Imagining well with almonds and honeybees in the Capitalocene – five multispecies movements for environmental and sustainability education

Abstract

Responses in resisting and subverting capitalist structures and practices often foreground imagination and experimentation. In environmental and sustainability education, imagination has been previously called upon as a way to sympathetically engage learners in environmental issues or to conjure alternative futures. But what other possibilities does imagination entail? We open this paper by arguing that to address the entanglements produced by the Capitalocene, imagination could be conceived of as thoroughly exploring and describing the assemblages in which particular beings exist – what we call imagining well. Next, we introduce and develop this idea of imagining well and proceed by experimenting with it in the honeybee-almond assemblage. To conclude, we offer five multispecies movements as practical and conceptual tools to environmental and sustainability education, to be used separately or in combination to attend to environmental issues within the constraints of educational institutions.

Keywords:

• imagining
• Capitalocene
• assemblage
• multispecies
• honeybee
• environmental and sustainability education (ESE)

Introduction – at the breakfast table

One morning, sitting at the breakfast table

reluctant to pour dairy into our coffee

given the ethical concerns of the industry

we find almond milk as a substitute

The coffee tastes amazing with this nut full of nutrients, sweet and tempting

we are hooked right away

*

This moment around the breakfast table affirms us: another problem is solved, and we can begin our days with relief and comfort, knowing that we are doing our part for the cows and for the environment. However, as multispecies scholars, we are not able to enjoy the moment for much longer. There is a nagging feeling that something else must be going on. The perspective of the cows and the environment begins to feel like a storyline that we have become too familiar with, an object that we have bought and that has materialized in the form of an almond milk carton readily available for us. While it seems truthful that almond milk is an ethical choice, there must be other stakeholders who are implicated in the stories that made us switch from dairy to almond milk. So, we get to work and quickly stumble upon an arduous laborer whose concerns have escaped the stories we live by—the honeybee.

In this article, we introduce, develop, and apply to practice an idea of imagining well (Brady, 1998) in order to explore its potential to augment the capacity of environmental and sustainability education (ESE) to meet the challenges of the Capitalocene. To help us with the exploration, we recruit the humble honeybee—an insect, much cherished by international organizations (such as the European Food Safety Authority, n. d.) and often figuring in ESE (Bueddefeld et al., 2022; Cho & Lee, 2018; Lloro-Bidart, 2019; Nxumalo, 2018; Schönfelder & Bogner, 2017).

In ESE research interaction with honeybees has been used as a technique to connect humans to nature, inspire pro-environmental behaviors and promote pollinator conservation (Bueddefeld et al., 2022; Cho & Lee, 2018). Engagement with honeybees, in particular, is usually motivated by their ability to provide crucial ecological services needed for human survival, such as pollination of food crops (Bueddefeld et al., 2022; Cho & Lee, 2018; Schönfelder & Bogner, 2017). In this regard, honeybees serve as a kind of envoy species, representing other pollinators and it is implicitly hoped that raising knowledge and improving attitudes toward honeybees will have a spillover effect toward other pollinators (for a discussion and a critique of a similar trend in educational entertainment, see Lloro-Bidart & Russel, 2017).

As said, however, honeybees are not the only pollinating insects. In fact, as noted by Rader et al. (2016), pollinating services provided by “flies, beetles, moths, and butterflies are equally if not more important for the production of some crops” (p. 147). What sets the honeybees apart in this case? One answer to this question may be that pollination by honeybees can be and is managed and controlled by humans, giving rise to such phenomena as pollination markets and migratory beekeeping (Rucker et al., 2012). This means that honeybees are entangled with humans not (only) within human-nature relationship, they are very much a part of capitalist practices—they are workers, producing services. Some scholars extend this line of thinking by stating that nature itself “is conceived as a complex, yet manageable, factory of goods” within the sustainability discourse (Rupprecht et al., 2020, p. 7). This makes conceptualizing the human-honeybee relationship as part of solely human-nature relationship incomplete and requires that ESE pays attention also to how bees are part of capitalist systems and what it means for all of us.

