Emergent Possibilities for Global Sustainability

Intersections of race, class and gender

Phoebe Godfrey, Denise Torres

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317570165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

It must be acknowledged that any solutions to anthropogenic Global Climate Change (GCC) are interdependent and ultimately inseparable from both its causes and consequences. As a result, limited analyses must be abandoned in favour of intersectional theories and practices.

Emergent Possibilities for Global Sustainability is an interdisciplinary collection which addresses global climate change and sustainability by engaging with the issues of race, gender, and class through an intersectional lens. The book challenges readers to foster new theoretical and practical linkages and to think beyond the traditional, and oftentimes reductionist, environmental science frame by examining issues within their turbulent political, cultural and personal landscapes. Through a variety of media and writing styles, this collection is unique in its presentation of a complex and integrated analysis of global climate change and its implications. Its companion book, Systemic Crises of Global Climate Change, addresses the social and ecological urgency surrounding climate change and the need to use intersectionality in both theory and practice.

This book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and both undergraduate and post-graduate students in the areas of Environmental Studies, Climate Change, Gender Studies and International studies as well as those seeking a more intersectional analysis of GCC.

Part I

Air

Figure I.1 Air

1 You probably still have doubts

Anonymous

It’s a fallacious argument.

I will prove that there is no such thing.

Global warming???

Yeah it’s hot today. It’s supposed be,

It’s summer Duh!!

There you have it.

The world is FLAT,

There was NEVER a moon landing

And there was only one shooter in the depository

Everything that you “believe” is nothing more than propaganda.

Neo-commie leftist hoo-ha.

Have you ever seen the world spin?

That’s why I home school my kids,

This notion that the world is a ball spinning in space is ludicrous.

Schools have globes. Lies. All lies.

The world is flat

And heaven is right above the clouds where God watches

over us in a big Chair with Jesus at his right and St. Peter at the gates (even

commies like yourself).

And in His wisdom he gave us good people to dispel this ridiculous idea that carbon emissions are

harming this sweet land.

Why, every time I see a smokestack all I see is industry. I see jobs.

Don’t talk to me about hurricanes and ocean levels rising and the polar caps melting.

Tsunami?

Well that’s just nature. Nature doing her thing

Just as the Good Lord designed it.

You probably still have doubts.

Simply put, if the Good Lord did not want this we wouldn’t have it.

You must be a pinko commie atheist

I will pray that The Lord forgives you for your evil ways and questioning His creation.

And don’t talk about planting any more trees.

Please,

I don’t want to have to explain how it was His design that we chop the trees raze the forests burn what

we need…

God wants us to be INDUSTRIOUS. It’s in the bible

There is no such thing as Global Warming.

Now if we are done, I am going to watch some television.

You know? I will never understand how the people get into that box.

Praise Jesus. It’s a miracle.

2 The Virgin and the seed

Phoebe Godfrey

Figure 2.1 Virgin. Oil and mixed media on canvas 78” × 52” × 62”

This triptych altarpiece speaks to the more than 2000-year-old story of the Christian ‘savior’ and the ‘mother figure’ and brings to light our current environmental crisis and what I believe is the need to return to Earth-based spirituality. On the right are symbols of patriarchal religious domination, as in the bishop’s crook, and a stained glass window depicting extinct birds and animals. There is a clock face at the top of the window representing the idea that the Christian savior is the alpha and omega—the beginning and end of time. In the middle is the Virgin, aka Pachamama, who has been used, along with her infant son, as the feminine face of the dominating force but who has now left the institution, giving up the male child who has been used to lead us away from the true sources of salvation—our connections with ourselves, hence nature. In her arms is the seed, sprouting so strongly that it is coming out of the canvas. On the left are the four elements: Earth, Air, Water and Fire—all inviting us to return to their healing powers. This panel includes bark, small tree branches and roots that are freely growing out and off the canvas. Above the Virgin is the Moon, the ancient symbol of the many goddesses who have reigned in the night sky. The power expressed in this piece is about the indomitable life force within us all and that asks and needs to be reclaimed.

