Articles by author: Brock University

  • New International Cooperation: Network of UNESCO Chairs and partners for inclusive and Open Knowledge in Sustainable Food Systems

    Tuesday, August 05, 2025 | By

    The UNESCO Chair in Community Sustainability: From Local to Global has joined a new international network to advance cooperation and knowledge regarding sustainable food systems. The new network was recently announced by the Triptolemos Foundation.

    Read more from the official announcement:

    “The UNESCO Chair “Science and Innovation for Sustainable Development: Global Food production and Food Safety” of the Triptolemos Foundation and the UNED has promoted the initiative to establish the informal NETWORK of UNESCO Chairs and partners for Inclusive and Open Knowledge in Sustainable Food Systems, which already has 10 chairs representing 8 countries and 4 UNESCO regions.

    The NETWORK, coordinated by the Triptolomemos Foundation, aims to expand the concept of sustainable food systems in a global environment where education, science and culture play a key role in facing the great challenges facing society and the planet. The RED pivots on the 4 macro areas in which the Triptolemos Foundation defines the food system and its main objective is to constitute a forum for meeting, study, dialogue, debate, participation, collaboration and training between the areas inherent to the global sustainable food system and to contribute to its improvement and optimization.”

    Read the Triptolemos Foundation newsletter in English

    Read the Triptolemos Foundation newsletter in Spanish

    Categories: Activities & Events, Updates of the Chair

  • Nature-based Solutions and circular economy for North America

    Monday, August 04, 2025 | By

    Four people stand in front of a presentation screen on a stage during a forum.

    Photo Caption: UNESCO Chair on Community Sustainability: From Local to Global Liette Vasseur (second from left) discussed how nature-based solutions can build more sustainable economies at a trilateral global forum in Mexico City on Thursday, July 24. Also pictured are Luis Alain Zúñiga Hernández (left) of Ecopil, Mexico; Felicia Marcus (second from right), Visiting Fellow at Stanford University; and Gregg Bill (right) of Accounting for Nature.

    The Nature-based Solutions concept has become a buzz term in many spheres of society. It attracts industries, organizations and governments because of the possibility it presents to use nature are a way to address societal challenges such as food security, water quality, biodiversity loss, and climate change. It can also be connected to the concept of circular economy, when we consider the reduction of waste and exploitation of natural resources.

    On Thursday, 24 July 2025, in Mexico City, the Joint Public Advisory Committee (JPAC) of the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), organized a public forum, Building Sustainable Economies: Circular Models and Nature-based Solutions for a Resilient North America. The public forum was a hybrid (in-person and virtual) event. Liette Vasseur, UNESCO Chair on Community Sustainability: From Local to Global, was invited to speak on Nature-based Solutions in the first session of this public forum.

    Woman stands on a stage with three flags to her right.

    The JPAC is the public face of the CEC, which represents the parallel agreement of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The JPAC, through these types of consultations, prepares recommendations that are then submitted to the Council of the Ministers of the Environment of the three countries (Canada, USA, and Mexico). The Council meeting was held on the Friday, the day following the public forum.

    “Having been a member of the JPAC several years ago, I know the importance and the influence of this advisory committee to influence public policies in the three countries,” Vasseur said. “The fact that the JPAC was interested in these concepts of Nature-based Solutions and circular economy demonstrates the willingness of the countries to accelerate the transition to more resilience  and sustainable economies in North America.”

    To follow updates on the work of the CEC and the JPAC, visit their website here.

    Categories: Updates of the Chair

  • Join us for an SDG Webinar and the Poetry Celebration!

    Monday, March 24, 2025 | By

    In my role as the Chair, I host a variety of different events to mobilize research, connect with stakeholders/partners and engage with the community.  There are two upcoming events that are open to all and free to attend.

    Celebration of the Annual Sustainability Poetry Contest 2025

    • Thursday, April 3 2025 at 6:30 p.m.; Mahtay Cafe in St. Catharines
      • The entire Brock University and Niagara community are welcome to celebrate International Poetry Day by listening to in-person readings of the poems submitted for this year’s Sustainability Poetry Contest (in either English or French). We also invite anyone interested in sharing their poetry to consider reading a poem aloud at the event.
      • The event is free to attend and light refreshments will be provided. For more information, visit the Brock University Experience BU page or the Sustainability Poetry Contest page of this website.

    Linking SDG 3 with SDG 13: Are we prepared? Online Webinar

    • Monday, March 31 2025 at 10:00 AM; Online
      • We invite you to learn about the challenges that vulnerable people face as a result of climate change, especially during extreme climate events, and what is/ can be done to improve their capacity to cope with these changes.
    • Moderator:
      Liette Vasseur, Professor and UNESCO Chair on Community Sustainability, Brock University
    • Invited Panelists:
      Kathryn Bakos, Managing Director, Finance and Resilience, Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, University of Waterloo
      Sean Kidd, Division Chief of Psychology at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto
      Olivia Groff, Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator, St Catharines
    • For more information about the event, visit the Brock University Experience BU page and tune in live to the event here: https://shorturl.at/WyZQi
    Categories: Updates of the Chair

  • Diverse perspectives, common goals: insights from the Beyond Sustainability Project

    Friday, July 19, 2024 | By

    The Beyond Sustainability project launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, hindering important in-person interactions for the transdisciplinary nature of the research. Face-to-face communication, vital for knowledge mobilization, was not possible during this time. The project team was quick to pivot to a virtual setting, however, and were able to maintain the intended focus: to integrate radical transformation, systems thinking and transdisciplinary research to find common ground. 