Importantly, the place of honeybees, as well as other animals and natural resources, such as fossil fuels, in capitalistic processes has already been discussed. For example, Kallis and Swyngedouw (2018) debate whether honeybees produce labor and contribute to production of value according to Marxist theorizations. In this article, we do not aim to further these discussions, nor do we intend to establish whether it is possible for the capitalistic thinking to value nature in its own right or simply condemn capitalistic systems for exploitation of the Earth’s resources. What we intend to do is to invite the reader to participate in an exercise of what we call imagining well. Imagining well, as an educational and everyday practice, as we hope, could illuminate the “vast network of economic and consumer interests” (Animal Studies Group, 2006, p. 5) in which the honeybee is entangled thus broadening the scope of how, when, and where environmental education could be employed. This in its turn could inform, if not produce, action, however small.

Imagination has been called upon as a tool to attend seriously to lived experiences and perspectives of other animals (Celermajer et al., 2020; Jensen, 2016). In most cases, attending seriously has meant attempting to come closer to understanding—what it is like to be¹—a bat, a bird, a plant, or any other creature. We think that imagining the other does not necessarily only involve trying to understand what kind of subjective experiences they have, it can also involve “an attentiveness to ecological flows and systems, and human and nonhuman connectivity” (Celermajer et al., 2020). In this regard, taking a creature seriously would mean attending to the various ways in which they are entangled with other creatures and practices and excavating these engagements and connections responsibly. We claim, thus, that imagination, instead of only addressing sympathetic relations between humans and the rest of nature, or bees in this case, can stretch to also cover connections and assemblages specifically produced by and emerging in the "world-ecology of power, capital, and nature” (Moore, 2016, p. 6). Therefore, we seek to explore not What is it like to be a bee? but What is it like to be a bee in the Capitalocene?

Our thinking in this exploration is much influenced by multispecies approaches in their insistence to draw attention to the complexity of ways in which “all of us become in consequential relationships with others” (van Dooren et al., 2016, p. 3, emphasis added). Here relational ontology does not merely mean that beings exist co-dependently, but as Segerdahl (2012, p. 157, emphasis added) writes: “Cross-species relationships thrive in so many locations, creating new animals and new humans, shaped not only by their novel genomes but also by their unpredictable bonds in new circumstances”. To attend to these “questions of kinds and their multiplicities” (van Dooren et al., 2016, p.1), we use the concept of assemblage (agencement) to think and write with situated, open-ended and somewhat shifting gatherings of heterogeneous materials that co-constitute and agence each other (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Tsing, 2015) and are not only limited to humans and other animals.

Multispecies and relational approaches have been previously employed by ESE scholars in relation to their potential for altering research practices, pedagogies and concepts (see e.g., these Special Issues: Clarke & Mcphie, 2020; Hart & White, 2022; Pedersen & Pini, 2017; Tammi et al., 2020), as well as ESE pedagogy and curriculum in general (Lloro-Bidart & Banschbach, 2019), and in early childhood education (Boileau & Russell, 2019; Hohti & MacLure, 2022; Nxumalo, 2018; Nxumalo & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017; Tammi et al., 2018; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015), educational entertainment (Lloro-Bidart & Russell, 2017) and higher education (Lloro-Bidart, 2018, 2019; Tammi & Rautio, 2023). Despite the different contexts, what unites this scholarship is a search for a way to foster less violent and more ethical relationships with a variety of human and more-than-human others—at times very unlikely ones, like molds (Tammi, 2020) or Asian citrus psyllids (Lloro-Bidart, 2018, 2019)—through pedagogical means. This search is organized around the crucial question of multispecies studies: “cui bono: who benefits when species meet?” (van Dooren et al., 2016, p. 16), which refrains in the educational context as: "When educators aim to teach their students to act more ethically in relation to other living entities, including diverse groups of human beings - who is included and excluded?" (Lloro-Bidart, 2019, p. 48). Seeking to answer this question, in its turn, necessitates searching for and developing a diversity of ways to make visible participation of other-than-human creatures in what used to be thought of as purely human life processes and to include them in ESE pedagogies (Lloro-Bidart, 2018). Such inclusion should at once resist the commodification of other-than-human animals as educational tools and the view of education as transmission of "seemingly objective scientific facts and depoliticized discourses of care" (Lloro-Bidart & Russell, 2017, p. 44). This becomes ever more urgent in the context of the Capitalocene—the massive transformation of Earth systems through industrialized agriculture, resource extractions, energy production, and petrochemicals (Kenney & Haraway, 2015), for which the process of commodification is inherent. When employed with these issues in mind, multispecies approaches (see Ogden et al., 2013; van Dooren et al., 2016) become critical in that they take seriously the complexity of the question of who benefits and to whose detriment while also being speculative, given that any particular critter is always entangled with and emerging from specific connections and open-ended, heterogeneous gatherings—assemblages. Multispecies assemblages in the Capitalocene necessarily involve economic flows, but also power asymmetries and cultural and natural phenomena that condition the possibilities of living and dying as a being, a commodity, a resource (Haraway, 2015; Moore, 2016).

