Title : The nexus of crises: the art of decolonising climate, species and culture
Abstract:
Given the nexus of climate, species and cultural crises, we humans need to think and act well beyond mitigation. Merely softening ecological (social and environmental) collapse is not an option, given present climatic catastrophes and those predicted by the IPCC’s most recent report (2021). Indeed, nothing less than a, very unlikely, Copernican-scale paradigm shift will overt the transformative state of our planet. We must, therefore, imagine how we and enough biodiversity may survive beyond the current extinction event to the next geological period; as the potential for life emerged from each previous planetary extinction.
This presentation will consider the nexus of crises, or perfect storm, as a time of immense danger and potential opportunity. The opportunity is the need to think differently. The 20th Century offered complexity, systems thinking and transdisciplinarity as ways to think beyond the previous five hundred years of science-dominated, epistemological thinking, but it did not seek to change the cultural paradigm of Colonialism that accompanied it. Indeed, since climate change became public knowledge, at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, culture was not considered as a factor of the Three Pillars - Social, Economy, Environment. This presentation will place Culture as the lintel that connects the columns and the seventeen SDGs.
We will learn the importance of culture to the survival and evolutionary development of all living beings, and how this vital factor has been manipulated, controlled and oppressed socially, economically and environmentally from the Age of Enlightenment to today. In addition to the Civil Rights of gender, ethnicity and colour, contemporary decolonisation offers the opportunity to rethink culture within our whole education and academic structures. Valuing ontological heuristics, the processes of ‘storying’ provide possible ways to reimagine our existential existence, offering potential patterns of cultural community, through which we may learn to adapt beyond engineered resilience to ecological resilience. In other words, how to critically recover from on-going climate disasters, regenerate biodiversity and become ‘global citizens, otherwise’.
Moving through the difficult issues of colonialism can engender, fear, guilt, inadequacy, vulnerability and other emotions that even with well-meaning, prevent us from challenging our acquired normative thinking. Culture represents all our belief systems that determine how we live with each other and other than humans to survive. We must, therefore, break through the barrier of Keynesian and neo-Darwinian ‘Sustainable Development’. Such a vision was glimpsed through the research project, Generous Domains: Globals Citizen Perspectives for Environmental Sciences with Valeria Vargas at Manchester Metropolitan University (2021). Potentially, this presentation touches all disciplines, includes all disciplines and may emancipate all disciplines towards ‘capable futures’.
