Is it possible to create thriving, liveable futures without doing the work to acknowledge and process the destructive systems, stories and behaviours that are causing so much devastation to life on Earth today ?
To understand how these logics run deeply through us and our dominant ways of thinking, seeing and relating.
To create space to collectively compost these ways to ensure we do not continue to perpetuate the same destructive patterns as we co-create responses and new pathways into the future.
To recognise the urgent need for intergenerational responsibility, to connect across generations for collective processing, learning and healing, cultivating moral responsibility for future life.
Personally I don’t believe we can avoid this work for much longer if we are serious about meaningful change and my guest in this episode Vanessa Andreotti has dedicated her life work to exploring how the dominant knowledge systems of modernity and ways of relating to ourselves, to each other and to the Earth are deeply entangled with the growing violence, divisiveness and declining health of all life on our home planet.
Vanessa is Dean of Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, Canada, Author, of the groundbreaking book - Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism and Co-founder, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective.
Vanessa’s life work has been in education and learning, her practice is rooted in relationality, indigenous knowledge and centering our entanglement with the living Earth.
She has worked extensively across sectors internationally and is a leading voice in global justice, global citizenship, Indigenous knowledge systems and the climate and nature emergencies.
If you haven’t read Hospicing Modernity, you may find some of this conversation challenging.
Hospicing Modernity is not a comfortable read, it proposes that colonialism, racism and other toxic divisions and cultural supremacies that inform the systems of modernity that we all inhabit run deeply inside us - perhaps neuro-biologically - it invites readers into an uncomfortable unlearning journey, of noticing, composting, letting go and unmaking ourselves from the violent ways of seeing and being that modernity and industrial consumerist society has created.
Through the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective - Vanessa and crew offer up powerful experiential learning courses, practices and metaphors to compost the W.E.I.R.D shit that we are carrying - Western, Entitled, Individualistic, Reductionist and Delusional.
We explore:
The challenges we are facing on Spaceship Earth
Responsibilities and challenges in education systems
Hospicing Modernity: The context today
The dis-ease of separation
Intergenerational responsibilities
Composting W.E.I.R.D shit
Politics of responsibility and entitlements
The role of education in addressing complexity
The gut as a site of learning and vulnerability
Embracing entanglement
Healing our fractured relationship with Earth
Supporting the young
The role of elders and rites of passage, transitioning through grief
It seems that the work we’re being called to do as a culture runs very deep, perhaps there’s no way through without a commitment to decolonise ourselves.
Not that long ago I used to question if this was really necessary, but the pace of accelerating climate breakdown, with Earth system overshoot, the ongoing obsession with economic growth even in this unravelling context, along with silence in most of the West in the last 12 months as we’ve watched the live streamed annihilation of the Palestinian people confirms to me at least the scale and depth of the work to do.
If regeneration is about care, connection and putting life back at the centre, about the interconnection and interdependence of all life, about justice and equity for all beings, why is there still mostly silence in the climate, sustainability and regeneration spaces, in our media and creative communities as we witness the most horrific violent colonising and rampant destruction of people and land 24/7 on our smartphones ?
While the majority of politics and mainstream media continue to deny what we can all see if we choose to look at it, if we choose to witness it.
If folks still struggle to see climate and ecological breakdown - violence to the Earth - through its entanglement with extractive, colonial capitalism, racial and social injustice and the military industrial complex - violence to humans - then I’d suggest that we’re still carrying the old story of separation and to begin to do the work to connect the dots and understand the intersectionality of these crises.
Perhaps it might have something to do with W.E.I.R.D - Western, Entitled, Individualistic, Reductionist and Delusional - traits of Modernity which Vanessa digs into in this chat - a colonisation of mind and body and a deep separation from the living Earth - a disease of separation as Vanessa explains.
Perhaps it’s desensitisation.
What we do to the Spaceship we do to ourselves.
And if our bodies really are part of the land, then the ongoing violence to some is violence to the whole.
This conversation was recorded earlier this summer, we chat about how Vanessa is experiencing the Hospicing Modernity work in this moment, some of the ideas from a new book forthcoming from the GTDF collective and we talk a lot about the young, the next generation and the call for intergenerational responsibility.
We explore sitting with the shit, opening up to the uncomfortable grief and why this composting work is so critical if we are to face into the future with humility and courage and with acceptance of the scale of the problems that this deep logic of modernity and ways of being has created.
To avoid repeating destructive patterns and behaviours as we seek alternative ways of organising and being.
This is really a conversation about unlearning and learning in new ways.
A big theme is how might we shift from a culture of entitlements to one of intergenerational responsibilities centred in our entanglement with a living Earth.
As Vanessa says:
We're being crushed by the weight of the complexity on our backs without having the capacity to hold it. We need to figure out a form of education that can help us to safely pick this weight from our back, put it in front of us and then lay it down on the earth so that it can be collectively composted and experienced and the grief will need a space where it can move us into a different way of being. And if we don't do that, it will break our back. It will break the back of humanity. We are setting ourselves on the course of premature extinction'
I feel we have to learn quickly to see ourselves as one big human family - maybe a very dysfunctional family, but family nevertheless, and we have to reject fully the dehumanisation of some humans, of some people and the ongoing colonisation of lands.
To absolutely reject colonial divisiveness and violence and the othering of some humans.
To stand up for all life - to put life at the centre.
And to see all life as sacred again.
As Bucky Fuller said 50 years ago
We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.
If this episode speaks to you, please let us know, and if you’re interested in the work of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures - we have hosted a learning gathering recently with Azul, one of the educators and Artists from the collective, and we’re exploring hosting again next year so let us know.
As usual if you dig what we ’re doing, please comment we’d love to hear from you, share with a friend and flip to a paid subscription if you’re able to - we really need more financial support to keep bringing these conversations, ideas and stories into the world.
Wishing you peace wherever you are.
Listen on all podcast platforms
Links
https://decolonialfutures.net/
https://decolonialfutures.net/hospicingmodernity/
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