    Sounds easy!

    It is already difficult enough to define terminologies in person and get a common understanding — the virtual meetings made it even more complicated. The varied viewpoints and working styles across disciplines proved to be both an enriching and challenging experience. Collaborating across multiple academic fields demanded time and patience in order to navigate the complexities arising from diverse perspectives. It became evident that individuals operate at different paces and levels of detail, illustrated even in tasks as seemingly straightforward as defining “sustainability”. 

    For example, the research team philosopher conceptualizes sustainability as the measure of a system’s capacity to withstand transformation. They propose that sustainability is achieved when these transformations do not significantly diminish the system’s complexity or its capacity for affective potentiality. They argue that a sustainable system thrives when the transformations it undergoes enhance its complexity or affective potentiality, thereby positively contributing to its constituent powers and relational capacity.

    Conversely, the research team biologist defines sustainability as the maintenance of the ecosystem, encompassing both human and socio-economic activities, in a manner that ensures the long-term protection and sustenance of all biotic and abiotic components of the planet. This perspective emphasizes the holistic preservation of ecological balance and biodiversity to safeguard the well-being of all life forms.

    In contrast, the research team engineer views sustainability as enabling people to live socially just lives within ecological limits. This simple perspective highlights the importance of achieving a balance between human and environmental needs. 

    Amidst these diverse perspectives, the research team encountered predictable hurdles often encountered in interdisciplinary collaboration. Researchers from different disciplines often possess different research strategies and methodologies, leading to potential misunderstandings and difficulties in appreciating the value of interdisciplinary perspectives. This challenge is particularly pronounced between the social and natural sciences. But by the end, however, all team members were able to find the common ground needed to produce highly collaborative blogs and reflection pieces. Students were also able to publish their work. 

    The project was intended to be of high risk, and this became more obvious with the pandemic. It was supposed to also lead to high reward. This might have been somewhat limited for the team itself, but the think tank at the end of the project brought new perspectives and possibilities. There is an idea of a second life but with a more focused direction. Approaches such as Nature-based Solutions (the weaving of Indigenous ways of knowing with other scientific approaches) are strongly related to systems thinking and reconnecting nature and humans. This approach leads to more concrete solutions and actions that can engage in the path for radical transformation. This remains high risk with great potential for high rewards. 

    Despite challenges, the project utilized digital platforms and solutions to broaden its reach globally. Empowering youth and fostering unconventional discourse, the project underscores the collective potential for impactful change, emphasizing the importance of collaboration in reshaping humanity’s relationship with the planet.

    Tags:
    Categories: Beyond Sustainability Blog

  • Beyond sustainability: radical transformation through system thinking – a lesson in patience and adaptation

    Thursday, July 18, 2024 | By

    Liette Vasseur presents at an event in front of a group of seated attendees between bookcases

    The New Frontiers Exploration Grant was awarded to the Beyond Sustainability international project team on April 1, 2020 – two weeks after the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

    Imagine: A project consisting of an international transdisciplinary team established to research new ways of thinking about how humans interact with non-humans and the natural environment (and how to transform that relationship through system thinking in order to go beyond sustainability) without being able to interact in person or spend time directly in the field. Even worse, the project was also intended to include meaningful interactions with local people, involving youth, community members and other researchers, and between the research team itself. The implications are many, with the most notable being that “the human brain is the result of tens of thousands of years of evolution, while technology is rapidly evolving, the brain, is configured to manage interactions and communications with others face to face”.1

    Why does it matter whether communication between people is less effective when it’s done through technology as opposed to in person? In the context of the Beyond sustainability: radical transformation through system thinking research project, this disparity in communication methods is not merely a matter of preference; it carries profound implications, particularly regarding its collaborative ventures.

    Communication researchers tend to agree that all forms of digital and virtual communication can “replace” an in-person, face-to-face experience2. With face-to-face communication, however, is still considered to be the ‘the gold standard’3.  Face-to-face communication surpasses all other communications methods in its ability to inspire and mobilize people. Before a single word is spoken, it allows for the full conveyance of not just verbal content, but also the nuanced messages of tone, voice modulation, emotion and body language. Directly addressing individuals, making eye contact and delivering precise information serves as an effective means to underscore and reinforce key points.

    The first year of the project meant engaging only in a virtual way with very little interaction with the public. Meetings with the team became more complicated with schedule restrictions due to time zones and other obligations. It was also clear that activities on the computer, such as email., for example, caused distractions during virtual meetings. The virtual community cafes that the team hosted did not draw in a large crowd of people, especially at the beginning of the second year of the project. It seemed that people’s calendars were becoming overly saturated with virtual, screen-based events that were used as a medium to talk to and learn from others. 

