Keywords

1 Panel Discussion

Yuval Dinoor

Before we dive into the wonderful panel discussion, I want to offer a brief land acknowledgment… (See Rosales Introduction.) Thank you very much for listening. I will pass it over to Rachel, who will introduce herself and begin to introduce our panelists today.

Rachel Elkis

As Jennifer mentioned, after our climate conversations in response to the Climate Action Vision Statement last year, I am representing the student voice and encouragement for incorporating sustainability in the curriculum. So without further ado, I would love for our faculty panelists to introduce themselves, their department, courses they are currently teaching, and then their role in the Barnard community, both inside and outside of the classroom.

Carl Wennerlind

I teach in the History department. I focus on seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe and am mostly interested in economic ideas, concepts, and institutions. But lately, I have gravitated towards the relationship between the economy, economic thought, and the environment. I am going to talk to you today about my course on the history of the idea of scarcity and introduce some aspects about how different ways of thinking about the world, can be viewed as instrumental in generating a culture in which the environment is treated and exploited in ways that have landed us in the predicament that we are now facing.

Orlando Betancor

Hello, my name is Orlando Bentancor. I teach in the Spanish department. I am also the chair of the Spanish department. I teach a course, Introduction to Hispanic Cultures I, which is a survey from the Romans to the Iberian Empire, and I always gave it a material/ecological twist. So I was always interested in ideas of imperialism, domination of nature, imperial expansion, and early modern globalization. Now I am also teaching a class called, Between Science Fiction and Climate Fiction, where I am teaching authors that are all females except one, and it is centered around literature written in the last five years. The course pays a lot of attention to environmental consequences, the agro-industry, and extractivism, and basically the consequences of this corporate exploitation of nature in Latin America.

Hilary S. Callahan

I am a botanist by training, specifically in plant ecology, and in addition to being a professor and the chair in the biology department, I do a lot of things around campus. I am the faculty director of the Ross Greenhouse and I work a lot on mentoring, research, and teaching experiences, like the Beckman’s Scholars Program and the Barnard Noyce Teacher Scholars program. I love teaching and also working with students on their journeys at Barnard, looking ahead to what they are going to do with their lives, especially students starting to discover an avocation as a botanist or plant ecologist. I am the only person in the Biology department who teaches plant courses. My main focus today is about ecology and how to teach ecological thinking. It is a complex discipline. It is imperfectly unified, in part because it is integrated with other aspects of biology, like genetics and genomics, while also being integrated with the social world, the economic world, and the worlds of public health and environmental health. I feel privileged to have a career studying these things, especially how it allows me to integrate what I do for my job with everything else in my life and my environment.

Yuval Dinoor

Thank you for sharing a little bit about what you do in the Barnard community. I think it is so exciting delving into our conversation that each of you comes from such different disciplinary backgrounds to this conversation about theorizing the environment in our classes. So to kick this off, I would love to hear more about how the courses that you teach right now connect to the theme, theorizing the environment. What does it look like to take that kind of focus in the different classes that you each teach?

Orlando Betancor

I integrate environmental discourses by focusing on classical philosophy, meaning Greek philosophy and medieval philosophy, how the dichotomy between humans and nature paved the way to the official ideology of the Spanish empire, and how that contributed to what Carl was talking about today. The Spaniards conceived nature in an instrumental way and that had a great impact on the environment. The main topic of my research was mining.Footnote 1 What I tried to do is to criticize the hegemonic perspective. My other class, the one I am teaching now on climate fiction, is very inclusive because I tried to bring in as many different voices as I can. When I teach this other class, I emphasize how important it is to understand the ideas behind dominant notions of nature, and how the ideas about climate change brought us here to this current situation. I am convinced that climate change and the environmental crisis are not something that is only practical. They are also ideological. Abstractions in a way, rule the world, and these presuppositions are extremely important. That is why sometimes the students complain about Hispanic Cultures I. Why don’t we have more diverse voices? First, it is very difficult, and second, I really want to place more emphasis on these dominant ideas, on these ideas that drove sixteenth-century mercantilism and capitalism.