In what follows, we will outline the idea of imagining well, proceed with an example of how the idea can unfold in practice, describe its relevance to ESE and conclude by offering a series of movements - thinking with, un-knowing, composting, creating spaces, and practicing humility - scalable and applicable across a variety of ESE practices.

In search of imagination for the Capitalocene

With humanity being faced with environmental crises, imagination is increasingly called into action, and simultaneously declared to be in crisis because of its epistemological and ontological grounding in modernity and anthropocentrism (e.g., Yoneyama, 2021). The need for thinking the unthinkable, tracing the untraceable, and creating stories that hold powers to surprise and to derail our thinking is often held central in bringing about change and halting further damage to Earth (Jensen, 2016; Hohti & Tammi, 2019; Yusoff & Gabrys, 2011). While many wordplays have been offered to define and critique the geological post-Holocene epoch, the Capitalocene is the one most directly addressing the entangled histories of power, capital and nature (see Moore, 2016). While the temporal and spatial scales of violence and destruction are extremely difficult to grasp in totality, scholars have emphasized interrogation of specific and situated combinations of human and more-than-human activity and how it works for and limits the accumulation of capital (Kenney & Haraway, 2015; Moore, 2016). Consequently, the ways of enabling the imagining of something new are in high demand, and not the least in the field of ESE. In this article, we source the means from approaches that highlight the importance of local detail and particular situations as sources of imagination (Haraway, 2015; Yoneyama, 2021), all the while cautious that the vernacular and even the subversive are quickly cooped up by, and profoundly also shaped by, the common structural conditions of globalized capitalism (Butler & Loacker, 2022; Dirlik, 2013). With this in mind, we turn our focus on the connections, or assemblages that can be interrogated, as it were, at a local level but that exist as parts of, and because of, global capitalist structures.

By tracing particular metamorphoses of sympathetic imagination, in what follows, we can begin to think about an imagination for the Capitalocene as something that reaches beyond sympathetic: beyond imagining what it’s like to be the other and allows critical examination of the assemblages the other (and oneself too) is part of.

Sympathetic imagination is a concept originally associated with Adam Smith and his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759/2006). In essence, sympathetic imagination, according to Smith, is the ability of humans to imaginatively place themselves in the situation of other humans and, thus, indirectly share in their subjective experiences. Though Smith primarily developed the concept to establish a theory of human morality, sympathetic imagination has made its way into contemporary environmental discourse as well. For example, in the field of multispecies justice, Martha Nussbaum (2006) has utilized a version of the concept in extending her capabilities approach to non-human animals, while Emily Brady (1998) has written about the concept in relation to environmental esthetics.

