Confronting Climate Crises Through Education by Young Rebecca L.;Adams John;Orr David W.;

Author:Young, Rebecca L.;Adams, John;Orr, David W.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

As we saw in Quinn’s novel, Berry scolds us for having squandered Leaver ideologies for Earth-abusing practices that serve our needs more cheaply and quickly. The cost of these practices, of course, manifests itself in more complex ways. It is evidenced, according to Berry, in a failing education system, hypocrisies in politics, the breakdown of American families, corruptions of free markets, eradication of farm land, an epidemic of preventable illnesses, disintegration of natural resources, and perhaps most blatantly, dismissal of individual responsibility.

If students have difficulty connecting the machine metaphor to these broad implications, educators might focus them on the more intimate effects they can recognize—from the absence of family dinners at the table to not knowing even our closest neighbors’ names. As Berry references, this ethos of mechanization pervades every aspect of our lives—from birth to death. Just as life-sustaining food is a common ground for bringing awareness to complex topics, so is death. Especially for students who may not be able to see the more complex or abstract effects of the current ethos, literature can illustrate them in more concrete terms.

A personal essay in the Moral Ground collection offers, for example, an accessible lesson for explicating Berry’s intimation that we disrupt even the “natural cycles of birth, growth, death, and decay.” Carly Lettero’s “Spray Glue Goes. Maggots Stay.” focuses on how an anthropocentric worldview of “progress” follows us even in our deaths, separating us superficially from nature and its processes. The narrative achieves this by juxtaposing the ways humans treat a body after death with how nature does. Upon witnessing the hospital’s procedural sanitizing of her grandfather’s dead body, which includes “so much disposable crap” in the form of “hermetically sealed cotton swabs,” “rubber gloves,” “individually wrapped wipes and plastic padded sheets,”[9] Lettero recalls a very different memory of finding the body of a sea lion that had washed ashore on a coast of Oregon:

Turkey vultures pecked into its stomach and chest, and black fluid flooded the holes. Closer still the holes were crawling with bugs. Maggots slithered through the black liquid and burrowed into the soft tissue. Flies swarmed above the body, landed, got swept down the beach by a gust of wind, and swarmed again. So much life spiraled out from this one dead animal. In stark contrast to my grandfather’s death, nothing was wasted.[10]

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