Hilary S. Callahan

I teach a science course, and I will talk a little later about what I call cross-scale thinking, across a lot of different spatial scales from the local to the global, and also temporal scales. I am honored to be with people who have such strong history training, who emphasize history in their scholarship. I do aspire, in my science course, to keep close to the foreground the soft and ideological aspects of what we are studying, and the history of ideas. I do that in an untidy way. It is scattered throughout the course because ecology has so many implications for law, politics, and policy.Footnote 2 Ecology is a professional practice. People hire ecologists when they want to build a road or open a mine. There is a lot of interaction between the global and colonizing north and how their cultures and their impacts have spread all over the world throughout the diverse tropics, diverse in terms of human diversity and biological diversity. I am also thinking about the role of historically marginalized people who are ecologists—a lot of white men built this relatively young field of ecology.Footnote 3 But the field was drawing from much older knowledge systems that women and Indigenous people had developed to understand the world, and continue to develop.

The way I sell ecology to science students is that it is Biology. And people love biology. It is the study of life and people. The cell is fascinating, and the body is also fascinating, and I do show students how ecologists do experiments with these entities, at the laboratory bench with test tubes and pipettes and instruments. The departure of ecology is doing experiments out in the world, in forests and lakes or in the ocean. Students immediately grasp that ecology is richly informed by nature-observing and being out in nature, but what my courses also stress is how ecology and ecologists are adamant about being theory-driven, operating as physicists do, from first principles about matter and energy. Ecologists also develop formal quantitative models, mathematically and computer-based. Ultimately, ecology is also an applied science, informing land-use, energy use, agriculture, water and fire management, and many other activities, including human health. For those aiming for medical school, we explore how being well-versed in ecology is likely to help in health-related STEM careers. And of course, ecology knowledge is going to be empowering to them intellectually not just in their jobs, but beyond their jobs, as citizens in the world.

Carl Wennerlind

The course that I am teaching on the history of scarcity shares a lot of common ground with Orlando’s teaching, thus suggesting a nice kind of synergy. The course is based on a book that I am in the process of finishing, Scarcity: Economy and Nature in the Age of Capitalism. It is a co-authored book with a colleague at the University of Chicago, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, and it explores the economic thinking of infinite economic growth, which we regard as an important underlying feature of the Anthropocene. Economics tends to think of human desires as endless and nature as infinitely expandable or infinitely substitutable. We are interested in investigating how such a bizarre idea took hold and offering a critique of why this way of thinking about the world is not appropriate for the development of sustainable economic processes. The course traces these ideas back to the seventeenth century and then moves forward in time, eventually ending up discussing contemporary challenges and opportunities.

Premodern writers had a tendency to think of both economic desires and nature as bounded. They viewed desires as limited by spiritual, moral, and political concerns and they thought of nature as scant, incapable of yielding ever-increasing amounts of goods. Matters began to change towards the end of the seventeenth century. Natural philosophers, such as Francis Bacon and Samuel Hartlib, gained confidence in their capacity to decipher nature’s source code and thus operate on it, in an almost godlike manner. They viewed nature as God’s gift to humanity and insisted that it was humanity’s responsibility to fully utilize all of nature’s resources. Along the same time, moral philosophers, such as Nicholas Barbon and Bernard Mandeville, began theorizing human desires as unlimited. Unlike their predecessors, who saw unlimited desires as unnatural and a danger to social stability, Barbon and Mandeville argued that never-ending desires for more consumption infuse society with a progressive energy that over time contributes to greater affluence. As such, they promoted a radically different way of thinking about the relationship between nature and human desires, a double helix of infinities.

The class then moves through the centuries, examining how the conceptualization of nature and the economy evolved. Most of it is not a linear but a dialectical story. People like Gerrard Winstanley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Karl Marx posited alternative grand narratives designed to reshape economic and environmental thinking. In the end, however, the notion of infinite growth prevailed and became entrenched in western cultures. Although my course is intrinsically historical, it is based upon a critique of contemporary thinking, a critique of contemporary neoclassical economics, which has become an almost hegemonic way of looking at the world. This way of thinking has seeped into the social fabric and now exercises a great deal of influence over how people think about the world and its future. If we are to successfully develop more sustainable economic patterns, new ways of thinking about the nature-economy nexus are required.

