Ecofeminist Theology: Intersectional Justice and Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 234-246
Author(s):  
Kimberly Carfore
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Gary Snyder ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Active Voice ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Dialogical Relationship ◽  
Ecofeminist Theology

The multi-faceted ecological crisis—combining problems of ecology, society, and religion—is tied to the ideologies implicit in Western thinking. In this essay, I outline an ecofeminist theology which addresses how the current ecological crisis we face—including but not limited to, climate change, mass species extinction, ocean acidification, the rise in wildfires and superstorms, glacial melt, pollution—are tied to problematic and incorrect ideologies. To do this, I utilize Val Plumwood’s robust ecofeminist philosophy to revealing harmful dualisms implicit in all forms of oppression. I critique transcendental monotheism for extracting life, God, and agency from the natural world. If God exists over and above the Earth, and this God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, this justifies the problematic lagged response to our urgent ecological crisis. In short, my ecofeminist theology (1) affirms intersectionality. It considers racial injustice and systemic racism are intertwined with the ecological crises. We cannot address our ecological crisis without also addressing racial injustice. (2) It critiques a transcendental monotheistic God as this reinforces irresponsible and apathetic responses to our multi-faceted ecological crisis. And (3) it affirms Plumwood’s “philosophical animism” as a way to retrieve nature in the active voice. By retrieving nature in the active voice, we retrieve a sense of groundedness in place through relationships with non-humans. Her “philosophical animism” affirms agency in the natural world without culturally appropriating Indigenous cultures. It is a way for Westerners to enter into dialogical relationship with the natural world. It is both political—affirming the rights of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color—and it is personal—engaging in a practice of the wild (Gary Snyder).

Separation and Unity: Zen Koan in Environmental Theory and Education

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
David Chang
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Education ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Ecological Ethics ◽  
Pedagogical Innovation ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Environmental Educators

Abstract The ecological crisis has been traced to a rupture in the human-nature relationship, which sees the natural world as inert materials that serve human utility. This prevailing sense of separation is thoroughly embedded in Western culture through engrained metaphors that reinforce a view of the Earth as a subject of human mastery. To counter the disjuncture between humans and nature, some theorists have suggested a unitive view of nature, while others have argued for more expansive forms of identification that engender a more responsive ecological ethics. Despite these efforts, the human-nature dichotomy remains a perennial issue of debate, especially for environmental educators who strive to cultivate a more harmonious relationship with the earth. This article examines the Zen Koan (case or example) as a pedagogical innovation that hones the learner’s ability to entertain opposing propositions. Humans are both united with and separate from nature at the same time. The Koan encourages an epistemological fluidity and openness to ambiguity that can enrich and deepen inquiry. In the context of environmental education, this contemplative approach to investigation can complement immersive pedagogies that enjoin somatic and sensory experience in explorations of the natural world.

Identity, Affirmation, and Resistance in the Exeter Riddle Collection

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney Catherine Barajas
Keyword(s):  
Human Service ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Natural State ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Best Interest ◽  
Active Voice ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Inherent Worth

The Exeter riddle collection imagines voices for the Earth community. The bird riddles (6 and 7) exploit similarities between human and avian behaviors to affirm the intrinsic worth of the Earth community even when it makes humans uncomfortable. The horn riddles (12 and 76) give voice to other-than-human beings celebrating their participation in heroic culture: these riddles imagine that animal-objects find pleasure and purpose in their “work”, despite removal from their natural state. However, the wood-weapon riddles (3, 51, and 71) reveal an awareness that conscription into human service is not always in the best interest of the other-than-human. These thematic clusters suggest an interest in the inherent worth, active voice, and purpose of the non-human natural world.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Jim Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
The Public ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Racial Injustice

This chapter sheds some light on strategic racism and identifies who is doing it, and why. It demonstrates that while the problems Americans face are severe, they are also eminently fixable, particularly if more people remember that the injustice being engineered by the group of billionaires and multimillionaires has not been limited to people of color. The chapter introduces how powerful a tool racial injustice has been for the ultra-wealthy in advancing their economic and political interests. It reveals that while such sordid realities are rarely mentioned in the public discourse, it was nevertheless true that there was a lot of money being made off of this type of large-scale cruelty. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the horrific form of modern-day racism was not adequately captured by the term “systemic racism.” It suggests that persistent racial inequities are merely the accidental byproducts of our economic and political systems. In reality, what the ultra-wealthy have been doing was worse than that, because behind all of the billions of dollars in investments they were making in opposition to communities of color, there was intentionality. There was strategy.