    Videoconferencing can also hamper creativity4. It limits cognitive concentration because participant focus is often concentrated on verbal content and all that is happening on the screen, and in the backgrounds, rather than on the key nuances of communication (body language, tone, emotion, etc3,4).

    The Beyond Sustainability project was initially meant to engage the broader public through activities such as proactive camps, conversation circles, community cafés and artistic events. The pandemic brought new risks to public health involved with in person interaction that were not predetermined during the preparation of the project. Best efforts were made, however, to engage with the public virtually through a host of on-line events that were held. 

    To ensure participation and co-creation of knowledge with youth, community members, private sector, governmental officials and Indigenous partners, the Beyond Sustainability project established a Clubhouse meeting room. Clubhouse is an audio-based social media app that allows people from around the world to engage in live conversations. The Beyond Sustainability Team ran weekly conversations on a specific topic each week from August 2021 until April 2023. It had a huge advantage: the team reached over 500 people worldwide, in countries that would not have been reached in any other way. In this regard, it was very successful with higher impact than what would have been achieved by remaining solely at the local level. 

    Empowering the next generation of researchers was an important goal of the Beyond Sustainability project.  The formation of the Young Professionals in research Exploration Group served as a testament to this commitment, providing a platform for students to dive deeper into discussions on radical transformations and the future of sustainability. The work of the group culminated in an artistic event in the third year of the project: Transforming Environmental Awareness with Artistic Interventions: a showcase of video art, fiber art, and a live performance. The event offered an alternative way to build environmental awareness through sustainability discourse rethinking and showcased the out-of-the-box thinking required to transform our currently unsustainable social-ecological systems.  

    The project drew to a close in the form of a Think Tank, where a group of “system thinking” researchers (three from the original project team and three new thinkers) met in person at Brock University to chart a new course of moving beyond sustainability. The work of the Think Tank was motivated by the alarming reality that society has surpassed the boundaries of the traditional “sustainability” model, symbolized by the three-legged stool. This model has been made obsolete by an economic system driven by profit and power, disregarding the well-being of both humanity and the planet. The Think Tank research team understands that as society navigates this chaotic phase, it presents opportunities to instigate paradigm shifts and enact transformative change, paving the way towards a future that is secure and equitable for all. 

    The timing of a global pandemic, which led to a worldwide surge in outdoor activities, coinciding with the work of the Beyond Sustainability research team as they embarked on a journey to redefine humanity’s relationship with the environment was indeed interesting. Did it change the relationship between nature and humans? That’s difficult to know. What we do know is changing mindsets and bringing more awareness can create a new path for humans and the planet. Alone, nobody can change the world, but small groups of people working together can change part of it. Over time, these small changes can create radical transformation, and the world is forever changed, for the better.

    1. Schwartz, L., Levy, J., Endevelt-Shapira, Y., Djalovski, A., Hayut, O., Dumas, G., & Feldman, R. (2022). Technologically-assisted communication attenuates inter-brain synchrony. doi:10.1101/2022.06.06.494185
    2. Walther, J. B. Theories of computer-mediated communication and interpersonal relations. In Sage Handbook of Interpersonal Communication (eds. Knapp, M. L. & Daly, J. A.) (Sage, 2011).
    3. Stieger, S., Lewetz, D., & Willinger, D. (2023). Face-to-face more important than digital communication for mental health during the pandemic. Scientific Reports, 13(1). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-34957-4#ref-CR11 
    4. Brucks, M. S., & Levav, J. (2022). Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation. Nature, 605(7908), 108-112. doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04643-y

    Tags:
    Categories: Beyond Sustainability Blog, Uncategorised

  • Beyond Sustainability: Engaging communities for transformative action

    Monday, May 27, 2024 | By

    Beyond sustainability panelists stand in a row after an even

    As part of the Beyond Sustainability research project, invited speakers and the public focused on sharing perspectives on effecting meaningful change at an event on January 25, 2024. Invited panelists included, from left: Patrick Robson, Christopher Warren, Derek Davy, Abiola Oke, Liette Vasseur.

    By: Liette Vasseur and Jocelyn Baker

    As the Beyond Sustainability project neared completion, the project team continued to engage the public through impactful events. On January 25, 2024, a small panel of individuals, committed to going beyond the standard of conventional sustainability, gathered to share their perspectives on effecting meaningful change. The event aimed to highlight tangible actions that can motivate society to move beyond sustainability and actively seek innovative and transformative approaches that challenge existing boundaries and push the concept of sustainability to new levels.

    Among the invitees were Liette Vasseur, UNESCO Chair on Community Sustainability: From Local to Global; Christopher Warren from Sustainability Leadership (Hamilton); Abiola Oke, a graduate of Niagara College’s Beekeeping Program; and Derek Davy, CEO of Econse Water Technologies. Facilitating the event was Patrick Robson, Professor of Environmental Studies at Niagara College. Each panelist discussed their own approaches to advancing sustainability, highlighting the need for transformative thinking and action.