Martha Nussbaum utilizes the concept of sympathetic imagination, or sympathetic imagining, as she calls it, in relation to animal justice in Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006). For Nussbaum, sympathetic imagination, understood as the ability to indirectly experience the inner life of other sentient creatures, becomes a way “to cross the species barrier” due to its potential to “extend and refine our moral judgements” (pp. 355–356). Nussbaum does not, however, describe what such imagination would involve and at times seems to deny imagination any power in dealing with some aspects of animal justice. Just one example of this is the questioning of the ability of humans to imagine “an animal supporting a decent life for species to which it is hostile” (p. 390). Nussbaum’s account of sympathetic imagination is, thus, contradictory and has been criticized for being potentially paternalistic and human centered (Martinić, 2022), as was the application of capabilities approach to other animals in general (Fulfer, 2013). Anik Waldow and David Schlosberg (in Celermajer et al., 2020, pp. 481–487) suggest an extension to Nussbaum’s version of sympathetic imagination by taking a relational approach. They propose to move from engagement with individual sentient animals toward interconnected systems in which different sentient and non-sentient creatures are embedded. Such imagination would, in the opinion of the authors, be capable of a certain double-movement—a simultaneous attention to a “a set or flow of interdependent relations in which different forms of life perpetually communicate with one another” (p. 483) and to “signals that a concretely embedded creature or system emits” (p. 484). Importantly, comprehending the situation in which other creatures find themselves in would not require accessing their inner world, especially if the imagination is informed by knowledge, sourced from diverse knowers.

Would sympathetic imagination, even of the kind proposed by Waldow and Schlosberg (in Celermajer et al., 2020), be a suitable tool to address the entanglements produced by the Capitalocene? The example of sympathetic imagination that Waldow and Schlosberg make is in relation to Australian bushfires—a tragic and catastrophic event, which took tens of human lives and thousands of human homes, as well as billions of animal lives and countless animal homes in 2019-2020 (WWF-Australia, 2018). Sympathetic imagination, powered by the “Australian identification with, and sympathy to ‘the bush’” and supported by the media (Celermajer et al., 2020, p. 486), produced action—calls were heard for the governments to take measures and to listen to multiple voices, concerned with climate change. Another example of sympathetic imagination, more local and personal this time, can be found in a memory one of the authors of this article holds dear—that of feeding an exhausted bee. Whenever Pauliina’s dad would find a tired honeybee somewhere he would prepare a mixture of water and sugar in a teaspoon and bring the drink to the bee. Pauliina would watch in awe as the bee would drink, slowly recover and after a while fly off. This act of reviving bees with sugar and water is commonly known and is a simple example of an act of compassion that requires imagining—estimation of the other’s plight and knowledge of how to act to alleviate it. In both these cases, sympathetic imagination is triggered by a catastrophic event, though on different scales—that of a whole country and that of the life of a single bee. Engagements with the Capitalocene, on the contrary, though very capable of producing extreme suffering—as in the case with industrialized meat and dairy production—for the most part are very mundane, routine and seemingly unproblematic. Additionally, such engagements can be framed as forms of sympathetic imagination—the production of almond milk, for example, as an answer to the suffering of animals in the dairy industry—providing seemingly simple solutions to complex problems. Therefore, an imagination for the Capitalocene needs to be able to start from mundane encounters, perhaps even from ordinary objects—such as a carton of almond milk. Though such imagination needs to be able to produce sympathy in those so inclined, it does not need to start from it, as opposed to the idea of sympathetic imagination. Instead, it needs to be guided by its object as well as by various knowledge practices. It needs also to pay attention to the many obvious and hidden connections that the production of this object or service includes. It needs to hold the connections in their complexity to remind us that, as Donna Haraway (2016) has suggested, solutions create new connections and, thus, new problems, and to remind us also of the importance of epistemic humility—understood simply as acknowledging that human knowledge is limited. This is what we call “imagining well”, borrowing the term from philosopher Emily Brady (1998).

Emily Brady (1998, 2011) started developing her conception of imagination in relation to the non-­cognitive approach to esthetic appreciation of nature. Such non-cognitive approach would not be constrained by scientific knowledge about the object, but only by the object itself. An important feature of such imagination she labeled as imagining well, which involves “spotting aesthetic potential, having a sense of what to look for, and knowing when to clip the wings of imagination. <…> preventing the irrelevance of shallow, naive, and sentimental imaginative responses which might impoverish rather than enrich appreciation” (Brady, 1998, p. 146). Eaton (1998), among others, criticizes the notion of imagining well by stating that it is, in fact, impossible to determine whether one’s imagination is directed by the object or know when to clip its wings if the looker does not possess of scientific knowledge about the object. In addition, she shows several convincing examples when imagination, though directed by the object, lead to negative consequences for the environment. One such example is that of Bambi—a fictional white-tailed deer, featuring in a 1923 book by Felix Salten and a 1942 animated drama film produced by Walt Disney. Eaton admits that the imaginative depiction of Bambi, his family, friends, and the forest around them is beautiful and potentially valuable for promoting appreciation of nature and educating children about a range of topics. She adds, however, that in practice this imaginative account became an obstacle in building dialogue between forest workers and the general public around the deer-managing strategies necessary for maintaining healthy forest environments (p. 153).