3 Womanism and agroecology

An intersectional praxis seed keeping as acts of political warfare

Shakara Tyler and Aleya Fraser

Earth is my home – though for centuries white people have tried to convince me I have no right to exist, except in the dirtiest, darkest corners of the globe. So let me tell you: I intend to protect my home.

(Alice Walker, 1983, p. 342)

Women of color warriors are constant warriors who dig in bare earth to feed the hungry child, who pray for health the bedside of the sick when there is no medicine, who fashion a toy to make a poor child smile, who take to the streets demanding freedom, freedom, freedom against armed police. Every act of survival by a woman of color is an act of resistance to the holocaust and the war. No soldier fights harder than a woman warrior for she fights for total change, for a new order in a world in which can finally rest and love.

(Barbara Omolade, 1994, p. 220)

***

Today we are barren fields completely dry after a fall harvest.

Yesterday we were our mothers’ spring garden, full of life and color.

Vivid as your imagination and as free-form as the kinks growing out of my head.

Alas, time is relative and today is yesterday and tomorrow is today and today is never-ending as I sit here in this barren field full of art

reflecting on how we got here.

My children always ask me…

do you hate all of the Washichus?

I tell them that my heart does not have the capacity for hate

and neither does their own.

I do wish they would be banished from Aya

and sent back to their own time space continuum

which they called Earth.

They came here from a parallel universe on a parallel planet

60,000 years ahead of the time that Aya was when they arrived.

They came looking for refuge from the ultraviolet rays

making their own world uninhabitable due to a myriad of human and natural causes. They came with the sole purpose of farming the land and the peoples of our Earth

in the same unsustainable ways

that turned all but underground caverns on their planet uninhabitable.

They came like an unchecked virus set loose on our precious ecosystem, infecting every part with their desperation.

The plants speak to us but do not speak to the Washichus

so they appointed us as stewards of the land.

It is written in our DNA to care for the land as an extension of our being

much like rings of growth on a tree

every year of our maturity grants us secret understanding of a new life classification widening our understanding of our own beings to include all life

and relationally all matter.

If it were not for the blatant disregard of the strangers

to our circles of compassion

we would have loved being stewards of the land

but only in a harmonious system.

The Wasichus instead look at the land as property to be owned conquered

and raped to death.

Almost no one on their place called Earth could actually hear the plants speak

feel what they hear and see what they say.

Electromagnetic radiation, pollution and negative energy

clouded the plant to human pathways

which we here on Aya depend on for survival.

We were twins in every sense

except for the way in which we cared for the land.

Fast forward to today…

as I sit here staring at this barren field

just fifty years after we were stolen from the land

across the sea that was already turning uninhabitable

by the Washichus due to the hot dry conditions and large amount of UV radiation.

The other side of our sphere has turned cooler, cloudier and rainier in climate

so we were brought here where the aliens can actually survive and have already driven those before us to extinction.

It was here on the other side that the aliens learned our secret.

The fact that melanated folks with feminine energy (women and third genders) hear plants the loudest. We cannot ignore them, we are one with them.

This naturally made us (the backbones as they call us) very valuable as they sought and continue to seek ways to dominate our life sources, our gods, our knowledge, our wisdom, our plants.

We have resisted in many ways

from not sharing all of our knowledge to seed keeping.

However they still have found ways to steal our secrets and use them to harm us, the Earth and ironically themselves.

A revolution is brewing.

For decades we have been secretly rebuilding our seed bank of beautiful, rare and important seeds to our spiritual and physical livelihoods.

Varieties that will be especially useful in the barren climate of our homeland

which has been turned into a desert by the Washichus abuse.

We are spiritually connected to that land and must return.

Our mitochondrial pull back to our original land is so deep that it is now all the plants speak to us about.

Sorghum speaks the loudest.

She says that we must take her there to repair the soils

and feed us and our animals

until we can begin growing her brothers and sisters.

She is drought and heat-tolerant because its roots run deep

and strong branching like the veins on the back of my hand.

