permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

Mother Pelican ~ A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability
http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html

*Mother Pelican*
*A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability*


*Vol. 18, No. 5, May 2022Luis T. Gutiérrez, Editor*

* Home Page <http://www.pelicanweb.org/> Front Page
<http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page1.html>*
[image: motherpelicanlogo2012] <http://www.pelicanweb.org/#infologo>







* Interlude 4 ~ Radical Self Accountability: An Antidote to Greenwashing
Cara Judea Alhadeff May 2022 *






















* ------------------------------ [image: 22.05.Page2.Cara1.jpg]
<http://www.carajudea.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/BodyComposting.png>
"Green Cremation:" Natural Reduction, aka Body Composting. Painting by
Micaela Amateau Amato <http://www.micaelaamato.com/> for Zazu Dreams:
Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the
Anthropocene Era <http://www.zazudreams.com/>. Click the image to enlarge.
------------------------------ ”The future enters into us in this way in
order to transform itself in us long before it happens.” — Rainer Maria
Rilke For my Mother Pelican monthly essays, I have recently been writing
about digital-technology addiction. I interrupted those investigations with
a few essays on Martin Luther King Jr. (which I will continue next month),
and now I am interrupting that exploration with this interlude on
greenwashing for the month May. Before we continue our discussion from last
month further exploring interspecies communication/collaboration—how
tree-knowledge as tree-living can be nourished through prayer-as-action—I
must address, yet again, the haunting ubiquity of greenwashing: this time
in the context of the month of May. Across time and culture, May symbolizes
transition. Maius, the Greek Goddess of Growth represents the
personification of transmutation. Maia became an agricultural deity. Rather
than thriving in the fertility of Maia/Maius (transformation), corporate
capitalism and it's offspring, consumer complicity are enraptured by the
Hindu version of måyå (artifice).[1]
<http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#backtoref01> Måyå
represents “pernicious power and knowledge” that “rob[s] a person of
liberating insight (jnana)( Abington Dictionary of Living Traditions, 1981,
469). Convenience-culture compliants are much more comfortable with the
known, habits maintained through socially constructed comfort and
desire.[2] <http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#backtoref02>
It behooves fearless cultural workers to reframe the concept of
growth—understanding/embodying growth as alchemy (Maius/Maia) rather than
our cultural epidemic that positions growth as acquisition
<http://www.cara.zazudreams.com/thought/#articles>[3]
<http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#backtoref03> (måyå).
This paradigm shift requires radical self accountability. We industrialized
humans can re-ignite our spiritual intelligence: our radical (Latin, radix,
radic for “root”) inherent relationship to deep time, land, water, spirit,
and one another embedded in daily life. Because I am focusing on the
imperative of radical care and radical investigation linked to radical
action, this month's installment is dedicated to: Rachel Carson, born May
27, 1907 and Isidore the Farm Labourer of Madrid (Isidro de Merlo y
Quintana) (the patron saint of farmers, peasants, day laborers, brick
layers, domesticated animals, and impovrished peoples and agriculture in
general), died May 15, 1130 The great feast celebrating Isidore and his
love for all animals (including people) is held on May 15th. In order to
illustrate the distinction between Maia/Maius as co-evolution through
alchemy (growth through transformation), a collaborative interspecies
intelligence, <http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n04page2.html> and måyå
as trickery (economic growth through greenwashing and capitalist
acquisition) this month's installment is also dedicated to unraveling
various manifestations of måyå—the intricacies of too frequently illusory
humanitarian and ecological justice—"care" that may actually divert us from
addressing why care is needed in the first place. Måyå, conditioned by
human ignorance, is both cause and effect. Radical diversion refers to the
systematic erasure of the underlying roots of our entangled crises. In the
case of the month of May: Consumer Product Safety Commission,[4]
<http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#backtoref04>
established May 14, 1973 and Endangered Species Day, established May 20,
2006 (the Endangered Species Act
<https://www.dailycamera.com/2017/12/09/cara-judea-alhadeff-a-declaration-of-interdependence-hanukkah-is-unity-in-diversity/>
was established in 1973) The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has
become a hazardous farce for two reasons: 1. The CPSC encourages consumers
to feel like they are buying something safe. In fact, "safety" must be
