Ecological Breakdown Research Articles

Entrepreneurship Educators in an Age of Climate and Ecological Breakdown

It is stated, with increasing frequency and urgency, that Entrepreneurship Education should help society move past Business as Usual, the unsustainable development pathway which depletes communities and is driving climate and ecological breakdown. We agree with this ideal, but our lived experience suggests that the everyday philosophy and practice of mainstream Entrepreneurship Education means this shift will be challenging for many educators. Mainstream narratives of economic growth and tools such as Business Model Canvas erase social and ecological concerns, compromising the Entrepreneurship Educator in the way they prioritize economic concerns over un/sustainability. Our question is, given the demand for transformation in Entrepreneurship Education, how do we—educators—change ourselves and our practice? In this paper we blend action-based accounts of change with interpretations from a dialogic perspective to elaborate how Entrepreneurship Educators can, and already are, taking action in light of climate and ecological breakdown. We provide a way of thinking about how change happens—in and through relations and dialogue between people—and new conceptual directions—the metacrisis and time between worlds—which aim to contribute a source of agency for educators.

The prioritisation of climate security: A content analysis of national security agendas

Climate change is leading to severe environmental degradation and ecological breakdown. We are on a path towards 2°C to 3°C warming above pre-industrial levels, yet at the current 1°C warming, we already see drastic and irreversible changes. Arguably, this represents an existential threat to humanity, and by extension, a national security threat to every country in the world. Nevertheless, the securitisation of climate remains contested, and research on states’ approaches to climate securitisation remains limited despite them being the most important actors in climate change policy. In this article, we perform a content analysis on a large corpus of current national security and defence documents from 94 countries to determine: Is climate on national security agendas? To what extent is it prioritised? What are the main ways in which national security agendas handle climate security? We find that although most states in our sample (84%) mention climate in their national security documents (NSDs), they still treat it as a low priority in most cases. All states devote less than a quarter of their NSDs to climate change. Only five states dedicate 10% or more, whilst the majority of states dedicate 3% or less.

Teaching under an orange sky: Toward reimagining educational purpose on a damaged planet

I begin with an assumption that there are intersectional relations among education, humans, cyber technologies, and nature, and assert that an expansive understanding of formal educational purpose is needed in the twenty first century. Drawing on Biesta’s (2009) three domains of educational purpose (qualification, socialization, and subjectification), I examine how posthuman, decolonial, and ecofeminist insights manifest in each domain. I employ Haraway’s concepts of kin-making and thinking-with as a methodological approach, using personal narrative to bridge theory and practice. By establishing “theoretical alliances” with diverse thinkers, scholars, and communities, I aim to challenge traditional individualistic and hierarchical approaches to philosophy in environmental education, fostering a more interconnected practice of living and learning in a time of ecological emergencies. Qualification is reconceptualized to include understandings that provide space for unknowing and mystery. Socialization is reimagined to include kin-making processes, while subjectification entails grappling with the difficult emotions surrounding ecological breakdown.

Special issue introduction: representation of diasporic food cultures

ABSTRACT Diasporic food cultures enter dominant societies through a variety of manners and spaces, in homes, at food fairs, restaurants, through cookbooks, in supermarkets, but also in visual media. This special section investigates how the representations of diasporic food cultures in popular television and film mediate a variety of food traditions which negotiate and challenge dominant societal assumptions about the present, the past and the future of food and eating, and their complex relationships to race, class, gender, identity and the environment. The contributions to the issue note how the meeting of various diasporic culinary traditions and the often already transcultural host food traditions marks the start of new, feminist, decolonial food cultures, identities and futures, which raise critical questions about our food culture. This investigation of the representation of diasporic food cultures not only reveals the continuing transmutation of food cultures but more importantly the transformation of culture as such, within an increasingly polarized, uneven and fortified world where the dominant food system contributes to a social and ecological breakdown.

The Grotesque Aesthetics of Relationality: Sibylle Berg’s GRM Brainfuck (2019)

This article proposes that Sibylle Berg’s novel GRM Brainfuck (2019) expresses an ethics of relationality by showing the possibility, no matter how fleeting and precarious, of connections and collaborations, both physical and digital, between individuals and groups in the epoch of neoliberal fundamentalism, rapidly developing Artificial Intelligence and ecological breakdown. Narrative indeterminacy lays the aesthetic foundations for Berg’s portrayal of precarious relationality on the margins of totalitarian society, and it also articulates difference. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel as a hybrid form and his concept of the carnivalesque, the article argues that Berg’s narrative discourse and grotesque depictions of the body articulate the young protagonists’ resistance against the white elite techno-patriarchy. Berg’s thematization of the underground music genre, grime, also plays into her carnivalesque tirade against the status quo. Ultimately, her portrayal of relationality explores possibilities of human-machine kinship, even as the novel catastrophizes technological singularity. GRM Brainfuck is thus a form of cyborg writing, in Donna Haraway’s sense, that manifests in the carnivalesque narrative form.

