Environmental Consciousness Action (ECA) Challenge
Facilitated by Zuri Burns
Thank you all for being here. I’m so glad to see all of you here with me today. And a lot of people in this room have also been a big part of making this come to life and making the project itself possible. So a lot of gratitude to light forms for being a space, Martin for sharing his gallery space. To Frank and Natasha for helping me put it up and supporting me throughout the entire process through artistic contributions. And to all of the people in this community who have joined the challenge, who made it possible for me to do it.
Thank you Zuri!
So to begin, I’ll give a short introduction to what the ECA challenge was for those who don’t know fully, and then I am going to invite everyone to go on a quick walk, and then we’ll have a little sharing from the contributors who were a apart of the challenge.
So ECA is “Environmental Consciousness Action” and it came out of a mixture of my biography and life questions, and then on a recent trip to Cameroon, it really came alive for me and I came back with this question of, “how do I cultivate my environmental consciousness and then transform it into activity in the world and a feeling that disconnection is everywhere today and often one might spend all day inside and not actually know that some flowers starting to grow or not know one's neighbors are of where one's farmers are. I believe this community is probably more locally conscious than many. But nonetheless, local consciousness, and then globally, we’re all here probably living in a global economy. If you have a phone or a computer or a fork or a car or shoes, then we’re all part of this global economy, yet I realized myself I often have no idea who or where or what I’m actually connected to when I go to the store and buy my thing. I have this experience of me wanting something, and then “Oh there it is” but I don’t know what all went into making it available to make my life better. So that was the global part.
It was separated into four chapters.
There was week one which was local consciousness. Week two was global consciousness. Week three was self action, which was this feeling, yeah so the second half, the action part came out of coming back to the US, and having all these conversation with people who were often sharing that they were either like hopeless or really upset or apathetic or had some sort of feeling about the environment and generally it felt like it was sort of paralyzing, that feeling which I’ve also experienced in my own life as someone who grew up always really caring about the earth and wanting to do something. And then going through periods where I felt like, you know, is there anything that I can actually do that matters? Probably not. Or, I’m living in so many contradictions in this system that, aren’t I just hypocritical, like it doesn’t really matter because I am doing all these things that don’t line up with my values, or, yeah, different feelings. And from that I came to think that we are often conscious of, that there are problems in the environment. Like, back to media, we hear all the time now about climate change or life threatening environmental degradation or the sixth mass extinction, or all these things. Especially, I think children in school today grow up hearing all of this and yet often I think it feels disconnected from an ability to take that information into one's self and transform it into something in the world.
And so that was the action part for me. Like, can I cultivate my consciousness and then can I find a way to transform that consciousness into action in my own life, things that I do and just haven’t changed because I am apathetic about it or something. Or things in community with others and feeling that for me I feel that there is actually so much hope. And, I came to feel the most important thing is that I’m in touch with what I care about. And, whatever that is, just being in touch with that inner fire, so that was sort of the framing of my question, which started from my own life and then it was also link to the youth section gathering here last summer where somehow this idea came, and Sorin said he was open to collaborations and I was like, why don’t you write an elephant song, and I shared the idea and Nathaniel was like, yeah that sounds good, like, I’ll do that. And, yeah different conversations, and I thought, ok what if I invite others into it and it becomes kind of an action research and I can learn from how different people take it off in their own lives. And so, there were two versions. One being these activities that I offered over the four weeks. And the other being independent projects that people did out of the inspiration, and in line with what they cared about.
This was a poem that Berry brought. We did a little pot luck the last day of the challenge and I really appreciated this poem so I asked her to bring it again tonight.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
And that's by Wendell Berry. (The Peace of the Wild Things by Wendell Berry)
So, I wanted to now take a moment and invite you all to go on a little walk. Gonna say five minutes. Can someone with a clock tell me what time that would mean to be back? Great. So let's say 5:20 to be back. And, yeah, when I began this challenge I looked up environment and that means “one's surroundings.” And so, there’s many different definitions one could come up with of what that is. But, the surroundings are conditions in which one is. And then, I also looked up consciousness which in summary is to be awake and aware to one's surroundings, objectively and also internally.
And so, with those thoughts, I invite you all to walk…