On February 14th and 15th, the Spring Creek Project sponsored a symposium entitled “Transformation Without Apocalypse: How to Live Well on an Altered Planet”
The final event focused on the power of stories and featured award winning writers Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson, in their first ever joint appearance, reading from their own and from each others work.
On February 14th and 15th, the Spring Creek Project sponsored a symposium entitled “Transformation Without Apocalypse: How to Live Well on an Altered Planet.” The second keynote presentation was given by Susana Almanza.
Susana Almanza is the Co-Director of People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources (PODER), and is one of three co-chairs for the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. She has served on numerous committees including the EPA’s Title VI Implementation Advisory Committee and the City of Austin Environmental Board, and she is a former Planning Commissioner for the City of Austin. She resides in East Austin, Texas. (www.poder-texas.org)
Continue reading “Transformation without Apocalypse – Episode #2: Susana Almanza”
On February 14th and 15th, the Spring Creek Project sponsored a symposium entitled “Transformation Without Apocalypse: How to Live Well on an Altered Planet” The third keynote presentation was given by Carolyn Finney.
Carloyn Finney is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where her work explores how difference, identity, representation, and power play a significant role in determining how people negotiate their daily lives in relation to the environment. Finney serves on a number of national boards and committees including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Orion Magazine, and the Center for Whole Communities. http://ourenvironment.berkeley.edu/people_profiles/carolyn-finney/
Continue reading “Transformation without Apocalypse – Episode #3: Carolyn Finney”
On February 24th, Nathan Schneider – author of Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, will discuss the origins and development of Occupy Wall Street, a social movement that remains as significant as it is misunderstood.
He will explore the movement’s strategy and spirit, including its little-recognized religious dimensions, both explicit and implicit.
Schneider has written about religion and resistance for publications including Harper’s, The Nation, the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere. He is an editor of the online literary magazine Killing the Buddha and Waging Nonviolence, a daily source for people-powered news and analysis from around the world. He is the author of “God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet” (http://www.therowboat.com/books/god-in-proof/) and “Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse” (http://www.therowboat.com/books/thank-you-anarchy/), both published by University of California Press in 2013.
This event was sponsored by the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, the Hundere Endowment for Religion and Culture, and the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University.
By José-Antonio Orosco and originally published in the Times of Trenton guest opinion column on January 20, 2014.
Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize. One of the most striking aspects of his acceptance speech is the hope he expressed in humanity’s ability to overcome war. This was no mere idealism on his part. Less than five years earlier, the world had come to the brink of thermonuclear destruction because of Cuba. The United States and the Soviet Union eventually diminished their threats and, in 1963, signed and ratified an agreement to end the open-air nuclear testing that was blanketing the planet with radioactive fallout. These were small steps, but to King they indicated that human beings were capable of cooperation, even in the face of something as horrendous as the suicide of the human race.
Today, the possibility of the annihilation of humanity looms again because of climate change. In 1964, King could not have imagined the particular features of global environmental destruction that we now face. Yet, he had reflected carefully on the kinds of action needed to avert mass extinction before, so his work can still be useful today in thinking about directions for the climate justice movement.
First, King reminds us to think in terms of the “beloved community” in which we are all interconnected. That means that the injustices that we experience are also intertwined. For many climate activists, thinking about racism, sexism or poverty are side issues; after all, if there is no habitable Earth, then those problems won’t really matter. King cautioned against the view that injustices could be divided into neat, isolated silos. The world, he said, faces the danger of the “evil triplets”: racism, militarism and materialism. These are interrelated features, he thought, that are at the root of wars of aggression against distant peoples for control of natural resources needed to maintain the luxuries of a few.
Climate change activists today need to acknowledge the overlapping systems of injustice that make some people vulnerable to climate damage much more immediately. It will be poor countries, largely in the global south, that will suffer the most from environmental degradation of air, water and soil. In the U.S., extreme weather — as we have already seen with Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy — will disproportionately affect economically fragile areas, usually made up of historically marginalized communities: indigenous people, people of color, immigrants, the elderly and LGBTQ people. Climate justice activists will need to build alliances around these diverse issues and develop the capabilities to listen to, and lift up, the voices of disenfranchised people.
In his last years, King wrote about the forms of activism that were needed to confront the evil triplets. He warned activists not to get trapped by the usual mix of demonstrations and protests that were hallmarks of the early civil rights movement. With these forms of direct action, King believed the movement had fallen into “crisis thinking,” that is, reacting to injustice after it had already appeared. Complex justice would require mass protests, but it also meant getting out in front of social problems and building alternative civic and economic structures so that people would not have to rely on problematic state or corporate institutions. He called for organizing neighborhoods and creating diverse networks of allies that could support one another.