distinguished from "health." This illusion of safety justifies flagrant
consumption. 2. The CPSC has radically failed to protect consumers,
actually supporting dangerously duplicitous product development. By
exposing gross misrepresentation of measurable negative impacts, I hope to
galvanize consumer activists to truly hold corporations accountable for
product standards. Equally critical to protecting consumers is a regulatory
system to protect those along the entire supply chain. A modern Isidore the
Farm Labourer might fight to establish a Producer Product Safety Commission
to protect laborers from manufacture-based exploitation. For example, “The
Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” is Mike Daisy’s Off-Broadway performance
addressing the slave-labor conditions of Apple-product factory workers in
Shenzhen, China. Because of the daily attempts of workers to commit
suicide—jumping off roofs—Apple installed a net across the tenements where
millions of workers live. iPhone Suicides have not impacted global
sales.[5] <http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#backtoref05>
My proposition to protect exploited laborers is not to be confused with
Producer-Responsibility Laws
<https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb22-1355?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=9d9750db-74a0-4010-a56e-2e5938e171a7>—i.e.,
corporate accountability. Congruently, since its establishment in 2006,
Endangered Species Day diverts our attention from the reasons why animals
are becoming extinct—inadvertently perpetuating the root causes of their
imminent extinction, their inability to survive because of habitat loss,
climate crisis, etc. This illusion of action invokes a false expectation of
collective effort, but in reality results in social inertia. I highlight
these two historic examples (CPSC and Endangered Species Day) in order to
sensitize ourselves to måyå—the phantasmagoric ways in which manipulative
marketing manifests (including not only branding and advertizing, but how
we educate/indoctrinate our children and how we take for granted imbricated
layers of consumer entitlement). Similar to Philanthrocapitalism and the
Erosion of Democracy: A Global Citizen's Report on the Corporate Control of
Technology, Health, and Agriculture (Vandana Shiva, Editor, David Orr,
Forward), these forms of greenwashing placate consumer-citizens. They
utilize single-issue diversion tactics—maintaining consumer/captialist
distraction through mass psychological persuasion. Manufactured consent
(sustained compliance through “persuasion psychology”) is more intricately
and intimately woven into our lives than ever previously imagined. In
contrast with complex, multilayered, intersectional, decolonized, polymath
thinking, education, and action, these forms of greenwashing establish
trends[6] <http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#backtoref06>
that are rooted in single-use products and single-use mind-set. [image:
22.05.Page2.Cara2.jpg]
<http://www.carajudea.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Fiske-SingleUse.jpg> A
Declaration of Interdependency: Love Lessons from Zazu Dreams, performance
at Fiske Planetarium, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2018. Click the
image to enlarge. Greenwashing is "sustainable" for capitalist-economic
growth rooted in måyå (deceit), not the Maia transformative growth of
empathy, compassion, cooperation, or resiliency, because it dovetails with
corporate and governmental diversion from systemic, underlying root causes.
Below, I present the convergence of an example of institutionalized
eco(justice)-diversion through Band-Aid food-waste solutions with an
example of greenwashing through the compostable plastic industry. At the
University of North Carolina, Asheville, 2019 Food Waste Solution Summit,
in addition to my full-length lecture, I was asked to present a five-minute
motivational talk that would compete with a group of other food-waste
activists. All of my “competitors” proposed wonderful “solutions” such as
hog-farm “composting,” school lunch reuse food tables, rewriting the EPA's
Food Recovery Hierarchy <https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food>.
[image: 22.05.Page2.Cara3.jpg]
<http://www.carajudea.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/EPA-Food-Recovery-Hierarchy.jpg>
EPA's Food Recovery Hierarchy
<https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food>. Click the image to
enlarge. However, I was the only competitor who examined the intersectional
underlying conditions why one in four children in the United States is
malnourished and twelve million are obese—the majority of whom are also
malnourished. This irony is at the core of our food-waste emergency. The
enormity of our food-system crisis demands a cultural paradigm shift
towards symbiotic interdependence. It is critical to address the underlying
causes behind why people and institutions waste food. These underlying
causes include: 1. US standard of living based on a sense of entitlement 2.
