Single-Use Planet

Interactivities

Fridge Magnets for Social Ecologists

As an interactive art piece:

Two mini or regular sized recovered refrigerators painted with simplistic prompts. Pieces are left with prompt and photos are taken at regular intervals to show progression of each separate prompt.

As an educational program:

Mobile magnet boards and guided discussion questions among individuals and small groups.

Description:

Murray Bookchin believes that “a society will live in harmony with nature because its members live in harmony with one another.” This interactive display and educational activity is intended to illustrate the connections between terms commonly used to describe our “human world” as they relate to our “natural world” through manipulating refrigerator magnets.

The terms are selected based on readings about social ecology from Murray Bookchin as well as commonly used vocabulary that describes the state of the environment and our interactions with human and non human nature. Four individuals as well as many participants who ultimately experimented with the magnet game provided feedback on terms. There is no limit to additional terms that could be made for use and this project can be adapted to describe a variety of social and environmental issues and relationships.

Magnet terms listed below were separated into groups based on the their creation. Categories are not shared with participants as grouping terms is entirely subject to interpretation.

Abusive and/or Ecophobic

Human Societal

Regenerative Terms

Subjects

Conjunctions/Connections/Punctuation

Guided Experience Directions

  1. Spend less than five minutes viewing the words on the door. Think about the terms that you understand fully and the terms that could be further defined. Think of the words relationships to one another.
  2. In less than ten minutes, choose terms and form sentences that represent the Earth as you see it presently. Include terms that you would define as human.
  3. Please explain why you chose the terms that you did and the reasoning for placing the magnets in your formation.
  4. Take a photo so that those words can be re-used if necessary.
  5. In less than ten minutes, choose terms and form sentences that represent the Earth as you would like to see it. Include terms that you would define as human.

Discussion

  1. What types of terms and sentences do we see in each Earth model both present and imaginary?
  2. Where do we see abused environment terms in relationship to oppressed human terms?
  3. Are any abusive terms interchangeable with human/societal and nature subjects?
  4. Which magnets would you identify as describing social or environmental justice terms? Where do we find social and environmental justice terms?
  5. How does our mapping of terms describe our relationship to other humans as well as our relationship as humans with nature? How do you define nature?

Themes of Social Ecology for further discussion

  1. Ecological dislocations have their principle sources in social dislocations (Bookchin, 1994, p.3).
  2. Social ecology stresses environmental problems as social problems, arising from the domination of human by human (Plumwood, 2002, p.18).
  3. Cruelty to humans often goes hand in hand with cruelty to nonhuman life forms.
  4. Social Ecologists tend to reject personal transformation as a viable solution to ecological crisis. They believe that personal transformation cheapens the ability of the individual to make large scale change and that they end of rejecting social concerns in favor of largely personal attitudes (Bookchin, 1987).
  5. Human thought processes are often contradicting the reality of the full consideration of many newly developed ideas (Bookchin, 1987).
  6. Letting “nature take its course” swings dangerously back into population growth, population control, oppression of women and certain races and swings back into ignoring social problems (Bookchin, 1993, p.7).
  7. Social Ecologists believe that reducing social facts to biological facts is a dangerous for all of ecology, the greater ecology that includes humans (Bookchin, 1993, p.6).
  8. Social Ecology finds agreement and disagreement in many other environmental and social theories including Deep Ecology, Feminist approach, Positivist approach, etc. These are equally complex relationships.
  9. Excerpt to read for critical discussion: Social Ecology has been described as “first nature rendered self-reflective, a thinking nature that knows itself and can guide its own evolution. First nature is the outer physical world, which in this context is given voice and intention through the gifts of second-nature humanity understood as “sociability, communication and intelligence as if we were nature rendered conscious. Social ecology is about the integration of human interest with nature in the production of everyday life” (Goto et al, 2014).

Non-guided Experience

  1. View the scrambled words for two minutes.
  2. Spend less than ten minutes organizing the words in whatever way makes the most sense to you.
  3. Take a photo.
  4. Participant is asked if they would like to share (or not share) their thought process behind their word placement.

Guided Classroom Presentation

  1. Introduction will include a small prompt about the students’ likely lack of understanding of all of the terms and their appropriate definitions. Students will be encouraged to place words without their full understanding as it is valuable information for the researcher to understand their word association, the way in which definitions are created among students and the associations students have with certain words.
  2. Students will be guided through prompts about current and imaginary societies and nature.
  3. Students will be asked to explain, in their respective groups, their choices for word groupings and word associations. The researcher will record this with a voice recorder and will also take photos.
  4. Students will be guided through some foundations of Social Ecology and questions about relationships between humans and other humans, societal structures and relationship with and understanding of non-human nature.
  5. Students will be guided through some of the better-known definitions of the words that they did not understand.
  6. Students will be asked for freeform feedback on nature and societal relationships as well as their experience with the game.

Bibliography

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. (2009, July). The danger of a single story. TED: Ideas worth spreading. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.

Barndt, Deborah. (2013). Blessings on the food, blessings on the workers: Arts-based education for migrant worker justice. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 18, 59-79.

Bookchin, Murray.(1987, June 25). Social ecology versus deep ecology: A challenge for the ecology movement. Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project, 4-5. Burlington, Vermont. Retrieved from http://environment-ecology.com/deep-ecology/64-social-ecology-versus-deep-ecology.html

Bookchin, Murray. (1995). The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism. Black Rose Books, volume 225.

Bullard, R. D. 1990. Dumping in Dixie: Race, class, and environmental quality. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Caput, Greg. (2015). Map of the Pajaro Valley Unified School District. Office of Fourth District Supervisor, County of Santa Cruz.

Freinkel, Susan. (2011). Plastic: a toxic love story. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Goto, Reiko, Shiu, Margaret, Mali, Wu. (2014). Ecofeminism: Art as Environment- A Cultural Action at Plum Tree Creek. Retrieved from http://bambooculture.com/en/news/1743

Harvester, Lara & Blenkinsop, Sean. (2010). Environmental education and ecofeminist pedagogy: Bridging the environmental and the social. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 15, 120-134.

Peet, Richard and Watts, Michael. (1996). Liberation ecologies: environment, development and social movements, London: Routledge.

Plumwood, Val. (2002). Feminism and the Master of Nature. Routledge USA and Canada: Routledge

Shiva, Vandana. (2015). Reductionism and Regeneration: A Crisis in Science. In Mies, Maria. and Shiva, Vandana. Ecofeminism (pp. 23-35). London, UK: Zed Books.