Becoming Ecozoic:

Fifteen Forward-Looking Academics offer
a Progressive Agenda for Higher Education

​
What if higher education was oriented
toward the well-being of life on earth?
​
What if the disciplines understood
themselves in life-centered terms?

What if textbooks assumed
an ecozoic outlook on life and
 
helped re-direct attention toward
justice, joy, and community.

Honoring many ways of knowing:
affective, empathic, scientific, and artistic.

In "From the Anthropocene to Mutual Thriving,"
fifteen scholars from social and natural sciences,

make the case, using developments in
ecological economics, as illustrative

of an agenda for the future.

​From the Anthropocene to Mutual Thriving:
​An Agenda for Higher Education in the Ecozoic

Ivan Vargas Roncancio 1,Leah Temper 1,*,Joshua Sterlin 1,Nina L. Smolyar 2,3,*,Shaun Sellers 1,Maya Moore 3,4,Rigo Melgar-Melgar 2,3,Jolyon Larson 2,3,Catherine Horner 3,5,Jon D. Erickson 2,3,Megan Egler 2,3,Peter G. Brown 1,Emille Boulot 1,Tina Beigi 1 andMichael Babcock 1

Sustainability 2019, 11(12), 3312; https://doi.org/10.3390/su11123312

Please click on button for link to the entire article.  

From the Anthropocene to Mutual Thriving: An Agenda for Higher Education in the Ecozoic

​A Few Key Ideas

Their argument, supported by a review of textooks, is that much higher education today presumes three things:

• humans are apart from, not a part of, the larger web of life,
• that knowing about the world is a disembodied act of acquiring 'information' for the purpose of helping students master the world,
• that "development" is hyper-industrialization and urbanization along a western model.

​
They all for a shift in assumptions:

• from an ontology of separation to an ontology of interconnectedness,
• from an epistemology of domination to one of egalitarian relationship;
• from an axiology of development to that of plural values for world-and meaning-making​

Their alternative ontology of interconnectedness emphasizes, along with the philosopher Whitehead and in the spirit of Thomas Berry, that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects, and that all relations are subject-subject relations.  There is something like subjectivity, or internal alivemeness, even with the depths of matter.  They also emphasize the importance of a re-direction of attention, involving the whole person, toward the interconnectedness of all things.  They call it "Becoming Ecozoic."

​Abstract: Education for the Well-Being of Life

​​Higher education in the global North, and exported elsewhere, is complicit in driving the planet’s socio-ecological crises by teaching how to most effectively marginalize and plunder Earth and human communities. As students and activists within the academic system, we take a firm stand to arrest this cycle, and to redirect education toward teaching how to create conditions for all life to thrive. In this paper, we articulate a research and education agenda for co-constructing knowledge and wisdom, and propose shifts in the ‘ologies from the current, destructive modes to intended regenerative counterparts. We offer to shift from an ontology of separation to that of interconnectedness; from an epistemology of domination to that of egalitarian relationship; and from an axiology of development to that of plural values for world- and meaning-making. Such paradigm shifts reflect the foundational aspirations of the consilient transdiscipline of ecological economics. We analyze several introductory university textbooks in economics, law, and natural sciences, to demonstrate how destructive ‘ologies are taught in North American universities, and how such teaching implicitly undermines critical inquiry and effective challenge. Our strategy for change is to provide a new theoretical framework for education: the regenerative ‘ologies of the Ecozoic’, based on biophysicality, embedded relationality, pluralism, and the sustainable well-being of all members in the community of life.

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Excerpt: Ecozoic Pedagogy

Ecozoic pedagogy is both a practical response to biophysical realities and an ethical response to the dire present. Its process or praxis is of equal importance to its content, and we focus on the mutual transition of both. In this manner, and to reiterate from above, our goals are two-fold: (1) to nourish the growth of healthy, joyful, self-determining, self-regulating, moral human beings, embracing in process and outcome, what Albert Schweitzer’s poetically called “a reverence for life” [11]; and (2) to inspire a praxis in defense of that life, tending students’ capacities to build coalitions of solidarity powerful enough to effectively dismantle systems and structures of domination and oppression, and, in their stead, to build, maintain, and reproduce equitable systems and thriving multispecies communities. This reorientation of collective social life towards the service of its own maintenance as an ecologically embedded subset of life is fundamentally our goal.

In conclusion, through a close examination of a sample of textbooks used for disseminating the foundational knowledge of disciplines, we find that anthropocentric ontology, epistemology, and axiology are upheld and perpetuated in universities in North America and throughout the world. Ecological economics is an example of one attempt to reorient a field around an Ecozoic narrative reflecting the biophysical and social embeddedness of the economy. Beyond ecological economics, we further challenge all disciplines and transdisciplines to question their unexamined assumptions using the ‘ologies of the Ecozoic’ framework offered in this paper, and in so doing, collectively begin to transform higher education and, ultimately, co-create the Ecozoic era.

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Excerpt: The Re-education of Attention

We must focus our pedagogy on the attunement of the human being in respect to their myriad facets: minds, bodies, senses, emotions, and spirit, to the comings and goings of what Tim Ingold has called the ‘meshwork’ .  This re-education of attention  to the deeply interlaced threads of the comings and goings of all beings that make up ‘nature’ and culture, is truly what it means to ‘think ecologically’ : all of us, at all levels and species, are indelibly intertwined ... All beings interact as subject/subject, from the level of individuals, all the way up to watersheds and communities, to polities, and the planet.