Based on these observations, Eaton (1998) states that imagining well makes “no sense unless one knows what the object is that one is talking about, something (in fact, as much as possible) about the object, and something (in fact, as much as possible) about the context in which the object is found” (p. 152). Brady, at a later point in her career, thinking outside of environmental esthetics, seems to have come to a similar conception of imagining well—as an imagining informed by epistemic tools, as well as direct experiences with the object of imagination. In a recent chapter What is it like to be a bird? co-written with Simon Burton (Burton & Brady, 2016), Brady utilizes an imaginative account of a Caspian tern and frames imagination as a practice of (epistemic) humility.

Below we begin to imagine well what it is like to be a bee in the Capitalocene. Being aware of "the famed power of capitalism for recycling everything aimed at its destruction" (Latour, 2004, p. 231), we start to imagine well with the premise that resisting the machine that one is part of involves getting to know it, if not fully but more and more each day, creatively and from a variety of perspectives. Thus, instead of asking a general question of whether or not bees are humanity’s most important pollinators, we seek to explore the assemblage where this statement seems to work fairly unproblematically—the capitalist mode of production of almonds within the industrial agricultural complex. This exercise of imagining well becomes also a practice of epistemic humility at work—acknowledging that our knowledge is limited, allows us to keep the assemblage open and trace its surprising, unexpected connections. The form and flow of the imaginative account, which is simultaneously poetic and academic, at once resists the symbolic “monocultural” tradition of writing academic texts and suggests that thinking differently sometimes also requires writing differently—allowing other pollinators to arrive (literally but also metaphorically) to thinking and writing.

Imagining well with almonds and honeybees

One morning, sitting at the breakfast table

reluctant to pour dairy into our coffee

given the ethical concerns of the industry

we find almond milk as a substitute

The coffee tastes amazing with this nut full of nutrients sweet and tempting

we are hooked right away

almond production has been greatly accelerating

since the second world war

in California, where most of the almonds come from

these days

water is running out, almond orchards suffer from drought

an example of market cycles and ecological cycles in tension (Reisman, 2019)

in an industry relying on monoculture

with its pesticides and artificial fertilizers

natural pollinators have disappeared

and the orchards and fields need pollination services

thus many beekeepers have turned

with support of the policies and successful marketing

to grow a particular bee species

Apis mellifera, the “European bee” and its subspecies, the “Italian bee” (Durant, 2019)

These bees need to be awakened from their dormancy

one to two months before it naturally would be the time

so that they can build a colony ready

for providing the services for the almond industry

when the almonds start to bloom (Durant, 2019)

these bees, it seems, can survive this kind of harassment

relatively well

But the work is hard for the bee

and the beekeepers need to feed them with extra energy

the honey becomes bitter

and incompatible with the public taste and the sweets market

(Durant, 2019; Rucker et al., 2012)

More troubles on the way

the bees don’t always stay in the area pointed to them

and the neighboring fields get their part of the “service” as well

potentially resulting in

competition with local pollinators for nest sites and flowers,

exposures to new pathogens,

disruption of pollination of native plants

(Goulson, 2003; see also Patel et al., 2021).

Preserving monocultural farming is indeed difficult

the fungal infections of the almonds are treated with agrochemicals

that are harmful to the bees

who, in turn, are suffering from Varroa mites and parasites

to whom their own toxics have been innovated

some of which mites are resistant to these days (Durant, 2019)

How these mites live and what kind of sociality they practice,

has not in general drawn any interest

but how the bee microbiota could be modified

so that the mites would not thrive, has (Stokstad, 2022).

At the same time, we are learning:

the bees are not only collecting pollen from the flowers

but that these flowers are rich places of microbial exchange

and that the microbiota of the bee importantly affects their health

protecting them from fungal infestations (Miller et al., 2021).

Unruly multispecies assemblages!

Queens mate in the air,

and make their genetic controlling more difficult

the workers visit other colonies

bringing their microbes and mites along (Kulhanek et al., 2021)

Multispecies stories lead us to mysteries, to strange assemblages.

Sometime ago all the workers left the nest in the middle of the season

and never got back

only the queen and some nurses stayed with the larvae

and no-one else got near the nest

Colony Collapse Disorder, they said

Is this some kind of biological resistance Catherine Malabou (Malabou & Shread, 2016) talks about?

The beekeepers reported these events widely

The researchers were not able to detect any one major explaining proposition

Maybe it was a combination:

Pathogens and immunological causes, viruses and fungi, pesticides, fungicides, antibiotics, miticides, climate change, migratory beekeeping, selective commercial breeding and lost genetic diversity, malnutrition, electromagnetic radiation, genetically modified crops (Wikipedia, n.d.)

what we don’t know becomes an opening,

instead of a dead-end (Burton & Brady, 2016)

telling us a lot about the mess

in which the sentence “the bee is our most important pollinator”

becomes true

and how true it also is that every solution gives birth to new troubles (Haraway, 2016)

When the bees have pollinated the almonds

they are loaded into the trucks by night

as the bees return to their nests for the night

and driven to the next blooming monocultural fields

citrus trees, then apple, pear and cherry orchards,

to berry blooms and vegetables like zucchini (Rucker et al., 2012).

and the honey tastes sweet again

an additional product in this assemblage

where the main purpose for beekeeping are the pollination services

the imported honey is so much cheaper

while the hunger for sweet

widely substituted by sugar (Durant, 2019)

somehow the income needs to be gained

and the agricultural animals cared for and nurtured,

the bee deaths grieved

the work of bees involves so many vulnerabilities

that over one third of the colonies do not survive to the next season

and some beekeepers refer to this as “normal cost of doing business”

while some scientists studying biodiversity say:

“It’s like sending the bees to war”

and for the growers this means that they have to pay more (McGinvey, 2020)

Patel et al. (2021) insist that bees are critical

for meeting many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Teaching disadvantaged people beekeeping, for instance,

would reduce poverty and increase education

and they also talk about other bees crucial for “food security”

the are over 20000 species of bees, butterflies, flies and many other pollinating vertebrates

but Apis mellifera has received most of the attention

at the detriment of thousands of wild ones (Geldmann and González-Varo, 2018)

The European bees were brought to the U.S. to produce honey

“backyard beekeeping”

for which the queens were transported from Europe in hundreds each year

the bees spread by themselves and with the humans throughout the country

colonialism – making the new land like home, like Europe –

is part of Apis mellifera too,

the “white man’s fly” as it was called by the Indigenous people

it’s buzz “signaling the arrival of the white man” (Smith, 2019)

In Finland, the pollination services are available as well

And the approved “products” are named and regulated (Finnish Food Authority, n.d.)

The Finnish Beekeeping Union (n.d.) advises that the pollination services are

“always a collaboration

between the beekeeper and the farmer”.

But what do we lose when we forget the multiple others involved in these worldings?

such as those Anna Tsing (2013) refers to when asking:

“how did anyone ever come up with the idea that non-humans are not social”?

That they are not “made in entangling relations with significant others”?

we wonder

Imagining well in ESE

Responses in resisting and subverting capitalist structures and practices often foreground imagination and experimentation and are fueled by an interest in creating alternative storylines to the status quo (Perini & Team Colors Collective, 2010, p. 183). Imagination is seen to hold transformative capacity not only for individuals but for collective mobilization and cultivation of shared hope (Dey & Mason, 2018, p. 88). In ESE imagination has been primarily employed to conjure alternative futures (see, e.g. Epstein-HaLevi et al., 2021; Ott, 2023), and to encourage affective, empathic, personal engagement with environmental issues (e. g. Jensen, 2016; Judson, 2010, 2017). With our employment of the notion of imagining well we develop the connection between imagination and ESE further—to a thorough exploration of the present conditions imaginatively and through diverse multispecies viewpoints or angles.

The viewpoint we have offered as an example is that of a honeybee. Buzzing away as both a product and an object of capitalist modes of production, and a being, imagining the honeybee well requires us to view it across a range of contexts and connections. One of the more surprising connections we stumbled upon was the one between the honeybee and production of almond milk—a substitute for dairy that we all learnt to enjoy as an ethical and sustainable alternative to industrially produced cow’s milk. The journey from the breakfast table through the Capitalocene from this vantage point is provided in this article as an example of what imagining well could be like.

Imagining well as part of ESE means not settling for simple relations and exclamations such as “Bees are our most important pollinators!” but excavating, instead, complex assemblages, a process which can begin to shed the idea of, for example, sustainability in a critical light: sustainable for whom, at the cost to whom? If bees are the most important pollinators, how is this condition being established? While opening possibilities for critical questioning, the multispecies notion of imagining well also necessitates speculation: what do we actually know about the mites or microbes, or pesticides involved? It also offers a possibility to consider our established ways of paying attention: How did we come to trace the honeybee rather than the almond tree? Educating about nature becomes education for connectedness that embraces the flows of materials and production of value as embedded in our daily notions of ‘nature’.

The Capitalocene concept helps us to hold on to the "world-ecology of power, capital, and nature” (Moore, 2016, p. 6) and to pay attention to the unfolding of hierarchies, economic flows, cultural practices and natural actors (humans included). Standardization of pollination services, the demand to produce more each year, increased numbers of bee deaths, uncontrollable and unexpected connections with microbes, mites and chemicals, intensification of extreme natural phenomena (such as drought and water shortages resulting from industrial and capitalist farming practices), marketing of “greener” products, is where we meet the honeybee. The honeybee is thoroughly situated, and it might better to talk about the Capitalocene honeybee and the Capitalocene almond milk to denote these complex connections.

The way in which the almond-honeybee assemblage was written—a kind of academic poetry—is inspired by compost storytelling practices (Hohti & Tammi, 2019; Hohti & Tammi, 2023) and other methodological apparatuses we have developed elsewhere (Rautio et al., 2022). We feel that in its spacey materiality it points toward ever-new connections and temporalities, inviting new pollinators and infections, while also performatively resisting monoculture. As much as imagining well opens up and takes apart—highlighting the complexities and ensuing inescapable vulnerabilities connected to the Capitalocene in a specific context—we see a possibility for it to transform into sustainable actions and choices, or at least remind us that sustainability cannot be reduced to simplistic solutions. Existing research shows that people, quite generally around the globe, struggle to connect the ongoing environmental crises to their daily lives—the concerns of which are often much more pressing for most of the world’s population (Pearson et al., 2017). The vocabularies connected to these crises—biodiversity, carbon neutrality, the green transition, even climate—are abstract and often remain without tangible everyday life connections (Fischer & Young, 2007; Lindemann-Mathies & Bose, 2008). The established way to overcome this disconnection with the help of imagination in ESE (e. g. Jensen, 2016) and, for example, the field of multispecies justice (Celermajer et al., 2020) has been through sympathetic or empathic engagement. Imagining well, though preserving the possibility for evoking an emotional response, begins from daily, routine even, encounters with the social, material, and more-than-human flows that are inextricably part of the Capitalocene and are connected to root causes and ongoing conditions of environmental crises—modes of capitalist production and consumption. Such as the carton of almond milk. The explorations on offer reveal connections and viewpoints that are surprising and start fueling one’s imagination: “If this is the case with almond milk, then where else is it happening—what else do I need to imagine anew?”. Therefore, imagining well becomes a tool and provocation for the multiplication of versions, following Vinciane Despret (2016), and-and-and logic, following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and thus perhaps generous for responding to the current ontological crisis (Yoneyama, 2021).