Rachel Elkis

Extremely interesting and working off of this historical context and how we think about these topics through time, I am wondering how this integration of environmentalism and sustainability has evolved within your courses over time?

Carl Wennerlind

I have always taught courses on capitalism. Most of the time, my focus has been on a critique of capitalism through a historical lens, but the criticism has mostly been about things like alienation, monopoly, exploitation, slavery, and colonization. Earlier, nature and the environment didn’t figure that much into my way of thinking about capitalism. Now that I have seen the light, so to speak, I recognize that you cannot think about capitalism without nature, nor can you think about nature without capitalism. So from now on, I will always explore prisms and readings that are integrating these two perspectives.

Hilary S. Callahan

One thing I clearly have in common with Carl is a focus on economic ideas. If you look up the definition of ecology, it is typically phrased as the study of the distribution, and it often refers to abundance, such as population abundance or species abundance. Abundance, like scarcity, is an inherently economic idea. The word is not really needed to talk about distribution. Clearly, there is clumpiness rather than uniformity, but that can be referred to as low and high density, or low and high frequencies, not using such loaded words. Another really dominant language that you hear in ecology is trade-offs, a balance of costs and benefits. And ecology constantly harks back to Thomas Malthus and the idea of overpopulation and scarcity, overlooking the many moral dimensions of such arguments. Concepts of abundance and trade-offs and over-population remain as important ideas in textbook ecology, typically with little if any ideological critique. Students learn it, and then if they become teachers, they continue to teach it and never critically dismantle it.

Being at Barnard has been such a great privilege because I am always in conversation with people like Carl and Orlando and I have come to completely change my perspective and approach, noticing and calling attention to words like “abundance” or “dominance” and seeking more neutral terminology and frameworks. Sometimes that comes from another motivation, which is to try to read more papers by women, including a notable single-authored paper by a woman in conservation biology, entitled Seven Types of Rarity. Its author, Rabinowitz, set up three dichotomies to identify eight ways that organisms can be found in the world. Most of the species that make up the world’s biodiversity are confined to seven types of rarity, being narrowly endemic in terms of geography rather than widespread, being ecological specialists with a narrow niche rather than broad generalists, or living in low densities within a habitat area. Or some combination of these. The eighth way is to be common in all three ways, as humans are—widespread globally, generalist and often at high densities, as in cities. Rabinowitz’s paper is just one example of gaining key insights by adding more papers by women. Over time, I also have started to include papers that are less neutral than hers, and may go beyond ecology into other non-ecological ways of thinking about biodiversity, even going as far as decentering capitalist economic thinking or other tacit ideologies that are inherent to ecological ideas or terms.

Orlando Betancor

Hilary, what you said, reminds me of Donna Haraway, and her 2016 book, Staying with the Trouble. The notion is simple: losing yourself with other things. But it is really beautiful. I was going to say something different about how my thinking about the environment changed over time, given the texts and the imperial ideologies I started with at the time. Since this is theorizing the environment, the theory I used relied heavily on fashionable French theory and this post-Heideggerian way of thinking, post-structuralism, Derrida, Deleuze, etc. But the basic Heideggerian topic is that technology is the problem. Technology is a way of considering nature in terms of a standing reserve as passive material and thus violent to nature. I was fully within that paradigm until I read two books. One of them was Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology and the other one was Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life. Then, I saw that technology was not the problem, and I saw clearly, in historical terms, that the problem was capitalism. That served my purposes, the purposes of reading these texts, way better than presupposing abstract ideas, such as the homogenous idea of humanity, and anthropocentrism, the technology. It was more a story of power, a story of an expansion, one of power and economics, one closer to what Carl was talking about, and that is why I appreciate his work so much.

Ideas such as the Aristotelian notions of desire were not just some kind of expression of a technological will to power that is threatening to engulf everything and eat the world. They were contingent, historically and geographically situated processes that could be changed. There is no necessity. It did not have to be that way. And that is how environmentalism changed in understanding over time, finding bits and pieces of theory here and there that somehow change the way you think about these topics.

