Foreword to Encountering Global Environmental Politics: Teaching,
Learning, and Empowering Knowledge, Edited by Michael Maniates
By Frances Moore Lappé
Rowman & Littlefield, January 2003
It’s almost midnight and still close to 100 degrees in the
steamy Punjabi town of Bhatinda. Waiting for our train on a dusty platform,
my daughter and I talk quietly with our Indian guide Afsar Jafri. Nearby,
destitute people sleep on the bare concrete. We’ve spent the
day with Jafri talking to local farmers about environmental devastation
and the epidemic of farmer suicides here in India’s breadbasket.
Weary myself and aware that this young man has chosen to devote his
life to reversing these alarming trends, I ask, “How do you keep
going?”
“ I do what I do because it is the only way I can
survive,” he answers calmly, and on many occasions since I’ve
pondered the meaning of his words.
Jafri, a recent Ph.D. in agronomy, had gathered considerable knowledge
in his 29 years. Much of it is about how bad things have become in
India, where Green Revolution technology is backfiring and Gene Revolution
advocates proffer yet another quick fix fraught with danger. But this
knowledge has not overwhelmed him, even in circumstances far more dire
than we in the industrial West typically encounter.
But what did Jafri mean? And how is it that he remained empowered
despite the depth of his knowledge of the problems? Now, the notion
that knowledge could ever be other than empowering is anathema to me.
Yet, if I’m honest with myself, I know part of me long feared
that if I told others how really bad I think things are they
would throw up their hands in despair, in defeat.
So I welcome Encountering Global Environmental Politics: Teaching,
Learning, and Empowering Knowledge in part because it forces
me to examine this unexamined fear and enables me to learn from the
insightful educators Dr. Maniates brings together in this book to
ask, What ensures that knowledge empowers?
The search for answers, I believe, begins with our assumptions about
our basic nature. The prevailing thought system, now going global,
makes no bones about who we humans are. It throws up to us a view of
ourselves as narrowly ego-driven and materialistic—what I have
come to see as a shabby caricature that belies our rich complexity
as well as a commonsense look at evolution. An alternative view, argued
by many anthropologists, is that homo sapiens simply would
not have survived without two particularly deep needs—for effectiveness
in the larger world and for connection with others. On the need for
agency, social philosopher Erich Fromm felt so strongly that he redid
Descartes to sum up our sense of self thusly: “I am, because
I effect.”
If true, then knowledge seeking isn’t optional. It is essential
to meeting our deepest needs. That night at the train station Jafri
was telling us that he engaged in this trying work for himself.
Knowledge that he was gaining about environmental and social devastation
in the Punjab was empowering, not disempowering, because he was conscious
of his need for effectiveness in the world and using his knowledge
to meet his own need.
So we need not protect ourselves from the bleak news of planetary
decline nor prod ourselves with it either. We needn’t guilt trip
ourselves about some “pay back” demanded by virtue of our
privilege. We have only to create environments in which educators and
students alike can come to hear—through the clatter of opposing
messages—and to trust their own yearning for effectiveness in
the larger world and for connection with others.
Responding to our own needs, trusting them, we become free to empower
ourselves with knowledge.
In my case, it took awhile to get there; in fact it took my entire
formal education! I love to agitate my hosts of university-sponsored
lectures by saying that I started learning for the first time once
I left of graduate school. Looking back, it is easy to see why. And
that it needn’t have been that way.
In college I tried to please professors. Actually, I tried to trick
them into not discovering I was actually the dumb Texas female I believed
myself to be. My approach to seeking knowledge was disempowering; it
was not a pathway for acting on my deeper needs but what I grasped
in desperation to avoid exposing my true self.
Then, in my mid-20s, something changed. Afraid of ending up never
knowing why I was here on this little planet at all, I took a deep
breath and made a personal vow: I won’t do anything else to “save
the world” until I understand how what I am doing relates to
the underlying causes of deepening suffering, until I can explain to
myself why I had chosen one path and not another.
That meant I had to stop. I had no structure, no external identity.
Yikes! But soon a funny thing—novel to me—began to happen.
I started listening. I started listening to myself, and I was astounded
to discover that there were questions coming from inside me. Questions
I had to answer. Questions that ultimately drew me to the agricultural
library, a large basement catacomb at U.C. Berkeley where I developed
a research technique that has served me for 30 years. I call it “following
my nose.”
Some of you may recall that era, the late 1960s, a time of alarming
predictions about the inevitability of famine. Could it be that humans
have actually lost the race, overrun the earth’s capacity? I
had to figure this out for myself. I let one question lead to the next,
and unearthed information that would forever change my life: Not only
is there enough food in the world to feed everyone but enough to make
us all overweight.
To discover my own questions required wandering, allowing each question
to lead me to the next. The value of such open-ended intellectual exploration
was the first lesson I learned about empowering knowledge. It allowed
me to see what my “teachers” missed, not because I was
smarter or had more data, but because I listened to my own questions
and let them lead me wherever they would. I had the advantage as well
of starting at square one; whereas those “advanced” in
the field had long ago leapt over it.
Ultimately, I became aware of an even more important aspect of empowering
knowledge. My question-to-question approach began to create for me
a new “frame of orientation,” as Fromm calls it: The mental
and emotional structure to which we attach new learning and the lens
determining what can see of the world. It’s what Einstein was
getting at when in 1926 he wrote, “…it is theory which
decides what we can observe.”
One’s frame of orientation—or what I call our mental
map—determines, I believe, whether knowledge is either empowering
or disempowering. If we unwittingly absorb and convey only the mental
map of the dominant culture—one telling us we’ve finally
arrived, happily or not, at the “end of history,” one assuring
us that global corporate capitalism is humanity’s culminating
social system because it best suits our selfish nature—then,
I believe, it’s difficult to see how knowledge can empower.
The reason is simple. Power, from the Latin posse, to be
able, suggests our capacity to act, but the dominant mental map tells
us our sphere of action is strictly limited. We can act as consumers
in the marketplace, or, a few of us at least, as experts behind the
scenes. Whereas, to pull our now global civilization back from the
environmental and social precipice, we must act as citizens.
There is scarce room in the dominant map for citizens. By citizens
I mean people aware of their deep need for effectiveness as co-creators
of their world; people who understand democracy not as merely a structure
of government but as away of life. By citizens in its fullest sense
I therefore mean people aware that, while none of us come to democracy
fully equipped, we can learn the collaborative arts of democracy just
as we learn any art, whether it be ballet or basketball.
This crisis—the crisis of a missing culture of democracy—is
the real one, the crisis beneath all our monumental environmental and
other global concerns. In such an era—in a time when the dominant
map constricts us yet the crises facing us are of unprecedented magnitude—I
believe no social role is more critical than that of educator. And
that is why I am delighted by Dr. Maniates’ vision that created
this book. To me, empowering educators are those helping themselves
and others listen both to the deep need for effectiveness and to our
own authentic questions.
Knowledge is empowering, then, as it becomes a process of building—question
by question—new frames of orientation that are life serving because
they acknowledge our need to be effective, to be citizens in the fullest
sense of the word. Such a teaching and learning experience by its very
nature begins to dissolve the dominant map telling us we’re merely
selfish materialists, for in it we experience ourselves not as passive
consumers of information but as creators of knowledge.
etting
a Grip is not an ordinary book: it's more like a new
pair of glasses, allowing you to see everything around you with greater
clarity. Suddenly the world is more comprehensible, more manageable, even
more beautiful. You won’t want to take them off. —Barbara
Kingsolver
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