Agricultural waste as a replacement for admixture in concrete – A short review

There are a number of issues with managing the biomass waste generated from rice straw. These include field firing, which contributes to polluted air, and the organic decomposition procedures, which releases methane. There is a possibility that arises from the given situation where-in one can think of converting the waste to ash and then utilize the powder in the form of admixtures in concrete. It will help in reusing the waste materials found in abundance in a country like India with a phenomenal percent of the entire population feeding on rice. This culminates into realizing the amount of biomass waste produced by the country annually. In this era of ecological breakdown, one must review advanced methods which will help recycle the waste into forming green utilities. The aim of this review paper considers the properties of rice straw ash (RSA) and collectively studies the chemical influence of the same as a replacement of admixtures in variable percentages in concrete. The gamut of this paper revolves around reviewing the effect of RSA in place of admixtures in concrete. It is no mystery that production of cement which is an integral ingredient of concrete results in the emission of approximately 20% of global Carbon Dioxide (CO2). Globalization has led to faster growth and consumption of concrete structures that aid climate change. With utilization of waste materials as replacements in cement or admixtures, both environmental issues and waste disposal problems can be tackled at the same time.

A meeting with gardenia: an ethnographic exploration of multispecies relationships and space construction in Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden

In an age of climate and ecological breakdown, questions of how we relate to the natural world and the more-than-human beings around us are more important than ever. This ethnography seeks to bring these questions to the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town, South Africa, a place known for its conservation and tourism value, by taking an experimental multispecies approach. Multispecies ethnography is particularly useful for these types of explorations as it allows the stories of the more-than-human to emerge from the periphery and be put in conversation with the human. This ethnography found that despite Kirstenbosch’s socioecological benefits, the intimacy fostered between humans and more-than-humans in the gardens is distinctly human-centric and centres on a colonial construction of nature and natural beauty. Practices of photography and viewing and the commercialisation of the gardens reinforce such a relationship, producing a space where human needs and desires are prioritised and the boundary between humans and more-than-humans reified. This multispecies approach to human–environment interactions highlights the potential failures of western conservation practices and contributes to the growing exploration of complex human–nature relationships in ways that are deeper and kinder and that recognise nature’s agency and animacy in the Anthropocene.

The green economy as plantation ecology: When dehumanization and ecological simplification go 'green

The green economy is proposed as a solution to address growing and potentially irreversible ecological crises. But what happens when environmental solutions are premised on the same logics of brutal simplification and dehumanization that sustain and reinforce systems of oppression and ecological breakdown? In this article, we describe the transformation of the biophysical landscape of the planet into replicable blueprints of the plantation plot. The plantation as a colonial-era organizational template is an ongoing ecological process premised on disciplining bodies and landscapes into efficient, predictable, calculable, and controllable plots to optimize commodity production and is dependent on racialized and gendered processes of dehumanization. The visible cultural, physical, aesthetic, and political singularity of the plot, under the guise of objectivity and neutrality, permits a tangible depiction of the way ecological breakdown takes place. We interrogate the notion of "greening" as a strategy to combat the unintended impacts of colonial plantation ecology, arguing that such tactics further reinforce the template of plantation ecology rather than dismantle it. We first conceptualize the historical plantation and its biophysical, cognitive, and corporeal organizational principles. We then offer examples of "greening" as new, more inclusive (but equally detrimental) forms of plantation logics, and crucially identify how these extensions of plantation logic get co-opted by resistance agents, from social movements to disease and pestilence. We consider sustainability certifications of palm oil through the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Colombia and compensatory afforestation programs designed to offset forest destruction through monoculture plantations in India. We conclude by highlighting how abolition ecologies can serve as an antidote to plantation logic and highlight necessary relationships of self-reflexivity, repair and collective solidarity required to disinvest in plantation ecology.

