Nurturing Nature and the Environment with Young Children

Children, Elders, Earth

Janice Kroeger, Casey Y. Myers, Katy Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429559693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book, at the intersection of early childhood and reconceptualizing practice, looks at how practitioners, theorists, and teachers are supporting young children to care about the environment differently.

Despite the current popularity of post-human perspectives, in social science more broadly and in early childhood studies more specifically, this is one of few to make visible international practices and perspectives that emerge at the intersection of early childhood education, environmental justice, sustainability, and intergenerational/interspecies communities. The book provides an innovative exploration of the links between children, elders, and nature. With contributions from established scholars, practitioners, and newcomers this book reframes educating for social justice within an ecological landscape; one in which young children and their elders are mobilized to understand, reconceptualize and even undo negative environmental impact, whilst grappling with the ways in which the earthly forces are acting upon them. Specific theoretical chapters (spirituality, nature, critical and post-human/materiality, pragmatics, and constructivism approaches) are blended with applications of pedagogic strategies from across the globe.

This book responds to a growing interest among early childhood professionals and scholars for sustainably focused and ethically reimagined programs. This collection rewards the reader with opportunities to critically reflect on their own practice, delves into new terrestrial collectives, and explores new pedagogical pathways. It will be essential reading for practitioners and scholars alike.

PART I

Worldly longing(s)

1

UNEASY ASSEMBLAGES OF CHILDEARTHBODIES

Karen Malone

Uneasiness

Precarity flourishes as the uncertainty and unpredictability of the current state of the planet continues to be the most pressing issue of this generation. The impact of climate change, habitat destruction, overpopulation, radiation, and human consumption means the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history is under way and it is thought to be more severe than previously feared. Over 50 years ago, Rachel Carson (1962) warned humanity dangerous chemicals and radioactive particles were causing increasing irreversible harm to all living beings.

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world. During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.

(p. 3)

The impact of environmental pollutants on children’s bodies, especially in large major cities, causes young children, nonhuman animals, and plants to die in increasing numbers. Due to their immature cells and closeness to the source (the earth) the build-up of toxins in their bodies is ingested at rates exponentially higher than adult humans.

This chapter takes you on journey to visit children in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan; a city where their everyday lives collide with stories embedded in dusty lively streets and playgrounds with historical traces of radiation. They bring to our attention a world that is in the making, and had been in the making since the atom bomb was first detonated as a form of controlling and managing humans and nature. The stories highlight the vulnerability of children in cities at times of planetary nuclear disasters as expressed through a concept of porosity as a significant material form that through diffractive theorizing has the potential to be an assemblage of a reconstituted ecological entanglement. It speaks deeply of a past, existing, and future life in an Anthropocentric world.

Unsettling

The Anthropocene was a term coined first by Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene F. Stoermer to describe the significant and irreversible impacts of human activities on Earth and the atmosphere described by Carson and others many decades before (Crutzen & Steffen, 2003). The Anthropocene as a rupturing force brings our attention to humans who are neither exempt from the ecological world nor exceptional to those we are acting/being/dying in relation with. Exploring the Anthropocene story is to speak of how humans became such a potent environmental force that a signature of all our doings, for good or ill, are measurable in the layered rock for millions of years to come. By altering climate, landscapes, and seascapes, as well as flows of species, genes, energy, and materials, we have damaged our planet, many say beyond redemption.

Many scientists proposed dates for when this new epoch would begin, one accepted start being in the 1950s, when human activity, namely rapid industrialization and nuclear activity, set global systems on a different trajectory. Scientists say nuclear bomb testing, industrial agriculture (particularly carcinogenic chemicals), human-caused global warming, and the proliferation of plastic waste across the globe have so profoundly and deliberately altered the planet from its natural state it should be marked by the renaming of this epoch. As Carson wrote in 1962, the changing planet was up until the past two centuries of human intervention, a series of natural events. Life including the earth’s animals and plants were until this time molded by the earth, an interactive dance of survival and adaption led by planetary evolution. Chemicals and other lethal materials produced by modern society have set off a chain of evils where life now affects the planet, irreversible and universal contamination seeping into all aspects of living tissues—radiation being one of these central lively actants.

Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man’s tampering with the atom.

(Carson, 1962, p.3)

As an unsettling ontology, the notion of the Anthropocene disrupts a persistent “humanist” paradigm in disciplines such as education by allowing new conversations to emerge around human-dominated global change, human exceptionalism, and the nature/culture divide (Lloro-Bidart, 2015). As a disrupting ontological tool it reveals there is no homogenous/universal species and the scale and impact of ecological damage is unequal, unethical, and unjust; indigenous peoples, woman, children, and the other-than-human species we share this planet with are in it more than those entrenched in dominant western masculine cultures. Were we asleep at the wheel while corporations metastasized into these monstrous creatures of capitalism? Did we ignore the clarion call of the Anthropocene? There has been critique from many in regard to the naming of the Anthropocene. One argument has been its universalist nature. Universalism produces an assumption that we (humans/nonhumans) are all in this together and implicated in a balanced and uniform manner. This universalizing of the human predicament neglects to acknowledge the extent of diversity in the human/nonhuman experience and the ways in which wealth, nationality, ethnicity, gender, class, age, location and so on mediate relationships with the planet (Malone, 2018). And that the burden of the Anthropocene overpopulation, limits to growth, is often placed at the feet of the most impoverished even though they often contribute the least to its manifestation. That is, the scale of human ecological impact is unequal, unethical, and unjust; the poor, the children, and the nonhuman are more in it than the wealthy (Malone, 2018).

