Following Gregory Bateson, Félix Guattari formulates an ecosophical approach that emphasises “molecular domains of sensibility, intelligence and desire” 1, attaining ecological ways of feeling, thinking and acting, as a way into the global ecological crisis. With our foundation Skillcity, initiated by Dutch ecosopher Henk Oosterling, we have been developing this approach into a pedagogical method in excluded neighbourhoods of Rotterdam since 2007. During that time working with children has continually magnified the tension between the macro level of geo-ecology and the micro level where life first plays out. Between our practice and continuous reflection an ecosophical pedagogy is unfolding. Excess, not just in the sense of consumption overload and artificial scarcity, but more radically in the sense of the infinite multiplicity that ecosophy entails, is its horizon.

Equivalorisation

Guattari opens The Three Ecologies with a take on the production mode of post-industrial capitalism or “Integrated World Capitalism”, IWC for short. The integration of IWC is an integration of market and state. Government and the free market have fused; become two sides of the same coin. They operate under a double logic – a pincer or a scissor – that valorises human activity. Valorisation either takes place by equalizing different value systems on the market, or by placing such a system or population “under the control of police and military machines” 2. IWC finds policing necessary where trading isn’t much possible, like in the Rotterdam neighbourhoods where we started Skillcity. In that way both trading and policing amount to the same process of valorisation, which is also the process of equivalorisation: the reduction of different values to an interchangeable economic value. Consequently, IWC has every appearance of a continuous process. It won’t just grind to a halt because of its internal contradictions, since it is predicated on and parasitizes off the ever shifting ways in which people find lives worth living, whatever their conditions 3.

Although it won’t just implode or come to a stand-still, IWC does entail further exploitation, deterioration of social rights and destruction of ecosystems; further extraction, if you will. In fact, we could say that equivalorisation is committed through extraction. The fact that extraction is key is the reason for an ecological approach to IWC. Just as, in the case of the fossil fuel companies, extracting oil, coal and gas from the crust of the earth is the basis for economic expansion, so it is for all profit generating market activities. Indeed, Naomi Klein tells us that “extractivism” is no longer just companies and states extracting natural “resources” for profit, but that it has come to mean a wider mentality of making profit without caring much for the consequences 4. Guattari proposes ecosophy as the complementary threefold of “social ecology, mental ecology and environmental ecology” 5. With that in mind we could say that the extractivist mentality acts on the relations between self and others, other beings and oneself. All of the relations in the three ecologies are treated as resources to be extracted by the market-state, and no heed is paid to the trash extraction results in, be it environmental, social or psychological. To revive forms of solidarity it is therefore necessary to work directly on the subjectivities of people in and outside of the market-state.

Extinction 

Contrary to what conservatives and liberals alike say of postmodernists, Guattari concerns himself explicitly with “the increasing deterioration of human relations with the socius, the psyche and ‘nature’” 6. And while his concerns are on a par with that of a conservative like Roger Scruton, unlike conservatives Guattari does not advocate a return to universal values. His answer to such static and unified views on the population is that social movements need to develop “collective forms of administration and control” 7 – in other terms, commons – and transversal storytelling in the face of ecological extinctions:

“It is not only species that are becoming extinct but also the words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity. A stifling cloak of silence has been thrown over the emancipatory struggles of women, and of the new proletariat: the unemployed, the ‘marginalized’, immigrants.” 8

In my view one of the guises of this “stifling cloak” is a specific form of economical and social stasis that is an emergent property of poor areas in our rapid, Northern European economy. In Rotterdam it is indeed “the new proletariat: the unemployed, the ‘marginalized’, immigrants” 6 and even more, their children, who are resigned to these areas of permanent economic as well as social and psychological depression. Individuals may and do escape, and resistance is internally present in many forms. Often though, it is in the guise of conservative and patriarchic values. These react to and feed back into the external forces of racist and extractionist bends that in turn also keep looping back. Through this interplay of market forces, social forces and government forces power constellations have emerged that make it next to impossible for positive change to gain traction by directly working in and on those constellations. Meanwhile economic value keeps flowing out. In order to halt the social and mental extinction of forms of solidarity, new commons must arise. But they cannot grow in direct confrontation with this economic and social stasis, since this prevents networks of mutual care from taking hold. Specifically, in the neighbourhoods where Skillcity works, the social networks are spread thin for positive emancipatory struggles to take over.