The “Greening” of Empire: The European Green Deal as the EU first agenda

The recent past has seen the proposal of multiple ‘Green New Deals’ across geographies as a means to fight against the climate crisis and ecological breakdown. Of these, the European Green Deal- EGD represents the world's first public commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of at least 55% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. Because the EGD plans to “transform the EU,” in this paper we examine how it fits within a historical continuum of colonial and neo-colonial relations. We argue that the EGD is the latest discursive strategy for the ‘greening' of empire through four registers: (1) turning ecological crises into profitable opportunities; (2) portraying the EU as a ‘moral’ intervener; (3) building on a ‘green' “will to improve”; and (4) securitizing and consolidating the empire. We find how the EU acts in key policy arenas of diplomacy, trade and investment leading to the ‘greening' of the empire that ensures its continued economic and political leadership while fundamentally maintaining a status quo. We conclude with some reflections on the role of the EU to cede place to other possibilities of building anti-colonial ecologies.

Our Children Will Fight for the Climate: How Congo-Basin Writers Prophesied Global Youth Climate Activism

In the context of climate change and ecological breakdown, this essay suggests that some Congo-Basin writers had prophesied the emergence of global youth/children’s climate activism. Specifically, it contends that Congolese writer and former cabinet minister Henri Djombo, Francophone Cameroonian-born, Brazzaville-based playwright, stage director and climate activist Osée Collins Koagne, Gabonese geographer, activist publisher and writer Nadia Origo, and Anglophone Cameroonian writer and environmentalist Ekpe Inyang had literarily predicted youth climate activism that correlates with the current global Youth Strikes for Climate. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism and writers as literary prophets, it uses Djombo and Koagne’s co-authored play Le Cri de la forêt (2015a), Djombo’s play Les Bénévoles (2015b), Nadia Origo’s novel Le Voyage d’Aurore (2014 [2007]), and Inyang’s plays The Hill Barbers (2010) and Beware (1993), among others, to argue that current global youth climate activism was, to an extent, prophesied in Africa through literary advocacy for including children in future climate solutions before emerging in Europe, especially through the Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg and other youth climate activists around the world. The essay also traces the role of youth in climate activism, partly accounts for the timid participation of African youth in climate protests and highlights the motivations behind youth climate activism for both the young characters in the texts and their writers.&nbsp

Sonic Figurations for the Anthropocene: A Musical Bestiary in the Compositions of Liza Lim

AbstractThis article presents a musical bestiary, a collection of creatures found in the work of the composer Liza Lim. It is a thought experiment, meant to unsettle current ways of thinking about music and its relationship with the world. Centring our discussion on sonic figurations rather than on a composer’s works, we experiment with alternative musical ontologies and consider their lessons for understanding the role of contemporary art in a time of ecological breakdown. Thinking of Lim’s musical creations in terms of strange beasts inhabiting the Anthropocene draws out a range of themes – including uncanny ventriloquism, performer-instrument symbiosis, theatricalization and the everyday, musical mourning and witnessing – that might help make sense of the sensory and conceptual derangements of our time. The prose style and nonlinear format are likewise experimental, intended as provocations that we might read and write otherwise about music in the Anthropocene.

Green Labs: a guide to developing sustainable science in your organization.

Scientific research plays a vital role for society, but carries a significant environmental footprint, involving intensive use of energy and resources. Scientists are well placed to understand the unfolding climate and ecological crises, but may not appreciate how heavily their research, and other work-related activities, contribute to emissions and pollution. With the consequences of climate change and ecological breakdown playing out in real time, scientists now have an important, urgent role to play in catalyzing solutions. Here, we explore how research organizations can reduce their environmental impact, share useful resources and encourage the global community to engage in making science more sustainable.

The Urgency of Protest

This paper makes a case for academicians to promote, support, and participate in nonviolent direct action in our roles as teachers and scholars given the unfolding climate catastrophe and the extent to which academic institutions are complicit in the systems driving ecological breakdown. Drawing from recent experiences resisting fossil fuel infrastructure in Appalachia and the literature on social movements, I argue that specialists in marginalized economies and societies in the Appalachian and Carpathian Mountains are primed to critique dominant narratives about economic growth and state nationalism, to embrace the reputation of mountains as ungovernable, and to leverage international networks for the sake of mass disobedience and mutual aid.

Being human now: The theatre of protest

In this personal account of a moment participating in a large group protest, the author reflects on how her training and experience as a performer, body-based therapist and parent have sensitized her to ecological destruction and equipped her to play a part in the ‘theatre of protest’: Non-violent direct action (NVDA). The author attributes her confidence while participating in protest to skills gained from embodied practices. This may lead the reader to reflect on the ways in which their own embodiment supports them in eco-somatic or eco-justice contexts and/or a variety of life practices. NVDA could be considered inherently embodied, in that it is the strategy of this form of protest for the bodies and actions of protestors to express the messages they want to communicate. When art is used in NVDA the artist may describe themselves as an ‘artivist’. This account endeavours to convey an embodied experience of NVDA, including emotions that arise as a result of active acceptance of the subject of the protest: climate and ecological breakdown. Specifics of time, place and collaborators are intentionally omitted from the narrative and accompanying photo, so as to evoke rather than document the themes described. This omission in text and image serves to protect the identities of protesters and anonymise the author’s role in protest movements. In addition, the choice to focus on the sensory/embodied quality rather than the specifics or academic qualifiers of the experience invites the reader to connect with the humanity that can be present in NVDA.

