3.3.2. Ecological Literacy Contrasts


## *3.4. A Counter Story from Christianity*

In the same decade that Orr was writing, Parker Palmer published *The Courage to Teach* (Palmer 1998), a book which has become a key text throughout the country in courses focused on helping people learn to teach. Indeed, it has been reprinted so often that it has both a 10th and a 20th anniversary edition. Even prior that book, however, a full decade earlier, Palmer published *To Know As We Are Known* (Palmer 1983). In his books, Palmer sought to retrieve what he identified as an ancient form of knowing rooted in the lives of the desert mothers and fathers. The writings of these people, generally understood to be Christians who lived in first few centuries following Jesus and who fled into the desert regions of what is now Egypt to form monastic communities, have become central to a retrieval of contemplative and communal forms of Christian knowing. Palmer has sought to help contemporary teachers shift their practices to embody this form of knowing he has termed "the community of truth".

Much like Orr, Palmer's arguments sought to dethrone what he labeled an "objectivist myth". His diagrams make his ideas clear, but they cannot be reprinted in this article due to copyright constraints.<sup>7</sup> Palmer's "community of truth" is a profoundly relational, as contrasted with relativist, way to conceptualize what it means to know. In his description, every entity knows, and even that which is known has agency: the topic or subject at the heart of our knowing impacts what we know. How we see shapes what we see, and what we see shapes how we see. To teach within this conception, within this frame of knowing, is to design spaces in which this "community of truth" can be genuinely embodied.

Palmer writes in a later book, with Arthur Zajonc, that physicist Henry Stapp believes that: "it is no longer possible even to think of the atom as a discrete entity ... an elementary particle is not an independently existing, unanalyzable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things" (Palmer and Zajonc 2010, p. 26). Further, they draw on the work of philosopher of science, Ian Barbour, to sugges<sup>t</sup> that: "Nature is understood now to be relational, ecological, and interdependent. Reality is constituted by events and relationships rather than separate substances or separate particles. We are now compelled to see nature as "a historical community of interdependent beings (Palmer and Zajonc 2010, p. 26)".

This profoundly interconnected, interdependent conception of reality can be linked, as Palmer suggests, to the ancient work of the desert mothers and fathers (Palmer 1983, p. 207 and following). I often offer students the "sound bite" version of Palmer's assertions by noting that "the more diverse the knowers, the more robust the knowing". This is a story about knowing, an epistemological argument, that is deeply congruen<sup>t</sup> with the contrasting epistemologies shaped by First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples in North America. Indeed, some scholars believe that this conception of knowing as thoroughly relational (not relativist), and profoundly embodied in story is a key similarity across indigenous epistemologies the world over.<sup>8</sup>

#### *3.5. Mediated Stories as Entry Points into the Trauma Found in Stock Stories*

What could it mean, for those of us embedded in the dominant stories of North America, to find ways to move to a more grounded—and I use that metaphor deliberately— conception of knowing? Knowing through story requires learning a series of embodied practices. Herein lies hope: hope for transformation (James and Brookfield 2014), hope for renewing relationship (Brookfield and Holst 2011), hope for leaning into the sacramentality of creation (Johnson 2014), the embodied and multi-sensory forms of knowing that can be understood as being at the very heart of Christianity (Smith 2004).

Consider the story of the two wolves with which I began this essay. Where did it come from? Who told it? In what context did I encounter it? What elements of my own already existing sense of story did it hook into? A story invites imagination, it invites "feeling with", it casts a vision for how to perceive that which is around and within you. It also narrows focus, and spotlights elements to the exclusion of other elements upon which it casts shadows.

In this third year of the COVID pandemic, Adam McKay wrote and produced a film entitled *Don't Look up* which was then sold to stream online through Netflix. This satirical comedy imagined a giant comet streaking towards the earth, certain to destroy the earth all together.<sup>9</sup> The film highlights the commercial success of misdirected and even patently false information, and the extent to which vast numbers of people with the structural capacity to respond to an existential threat instead are drawn into petty and self-serving dynamics. The president of the US in the film, the military advisors, the mass stream "news" anchors: all of them are in thrall to immediate polling numbers, the latest celebrity scandal, and their own personal anxieties.