Refusal to recognize the intrinsic value of food 3. Disconnection from the
food-production process and food justice 4. Adherence to technological
fixes 5. False divisions between corporations, government, and everyday
people 6. Lack of education for children and adults 7. Environmental racism
undermines food security I suggested that one direct action is to learn
from other cultures’ reciprocal relationships to food production. Another
is to include children in our food-system solutions’ conversation. How we
raise our children is a direct reflection of our commitment to preventing
food waste. If we want to create a world without waste, we’ve got to
develop and support cross-cultural and historical education for adults and
children. The voting took place in the auditorium using smart phones. (I
have never and will never own a smart phone, and the fact that the
organizers assumed all audience members owned one and that was their only
way to cast a vote was in and of itself rooted in a colonized economy—and
represented a direct obstacle to sustainable food-waste solutions.)
Regardless of my position on digital technology, most participants, of
course, did own smart phones and cast their votes. I received eight
percent. The audience felt overwhelmed by my proposal to examine root
causes, and chose to focus on, what I felt, were Band-Aid perceived
solutions—again our easy-access addiction to institutionally-supported
illusion—måyå. I had hoped questioning and taking intellectual and
structural risks would be welcomed; a willingness to directly challenge how
underlying causes maintain intricately entangled systems of food
insecurity, colonial economics, and corporatized oppressions. If
vulnerability, curiosity, and a capacity to learn from the unfamiliar were
integrated at the core of our beings (radical self accountability), I
suggest many of our interlocking devastating realities could be uprooted.
My final example for this month's essay in which I attempt to unveil måyå
by disentangling greenwashing confronts "compostable" plastics. In the name
of people and planetary health, surrogate Band-Aids are deployed that are
in fact equal to or worse than what is being replaced including
bioplastics, phthalates replacements, and hydrofluorocarbons. For example:
1. Compostable disposables, also known as bioplastics, are most frequently
produced from GMO-corn monoculture and “composted” in highly restricted
environments that are inaccessible to the general public. Due to corn-crop
monoculture practices that are dependent on agribusiness's heavy use of
pesticides and herbicides (for example, Monsanto’s Round-Up/glyphosate),
compostable plastics are not a clean solution. The infrastructure and
politics of actually “composting” these products are extraordinarily
problematic. These not-so eco-friendly products require extremely high
temperatures to decompose. Such composting facilities are rarely available
to private consumers. Additionally, their chemical compounds cause extreme
damage to water, soil, and wildlife. They cause heavy acidification when
they get into the water and eutrophication (lack of oxygen) when they leach
nitrogen into the soil. 2. The trend to replace Bisphenol A (BPA) led to
even more debilitating phthalates in products. 3. Lastly, we now know that
hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), “ozone-friendly” replacements, are equally
environmentally destructive as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Compostables
marketing, like the recycling industry, strips us of our capacity to
recognize our radical interrelatedness.[7]
<http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#backtoref07> Through
habituated obedience to consumer-addicted societal norms, we abdicate our
capacity to think, to imagine, and to dream—reinforcing the concept of
nature and “resources” as solely utilitarian. In 1991, I initiated Sarah
Lawrence College’s first recycling program that Governor Cuomo used as a
prototype for the state of New York. The head of Sarah Lawrence's Student
Affairs was delighted: “Now we can use more!” That comment has haunted me
for twenty-five years, and is at the crux of many of my professional and
personal life choices <http://www.carajudea.com/>. Next month we will
explore how natural burial practices offer an antidote to greenwashing
through the fertility of alchemy found in Maius (Greek Goddess of Growth).
