nature and culture, humans and other species”.(37) A citizenship education for ‘blessed unrest’ in time of rampant climate change, we submit, needs to be shaped by engagement in community-based action that creates, resists and transgresses in the name of sustainability. The notion of ‘citizenship’ might helpfully give way to that of ‘denizenship’, a denizen being an inhabitant of a particular place, the word connoting the primacy, aliveness and realness of immediate context while also neatly sidestepping the built-in anthropocentrism of citizenship, in that a denizen can be either human or other-than-human.

A Cosmopolitan Dialogue for Climate Justice

Opening the way to the close-at-hand democracy of the denizen does, however, carry the ever-attendant danger of protectionism and insularity, raising the specter of the climate change equivalent of the gated community, especially amongst the affluent. Building a concomitant commitment to a global climate justice ethic is, then, a crucial dimension in catalyzing blessed unrest (it remains by and large ignored in current climate change curricula). While countries in the South of the planet are held to account for their financial indebtedness, there is no holding to account of countries of the North for their ecological indebtedness arising from their polluting the atmospheric global commons.(38) Also, the effects of climate change are falling and will continue to fall in a hugely disproportionate way on nations and communities of the South, who are least responsible for CO2 emissions.(39) These issues, calling for reparation, on the one hand, and restorative justice, on the other, speak to engagement in a cosmopolitan and reflexive learning dialog as a vital complementary dimension to localized learning and action.(40) There need to be learning synergies through the sharing of blessed unrest.

A Harbinger of Authentic Hope

Blessed connotes blissfulness, good fortune, a favored state, a condition of spiritual wellbeing and joyfulness, a state of reverential entanglement with the world. Unrest signifies disaffection, dissatisfaction, discontentment, disturbance, a state of active unease and unsettlement fomenting dissidence and dissent. The words, juxtaposed, look like an oxymoron. But, we suggest, they offer a potent transformative learning concoction in response to ‘interesting times’ that are marked by crisis, danger and turbulence, on the one hand, but are also redolent with the creative and liberating potential bred of impending collapse. The climate change learning we propose is no easy road; it is countercultural, it runs against the grain of the prevailing ‘eyes wide shut’ syndrome, and it will not be favored by those of ‘business as usual’ disposition. But to look only where comfortable light shines, we maintain, leads to the easy embrace of inauthentic hope. The rough ride of ‘blessed unrest’ offers a ruffling and dark pathway but a way through to an authentic, grounded hopefulness.

Related activities:
• Weathering Climate Confusion
• Climate Change Denial
• Climate Change Despair and Empowerment Activity Sequence
• Guidebook for survivors

David Selby is Founding Director and Fumiyo Kagawa is Research Director of Sustainability Frontiers, a new not-for-profit international organization with offices in Canada and the UK. They are editors of Education and Climate Change: Living and Learning in Interesting Times, published in 2010 by Routledge. They have recently written the UNESCO Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development teacher education program and support materials for Africa, Asia, Europe and North America and the Small Island Nations.

The authors would especially welcome feedback from teachers who try their four activities with their students. Contact them at info@sustainabilityfrontiers.org.

To view the photo-rich magazine version, click here.

David Selby is Founding Director and Fumiyo Kagawa is Research Director of Sustainability Frontiers, a new not-for-profit international organization with offices in Canada and the UK.  (See http://www.sustainabilityfrontiers.org.)  They are editors of Education and Climate Change: Living and Learning in Interesting Times, published in 2010 by Routledge. They have recently written the UNESCO Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development teacher education program and support materials for Africa, Asia, Europe and North America and the Small Island Nations, which will be available online Fall 2011. They will be holding two summer institutes on Deep Climate Change Education in the seaside town of Sidmouth, Devon, England, July/August 2012.

The authors would especially welcome feedback from teachers who try the following four activities with their students.  Contact them at info@sustainabilityfrontiers.org.