Mediacologyputting the ‘eco’ into media ecology (and other tangential meditations)

Photo by me

As we watched the events unfold at Copenhagen, many of us felt powerless to infuse wisdom into the process. It seems as if the globe’s political leaders cannot transcend their own momentum, and remain stuck in a reality that defines everything in the context of numbers. One thing that Jacques Ellus points out in The Technological Society is that a consequence of the technological mindset is establishing a set of perimeters on how to think about and categorize the world, and to make taboo human scaled relationships that result from organic processes.

Consequently, this year the theme that keeps knocking me over is to scale down. In my work and professional/activist ambitions I have felt the need, like many of us, to change the world as quickly as possible. The task often feels existential and too massive to contain– our system seems like giant robots trouncing the earth and often I feel like a Lilliputan trying to pin it down.

As a colleague reminds me, complexity theory shows that all system change happens at a local level. Perhaps in our desire to see a massive global political shift many of us have disregarded another option, which is to scale down our thoughts to the local level, and to work within the means that we have available to us. For me that translates to living a certain kind of low impact lifestyle, and also re-dedicating my work in the classroom where I have a lot of one-on-one contact with the next prototype of human, our youth. And of course spending more time with my family.

My sustainability education mentor, Pramod Prajoli, has the following guidelines for moving into the next phase of transformation:

1) critique to regeneration

2) ideologies to ideas

3) discourse to design

4) global thinking to local thinking

Some ideas I have for the coming year include editing a textbook for media educators that incorporates a sustainable framework, and to develop a green curriculum that can be used as part of media literacy work.

Meanwhile, I want to rededicate myself to eating well, relaxing more, taking it a bit slower and remembering to breath. Now is not the time to panic, but to become grounded and rooted again in our life work.

I’ll close with these thoughts from Tricycle Magazine:

Caring for Each Other

The Buddha has suggested that we are without a mother and father to take care of things for us. Mother Earth, once thought to be all-forgiving and capable of absorbing any abuse we could heap upon her, is not the infinitely benevolent resource we thought she was. As we learn of our own mothers at a certain point of maturity, Mother Earth can and does get worn down by giving and forgiving in the face of our persistent demands. And our Father who is in heaven, though perhaps immensely old and lord over a host of devas (as the Buddhists view him), is nevertheless subject to the laws of karma and is not sufficiently omnipotent to make it all work out for us in the end.

If we do not care for one another, who else will care for us? Who among us has the right to say of another, “He is of no use to us?” For better or worse, whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. Learning how to care for one another is a central part of the path and of the practice.

- Andrew Olendzki, Ph.D., “Medicine for the World,” from the Summer 2008 Tricycle. Read the complete article.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2009 at 9:24 am and is filed under Commentary, Self-Referential. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.