Improving quantitative synthesis to achieve generality in ecology.

Synthesis of primary ecological data is often assumed to achieve a notion of 'generality', through the quantification of overall effect sizes and consistency among studies, and has become a dominant research approach in ecology. Unfortunately, ecologists rarely define either the generality of their findings, their estimand (the target of estimation) or the population of interest. Given that generality is fundamental to science, and the urgent need for scientific understanding to curb global scale ecological breakdown, loose usage of the term 'generality' is problematic. In other disciplines, generality is defined as comprising both generalizability-extending an inference about an estimand from the sample to the population-and transferability-the validity of estimand predictions in a different sampling unit or population. We review current practice in ecological synthesis and demonstrate that, when researchers fail to define the assumptions underpinning generalizations and transfers of effect sizes, generality often misses its target. We provide guidance for communicating nuanced inferences and maximizing the impact of syntheses both within and beyond academia. We propose pathways to generality applicable to ecological syntheses, including the development of quantitative and qualitative criteria with which to license the transfer of estimands from both primary and synthetic studies.

Maturing conversations: developing climate engagement through group dialogues.

Climate change is a threat to global ecosystems, societies and psychological well-being. As a collectively driven phenomena, I argue that it requires collective responses and action. In order to ease the trauma of awakening to, and engaging with, climate and ecological breakdown, I suggest that individuals and communities need to build safe containers and establish support to help us recognize resistance, explore defences and feel into the territory beyond the known and familiar. Using participatory research as a case study, this paper considers the often intense feelings of confusion, tension and fear that can be generated by climate disruption, and the developmental processes that can arise when these feelings are well supported and contained. My experience suggests that when people are given a safe facilitated space to identify and share their feelings and thoughts, fears and hopes, dreams and images with others, it stimulates a creative process of collective engagement and sense-making that has the potential to seed personal and social transformation and action. I suggest that Jungian practitioners in particular can play a valuable role by facilitating dialogues and inquiries which are attuned to collective symbolic processes and which incorporate the imaginal realm of story, dream, and image.

Tender Places

Tender Places is a creative research project engaging the settler body in reflexive dialogue with theory in and through place, to explore moral responsibilities of settler descended peoples in the time of ecological breakdown. The entanglement of severance and extraction with ecological and social violence poses a provocation to settler descended peoples. Working with the Ilparpa Claypans, a site of personal significance on the outskirts of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, my creative research uses Deborah Bird Rose’s provocation of “Taking Notice,” sensual language and presencing the co-existence of love and violence in order to mobilise the body in the act of physical translation of ideas with/in place through walking, writing and digital photography. The research acknowledges and activates trans-local relationships through the creation and sending of postcards that document, translate and disseminate field notes to and through an international network of artist peers. The postcard is presented as a queering material medium; an appropriated artefact of outsider privilege, a public/ private artwork for an audience of one, and a material item that crosses political and geographical borders to link places and people through space and time. My paper locates this practice of (trans)local place-based inquiry into ecological crisis within broader decolonising, feminist and creative inquiries into the Anthropocene. Postcards and other creative research artefacts will be shared to demonstrate the methodology in action, and I reflect on the decolonising potential of reflexive and embodied engagement with place in relation to settler identity.

Everything Stays the Same while Everything Changes

Everything Stays the Same while Everything Changes

Inequality can double the energy required to secure universal decent living

Ecological breakdown and economic inequality are among the largest contemporary global challenges, and the issues are thoroughly entangled – as they have been throughout the history of civilisations. Yet, the global economy continues toward ecological crises, and inequalities remain far higher than citizens believe to be fair. Here, we explore the role of inequality, alongside traditional drivers of ecological impacts, in determining global energy requirements for providing universal decent living. We consider scenarios from fair inequality – where inequalities mirror public ideals – through a fairly unequal world, to one with a super-rich global elite. The energy-costs of inequality appear far more significant than population: even fair levels increase the energy required to provide universal decent living by 40%, and a super-rich global 1% could consume as much energy as would providing decent living to 1.7 billion. We finish by arguing that total population remains important nonetheless, but for reasons beyond ecological impacts.

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene