The Earth

This is an excerpt from my book on Managing Diversity published by Dunamis Publishers, 2009.

The liberation of the Earth

    An absolutely crucial word needs to be said about the importance of our modern understanding of ecology and cosmology in opening up new possibilities for appreciating the role of religious diversity and its implications for our living together.

     For the first time in the history of humanity we have the capacity to provide a universal and coherent story of our origins.  Science has unraveled so much of the story of the origins of the universe, of our planet and of life on this planet that we are now able to piece together a story that can help us understand who we are in the context of our planet and indeed our universe.  In that respect, the “story of the universe” becomes a major inter-cultural achievement that can provide a whole new bridge to inter-religious dialogue and to our identity and place in the universe.

Popular Education

Yesterday I attended a presentation on the situation in Colombia. It was part of a monthly series of popular education events to inform and mobilize people in Montreal – especially youth.  The presentation led me to reflect on what people today understand by “popular education.”  I attend of a lot of events, most of them with a speaker or a film and then questions.  It is not clear to me how this fits into popular education.

First of all, the term includes “popular,” that is to say, “of the people.”  Here we are talking about what has classically been termed the “option for the poor.” By the poor I mean to refer to those who have difficulty meeting their basic human needs. It does not mean those with limited revenue, though in many circumstances they may be poor. The distinction is important in many contexts around the world. Moreover, I have not often seen popular education work well with professionals or with people from the middle class. They have their own interests and their reality is not one that requires the process popular education offers. What can happen however, is that people from this milieu can be brought to recognize that their grasp of reality is very limited and that there is a larger reality that they need to understand and deal with. A good process can lead to stronger solidarity with the poor.  In that sense it is positive to work with those groups using some of the approach of popular education. It needs also to be said that in the current global setting, there are very few people who, at one level or another, are not struggling to meet basic needs, especially if one includes among those needs some participation in social, economic, cultural and political decisions that affect them. More and more people are also finding that meeting their need for adequate food and housing is becoming a challenge especially if they look for healthy food and healthy communities.

Secondly, by popular education we mean education and not information. Much of what goes as education is really the pouring of information into the heads of people with the assumption that, miraculously, that is going to change something in them or the world. Education is a very different process. Education means comprehending, in the original sense, of “grasping,” getting a hold on one`s reality, one’s own reality, being able to name it in a way that gives one a hold on it.

In the tradition of popular education it is assumed, first of all, that the poor can be educated, that they can become the protagonists of their own lives.  This is the meaning of “empowerment:” being able to take hold of one’s reality and transform it.  The process of education is one then of getting hold of the basic process that enables people to meet their own needs and also to get hold of the processes that are preventing that from happening. It is a question of learning “critical analysis,” that is to say learning to understand the structures and processes of power at work in one’s own community – for life or for death and then learning the ways to deal with those structures and processes.

Classically, in popular education, it is assumed that ordinary people, poor people, people who have difficulty meeting their needs have within them the elements necessary to do all that but that a piece of work is needed to bring it out, to articulate it, to put words to it, to name it. Thus an educator is not primarily someone who provides information but one who enables people to reflect on their own reality in a way that they themselves discover ways to name the powers at work there. It is a reality they know already and that they know best. For that reason an educator is primarily a facilitator.
   For background on popular education we need to go back to the classical sources: John Dewey who insisted that education was for everyone and that it was a matter of puting some order into our ideas; the Frankfurt School, a philosophical movement that develooped the concept of critical analysis; and then finally Paulo Freire, who put it all together in a way that defined what popular education means today.

Canadian Mining Institute holds Congress in Montreal

and we were there !

http://vimeo.com/24611150 

Fixing The Future?

     There is a growing movement throughout the world today to create local communities with economies serving local needs. Sometimes they are called “transition villages.”  It is the burgeoning of a renewed vision of the “other world that is possible,” but this time in very concrete terms and in ways that take into account the scale of economy that fits the ecological context.      

     The movement coincides well with the vision of “right relationship” proposed in a book of that name by Peter G. Brown, professor at McGill University in Montreal (Canada). In the book (published by BK Publishers) he establishes the framework for a “whole earth economy” that can realistically replace the savage capitalist system that is currently ravaging the earth and its creatures, including ourselves. It is an economic theory that measures the impact on the “spaceship earth” of all its creatures by a formula that sees the global impact as a combined function of population, affluence (consumption), technology and ethics (values). He also outlines a process for gradually bringing about transformation. It involves four stages: grounding and clarification (beginning with awe and reverence for the planetary eco-system), design (including modeling), institutional change (He proposes a global reserve that would do the necessary research and develop policy proposals, a planetary trust to enact measures designed to protect life systems, a global federation for security and taxation and finally a global court.) and as the final stage, non-violent reform, that is to say actually going about the process of pressing the changes into being much as the “transition villages” are doing. Much of the transition could be built in part on what already exists locally and internationally.

       After viewing Inside Job (2010, directed by Charles Ferguson) or Gasland (with Josh Fox), it is not hard to recognize that our current economic system based on the fantasy of financial speculation is doomed. The sooner it can be replaced the better – for everyone. In contrast I much enjoyed Fixing the Future (a PBS production) focusing on what communities are doing to localize their economies.