    The event also provided a platform for public participation, inviting attendees to share their insights and ideas. Responses to questions such as “What does sustainability mean to you?” brought forward interesting perspectives, like the idea of ecosystem maintenance, long-term conservation, and conscientious decision-making. Notable responses included the “the ability to maintain an ecosystem”; “the practice and the methodology that allow the conservation of the environment and people in the long term”; “to enjoy the fruits of the tree without destroying it for future generations”; “being aware of how your actions directly and indirectly impact the environment while taking steps to gradually make better decisions when it comes to said impact”; “keeping the long-term benefit for something of value”; “conscientious communities where no one is left behind and growth is dependent on what the earth can provide”; and, “taking care of the earth so it will continue to take care of my children”.

    When getting further into the idea of “beyond sustainability,” participants stressed the necessity for societal paradigm shifts, behavioral changes, and holistic viewpoints.

    Responses included:

    • “A change in how societies operate and make their decisions. It moves further beyond the three pillars of sustainability. In simple terms, it is changing the mindset.”
    • “A behavioural change of people. Shifts in the way people consume, a decrease in waste, and a raised awareness of the effects that individual decisions have on the environment and society.”
    • “Hopeful imagining that we can reframe sustainability away from the idea of sacrifice”
    • “Going beyond the concept we know about sustainability which is meeting our need now while meeting the needs of future generations (economics, society, environment). It means considering the world systems as a whole and world issues as complex and interconnected”
    • “A holistic viewpoint of life in all aspects, both on an individual and grand scale.”

    The discussions encouraged attendees to reconsider their personal views and daily actions. Many expressed a newfound awareness of the interconnections between their behaviours and environmental impacts. Some found it surprisingly possible to reduce their carbon footprints through minor lifestyle adjustments, while others remained skeptical, concerned about inaction, particularly among large corporations.

    Despite varying viewpoints, common ground was seen in a commitment to promoting sustainability beyond its conventional boundaries. As one participant summarized, every small change contributes to a larger transformation. This sentiment resonated throughout the event, reinforcing the need for radical action in the face of global crises.

    The panelists’ contributions further defined pathways to achieving beyond sustainability.  Oke, for example, outlined her vision of equalizing environmental, societal, and economic considerations advocating for individual carbon footprint reduction as an important step.  Davy shared his insights into combating water pollution through innovative on-site treatment technologies, emphasizing the importance of community engagement in addressing environmental challenges. Warren encouraged participants to consider scale and geography when looking at options, recognizing that the solution should not cause more harm than the problem itself.

    The Beyond Sustainability event provided an opportunity to discuss strategies for moving to new ways of thinking about sustainability that are more ambitious and progressive than what is commonly accepted or practiced. The action-oriented approach showcased practical solutions challenging attendees to think beyond the status quo and commit to meaningful change. This collective reframing, although on a small scale, is especially important amidst the urgency imposed by accelerated planetary changes.

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    Categories: Beyond Sustainability Blog

  • “Wicked problems” Part 2: In relation to policy as part of the systems thinking (applications)

    Thursday, February 23, 2023 | By

    tree seedling sitting on grass ready to be planted

    Addressing environmental challenges is not always straightforward. The effectiveness of Canada’s plan to plant 2 billion trees, for example, is impacted by logistical challenges  and ecological dynamics such as insect pest outbreaks or increased fire risks.

    Contributor: Brian Leung 

    This blog is the second of a two-part series on “Wicked Problems”. Read Part One Here.

    On the surface, solutions to many current problems appear straightforward: if we want to address climate change, reduce emissions; if we want to conserve species, protect more areas; if we want to improve air and water quality, stop pollution. Indeed, policies have been put in place for these purposes and should be lauded. The difficulty comes in actually achieving the goals in a meaningful way. This comes about arguably because of the high level of socio-ecological complexity of these problems (e.g. the cause of “wicked” problems). 

    For ecological complexity, we often do not fully understand the dynamics of the system at play. The models that we use to make predictions are either missing important factors or incorrectly model them as we can only model the phenomenon that we have thought of, and for which we have some information. Some main difficulties include interactions and feedbacks within the system. An example of interactive effects: Canada has a plan to plant 2 billion trees to help reduce amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. Beyond the logistical challenges of doing this, ecological dynamics such as insect pest outbreaks or increased fire risk reduce the effectiveness of the plan. Indeed, it may actually cause forests to be net emitters of CO2, which has additional, unintended social consequences.  What is known as “tipping points” can also occur, wherein after a certain degree of change, positive feedback loops (a closed system of amplifying disturbances) occur. For example, the progression of climate change could reduce snow cover in northern latitudes, which reduces reflectivity (white snow versus dark bare ground) resulting in an increase in heat absorption and thus, air temperature, which then further accelerates warming. This highlights the fact that predicting outcomes is not actually straightforward.

    In societies, feedbacks can also occur due to human behaviour and motivation. Even if a company (or country) wants to be proactive, this could cause a competitive disadvantage compared to other companies/countries whose only focus is monetary gain and is then able to expand more and become more dominant. Put another way, actions do not occur in isolation, but rather, occur given a landscape of all other actors and their potential actions. Accounting for these dynamics and putting the appropriate incentive structures in place requires substantial insight and coordination (e.g., so that the socially responsible company “wins,” everyone would be willing to pay a little more and not buy from the other companies).   

