Environmental anthropology is a depressing class to teach. We’ve
destroyed so much on this planet, and nothing is left unchanged. I actually had
at least on student descend into full-blown depression and commit himself to
the VA rehab center after this class. This is, of course, an extreme example,
but it is difficult to teach this class without becoming consumed by the
radical and fundamental transformations taking place in our environment and the
clear evidence that we’re reaching the end of a way of life that is all that we
know. Discussions of the separation (or not) between culture/nature, review of different
modes of adaptation, consideration of carbon footprints, and watersheds – all fade
before the awareness that we’re part of an all-encompassing system over which
we seem to have very little individual control. The vastness of it engenders
profound pessimism. And they’re not wrong …
I’ve tried various forms of teaching Environmental
Anthropology. Part of me likes the tried-and-true “oh, look at all of the
different ways that humans have lived!” and this what students like. We do not
have an anthropology major here (we’re now part of a combined
Geography/Anthropology department); at least 50% of my students in this class
are Environmental Studies majors. They’re hoping for a fun traipse through the different
and exotic. Of course, in the end, final exams are always written of people in
the past tense. They see today’s foragers, horticulturalists, pastoralists as
remnants of a charming past. It becomes romantic nostalgia. They don’t see how
to apply this information to their own world.
Another form was to do this class as “Community-Based
Learning,” which is highly supported and valued on our campus. I am proud of the
work we did the last time (for the Root-Pike Watershed Initiative Network[1]) and I think we helped to
point out problems with the kinds of social surveys they’ve been doing and
pointed them to a new direction for thinking about how to explain the
importance of watersheds in their public education work. Students were less pleased, however. They did
not leave the class with a sense of confidence. On our campus, Environmental
Studies is housed with Biology and students get a firm grounding in biology and
chemistry, but only a smattering of classes in the social sciences. That meant that we had to start from the
basics of what anthropology is and how we know what we know; ethics; methods
and practice in methods; and anthropological analyses. That left too little
time for learning about the diversity of human adaptations. It also left the
few anthropology students in the class feeling like they’d just experienced a
semester-long review of things they’d already been studying.
How, then, to find the balance between learning anthropological
ways of thinking and being able to apply it? Between learning about diversity
and seeing its relevance to our own lived world? Between book/theoretical
learning and praxis?
I want to give student tools to live in the world as it is
and will be. Anthropology is crucial to that, given that we study the wide
range of ways that humans live and have lived. By implication, this gives us
the possibility to think about how we could live. I, in fact, think
about this all of the time in my daily life. And students in intro classes
often ask me about whether it would be possible for us, today, to have a truly
egalitarian society or … I think about this in my own life – what will work for
my garden(s), my native plant restoration, for how I share information with
people, how we can engage with each other, whether it’s possible to create
ground-up networks that are truly powerful (more on power later) and, most of
all, is sustainability even possible in capitalism?
I sought, therefore, to apply all of that in my most recent
iteration of Environmental Anthropology. It’s subtitle was “Living in the Anthropocene.”
The goal was to pass on the wide range of knowledge and experience I have to a
new generation, to make of it what they will. I wanted to give them hope for a
future that they could create themselves. It’s their world. They will have to
live in what all of the previous generations have wrought. It’s all up to them,
but that’s a heavy burden. What can I do to help them feel that they have the
knowledge and skills to adapt to the coming rupture?
More soon!
May 28, 2019
[1]
The Root-Pike WIN funded and carried out watershed rehabilitation plans for the
major rivers of Southeast Wisconsin – the Root River and the Pike River. See http://www.rootpikewin.org/ for more
information.