Her grains can be used for animal feed

popped like popcorn

boiled like rice

ground into flour

and fermented into beer

which my mother used to trade in the marketplace.

Beautiful grains with beautiful individual stories.

The stalks can be used to make molasses

broom sticks

building material.

Her stalks and leaves converting sunlight into energy

in efficient ways that my grandmother has never witnessed in any other plants

and she has known millions.

Sorghum, in the same voice of every woman I know said

she will provide us all that we need to fight our oppressors and I trust her.

I trust her seeds.

***

Introduction

Womanism, as coined by Alice Walker in In Search of our Mother’s Garden employs a critical cultural lens to validate the special vantage point of black women from many intersecting paradigms – black lesbian, black queer, black poor women, and the very junctions of these identities. These multiple vantage points are unearthed to better recognize and understand the interlocking systems of oppression while embodying humanism for collective liberation. Womanism breathed life into intersectionality, as a theory and practice. As conceptualized by Walker, womanism contextualizes black women’s resistance to various faces of oppression as acts of loving nature and nurturing the gardens from which black people’s resilience grew. Black women’s resistance can also be described akin to warfare with black and brown women as “constant warriors who dig in bare earth to feed the hungry child, who pray for health at the bedside of the sick when there is no medicine” (Omolade, 1994, p. 220). Black people’s resilience during slavery and post-slavery eras was agroecologically cultivated by ancestral knowledge of sustaining the land and all things that flow from the land including seeds.

Agroecology is a dual process of ecological agricultural production and organizing and building community self-determination that builds upon ancestral and cultural knowledge (WhyHunger, 2015). Women and our knowledge, values, vision, and leadership are critical to agroecology as a practice, science, and social movement (Anderson et al., 2015). This narrative theorizes womanism and agroecology as an intersectional praxis building on the theory of intersectionality. The intent is to provide a way of Afro-futuristically visioning black women’s role as agroecological warriors keeping seeds to creatively plant and cultivate an alternative world in which the “imperialist white supremacists capitalists patriarchy” (hooks, 2013, p. 4) becomes transparent and we can practice different ways of being (Alexander, 2000). We are black women immersed in an intersectional matrix where we can stand in our purpose as womanists, returning generation farmers, educators, warriors, artists and scholars. These intertwined identities are the roots of our resistance, healing, and empowerment that construct our intersectional activism across both wombs of womanism and agroecology.

While no other group in the United States (US) has had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women (hooks, 1981), US black women have also continued to produce social thought designed to oppose this invisibility and oppression (Collins, 2009). This narrative intends to be an exhibition of our social thought where – like the black literary tradition – “escape for the body and freedom for the soul went together” (Walker, 1983, p. 5). Opening this narrative with a visionary fiction story represents the wedding of our bodily and soul freedom. While we acknowledge the “matrix of domination” that refers to how intersecting oppressions are organized (Collins, 2009), we focus on the regenerative notions of intersectionality to resist oppression. By dwelling not on the oppressive reality constructed by patriarchal domains, but dwelling on the liberation visions of black women in agroecology through an Afro-futuristic seed story, we unveil a new sun Octavia Butler speaks so confidently of in her visionary work (Butler, 2012).

Visionary fiction offers new models for creating new possible worlds (Ferguson is the Future, 2015). According to Octavia Butler, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns” (in Canavan, 2014). Seed keeping stories as acts of political warfare are an incubation of an alternative agroecological world rooted in our womanist imaginations – imaginations where we reclaim our mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers, and great greats. We preface the theoretical exploration of womanism and agroecology with an Afro-futuristic narrative to plot a different course forward by discussing the historical, present and future manifestations of an agroecological reality centering the experiences of black women, the herstories. It becomes imaginatively emblematic of the larger freedom struggle for humanity to return to the rightful communion with mother earth. For “[i]n a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: opportunities for renewal: intersectional praxis for just sustainabilities
• PART I Air
• PART II Earth
• PART III Fire
• PART IV Water
• PART V Aether
• Index