    Human values and motivations are not uniform and are not always geared towards societal improvements. People can be innovative and smart, and even when policies are in place, actors may not necessarily comply, or will find ways to navigate around the policies.  These dynamics of human behaviour and response are critical for policy success, and should be predictable to a certain extent, yet rarely enter the models which inform policy. How systems perpetuate and how to break detrimental feedback loops remain an open question. Finally, policies have costs and benefits, with often the most vulnerable sections of society disproportionately, and negatively affected. 

    Categories: Beyond Sustainability Blog

  • “Wicked Problems” Part 1: In relation to policy as part of the systems thinking (issues)

    Wednesday, February 22, 2023 | By

    group of protesters holding a sign that says its not easy being gree

    The most pressing environmental problems of our time often defy straightforward solutions and can be considered “wicked problems”.

    Contributor: Charles Conteh  

    This blog is the first of a two-part series on “Wicked Problems”. 

    What do we mean by wicked problems? These are knotty issues that defy straightforward solutions; problems that rebel against our conventional suite of simple “answers” or “solutions.”  For instance, some of the pressing environmental issues of our time, such as climate change, water pollution, deforestation, and loss of biodiversity, can all be considered wicked problems. They are problems that require everyone, from diverse backgrounds, working together to find solutions.  

    Such problems do not fit into conventional policy toolboxes. They do not align easily with the political system of our countries, where ministries, departments, and agencies are tasked with a specific mandate and do not always talk to each other. Also, given the widespread and transboundary nature of most environmental problems, they defy the capacity of any one country to solve them alone.  

    All these characteristics of “wicked” environmental problems call attention to the fact that the natural world is a complex system. But then, this begs the question: what are systems? Systems in environmental policy are complex but interrelated domains consisting of varying life forms interacting together, such as crops and the weeds competing in an agricultural field. In public policy, our appreciation of complex systems has gained prominence, inspiring a group of scholars who are re-thinking conventional approaches to how governments regulate human interactions with the biosphere. 

    We should point out that wicked problems do not necessarily mean “evil” problems. Rather, they are tremendously complex and have many moving parts. By their very nature, wicked problems make a mockery of our modern mechanistic worldview and our attempts to use simple, linear thinking to force complex social problems into straitjacket solutions. Wicked problems highlight that reality is “messy.” In public policy, a wicked problem is difficult — but not impossible — to solve. Wicked problems challenge us to be responsive to changing values and changing interactions between humanity and the planet.  

    Categories: Beyond Sustainability Blog

  • Inside Earth Sensations: Outside of Theory. Reflections on a Conference

    Thursday, February 16, 2023 | By

    Contributor: Julie Gemuend, member of the Young Professionals (in research) Exploration Group (YPEG).
    Photo by: Julie     Gemuend

    In the late, long shadow afternoon of October, I breathe a rose. The rose is one of many that has come to full flower in the botanical gardens of Aarhus, Denmark. I arrived here, in the country’s second-largest city, for the academic conference Earth Sensations: Affects, Sensibilities and Attachments in an Era of Climate Change. This beautifully-composed interdisciplinary conference gathered thinkers of all stripes to explore the sensational flows and interchanges between bodies and environments — between interior and exterior landscapes — in the hopes of sparking new modes of thinking about and being within the mutating material world. Thought-provoking presentations yielded thoughtful conversations that addressed the ways we perceive and participate in the natural world; though, that world of muck and mystery, mosses, and magic, was itself absent. There were seldom moments when we engaged with that living world, save a few rushed breaths of fresh air between panels, cloistered as we were in those institutionally antiseptic, temperature-controlled buildings. But, of course, this is the way of conferences, of learning in higher education, and of academia at large. We are accustomed to withdrawing into safe, comfortable spaces that facilitate concentration and theorization, after the archetypal image of the standalone genius — the thinking individual reading and writing philosophy in solitude.

     And yet. 

    There is something so alienating about this model of producing knowledge, especially for those of us who dedicate our research to excavating our connection to nature — who not only think and write about the necessity of rekindling a whole-hearted, embodied, and ecological participation in the adventure of life itself, but also, try to live it. Thinking and writing are typically conducted in isolation, in a room of one’s own, not only separated from others and the physical world, but from our bodies, as well. And though scholarly research can be conceived as some sort of conversation between the author and the thinking and writing formerly done by others, it nevertheless unfolds in the ether of imagination — a disembodied experience, distanced from the material and sensory world. This is why Virginia Woolf suggests that we stipple our reading and research with divergent pursuits, such as walking, cooking, or gardening.i. Reading, Woolf proposes, is best served by pausing to engage in simple or repetitive tasks that allow a short vacation from the work. Time spent in a garden — “picking a snail from a rose” — refreshes the senses and ignites little synapse fires across the brain, which offer sudden unexpected points of entry back into the work.ii. Thus, thinking not only requires fingers that press keys into black words on a white screen but also fingers that sink deep and slow into the warm soil of the living world.