scholarly journals Ecology and Anthropology in Ecofeminist Theology

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-104
Author(s):  
Cezary Naumowicz
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Theological Reflection ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Rosemary Radford Ruether ◽  
Time Problem ◽  
Ecofeminist Theology ◽  
A Current

Ecofeminism is a current emerged in 1970, it’s a movement that sees a connection between the degradation of the natural world and the subordination and oppression of women. For some time problem of the ecological crisis and feministic analyses have been influencing theological reflection. Ecofeminist theology aims at combining ecology, feminism, and theology. Its main proponents are Rosemary Radford Ruether, Elizabeth Johnson, Sally McFague, Mary Grey, Anne Primavesi, Ivone Gebara, Elizabeth Green, and Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel. Many authors make a hypothesis about responsibility of Jewish and Christian tradition for women suppression in patriarchal dualism and aim at reinterpreting some theological concepts.

Tending this Fragile Earth, Our Island Home: The Pope's Encyclical in Dialogue with Ecomimesis, a Design Model for Conservation Stewardship

2018 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-766
Author(s):  
Lillian C. Woo
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Water Pollution ◽  
Anthropogenic Impact ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Design Solution ◽  
World Population ◽  
Natural Ecosystem ◽  
Natural Ecosystems ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World

In the last fifty years, empirical evidence has shown that climate change and environmental degradation are largely the results of increased world population, economic development, and changes in cultural and social norms. Thus far we have been unable to slow or reverse the practices that continue to produce more air and water pollution, soil and ocean degradation, and ecosystem decline. This paper analyzes the negative anthropogenic impact on the ecosystem and proposes a new design solution: ecomimesis, which uses the natural ecosystem as its template to conserve, restore, and improve existing ecosystems. Through its nonintrusive strategies and designs, and its goal of preserving natural ecosystems and the earth, ecomimesis can become an integral part of stabilizing and rehabilitating our natural world at the same time that it addresses the needs of growing economies and populations around the world.

Asco, Chris Burden, and the Politics of the Misfire

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 312-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faye Gleisser
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Access To Resources ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
White Masculinity ◽  
Visual Narratives

This article draws out the ‘politics of the misfire’ as a process constituted in part by discursive articulations of the ‘misuse’ of guns, and in part by mediated visual narratives of criminality cultivated in American visual culture. Specifically, the author examines how the decades-long historiography of artist Chris Burden’s iconic artwork, Shoot (1971), relies upon and perpetuates spatially racialized and gendered notions of innocence and safety. She argues that the conceptual art collective Asco’s theorizing of misfires in response to their vulnerability as Chicanos in America provides a vital framework for recognizing how the neutralized archetype of white masculinity, simultaneously innocent and lawless, animates and sustains the legacy of Shoot. Through consideration of geographies of cumulative vulnerability, access to resources, and systemic racism this article links processes of art historical canonization to discriminatory practices that structurally oppress people of color in the United States.

scholarly journals An Orthodox perspective on hamartology and ecology: Assessing John Chryssavgis’ contribution to current discourse

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Newton Cloete
Keyword(s):  
Theological Reflection ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Concise Overview ◽  
Christian Understanding ◽  
Christian Discourse

This article is a sequel to my earlier paper entitled ‘Hamartology and Ecology: An assessment of Aruna Gnanadason’s contribution to the contemporary debate’. Christian ecotheology presents a Christian critique of ecological destruction while also offering an ecological critique of Christianity. It entails a reinterpretation of all the classic Christian symbols, in this case the doctrine of sin, specifically the nature of sin, explored in the light of ecological discourse. Considering the contemporary ecological crisis, this article highlights Orthodox theologian John Chryssavgis’ contribution to the current debate. Following a concise overview on Christian discourse on ecology, as well as the Christian understanding of the nature of sin and the ways in which it is re-described in contemporary ecotheological terms, this article explores John Chryssavgis’ position on ecotheological discourse through a discussion of anthropocentrism, domination in the name of differences of species, consumerist greed, alienation of humans from the earth community as well as denial and disdain. The Orthodox tradition is an important factor in the formulation of his ecotheology. The method employed here encompasses ecclesial scrutiny, namely Chryssavgis’ assessment of the Christian tradition’s role in contributing to the contemporary crisis, followed by theological reflection on his interpretations of ecological sin and finally, alternative courses of action to appropriately address the issues in question. In closing, the article offers an assessment of Chryssavgis’ overall contribution to current ecotheological discourse.

scholarly journals Coming up for Air: On Reading in a Global Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-21
Author(s):  
Aparna Tarc
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Teaching Of Reading ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere

The thought of breath grips the world as climate change, racial injustice and a global pandemic converge to suck oxygen, the lifeforce, out of the earth. The visibility of breath, its critical significance to existence, I argue, is made evident by poets. To speak of breath is to lodge ourselves between birth and death and requires sustained, meditative, attentive study to an everyday yet taken for granted practice. Like breathing, reading is also a practice that many took for granted until the pandemic. My paper will engage the affective and/or poetic dimensions of reading left out of theories of literacy that render it instrumental and divorced from the life of the reader (Freire, 1978). I will suggest that scholars of literacy, in every language, begin to engage a poetics of literacy as attending to the existential significance of language in carrying our personhood and lives. I will also argue that our diminishing capacities to read imaginatively and creatively have led to the rise of populist ideologies that infect public discourse and an increasingly anti-intellectual and depressed social sphere. Despite this decline in the practice and teaching of reading, it is reported that more than any other activity, reading sustained the lives of individuals and communities’ during a global pandemic. Teachers and scholars might take advantage of the renewed interested in reading to redeliver poetry and literary language to the public sphere to teach affective reading. Poetry harkens back to ancient practices of reading inherent in all traditions of reading. It enacts a pedagogy of breath, I argue, one that observes its significance in our capacity to exist through the exchange of air in words, an exchange of vital textual meanings we have taken for granted as we continue to infect our social and political world and earth with social hatred, toxins, and death. In this paper I engage fragments of poetry by poets of our time (last century onward) that teaches us to breathe and relearn the divine and primal stance that reading poetry attends to and demands. More than any other form, “poetry,” Ada Limon claims, “has breath built into it”. As such, reading poetry helps us to breathe when the world bears down and makes it hard for us to come up for air.

Vibration, Difference, and Solidarity in the Anthropocene

Resonance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-241
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Chung
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
Departure Point ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Black Skin

Taking the new materialist and climate change themes of Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: an Opera for Objects as a departure point, this article examines sound studies’ recent invocations of new materialist philosophy alongside this philosophy's foundational concern toward the Anthropocene ecological crisis. I argue that new materialist sonic thought retraces new materialism’s dubious ethical program by deriving equivalencies of moral standing from logically prior ontological equivalencies of material entities and social actors rooted in their shared capacities to vibrate. Some sonic thought thus amplifies what scholars in Black and Indigenous decolonial critique have exposed as the homogenizing, assimilative character of new materialism’s superficially inclusional and optimistic ontological imaginary, which includes tendencies to obscure the ongoingness of racial inequality and settler-colonial exploitation in favor of theorizing difference as a superfice or illusion. As I argue in a sonic reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, some of new materialism’s favored analytical and ecological terms such as objecthood, vibrationality, and connection to the Earth are also terms through which anti-Blackness, colonial desire, and the universalization of Whiteness have historically been routed. This historical amnesia in new materialism enables its powerfully obfuscating premises. As a result, I argue that new materialist sound studies and philosophy risk amplifying the Anthropocene’s similarly homogenizing rhetorics, which often propound a mythic planetary oneness while concealing racial and colonial climate inequities. If sound studies and the sonic arts are to have illuminating perspectives on the Anthropocene, they must oppose rather than affirm its homogenizing logics.

The poetics of learning in the texts of Gary Snyder

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Βασίλειος Σταυρόπουλος
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Education ◽  
Transfer Of Learning ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Physical Work ◽  
Gary Snyder ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Essential Knowledge ◽  
The One

The aim of this dissertation is to explore how the poetics of Gary Snyder constitute a valuable source of learning transmitted through performance and orality. The ethnopoetic approach specifies the way learning occurs in the mythic and poetic universe of Snyder. Preparation for a hunt becomes a proposal for alternative education, while the function of the shaman-protopoet broadens the scope of learning in every dimension of the world, both on the realistic and supernatural planes. Snyder demonstrates the passing on of the practice through a grand performative parable of a father-to-son instruction which is realized in constant dialogue with the old masters, for the betterment of the community. There is a personal dimension of learning that takes place as a result of enlightenment, based on the poetic physiognomy of tools on the one hand, and physical work with work rhythm, on the other hand. The performance of nature facilitates the transfer of learning and provides a multiplicity of remarkable levels of consideration regarding its ability to generate essential knowledge. Moreover, learning is not withheld, but is transmitted back to the community that needs it, in order to define the “how to be” on this planet. Finally, applying the ecocritical approach I comment on the significance of "old song and tale,” which constitutes the inexhaustible reservoir of inspiration, the great literary “compost” in the American poetic tradition. The poet becomes a seeker of learning in the flux of natural events, which he studies as a kind of performative, ever-fresh text. The challenge for the poet, as this thesis desciibes, is to become worthy of the apocalyptic knowledge nature offers to the adept seekers of the learning that inhabits the realm of wild landscape of the earth and the human mind.

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