Yuval Dinoor

I think it is so interesting to hear from all three of you about the wide array of voices that you are all bringing into your course material to related stories in all of your different course disciplines. I’m curious about beyond the theoretical component, how this turns into practice. Are there ways that you designed or planned your course so that it encourages students to think about environmental theory beyond the classrooms? What do you think has worked well in that regard as you have experimented with this in the past?

Hilary S. Callahan

There are two things that I use in developing a framework for the course and a reading list. One is crossed-scale thinking, which somewhat connects with Barnard’s Foundations Curriculum, for example our Modes of Thinking—Thinking Globally and Thinking Locally. In my course, I try to cover things that are local. I love it when we can study something ecological about New York City that is very local. But I do not want to be restricted to just this specific city. I want to be able to go to other parts of the world. In Spring 2020, I was teaching Ecology and I made the decision to read up on the fires that were happening in Australia and to talk about them at the opening of the course. Ironically, in my previous notes from teaching quite a few years ago in 2011, I had opened the course with a discussion of disease ecology, because of the Ebola epidemic. So in December 2019, I replaced that opening focus with new material about Australia, because I thought it would be interesting to open the class up to a more global perspective, to focus on another part of the world and to think about the climate crisis and the ongoing wildfires. There are interesting conflicts between European settlers in Australia and Indigenous traditions in managing fire and managing land resources. It was great. But then, less than a month into the course, I realized I needed to use that epidemic and disease ecology material, because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Regardless of current events topics in any given semester, I do try to look at all scales. Ecologists do go all the way from experiments that can be done in a test tubes in the lab or in the greenhouse, to studying tiny insects and mosses in the field, and also doing investigations requiring satellites to gather data remotely, to focus on whole swathes of the earth, if not the entire earth.

Also, I try to bring the canonical list of important ecology articles into dialogue with other voices. Ecology has a strong White, male-dominated list of influential papers, and there is rampant argument about it.Footnote 4 I bring that argument right into the classroom. That type of critique is such a Barnard thing. Reading women authors, and more authors from Latin America or Africa, goes hand-in-glove with having geographic diversity, so useful in ecology, and also a diversity of conceptual perspectives.

Along with diversity all around the globe, I add in diversity through time, and not just evolutionary time but also more recent changes through time. I am honored to be talking with these two distinguished people who know so much about the history of the last 500 years. Trying to understand the ecology of five hundred years ago is clearly relevant to ecology today, but perhaps less understood and less studied is the world as compared to studies that last just a few growing seasons, or that use the evolutionary perspective to think about what happened, say, 10 or 20 million years ago. This vast range of scales is important to comprehend the mess that we are now in with the climate. Modern evolutionary biology and ecology have existed for just a little over a century, and only in the last few decades have ecologists developed ecological lenses for this intermediate time scale, allowing us to investigate globalization, which has been happening over 500–600 years, and also the impact of the industrial revolution and fossil-fuel burning.

Orlando Betancor

I was going to say something briefly about going beyond the classroom at this point. In the last few weeks. I have been talking to Chilean scholars who work on communication media studies on climate change. These scholars are interested in bringing feminine perspectives, Indigenous perspectives, and making a critique of extractivism. One of them specifically is making a critique of how corporations invent their own notions of sustainability, sustainability as a corporate invention, basically, which is something maybe we could pay more attention to in the United States. These mining corporations are the ones who are moving the strings when it comes to reinventing this notion of sustainability and the impact of the mining practices on the environment. We decided to engage in an interdisciplinary project where I can bring my own text-based approach to other perspectives open to the experience of communities that are suffering right now and the impact of destructiveness in these communities.

Carl Wennerlind

Let me also give you an example. When I taught the course last time, we started by reading a glossy insert in The Financial Times that documented all the things that the corporate community is doing for sustainability and for greening capitalism. It was quite the study in self-congratulatory rhetoric. It almost felt as though The Financial Times exists in an alternate reality. The students compared the choice of grand narratives to the film, The Matrix. If you take the blue pill you can continue living as though nothing is wrong, but if you take the red pill and start learning about the coproduction of capitalism and the environment, you can never look back. You then bring that perspective with you into all of your other classes and into life in general, and it is almost impossible to unlearn the inconvenient truth. For me, it took a long time to get there, but luckily my students are taking in these lessons early in life.

