Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life

Abstract

Seeking new definitions of ecology in the tar sands of northern Alberta and searching for the sweetness of life in the face of planetary crises. Confounded by global warming and in search of an affirmative politics that links ecology with social change, Matt Hern and Am Johal set off on a series of road trips to the tar sands of northern Alberta—perhaps the world's largest industrial site, dedicated to the dirty work of extracting oil from Alberta's vast reserves. Traveling from culturally liberal, self-consciously “green” Vancouver, and aware that our well-meaning performances of recycling and climate-justice marching are accompanied by constant driving, flying, heating, and fossil-fuel consumption, Hern and Johal want to talk to people whose lives and fortunes depend on or are imperiled by extraction. They are seeking new definitions of ecology built on a renovated politics of land. Traveling with them is their friend Joe Sacco—infamous journalist and cartoonist, teller of complex stories from Gaza to Paris—who contributes illustrations and insights and a chapter-length comic about the contradictions of life in an oil town. The epic scale of the ecological horror is captured through an series of stunning color photos by award-winning aerial photographer Louis Helbig. Seamlessly combining travelogue, sophisticated political analysis, and ecological theory, speaking both to local residents and to leading scholars, the authors propose a new understanding of ecology that links the domination of the other-than-human world to the domination of humans by humans. They argue that any definition of ecology has to start with decolonization and that confronting global warming requires a politics that speaks to a different way of being in the world—a reconstituted understanding of the sweetness of life. Published with the help of funding from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan fund

Moving urban political ecology beyond the ‘urbanization of nature’

“…. approaches that help us understand the settler-colonial aspects of Canadian urban history and grasp the inter-national dimensions of Indigenous politics' (see also Hern and Johal, 2018;Pickerill, 2018). Simpson and Bagelman (2018) argue that in occupied British Colombia while a 'colonial socionatural order' has been imposed on millennia-old (indigenous) Lekwungen socioecologies, these have never been completely erased, such that the production of nature proceeds through the ongoing interplay of colonization and resistance.…”

A “Strong” Approach to Sustainability Literacy: Embodied Ecology and Media

“…We consider how this perspective on environment includes the transformed relations to both the environment and to literacy brought about by the increased digitization of the lifeworld in recent decades. In Section 3, we highlight how technology needs to be critically considered as it also affects the environment negatively, having been, particularly in the second half of the 20th century, intimately linked to colonization and environmental exploitation [44,45]. We will explain how digital media are embodied and linked to external (material, non-virtual) environments and artefacts.…”

“…Taking arbitrariness as the criterion that makes a semiotic system social and, therefore, operational, leads to a construction of environments (natural and social) and of the body as cultural constructions. We need a model of semiosis that recognizes that meaning-making is not grounded in arbitrariness and the combinatorial differentiation characteristic of natural language, but rather, ecological participation and flourishing: "the wider and more complete participation of all components in a whole" (Bookchin, as cited in (p. 91 in [44]). To summarize, our argument here is to replace the concept of text with (a dialectic of) model and mediality, and to ground literacy in this broader notion of modelling.…”

“…As noted in Hern and Johal [44], any understanding of an "ecological politics, the politics required to answer global-warming, must acknowledge that the domination of otherthan-humans and the land is made permissible by the domination of humans by humans" (p. 94). Sustainability education and literacy must be subtle and nuanced enough to recognize the interrelatedness of ecology, capitalist exploitation, colonization and decolonization.…”

Posthumanist and Postcolonial Possibilities for Outdoor Experiential Education

“…Other scholars, like Tuck and McKenzie (2015) argued that human supremacism and exceptionalism are the effect of neo-liberalism, driven by the neo-liberal subject as bound in individualistic autonomy and enmeshed within a Western trajectory of cultural norms and practices promoting “‘free market’ conditions that prioritize corporations and economic growth over considerations of social equity or environmental protection” (p. 3). Hern and Johal (2018) suggested that at the roots of human supremacism and exceptionalism lie within pervasive capitalism and colonialism, in which the world is viewed as a resource to be exploited through power differentials of coercive hierarchy and accumulation by dispossession.…”