    My experience in the rose garden offered an invitation to engage in the latter. To spend time in direct and intimate observation with roses was clarifying — smoothing the velvet petals between two fingers, inhaling the honeyed scent, utterly bewitched by the incandescent ruby reds and island yellows. The garden provides an escape from the vortex of academic vernacular. In an era where deception and illusion have become cultural pastimes, the garden gives us a way to ground ourselves in something more substantial, more tangible. This material realm is one of processes and the passage of time, of bodily labour and the senses, of reciprocal generosity and care. To live more than a half-life, we must pass beyond a simple understanding of what those black-and-white words might mean, and truly feel the prismatic spectrum of life in our bodies — live it with all our senses.

    Rebecca Solnit reminds us that “just as everything symbolizes the body so the body symbolizes everything else,” which, she claims, is a sentiment that could be applied to roses, as well. iii Roses, in western culture, have come to embody the whole gamut of human experience. They are the customary offering for milestone life moments that soften sorrow and loss and celebrate romance, achievement, recovery, and hope. In this way, the rose is more of a vessel than it is a flower — a vessel that conveys both life and death. The body, of course, is a kind of vessel, as well, one that Jane Bennett speculates can convey the creativity of the cosmos. In her keynote presentation at the Earth Sensations conference, Bennett explores the ways in which words take up residence in the porous body. She speaks animatedly about how we think, framing the process as an encounter of surprise that comes from something in the cosmos that then mixes with something in the human. Bennett conjures the doodle to illustrate her point. When a person doodles, it is often with a certain measure of miles-away absentmindedness, a wandering rather than a walk with a clear destination or purpose in mind. This, Bennett suggests, is because the doodler inhabits a mode of subjectivity that isn’t quite theirs — it’s crossbred with something already in existence, with nonhuman constituents, cosmic forces that express themselves through the human body in a spontaneous act of co-creation. Bennett, who understands the human as composed of animal, vegetal, mineral, and atmospheric vitalities, seeks a language capable of expressing the way this nonhuman cocktail is immanent within human writing itself. Her proposal: middle-voiced verbs.

    Middle-voiced verbs are neither active nor passive. Using them situates us as contemporaneous with the act so that our efficacy is one amongst a complex, heterogeneous process. In this way, we participate in a lively process while being processed. Take Walt Whitman’s phrase “It sails me, I dab with bare feet” or “I sing the body electric.” According to Bennet, we can’t sing the body electric unless we are amidst the body. Middle-voiced verbs, in Bennett’s formulation, best represent our ontological entanglement with other agential nonhuman entities and forces. Writing is the outgrowth of our own subjectivity interwoven into the subjectivities of the cosmos, which speaks through us in middle-voiced verbs. Through her examination of language, Bennett proposes that we humans are more akin to middle-voiced verbs than we are actors or participants. We are composed and decomposed by extraneous and intrinsic substances and forces, as middle-voiced verbs remind us, the outside is inside, the strange is inherent in the familiar. 

    While Bennett’s presentation explores feelings and forces that are operative below the radar of sense perception and the kinds of words that can tune into them, Alexis Shotwell’s presentation examines feelings that are not so much imperceptible as they are hard to make out or rather make fit into established categories. Shotwell’s approach is an affective one that acknowledges feelings as relational and co-formed rather than individual. That is, we require others to feel. This means that others have power over our feelings through processes of interpretation. For example, those who occupy positions of social power may interpret our feelings through emotional categories that serve their own needs and interests. Collectivizing feelings in this way has transformed mourning into political organization, evidenced by feminist anger or climate anxiety, but, as Shotwell suggests, our feelings are often too nuanced to be contained by existing classical emotional categories such as joy, fear, anger, or sadness. Inchoate, slippery, and difficult to express, Shotwell calls these feelings “freeform.” 

    My experience in the rose garden serves as an example of such feelings: the warm sun slanted the gardens into my lap and the absence of other people made it so that all my senses were tuned to the frequency of roses, which perfumed the air so intensely that as I inhaled I felt as if I were breathing the roses into me, as if through the power of scent their essence became a part of me, became infused with my own life force. Did the rose become a part of me, or did I become a part of it? This hard-to-describe feeling arose from an ineffable, but in no way vague, shift of consciousness into the plant itself. I was no longer sensing the rose but living it. 

    Shotwell believes that the acceptance of big-box feelings as the only feelings available to us is a political problem that might be solved by building non-monetizable spaces where new, collective, free-form feelings, like those of my rose rendezvous, can be cultivated. These spaces would advance a no border politics, thus opening portals through which feelings flow and mingle, uniting us in solidarity with one another towards futures that are still in the making — futures to which free-form feelings can contribute. Borders, Shotwell stresses, are not just about fixing and categorizing but produce and are the product of social relations from which we must emancipate ourselves. Borders have been demonized in some academic circles for the deep divisions they create between self/other, mind/body, and a cascade of additional dialectic oppositions. But do we want to fully dissolve borders? Elsewhere in the conference borders were deemed necessary. Sophie von Redecker regards borders as necessary for encounters for we can only be in touch with the other if there is a border that distinguishes self from other. Von Redecker’s presentation explores human-nonhuman working groups through alpine shepherding in northeastern Italy, positing that agency is distributed amongst the shepherd-livestock-guard dogs-landscape assemblage. In this case, the borders that fences create are indispensable because they do the work of the shepherd while she sleeps. In a sense, they allow the shepherd to extend the boundaries of self.