A glimpse of this kind of activism came about when Occupy organizers provided assistance in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Achieving climate justice, then, will mean not only protesting against this pipeline or that shipping port, but also working to connect local community gardens, alternative currencies, free libraries and medical clinics into thick webs reaching across urban and rural areas. This kind of organizing will enable widespread skill sharing and mutual aid, but also deliver a message that was dawning at the height of the Occupy movement: Another world is possible, and there are many across the world who desire to work together to build it.
King believed we had it within us to avoid mutually assured destruction. He also thought we were developing the insights and activist resources to radically align our world to the moral arc of the universe. The climate justice movement might become the place where we prove him right.
In January 2014, the City of Corvallis sponsored an essay contest for students at the high school level and received many amazing entries. In an event, co-sponsored by the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, OSU Peace Studies, and the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, hosted at the historic Majestic Theater on January 22, excerpts from each winners essay were read by Mayor Julie Manning who subsequently presented each student with their awards.
Humans will be living differently in the very near future, perhaps occasioned by catastrophes brought on by forces of greed and climatic disintegration. But it’s also conceivable that we will choose, by acts of imagination and collective will, to create new narratives of how to inhabit the planet. This will require a radical re-imagining of who we are in relation to the world and how we ought to live. We have to do everything possible to end dependence on fossil fuels, stop the privatization of water, seeds, and the atmosphere, and arrest climate chaos. But that work will fare better if we have tangible visions of new/old ways to live that promise thriving without exhausting the Earth. So this symposium will engage the essential experiment, testing a different sets of ideas about how to live on Earth.
The symposium will include an environmental and social activists’ fair so people can immediately begin channeling the inspiration of the event into new alliances.
All events will be free and open to the public.
Join us for a screening of World Peace and other 4th-Grade Achievements including a Q&A with author John Hunter at the Majestic Theater in Downtown Corvallis on 01/22 @ 7pm as part of the City of Corvallis Martin Luther King Celebration.
What can 4th graders do? John Hunter, an elementary school teacher in Virginia, believes they can solve world peace. He believes they are capable of much more than we usually ask of them. As we prepare children for their futures, teacher John Hunter describes his type of teaching as particularly relevant for students today because “The World Peace Game is about learning to live and work comfortably in the unknown.” For over thirty years, Hunter has been teaching students the world of peace through a remarkable exercise that he created called The World Peace Game.
The World Peace Game is a multi-dimensional strategic board game that requires participants to solve global economic, geo-political, environmental, and other challenging world issues. The participants must decide for themselves how to approach, and respond to each situation, whether through negotiation, the threat or use of force, or acquiescence. Hunter uses his large-scale game grounded in real-world problems to teach his students critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, coordination, communication, research, negotiation skills, and the skill of synthesis, to name a few. Because the ever changing, interconnected world in which we live demands it, Hunter intentionally presents his students with complexity and ambiguity in order to challenge them to think their way through unclear, layered issues and dilemmas.
Filmmaker Chris Farina documented one class’s participation in The World Peace Game in his film, World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements. This exceptional and moving look into Mr. Hunter’s classroom is an engaging and exciting example of what project-based, problem-based, highly energized and relevant teaching and learning looks like. It shows a very structured and engaging classroom created by relinquishing the traditional notion of teacher always in control, at the front of the room, dispensing well-proportioned information. The film shows what is possible to create when we adopt a new vision of the learner and his or her needs and what is possible when educators continue to grow, learn, and challenge themselves.
On October 31st, Katherine Ann Power spoke to a standing room only audience at Oregon State University about her evolution from student activist against the Vietnam War, to self-styled revolutionary guerrilla, to fugitive on FBI’s Most Wanted List, to her surrender and experiences as prisoner and penitent, to her deepening commitment to live as a “practical peace catalyst.”
Power was underground for 23 years, much of that time in the Corvallis area. She ultimately served six years in prison and 20 years of probation.
Her book “Surrender” is due to be released soon.
Mtro. Enrique Fuentes Flores from the Universidad Latina de América presented a wonderful lecture at Oregon State University on October 30th 2013 that focused on the trends of higher education in Mexico, as well as its challenges.
In a nation with many social and political challenges, universities are attempting to provide Mexican society with professionals who can respond to current conditions in responsive, creative new ways.
But what does it mean to have access to higher education in Mexico? How do corruption and unemployment affect the outcome of the efforts made by universities and teachers?
In a dynamic presentation on October 25th, American social justice activist and writer Chris Crass spoke at Oregon State University on the topic of social justice vision and leadership.
Chris Crass has written and spoken widely about anti-racist organizing, lessons from women of color feminism, strategies to build visionary movements, and leadership for liberation. His book Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy was published in 2013.