As is often stated, if you cannot imagine it, it is difficult to work towards transformation. Further, if you cannot feel it, how are you to desire transformation? Stock stories numb our emotions, they hide and deny anguish, they seek to teach us that helping each other somehow harms us by creating "dependence" (Stone 2008). We have to reclaim our ability to sense and feel pain, and then to heal and grow with it. Just as the two wolves story suggests we must "feed the wolf" of joy and love, we can engage the Christian story of Jesus as one in which Jesus engages in relationship with everyone, no matter how marginalized, and as a story in which "being baptized into death" ye<sup>t</sup> brings forth life.

Resmaa Menakem has described two different kinds of pain that attend trauma. He describes a traumatic event as "an incident that causes physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological harm. The person experiencing the distressing event may feel threatened, anxious, or frightened as a result. In some cases, they may not know how to respond, or may be in denial about the effect such an event has had". In 2022, we are surrounded by traumatic events, events that are entwined with environmental injustice, with deeply oppressive relationships with creation (or the lack thereof). But Menakem describes trauma not as an endpoint, but rather as the starting point for asking how we are to heal. In doing so he suggests that there are at least two kinds of pain: "clean" pain and "dirty" pain. Clean pain is "pain that mends and can build your capacity for growth. It's the pain you feel when you know what to say or do; when you really, really don't want to say or do it; and when you do it anyway, responding from the best parts of yourself". While dirty pain is the "pain of avoidance, blame, or denial—when you respond from your most wounded parts" (Menakem 2018, p. 26).

Do dominant or stock stories help us to distinguish between clean and dirty pain? Or instead, do they seek to numb us to the pain, hide its origins, and deflect engagemen<sup>t</sup> with it? Might they in fact be supporting precisely the kind of "numbing" of which Brown warned? In the film *Don't Look Up*, the only hints of a different way to view reality come in brief glimpses of animals amidst the beauty of nature. In contrast, we see many examples of attempts to ignore, deny, and numb what Menakem would label "dirty" pain in the

actions of the main characters. Perhaps one of the clearest examples of dirty pain in that film, of someone who numbs themselves to reality, comes from a scientist who gets drawn into an adulterous relationship with a media celebrity rather than deal with the pain in his family.

The film concludes with a small group of people who sought unsuccessfully to intervene in the disaster, eating one final meal together and sharing their sense of the peace that can come from deep relationality, even as the comet obliterates them. It is a bleak ending, and once again reinforces the notion that it is up to individual human beings ensconced in particular structures of power to change things. It concludes that ordinary, everyday human beings have little or nothing to contribute in transformation. Yet even in that bleakness there is also a glimpse of the hope and joy that can come in sharing a simple meal, in being with loved ones. Indeed, the only depiction of religion in the whole film comes in this final scene when a millennial who has left a conservative evangelical upbringing behind offers a profound prayer. There is hope to be found here, even if it is a bleak hope, in acknowledging that we are all part of one another—indeed of all of creation.

#### *3.6. Digital Stories as Entry Points into Resistance and Counter Stories*

There are a nearly infinite number of examples of short pieces available through Youtube that offer an imagination for such hope that is deeper and vividly depicted. There are four that are particularly pertinent here.

The first is a film produced by the Bioneers,<sup>10</sup> with Robin Kimmerer narrating, entitled "the Honorable Harvest". In this piece, Kimmerer offers the insight of a counter story that the honorable harvest is a "covenant of reciprocity between humans and the living world". This covenant demands an understanding that the lives we are taking, when we pick plants, are the "lives of sovereign beings ... . And in order to accept their gift we owe them at least our attention". She goes on to describe how she has been taught "never to take the first plant that you see ... If you are going to take a life, you have to be personally accountable for it". This is a way of seeing the world, a way of knowing, that is very much part of the epistemological frames I noted earlier, within native communities. Robin Kimmerer herself is an enrolled member of the Potowatomi Nation. Her description of the "honorable harvest" also has clear resonance with the "community of truth" of which Palmer writes.

A second piece produced by The Intercept, and narrated by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, is entitled "A Message from the Future".<sup>11</sup> In this short animation, Cortez imagines herself twenty years in the future, looking back on both the climate devastation wrought by humans, and also the hopeful interventions and shifts made possible when human beings organize collectively to offer universal health care, universal income, universal access to work. Hers is a profoundly political message, but one which is shaped by ideas about collective action and collective accountability. She is narrating a resistance story, one which invites an imagination that could develop into a counter story.

