Future Ecologies presents: The Right to Feel (Part 2 — Eulogies)
Jul 17, 2024
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Dive into a world where emotions collide with climate realities. Students articulate fictional eulogies for vulnerable species, exploring the profound grief of ecological loss. From pteropods to wolves, the narratives reveal urgent truths about interconnected ecosystems. Discover the heartfelt stories of a farm's closure and the community's fight for sustainable practices. The power of collective action shines through, showcasing how artists, scientists, and activists unite against environmental challenges for a hopeful future.
The emotional writing practice allowed students to express complex feelings around climate impacts, highlighting the importance of integrating emotional narratives into climate discourse.
The extinction of wolves serves as a powerful metaphor for humanity's disruption of natural ecosystems, urging a reconnection and respect for all species within ecological systems.
Deep dives
Eulogy for Terrapods
The role of terrapods in marine ecosystems is crucial, serving as a significant food source for species like salmon, herring, and whales. These tiny zooplankton are immensely impacted by ocean acidification which threatens their survival, posing a risk to the salmon population that relies on them. As the oceans absorb more CO2, terrapods struggle to maintain their calcium carbonate shells, leading to potential collapse of the food web. The decline of these organisms symbolizes a broader ecological crisis, illustrating how human activities have far-reaching effects on marine life.
Challenges Facing Local Farms
Local farms face immense pressures from environmental changes, economic hardships, and competition from corporations that disrupt sustainable agriculture. The closure of a family-run organic farm highlights how shifts in climate and increased pollution have rendered local food production unsustainable. Farmers like Martina Cardin express despair as water shortages and regulations favoring industrial use undermine their livelihoods. The struggle to maintain local food systems amid advancing corporate interests indicates a profound transformation in food economies and community support for sustainable practices.
The Importance of Wolves
Wolves play an intricate role in maintaining ecological balance and dynamic interplay within ecosystems, particularly with their prey, caribou. Their extinction signifies a disconnect in natural rhythms, a consequence of human interference and extraction practices. The narrative of wolves reflects a history of misunderstanding coexistence with nature, emphasizing the need for respect towards all species for ecological resilience. This loss prompts reflection on the larger impacts of humanity's actions and challenges society to repair its relationship with the natural world.
Reimagining Hidden Worlds
The existence of hidden beings, such as elves and fairies, highlights a cultural relationship with nature that celebrates reverence and interconnectedness. Traditional beliefs in these entities underscore the need to respect and engage with the environment beyond a materialistic view driven by capitalism. As modernity encroaches upon these beliefs, the consequence is a loss of spiritual engagement with nature. The future envisions a reawakening of these connections, urging a return to multidimensional understandings of life that honor both human and non-human realms.
Future Ecologies presents "The Right to Feel," a two episode mini-series on the emotional realities of the climate crisis.
The second and final episode, “Eulogies,” is based on fictional writing from the class. Students imagine and eulogize something that could be harmed by the climate emergency, and then imagine a speculative future in which action was taken to mitigate that harm.
Over a two-year period, associate professor of climate justice and co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice Naomi Klein taught a small graduate seminar designed to help young scholars put the emotions of the climate and extinction crises into words. The students came from a range of disciplines, ranging from zoology to political science, and they wrote eulogies for predators and pollinators, alongside love letters to paddling and destroyed docks. Across these diverse methods of scholarship, the students uncovered layers of emotion far too often left out of scholarly approaches to the climate emergency. They put these emotions into words, both personal reflections and fictional stories.
“The Right to Feel” was produced on the unceded and asserted territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.