The uptake of radioactivity associated with the proliferation of nuclear weapons testing in the mid-20th century, for example, has been identified as one of the golden spikes indicative of the era of the Anthropocene. The nuclear age has left an invisible but global and affective reading of radiation, by employing the disruptive concept of porosity as a means for revealing our shared fragility—exposing our naked bodies and providing for an undressing of the exceptionalism of humans. Radiation is the effect of an entangled mattering of materials, objects, and bodies.

Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death.

(Carson, 1962, p.3)

Massumi (2015), drawing on the work of Spinoza, speaks of the “body in terms of its capacity for affecting or being affected” (p. 3); “to affect and be affected is to be open to the world, to be active in it and be patient for its return activity” (p. ix). At this time of the Anthropocene we are “in a far-from-equilibrium situation” (Massumi, 2015, p.114); we are beings affected and affecting the complexity of our times—this attunement to the “experience of precarity” brings with it chaotic situations, uneasiness, uncertainty. Those systems, our “bodies” (in its broadest sense) we have relied on, are in catastrophe and “there’s no vantage point from which to understand it from the outside. We are immersed in it” (Massumi, 2015, p. 114). We are it, it is us. It is in us and we are in it.

Diffraction

Exploring the complexities of children’s lives in the Anthropocene, attuning to their entanglement within an assemblage of human–nonhuman matter, this is the work I am doing. I am queering awkward binaries—human/nature, subject/object, I self/other not self, adult/child—through diffractive theorizing by working with Barad (2007, 2014), Nancy (1991), Derrida (2005), and Smith (2013) as the means for interrupting discourses of human exceptionalism. Posthumanist approaches have the direct task of de-centering the human; it problematizes the notion of human as exceptional. The exceptional human assumes what matters to humans is the most important, and what matters to other species and things matters less. Posthumanist approaches demand a disruption of the human story, that we are somehow exempt from the consequences of our own contaminating ways—such an approach demands an “unlearning” of anthropomorphic ways of being and knowing the world, an onto-epistemological recasting of difference, a queering of binaries through diffractive theorizing. The focus of my recent research work is the onto-epistemological study of “lively matter—radiation” in the cities of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan (see Malone, 2018 for more specific details on the purpose of this project). I am curious to consider how radiation is entangled with humans and the collective of human–nonhuman things that are tied together; knotted in knots in an intricate ecological collective. Onto-epistemology assumes epistemology and ontology are mutually implicated “because we are of the world,” not standing outside of it. I am working with Donna Haraway’s (2003) notion of relational natures of difference and Karen Barad’s (2007, 2014) tools of diffraction—not to map where differences appear, but rather map the effects of difference. I explore the technique of diffraction as an analytical tool by exposing the paradoxical potential of the diffraction of radioactive waves that interfere with the cellular composition of all worldly objects, including human bodies. I am seeking to find ways to express my own unexceptional humanness. I am an animal, an organic being with all its fragilities.

Porosity

Frogs have a permeable skin, it makes them particularly vulnerable to chemical contamination, pesticides, herbicides, oil, heavy metals, and radioactive wastes, in the water, the air, and the soil. When the pH of creeks or ponds drops below 4.5, frogs disappear. “Frogs are an indicator species of toxic pollution—a kind of canary in the mines,” proclaims my year 7 biology teacher. It is 1977; we are making our way through chapter one of the “Biological Science: The Web of Life.” There is a picture of a pyramid, humans are at the apex—“humans are a complex intelligent social being,” my teacher notes. All other living things are distributed below “they are ‘simple’ nature,” he says. I was both fascinated and concerned; there was a storm water drain near my house where I would go to be with a host of frogs and others. A shimmer of oil sometimes glistened on the water surface in the late afternoon light, I worried toxins would be killing my storm water companions.

Scientists claimed humans were biological islands, (exceptional creatures) entirely capable of regulating their own internal workings. The specialized cells of our immune system taught themselves how to recognize and attack dangerous pathogens while at the same time mostly sparing our own tissues. Just as we have come to see we are not exempt from the Anthropocentric impacts we are having on the planetary systems, in recent times researchers have demonstrated that the human body is not such a neatly self-sufficient island after all. It is, like the planet, a complex ecosystem—an assemblage—containing trillions of bacteria and other microorganisms that inhabit our skin, mouth, and internal organs (Smith, 2015). In fact, most of the cells in the human body, my body, are not human at all. Bacterial cells in the human body for instance outnumber human cells ten to one (MacDougall, 2012). Haraway (2003) writes: “I love the fact that human genomes can be found on only about 10% of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body … To be one is always to become with many” (pp. 3–4).

This mixed community of microbial cells and the genes they contain is collectively known as the microbiome (Ley, Peterson, & Gordon, 2006). All humans acquire this microbiome from very early in life, essentially during the birthing process and breastfeeding. Even though they do not start out with one, “Primate fetal developme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: why nurture nature and the environment with young children?
• PART I: Worldly longing(s)
• PART II: Earth-indigeneity: Place and pedagogies
• PART III: Sustainable futures: New terrestrial collectives
• Index