A third piece is an excerpt from a much longer film which is an interview with Joanna Macy.<sup>12</sup> In this short excerpt, she describes what it means to "befriend our despair," and in doing so talks about how we as a "planet people" are "sick in our soul". She suggests that we "need pain to alert us to what needs attention". Rather than treating pain as an "enemy to our cheerfulness", we need to understand (as does the first noble truth of Buddhism) that "there is suffering". She remembers her early childhood in the Christian church to draw out a belief that recognizing the pain of our suffering world is essential. "Pain opens the heart and the eyes so you can see the beauty." Here she is offering an example of Menakem's "clean" pain, and inviting us to see—as does Brown—how refusing to numb our emotions is crucial.

Finally, a fourth piece is a short music video by the group Birdtalker, entitled "One."<sup>13</sup> This song uses a poem by Rumi to narrate a string of images which ignite imagination for the heartbeat of creation, a heartbeat in which we all participate. A line from the song, "underneath what's detectable with eyes, every particle's vibrating with the one life", makes clear the interdependent, entwined nature of reality. This is my briefest but perhaps most compelling example of a counter story rooted in this alternate epistemology, this connected and relational and accountable form of knowing.

I offer these four examples because they are diverse, grounded in wildly different spaces, and ye<sup>t</sup> all four offer a narrative, a story, a vision of an inter-connected, interdependent world that is in sharp contrast to dominant narratives. They are available via digital media, they invite curiosity about our deep relationality, they draw on multiple senses—visual, aural—to embody their story, and they each refuse to succumb to despair.

## **4. Developmental Psychology for Transformation**

How are we to engage stories, then, how can we help people to see "through" the satirical lens of dominant media, and to seek out and embrace resistance stories in ways that might move us into the "community of truth" of which Palmer writes, the "ecological literacy" of Orr; indeed, the contrasting epistemological frames offered by long minoritized indigenous communities that provide profound counter narratives?

To return to the biblical stories we first read in Genesis, for those of us working within Christian contexts at least, we have a set of stories that have come to be understood within a fairly narrow range of interpretations. Before we can even begin to articulate alternatives, resistance stories that might help us move to counter stories, we have to understand where people are, how they have understood what it means to be Christian, particularly as part of or in relation to Creation. This is urgen<sup>t</sup> work that demands that we understand working at the level of heart knowledge, not simply cognitive ideas. This is work that demands transformation in the ways we know.

Robert Kegan, a constructive developmental psychologist, is eloquent about how transformation of meaning-making unfolds in adult life. He has demonstrated that adult learning and development proceeds in a spiral fashion that can be identified as "confirmation, contradiction, continuity" (Kegan 1982, p. 123 and following). He and his colleagues have documented different forms of meaning-making that can develop in adulthood. Of specific interest here are the shifts they have observed when people move from what they have labelled a "socialized mind with cross-categorical meanings" to a "self-authoring mind capable of complex systemic" meaning-making. At least for people who carry one or more of the identity markers that confer privilege in our systems of dominance (gender, race, age, ability, economic status, education, and so on), it is a "self-authoring mind" that needs to be cultivated to be able both to see these systems and begin to construct ways beyond them.<sup>14</sup> It is a "self-authoring" mind that invites relational accountability, and offers the capacity to embody such.

As an example, if you are watching the 2022 commercial for streaming services I described earlier, could you differentiate between the experience of joy and curiosity you might experience in engaging stories in such digital streams while at the same time acknowledging the tenuous relationship with the outdoors that is being depicted? If connection to the outdoors truly is to bring connection and joy, how might you be fully present to it? Holding awareness of both at the same time is a deeply challenging stance that emerges within a self-authoring mind.<sup>15</sup> In a similar dynamic, is it possible to engage the stories of Genesis—particularly of the Garden of Eden, of the Fall, of the expulsion from the Garden—as deep truths and at the same time enter into the awe and wonder evoked by scientific explanations of the Big Bang, and the ever expanding and evolving Cosmos?

In the worlds in which the biblical stories first arose as compelling truths, in the social spaces of oral culture, all that we can glean at this many centuries of distance from their first telling suggests that a deep relationship with Creation was the center and heartbeat of that imagination (Johnson 2014; Jennings 2010). When Palmer writes of a "community of truth" that centers on learning a topic, a subject such that that topic, that subject, has real subjectivity and agency itself, he is echoing in the language of rationalist western culture, something that appears to me, at least, to be deeply rooted in the epistemological frames, the stories and practices, of so many indigenous peoples.