Rachel Elkis

Really interesting. We want to get to the audience’s questions.

Student

I wanted to ask a little bit more about how the way your disciplines are structured informs the way that we perceive or conceptualize sustainability. I think you touched on this a little bit in terms of at least for the economics example, talking about how the discipline carries these assumptions about human behavior as inherently wanting to maximize consumption and the implication that says about our behaviors surrounding consumption versus sustainability. I am curious to know if there are other things you have noticed about the way knowledge is produced in each of these disciplines that maybe reproduces these assumptions surrounding sustainability.

Carl Wennerlind

Economics is an inherently ahistorical discipline. It is based on a series of rather crude assumptions about human psychology. One such assumption is that people always prefer more consumption to less. This assumption might make sense in a world of consumer capitalism, say after the 1870s in the western world, but it would be difficult to maintain that this is the aim that characterizes people in earlier periods or in non-capitalist societies. The notion that people approach the world as a set of consumption choices only makes sense in a consumer society. The assumption that people have insatiable desires leads economists to conclude that it is in people’s interest for the economy to grow as much as possible. The problem, as this panel has discussed, is that economic growth can no longer continue unchecked. Therefore, we need to rethink the purpose of the economy. We might not have to dedicate ourselves to no-growth, but we definitely have to find ways to grow that improve our lives without destroying earth systems. In writing our book on the history of scarcity and in teaching this course, I view it as essential to deconstruct the notion of scarcity and point out that it is based on assumptions made in the 1870s, grounded in limited psychological or anthropological research. It was just analytically convenient to assume that human desires are insatiable and that people are mostly focused on consumption. While this way of thinking fostered behavior and policies conducive to economic growth, our present challenge is to build a social science that is conducive to more sustainable practices.

Severin Fowles (Anthropology)

I am interested to hear what the others have to say about that question as well. This has just been great. Thank you all for doing this. Carl, what you were just saying made me suddenly leap back to readings of Marshall Sahlins and the Zen Road to Affluence, which is being resuscitated in so many communities I circle into, that are all about degrowth right now. The question that I have actually builds off of the fascinating comment that Hilary made about the incorporation of a certain kind of economic language in ecological theory. What interests me is that ecological language and ecological discourses have been taken up in the humanities as the core metaphor now. That started with Bateson and in the ecology of mind. But now, the new materialist language is all ecological language. So suddenly, I had this vision of the laundering of certain kinds of economic principles through Ecology back into Social Sciences. I am curious about how all three of you think about the language that we use now, which draws upon so many ecological metaphors, but maybe too loosely and maybe in ways that are denying that complicated history you were just pointing towards.

Hilary S. Callahan

There has been a lot of work done to critique the overemphasis on competition as the most important type of biotic interaction among organisms, rather than other ways that organisms interact.Footnote 5 Additionally, for years, there has been this tension and hand-wringing among ecologists and in teaching ecology—the pressure to keep ecology pure, to keep it scientific and therefore untainted by ideology or politics.Footnote 6 I was fortunate to have had mentors who were on the other end of the spectrum. My dissertation adviser, while he was mentoring me and running our lab, was suing the United States Forest Service, alleging that it was negligent in protecting biodiversity. I learned so much by having a mentor who is not afraid of the soft, more social, and very political side of ecology.

Severin Fowles

I am just going to follow that because it is so fascinating: if ecological discourse is being mobilized in anti-capitalist theory in the humanities right now, what you are just pointing to really concerns me, because its grounding is also in conservative, and capitalist economic theory.

Hilary S. Callahan

Yes, and some of the neo-Malthusian stuff is especially troubling. For years, people who teach about ecology have used a “Tragedy of the Commons” metaphor to discuss resource management, citing the opinion piece by Hardin (1968) in the prestigious journal Science. Over the years, it is more and more recognized that the idea and the person who advanced it was questionable, and also associated with white nationalism (see also Ghoche & Udoh, this volume, chapter 5). Yet his ideas are written into many ecology textbooks.Footnote 7

Yuval Dinoor

That is such a rich starting point for so many conversations. We are going to transition to breakout rooms now.