Concluding movements

An example of imagining well, similar to the one we have presented in this paper, can be found in a popular online resource already used by ESE teachers—Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff (The Story of Stuff Project, 2009; see also Jensen, 2016). The Story of Stuff is a YouTube channel that features short videos on the “life” stories of various everyday objects, such as bottled water, change, microfibers, or cosmetics all along exposing “the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues” (The Story of Stuff Project, 2009). A big part of the channel’s mission is to complicate in the eyes of learners the seemingly simple linear model of industrial production and consumption. Over the years, the channel has inspired and educated many students and continues to do so, which is apparent in the comment section to the videos. Leonard’s channel has some differences with our exploration of the almond milk assemblage—for one it seems to take an anthropocentric focus and view other animals’ part in the assemblages as resources. However, there is one crucial similarity—to imagine well, in the sense we mean it, takes time. In the introductory video to The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard tells the viewer that it took her ten years of travel and research to produce the short videos. It took us, a group of writers, several months to imagine well the situation of the honeybee. We acknowledge this and, since we remain doubtful of the degree to which the current temporal and spatial structures of education allow easy adoption of time-consuming critical approaches, summarize below the five multispecies movements through which our imagining well has come to be. We then offer these to practitioners of ESE to be applied and modified, rather than strictly followed.

The starting point—an encounter, attraction, trouble—is where the movements begin to originate. For us, the original trouble was that the status of almond milk as an ethical alternative to dairy was compromised when bees entered the picture. Starting points for imagining well, thus, can be the self-evident things or practices, concrete situations in our everyday lives that begin to trouble us with their opaqueness, like the “milk” in our morning coffee. As such they seem to require the movements of imagining well. The five movements that we have made, all geared at fueling imagination, are summarized below as thinking with, un-knowing, composting, creating spaces, and practicing humility.

The first movement is thinking with. Grasping our almond milk cartons, having just learnt about the impacts of its production on bees, we moved from thinking about bees in general into thinking with bees in particular assemblages, thinking and tracing the connections on different temporal and spatial scales.

The second movement is un-knowing. This is when we moved between what we think we knew about bees—for example, that they are our most important pollinators—toward the conditions for knowing it—for example, that it is only true in particular assemblages—toward what we do not know—for example, what other (multispecies) perspectives are there? This movement required engaging with various sources of knowledge, from academic articles to memories of our own engagements with bees and other creatures involved. While the process took time, it also carved space for detailed and passionate attention and dedication, needed for imagination to take off.

The third movement is composting. By collecting things (thoughts, ideas, connections, etc.) into a thinking compost and allowing time for the composting process—moving along different threads, noticing, and bringing in other species and objects, other timeframes and spaces—eventually new concerns are born (Haraway, 2016; Hohti & Tammi, 2023). This allowed us to critically observe modes of power, oppression, and injustice, which are all part of what it means to be a honeybee in the Capitalocene, but also acknowledge that humans are not fully in control of unruly multispecies assemblages (see also, Tsing, 2013).

The fourth movement is creating spaces. By writing our imagining well poetically we were able to leave spaces between concepts and ideas—spaces, which we do not perceive as gaps in knowledge, but as productive entities that may lead the way to further questions and assemblages (see also, Hohti & Tammi, 2023).

The fifth movement is practicing humility. A sustained practice of epistemic humility was added to keep our minds from producing final answers. Our inability to know completely or fully, even temporarily is recognition and exploration of the limits of our knowledge. We consider this, as well as the other movements, to be potential fuel for imagination and further engagement—to sustain the process of imagining well.

These five movements, though written here in a given order, quite similar, for example, to the steps of the inquiry-based process (see e.g., Pedaste et al., 2015), are not prescriptive. We offer these movements to ESE as scalable conceptual tools, which require changes in pedagogy first, and later in the educational structures. We hope they could be used separately or in combination to connect everyday materialities with the global capitalist modes of production and consumption and the related lives and deaths of multiple others.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all the organizations and multispecies fellows for being part of our imagining well in this article. Thank you to Eudaimonia Institute (University of Oulu, Finland) and Academy of Finland (project number 333438) for supporting this research financially, and to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The cue what is it like to be almost instantly calls for - a bat thanks to a seminal article by Nagel (1974), who famously stated that even in imagination one cannot reach the subjective experience of the other.