Robin Kimmerer (trained in the western practices of environmental and forest biology, and also an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation) is one of the few teacher/scholars I have encountered who is able to speak in these disparate languages (Kimmerer 2013). Her description of the "honorable harvest" I noted above in the short video, offers the two frames side by side, or perhaps intermingled, in a way that bridges some of the distance that might be perceived between them, while at the same time lifting up the essential moral convictions embedded in indigenous epistemologies.<sup>16</sup> Palmer is seeking a similar moral conviction, when he urges readers to recognize that "we know as we are known" by a God who is relational within God's very self, in the social Trinity. So, too, Pope Francis when he urges "care for our common home" (Pope Francis 2015).

Why does this matter to environmental education in religious settings?

Joanna Macy is quoted by ter Kuile (2020) as noting four metaphors for describing our relationship with creation:

The first is to think of the world as a battlefield in which the forces of good fight the forces of evil. In this frame of mind, the earth is a resource to be mined and shaped to meet our human desires . . . .

Macy identifies the second paradigm as viewing the world as a trap.

Instead, argues Macy, we might think of the world as our lover. "When you see the world as lover, every being, every phenomenon, can become an expression of that ongoing, erotic impulse . . .

The fourth and final paradigm Macy invites us into is seeing the world as self. No longer is nature something outside of us, a landscape for us to admire or even to love—instead, we are nature. (quote in ter Kuile 2020, pp. 142–46)

This is a description that, at a minimum, comes from a "self-authoring mind", perhaps it even stretches into what Kegan calls a "self-transforming mind".<sup>17</sup>

Do those psychological labels matter? Only if we can use them as a way to deepen our empathy for the learning challenges we are facing in doing environmental education entwined with religious education. As Kegan notes, transformative learning proceeds from confirmation through contradiction and beyond **only if and when sufficient continuity is present**. What can offer such continuity? What are the resources, the stories, we can use that will hold us in such a way that we can perceive the contradictions we face without descending into despair? Can we find our way into these forms of knowing that offer hope in the midst of climate catastrophe? Is there a way to be present to our pain, to refuse to ignore or deny what is going on all around us, and instead to live into deep relational accountability?

In this third year of the global pandemic, I want to recall the early months, the summer of 2020, when most of the world was enduring some form of stark lockdown. The enforced physical separation led many of us to mourn what we were losing when our relational patterns were so sharply disrupted. There was a short video spreading wildly, circulating "like a virus" in March of 2020 entitled "#ASCOLTATE #LISTEN—a letter from the virus". Since then, many, many different versions of a "communication from the virus" have been created and shared. One I particularly like is by a group called Sustainable Humans and is entitled "What might we learn from COVID".<sup>18</sup> These pieces which ignited imagination and drew global attention (as evidenced by their wide sharing),<sup>19</sup> imagined the virus as having subjectivity, as acting with intent, the intent being to force humans to slow down, to pause, to quiet ourselves, and to listen to all that we are doing that is harming the earth and its inhabitants. These videos urge us to see human beings intimately bound up with all of creation; to see, as Macy suggests, that "we are nature".

That same summer, in May of 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer near my hometown in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As the urgen<sup>t</sup> uprising following that murder unfolded, and as the funerals and memorials began, many people remarked on how the video that 17-year-old Darnella Frazier filmed as the murder unfolded captured the attention of a nation in lockdown. There was surprise that people were able to focus, to listen, to sense their own anguish and outrage at what was happening, and recognition that that awareness was possible precisely because so many people were bereft of their usual entertainment distractions. The Rev. Al Sharpton, in offering words at George Floyd's memorial in Minneapolis that June of 2020, noted that we are "in a different time, a different season".<sup>20</sup> He was doing a riff on the Ecclesiastes 3 text, and urging people in the midst of a time of COVID disruption, to use the space created by not having popular entertainment to distract us, to use that space to focus a spotlight on the brutality and systemic racism embedded in our systems of policing.

This season—of COVID, of global uprising in relation to racial injustice—has perhaps disrupted our dominant stories just enough for us to long for a different way to view the world, to long for a different form of knowing.
