critical thinking Theme 8: Participatory practice as an ecological imperative

people to understand and surface their innate knowledge, while at same time valuing that knowledge.

The starting point of living the questions is again the everyday stories we tell ourselves. People’s lived experience is both explained and questioned as they recount their experience to others. Telling our story is a meaning-making process and so is the dialogue that will follow it. One of the most illuminating questions we can ask each other is ‘Why?’. In the film Misbehaviour, which is set in 1970, the main character is asked in an interview for a university why Britain had not had a revolution: her reply was: “A better question is why no revolution in Britain has been successful.” We are not given the answer but when we sit with the question, the spiral of understanding begins to unfold. There is some merit in sitting with questions and not necessarily knowing the answers. This encourages an openness to alternatives. As we spiral in and out with the questions, we start to see the bigger picture. The writer Myss (2019) often uses a high-rise apartment block as a metaphor. When we are on the ground floor, we can hear the traffic but, as we rise further up the building, people and vehicles become smaller and the noise decreases. From up here we can see the bigger picture and start to understand the wider structures that impact on our daily lives. This creates a more holistic and less splintered thinking and perspective. This is why Freirean pedagogy is a key element within this book. Its power lies in how it encourages people to question.

Such expansion of the mind is what traditional teaching practices of indigenous cultures encourage by using all forms of knowing, including ritual storytelling, dreams and altered states of consciousness. By engaging the right brain, you are tapping into a wealth of knowledge beyond the rational. In the Cree tradition of transformative practice, for example, healing takes place only when unconscious conflict and resistance is brought to a conscious level. Once we are conscious of them they can be worked with. As with feminist consciousness raising (hooks, 1990), the process begins with airing our feelings, perceptions and personal reactions. This then leads to discovering that those feelings, perceptions and personal reactions are socially constructed. Thus, moving from surface phenomenon immediately related to the present, we move into the depths of pain, anger and bitterness related to the past and then outwards to a utopia we can aspire to (Hart, 2000). This is a large undertaking, as what is required is an overcoming of what Graveline (1998) calls the ‘cage of oppression’, which is not a singular experience but an ongoing set of social relations. Knowing how one experiences those relationships on an everyday basis is a group process and through the co-creation of such grassroots knowledge new social movements are born.

Theme 8: Participatory practice as an ecological imperative

Everything that is in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness. (Hildegard of Bingen, 1982)

Plotkin (2008), in his book Nature and the Human Soul, argues that being truly human is only possible in relationship with the natural world. The dehumanising effect of contemporary power dynamics, with its emphasis on separation, also separates us from nature. Under Western-derived religious doctrine, nature is there for humans to exploit and own. However, many indigenous knowledge systems argue that all things have inherent value, that there are cycles of growth and change in nature. In ancient and indigenous societies these cycles were and are marked by rituals that honour them. In Celtic culture, for example, the seasons are marked by the festivals Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasa. In some countries in Europe similar festivals are integrated into the system of holidays. For example, in Sweden Walpurgis night (30 April), which celebrates the end of winter, and Midsummer are both still celebrated with festivals and collective rituals. Yet in the UK and its former colonies, the seasons are generally ignored, and for holidays, with the exception of Christmas and Easter (themselves the Christian appropriation of so-called pagan festivals), any connection to nature has been replaced by commercially driven ‘bank holidays’. So, there are no longer any reminders that, just as we are inextricably connected by the web of common humanity, we are woven into all forms of life on Earth: we participate in the ecosystem.

Recognising that we are a part of an ecosystem, held in fragile balance, is the final theme of this book. The concept of the ecosystem helps us understand that by harming anyone or anything we are violating our interdependence, and so endangering the well-being of the whole. Ecosystems are constantly trying to keep balance. Thus, if we upset the balance too far, as James Lovelock (1995) argued, this could mean the extinction of humanity itself. In some ways, thinking about our connection with nature and humanity as a whole using an ecosystems lens is the modern equivalent to older indigenous ways of knowing: that we are participants in nature, not external to it. The notion of separation from nature has been nurtured not just by modern industrialisation but also through the idea of dualism, the belief that humans are separate from nature and mind from matter. Dewey (1925a) argued that under a dualistic perspective experience is dismissed as irrational and that nature becomes defined as separate from experience. For Dewey, knowledge is derived from embodied intelligence, not from mind alone. So, decontextualising humanity from the natural world creates internally alienated selves, as well as ecological problems (Heron, 1992).

In seeing ourselves as part of, not set apart from, the ecosystem, we act differently. We become aware of how our actions on the world can have an impact elsewhere in the system – what Capra (1996) calls ‘the web of life’. In his book of the same name, Capra describes some of the salient characteristics of the organisation of ecosystems that, he argues, it is necessary to understand in order to develop sustainable human communities. These include, first of all, interdependence, which is how the behaviour and success of one person is tied up with the behaviour and success of everyone else. Secondly, there is the cyclical nature of ecological processes that consist of exchanges of energy and resources