Surviving the Anthropocene

This project critically responds to the reckless and unconscious creation of the Anthropocene Epoch by the human industrial military complex since the Great Acceleration of the 1950s that may yet render nature as an artefact. It is further provoked by the governmental lack of effective response to the subsequent g/local climate change crisis of the twenty-first century that radically diminishes the cultural heritage of inter-species relations and thus the community of life. This inter-disciplinary project offers new conditions of possibility for elemental water and aerial sustainability and philosophico-ethical reasoning, which is to be achieved by co-creating innovative change that advances shifts in consciousness and planning. Given that local human agricultural, industrial and military enterprise has flow-on effects globally through weather and elemental conditions until the present time, this project is predicated on actors becoming conscious of and accountable to g/local effects of mis-management particularly of the porous elements of water and air. This project addresses the crisis from the different optics of sharing the world, biosociality, CAS theory, and ecological literacy. It seems that only by standing on the precipice of extinction of species and what is commonly understood as the natural world, with concomitant disappearances of water courses and polluted air and earth, will humanity come to grips with the catastrophic promise of a degraded tomorrow. The aim of this project is to resolve the perceived clash between culture, nature and ethics in the Anthropocene. It magnifies and expands an elemental philosophy of water and air, and related pedagogical innovation, with biosocial (cultural) geography included as a key for approaching a new paradigm. By explicitly linking environmental discourse and communication to environmental preferences and policy making, it identifies channels of influence and provides new avenues of thinking and interlinking of various fields within humanities, social sciences and environmental studies. The project addresses three interdisciplinary intertwined issues: environmental ontology (the so called water & aerial literacy and biosocial (cultural) geography), environmental pedagogy, and finally, environmental public policy. We apply elemental literacy (to transpose current understandings and to produce insight and management reform and philosophical analysis predicated on the theme of restorative ecological justice and practice. The specificity of this inquiry rests with the elements of water (an element of fluidity/porousness), and air (as an element of a new respiratory philosophy), two elements that animate all life and which critically rely on clean aquatic and atmospheric conditions for expression, co-evolvement and life-supporting reorganization. A critical aspect of the research project is an innovative and inclusive pedagogical approach that inspires a range of stakeholders, and is invested in disrupting pre-existing structural obstacles. To re- imagine former pathways of being and to scrutinise systems resilience or breakdown, we further apply in this project Prigogine and Stengers Complex Adaptive Systems theory (CAS an interdisciplinary method) further elaborated by Levin and Kauffman, and augmented through elemental water and aerial literacy that recognises the planet as a complex adaptive system, based on our elaborations of an ontologico-pedagogical potential of both water and air.

The Austrian part of the project contributed to new educational approaches that aim at resolving the perceived clash between culture, nature/animals, and ethics at a time of alarming environmental crisis. It brought together inter-cultural, inter-disciplinary and systems thinking, environmental and animal ethical reasoning, and educational approaches that foreground participative and place-based learning. This yielded two outcomes. On the one hand, the team developed (together with the Slovenian partner) a massive open online course to teach water literacy and facilitate students' self-directed research in their own riverscapes. This MOOC is an open access online platform which offers teaching and learning material on ecological, economic and cultural aspects of water and riverscapes, as well as a module that explains how to carry out an ethnographic study. The MOOC also provides space to share students' experiences and their own project findings. With this teaching and learning tool, the project team addressed some shortcomings of the mainstream discourse on water literacy that tends to focus too much on the cognitive dimension at the expense of the affective, bodily, cultural and practical dimensions, to give too much weight to Western scientific thinking, and to take an anthropocentric perspective. It also overcomes the limits of behaviouristic education that trains students to perform partial solutions (such as separating waste or turning off the tap) by mobilizing young people's civic engagement in their more-than-human riverscapes. On the other hand, the project questioned and developed theoretical and conceptual aspects of Critical Animal Pedagogy. This field of education seeks to deconstruct anthropocentric and speciesist structures, beliefs and cultural practices that legitimize animal exploitation and oppression. It further endeavors to reconstruct possibilities for more ethical and sustainable human-animal relationships. The project team was able to identify a number of weaknesses and contradictions in the Critical Animal Studies that hamper a full understanding of humans and nonhumans as agents and self-directed learners who potentially shape a transspecies learning space together. While nonhuman animals are usually trained to fulfill human needs and desires, humans are also sometimes regarded as in need of training, e.g. to fulfill the needs of the labour market or the moral demands of a changing society. However, in order to restore, preserve and facilitate the ability and need to learn with intrinsic motivation, rather than being manipulated - which is essential for all living beings - we must put up the question of participative learning for oppressors and oppressed alike.