Contemplating educations of ecological well-becoming, with gratitude to (Mother) Earth, wildlife, and women

Abstract

Given ecological atrocities and widespread ill mental health among humans, this article contemplates possibilities for educations of ecological well-becoming. It introduces contemplative, emotion-aware, and cosmospolitan embraces as part of such educations. Additionally, with reference to psychoanalysis, Buddhist thought, and Indigenous, specifically Anishinaabe, wisdom, I consider and complicate literacies steeped in gratitude for (Mother) Earth, wildlife, and women. I also wrestle with such dualisms as contemplation/action, mind/body, wilderness/civilization, self/other, inner/outer, and knowing/not knowing. By way of conclusion, I introduce Lifeworld educations, nondual ecological well-becoming and gratitude, and also briefly consider select implications of ecological well-becoming for contemporary schooling.

Keywords:

• Ecological well-becoming
• gratitude
• transformation
• emotion
• cosmopolitanism
• contemplation
• lifeworlds
• curriculum studies

Acknowledgements

My deep thanks to Jackie Bach and the contributors to this special symposium. My gratitude also to all the reviewers of this article for their rigorous and so very helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 I long debated whether to include this field note entry of this stranger’s act, and decided to add it, wanting this individual’s despair to be given voice. Documented increases in Toronto subway suicides are indicative of growing societal ill mental health. According to a 2019 news article, the Toronto Transit Commission has been considering making such events public (Roumeliotis, 2019).

2 Greenspan (2004) observed that despair is more complex than fear or grief, includes both fear and grief within it, and carries a “moral and social dimension that calls us to pay attention” (p. 121). For years now, I have included opportunities in my graduate classes for envisioning alternate presents and futures, as I believe doing so can help undo despair/hope polarities.

3 My thanks to Thomas Falkenberg for introducing me to the term “well-becoming,” in correspondence. See his and his collaborators’ critically important research initiative on well-being in Canadian schools: Well-Being and Well-Becoming in Schools Research Initiative (n.d.).

4 The spirit of this question seeks to avoid “it is all up to humans” thinking—yet another human mastery/hero narrative. It is informed rather by commitment to inquiries into the ways in which human beings can contribute, by transforming damaging governing stories, ethics, and practices of not/relating.

5 Buddhist philosophy/psychology has been increasingly engaged by physicists, neuroscientists, and biologists (e.g., Barash, 2014; Theise & Kafatos, 2016; Wallace, 2009; Zajonc, 2004). However, this dialogue between science and Buddhism is complicated; for a recent critique of this dialogue, as well as a critique of neoliberal McMindfulness, see Hynes (2021).

6 While introducing Buddhist thought in very general and rudimentary terms, I am mindful of vast Buddhist traditions, texts, and practices across histories and geographies. Buddhist thought is in ongoing, dynamic, and wide-ranging discussion and debate. In the 1960s, “Engaged Buddhism” developed in the context of the Vietnam war. Led by Thich Nhat Hanh, it emphasizes the importance of meditation combined with social action. The last decades have witnessed growing Buddhist discussion on intersectional topics such as ecology (e.g., Kaza, 2019; Kaza & Kraft, 2000), gender and sexuality (e.g., Cabezón, 2017; Gross, 1993), and racism, anti-racism, and white privilege (e.g., Yancy & McRae, 2019; Yetunde & Giles, 2020), among others.

7 Buddhism, as it travelled from India to many parts of the world, integrated in deep and complex ways with the Indigenous traditions there before it, including Bon in Tibet, Taoism in China, and Shinto in Japan, for example. Travis et al. (2005) drew attention to generative contemporary Indigenous-Buddhist conversations happening in North America.

8 I also here note Wilson’s (2005) concern that Anishinaabe identity and culture not be essentialized (p. 342).

9 Also, recognition that the Earth may be indifferent to human beings does not, in my view, diminish the value or power of gratitude. I believe one can be grateful to the Earth, and even evoke her as Mother, without expecting that the Earth exists in order to serve human beings and without expectations of something from the Earth in return for our gratitude. Human beings can be grateful for the Earth’s bounty and fertility and, at the same time, humbly and respectfully realize it/she/Mother does not exist in order to protect us and keep us alive.

10 I have mixed responses to nonhuman, which not only carries the word human within it but also sets up a binary between human and nonhuman.

11 In another class, this discussion about danger also came up. However, recently in a class of cisgender women, the fear expressed was more about encounters with men appearing in the wild than about wilderness per se.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claudia Eppert

Claudia Eppert is associate professor of curriculum studies and English language arts education at the University of Alberta. She can be reached at [email protected].