    Borders may be about fixing things, but they are not fixed. They are porous, plastic, and pliable, constantly renegotiating what falls inside and outside of their parameters. The conference panels considered this interplay between interior and exterior through various lenses: grief, trauma, pleasure, enchantment, toxicity, decolonization and migration, wild and cultivated landscapes, art and design, affects and activism. My own presentation was part of the Sensibility and Health panel. I reframed the hypersensitive body as an imaginative intervention that figures embodiment as porous, co-composed, infected, and infectious — as positively vulnerable. This reframing articulates an understanding of the human as contaminated by otherness and thus accountable to a material world that is never merely an external place but always the very substance of ourselves.

    In other words, we exist in a web of reciprocal interactions between humans, animals, plants, objects, and environments. Timothy Morton visualizes this kind of interconnectedness as a mesh. Morton’s mesh is populated by a multitude of entangled entities, none of which exist in a vacuum. In this reality, the boundaries of form are blurred — there is no clearly defined inside or outside of beings. The mesh travels within, across and among all entities, which include everything from cells to stars. We can never perceive the mesh directly but if we orient our attention toward our bodies, the biosphere, and its inhabitants we might be able to detect it amid certain earth sensations: the gesture with which a small flower opens in the morning; the sound of the wind whispering through the trees; the full-bodied scent of a rose as it nears the end of its cycle — the smell of life and death, of sweet decay. Emblems of ephemerality, roses often appeared in 17th-century vanitas paintings common in Europe at the time, where robust bouquets were set alongside skulls as a reminder that blossoming, and decaying cannot be uncoiled. 

    Vanitas Still-Life with a Bouquet and a Skull, Adriaen van Utrecht, 1642. Adriaen van Utrecht, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

     

    In a sense, this investigation of inside and outside that so permeated the conference was largely a brokering of self and non-self, life, and death. In Western culture, we consider life and death as oppositional, a hard and unyielding boundary between them. Yet, if we look at the field of posthumanism, we encounter a recasting of the life/death binary as a life-death continuum, where these formerly discrete categories are folded into each other, together creating what we might call zoe. Zoe is cosmic energy, like Bennett’s nonhuman vitalities. According to Rosi Braidotti, one of the foremost thinkers of posthumanism, zoe is the non-human, vital force of all living creatures, the “dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself.”v. Zoe is restless, fugitive — as in too much, too vast to be contained in any one body for long. Zoe grows out of the body the way a crab grows out of its shell and continues its journey onward from one vessel to the next. This means that death is not an end, it is rather “the transience of life.” Viewing the world through this kind of frame impacts the way we encounter the material world. vi. A feeling of belonging begins to replace one of separation and we come to realize that lives are not lived only in the head, but they are an embodied experience where all human and nonhuman entities are tethered to each other by the shimmering, web-like filaments that zoe leaves in its wake.

    This same reframing might also cast a light on the inextricability of theory and practice, thinking and doing, a difficult perspective to embrace considering that stability and categorization grant us a sense of control in this overwhelmingly complex and accelerated world. It may seem easier to imagine things as belonging to discrete categories rather than all tangled up with each other. But we don’t need to untangle those knots. We need to live them, not just with our minds, as academia prescribes, but with our bodies. Thinking-with we might call it — thinking while walking, while gardening, with others, human and nonhuman alike, with the world. Cognition, as Katherine Hayle reminds us, is not localized in the neocortex but occurs throughout the body. Furthermore, “it extends beyond the body’s boundaries in ways that challenge our ability to say where or even if cognitive networks end.” vii. Expanding the boundaries of self, of mind, into the body and beyond will bring discourse to life or bring life to discourse. 

    This is my ultimate takeaway from the conference and conceivably why my rose encounter continues to take up so much real estate in my mind. Why those same roses have found their way, rather conspicuously, into the fabric of this reflection paper. The rose urges us to remember the garden and the garden ushers our minds from abstract realms back to the earth, back to our bodies and our senses. The body reminds us of our mortality, which in turn reminds us to live in the here and now, to take the pulse of the world-as-it-is. A mere mental evocation of the elemental is not enough. The body’s feelings, whether they arise as shy and shaky puffs and whispers or the most explosive emotional resonances, are the thick, radial root for true vision, and only from that root will we truly see that the world does not happen to us, nor do we happen to the world. We are in a relationship with the world, amidst the world. We are, following Jane Bennett, middle-voiced verbs. 

    i Woolf, Virginia. 2020. “How One Should Read a Book.” Gateway to the Great Books, volume 5, edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler, Laurence King Publishing.

    ii Woolf, Virginia. 2020. “How One Should Read a Book.” Gateway to the Great Books, volume 5, edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler, Laurence King Publishing, p. 50.

    iii Solnit, Rebecca. 2021. Orwell’s Roses. Viking, p. 15.

    iv Morton, Timothy. 2012. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press. v Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Polity Press, p. 60.

    vi Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Polity Press, p. 133.

    vii Hayles, Katherine N. 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. The University of Chicago Press, p.17. 