Notes [1] <http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#gotoref01>
The Sanskrit concept, Law of Måyå, symbolizes principles of relativity and
duality. Although Måyå, the mother of Buddha, is the symbol of
extraordinary fecundity and creativity rooted in empirical reality, måyå is
unpredictable, mysterious, fleeting, and the most popular—and perhaps most
reductive translation, the most facile identification: illusion. This
ubiquitous dumbing down of Eastern philosophies (for example, the Sanskrit
concepts of Måyå, Karma, and Prana), reinforces mass commercialization. [2]
<http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#gotoref02> For further
discussion on manufactured consent and habituated obedience see my
“Queering the Apocalypse: Climate Chaos and The Obscene,” in Socioscapes:
International Journal of Societies, Politics, and Cultures; Gender and
Sexualities Studies in Difficult Times: Uncertain Presents, Coalitional
Futures, S.IJSPC vol. 1 Issue 1, pp. 143-154, ISSN 2734-0940. [3]
<http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#gotoref03> See my
"Disentangling Green Colonialism:Greenwashing and Environmental Racism in
the Renewable Energy Revolution
<http://www.cara.zazudreams.com/thought/#articles>.” [4]
<http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#gotoref04> See Consumer
Product Safety Commission (CPSC)
<https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumer-product-safety-commission.asp>,
Will Kenton, Investopedia, 5 June 2020. [5]
<http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#gotoref05> For details
on this post-human phenomenon see my Viscous Expectations, Justice,
Vulnerability, the Ob-scene
<http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html>. State College: Penn
State University Press, 2014, 274 n. 465. [6]
<http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#gotoref06> The list of
single-issue campaigns that ignore the root of the crisis at hand is almost
infinite, including "Save the Turtles," "Save the Whales," " Save the
Bats," "Save the Bees"... [7]
<http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html#gotoref07> For a
detailed exposé of greenwashing and the industrial-capitalist motivation
for recycling see Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert's Bright
Green Lies: How The Environmental Movement Lost It's Way and What We Can Do
About it. Monkfish Press: New York, NY, 2020. Also see their article in
Mother Pelican <http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv17n06page5.html> See my
video essay on overcoming environmental racism for the international
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference:
Disentangling Green Colonialism: Social Permaculture in the Ecozoic Era
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucLJbt-EzAg>.
------------------------------ ABOUT THE AUTHOR [image:
21.02.Page2.Sazu.jpg]
<http://www.zazudreams.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/zd_cover-768x1009.jpg>
Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD, is a scholar/activist/artist/mother whose work
engages feminist embodied theory, and has been the subject of several
documentaries for international public television and film. In addition to
critically-acclaimed Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A
Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era <http://www.zazudreams.com/>
(Eifrig Publishing, 2017), her books include: Viscous Expectations:
Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene
<https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-9885170-6-6.html> (Penn State
University Press, 2014) and Climate Justice Now: Transforming the
Anthropocene into The Ecozoic Era
<http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv18n05page2.html> (Routledge,
forthcoming). She has published dozens of interdisciplinary essays in
eco-literacy, environmental justice, epigenetics, philosophy,
performance-studies, art, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies’
journals/anthologies. Her pedagogical practices, work as program director
of Jews of the Earth <http://aytzim.org/jote>, parenting, and commitment to
solidarity economics and lived social-ecological ethics are intimately
bound. Her photographs/performances have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech
organizations (Electronic Freedom Foundation, Artsave/People for the
AmericanWay, and the ACLU), and are in numerous collections including
SanFrancisco MoMA, Berlin’s Jewish Museum, MoMA Salzburg, Austria, Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Cara is a former professor of
Performance & Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz and Critical Philosophy at the
Global Center for Advanced Studies. She teaches, performs, parents, and
lives a creative-zero-waste life. She is always eager to collaborate with
other activists, scholars, and artists from other disciplines.  If you are
interested please contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com
<photo@carajudea.com> or via her websites, Cara Judea
<http://www.carajudea.com> and Zazu Dreams <http://www.zazudreams.com>. See
also this article: Social ecology pioneers return to Nederland
<https://themtnear.com/2020/11/social-ecology-pioneers-return-to-nederland/>.
Disentangling Green Colonialism: Social Permaculture in the Ecozoic Era
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucLJbt-EzAg> Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD, 11
June 2021 *