     

    Categories: Beyond Sustainability Blog

  • Why we need to exit from colonisation for better sustainability

    Thursday, February 02, 2023 | By

    Photo: Liette Vasseur; 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference

    Contributor: Simone Bignall

    Indigenous peoples have long governed lands and waters sustainably, historically using resources wisely for thousands of years and now continuing to do so in the present period following colonial invasion and settlement.

    Indigenous peoples do not merely strive to live in harmony with the natural world (like many non-Indigenous people do). More profoundly, being Indigenous means living rightfully and lawfully as part of the natural world; existing as Country.i Indigenous peoples therefore consider that they have an ages-old natural authority and responsibility to care for the Country that defines what it is to be an Indigenous human. In this sense, ‘Country’ is the interconnected web of land, water, sky, human and nonhuman life, ancestral agencies, and environmental forces that, together, make up the distinctive character of a place. From this perspective, healthy Country means healthy people and humanity is thus obliged to uphold the health of the Country that sustains all life within an interconnected ecology.

    Environmental damage depletes human wellbeing, since it weakens the reciprocal connections needed for all to flourish in harmony. Additionally, human damage depletes environments that rely upon symbiotic processes balancing complex systems of relationship.  The cultural identity and wellbeing of Indigenous peoples is connected with the health of the environment, because belonging to a place defines the cultural and political identities of First Nations. Likewise, environmental destruction affects the capacity of Indigenous peoples to enjoy and exercise their collective cultural rights. In the current global context of climate crisis, mass species extinction, and the collapse of fragile ecologies because of unsustainable extractive industry, the cultural need to protect Country is ever more urgent to Indigenous leaders and communities.

    In many settler-colonial places, environmental policy planning has recently shifted to recognise First Nations leaders as “stewards” and “custodians” of their traditional lands and waters. Yet, such acts of recognition rarely extend to the acknowledgement of Indigenous leaders as environmental “governors,” exercising rights flowing from aboriginal sovereignty. Properly recognised in political terms, Indigenous governors would then be vested with the authority to manage environmental resources wisely according to scientific evidence that has been developed through ages of innovation, experimentation, and observation.ii It makes perfect sense then that Indigenous authorities should lead the way as humanity struggles to find more sustainable pathways, because Indigenous peoples already know how to govern life, lands and waters sustainably.  This obvious solution, however, appears hard to realise when Indigenous authority has been so severely impacted by settler-colonisation. In fact, settler-colonisation works specifically to erode or deny Indigenous sovereignty and settler-colonial governments rarely even imagine turning to Indigenous governments for advice and assistance in public planning or environmental policy. Indigenous political structures and processes have also, in many cases, been weakened by settler-colonisation. This has resulted in a loss of jurisdiction and less capacity for self-determination or self-government in many communities, which consequently are unable to demonstrate effective leadership for social development and environmental stewardship.

    Around the world, many Indigenous communities have begun strategic programmes of Indigenous Nation (re)building as a way of responding to these legacies of settler-colonisation in Canada, Australia, Sápmi, the United States of America, Aoearoa-New Zealand, and other occupied territories. Nation (re)building refers to: “the processes by which a Native nation enhances its own foundational capacity for effective self-governance and for self-determined community and economic development.”[iii] Nation (re)building revives the political life of an Indigenous collective in a way that matches cultural traditions while catering to contemporary political needs and aspirations. It involves an Indigenous polity raising cultural awareness and resilience amongst its citizenry, honing political structures and processes for maximum effectiveness in relevant contexts of political and economic engagement. Moving through stages of identifying, organising, and acting as a political collective, the process of nation (re)building supports a community’s leaders to act strategically and make decisions that can bring about the long-term vision of their nation. By reviving the capacity for Indigenous governments to exercise meaningful authority and expand their powers over traditional jurisdictions that have been lost through colonisation, Indigenous nation (re)building opens up pathways of exit from colonialism.

    Settlers, too, must responsibly learn how to walk these pathways collaboratively for a more general release from the colonial structures that continue to shape every aspect of post-colonial society.[iv] Ultimately, Indigenous peoples’ renewed enjoyment of political authority and expanded jurisdiction over Country allows for the firm expression of Indigenous voice in federal and international policy developments for decolonisation and sustainable environmental governance. And this offers all of humanity hope for securing the future of life on Earth.

    i See, for example: Steve Hemming, Daryle Rigney, Simone Bignall, Shaun Berg & Grant Rigney. 2019. ‘Indigenous nation building for environmental futures: Murrundi flows through Ngarrindjeri country’, Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, 26:3, 216-235.

    ii. Gregory Cajete. 2000. Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Santa Fe: Clear Light Books

    iii. Miriam Jorgensen (editor). 2007. Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development. University of Arizona Press, page xii.

    iv. Simone Bignall. 2014. ‘The Collaborative Struggle for Ex-Colonialism’, Journal of Settler-Colonial Studies, 4:4, 340-356.

     

    Categories: Beyond Sustainability Blog

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