Physical Integrity  

While the economic approach is about extracting other values, ecosophy is about drawing relations between the different planes of our existence. Crucial for ecosophy is thinking transversally. Enter our ecosophical education. It is both the fruit of a transversal network analysis of the social stasis described above, and it teaches transversal thinking. Skillcity’s primary school traject is called ‘Physical Integrity’. The traject is concerned with the development of skills, virtuous manipulations of matter and thought, that bear on the children’s relations to themselves, to each other and to the other beings. In other words, skills they can use to tend to their mental, social and biophysical ecologies. Six to ten hours of the school week are dedicated to explicitly relational activities, organized in an ecosocial circle centring on the children’s bodies. From the earth and back, the circle starts with eating together. Quite a number of parents, mostly mothers, middle and higher education interns and a professional cook prepare a two-course lunch every day: a warm meal and a bowl of fresh fruit afterwards.

The pupils themselves are seated at long tables where the higher graders tend to the younger kids under the supervision of a parent or an intern. In the Netherlands school lunches aren’t normally a part of school culture. Instead pupils eat at home between noon and 1 pm. As a consequence in the poorer areas many children don’t eat well or don’t eat at all during their lunch break, on top of a diet that is generally lacking in nutrition. To try and break this cycle, we do not just serve the children lunch. They are also taught to prepare food in cooking classes for all ages between four and twelve years old, and they attend gardening and permaculture class in gardens specially built for the schools. Growing, preparing and consuming their own food constitute the first half of the ecosocial circle. This half is concerned mostly with caring and regaining energy. The second half is about spending the energy gained bodily and mentally in more competitive classes: judo and philosophy. Caring is present here too, albeit in a different way: not exercising care will result in injury during judo and in hurt feelings and boring discussions during philosophy. Thus Physical Integrity interprets Guattari’s ‘mission statement’ for ecosophy: “How do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity – if it ever had it – a sense of responsibility, not only for its own survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet” 10 on the micro level of the school class and the meso level of the school.

Ecosophy

It is in philosophy class that we give room to what we’ve come to call “Ecosophy” with a capital “E” as a proper subject to be taught at school. We’re in the middle of writing a first definitive three-year syllabus for children aged 10 to 12 years old. “One of the key analytic problems confronted by social and mental ecology is the introjection
of repressive power by the oppressed” 11, says Guattari. To break with that introjection, “Ecosophy” is a form of children’s philosophy that is not only concerned with developing the mental ecology, but also with developing the physical and social aspects of ecology. The model we use is that of concentric spheres of influence, with the threefold ecology touched upon during each successive grade. Guattari calls for the development of “a new gentleness” 12. But many children in our classes have trouble recognizing their emotion for what they are. Therefore, we use meditation techniques as the introduction to each class. During first year, the occurrences during meditation often serve as the material for reflection and conversation. Year one is mostly about discovering what thinking and feeling mean for each child respectively; year two takes the class as its starting point; and year three engages the class with their wider environment.

When thinking about skills, probably arts and crafts come to mind first. Such skills are often referred to as “hard skills” because they are immediately applicable for material creation. Widespread in modern education is now also the emphasis on “21 st Century Skills” such as creativity and problem solving. This is a set of skills that was developed as an offshoot of earlier discussions on “soft skills”: skills that help one find one’s orientation and relational bearing. However, the 21 st Century Skills are designed with personal efficiency and employability in mind. While that makes them far from useless, they are not primary for our purposes. Instead, we think of soft or relational skills in terms of the threefold ecology. And far before employability becomes an issue, becoming able to form positive relations with oneself, one’s peers and one’s surroundings is.

Ecowise

This becoming “ecowise” begins with training skills that are important for any conversation: listening, responding, expressing a feeling, giving an opinion, formulating an argument, repeating another’s argument and countering it. The second year adds conflict mediation, meditation, and discussion. Year three adds developing ecological projects in which the 21 st Century Skills come in handy too. But what of properly ecological skills? What could these be? When does transversality come into play as a skill instead of just the leading motive of the traject Physical Integrity? After all, if transversal thinking is ecosophy’s crux, then the same should hold for children’s “Ecosophy”. It is the California Centre for Ecoliteracy that put us in the right direction. With poet Wendell Berry, they believe that the prime ecological skill is “solving for pattern” 13. We have translated this as becoming able to search for causal connections, to weave a thread, and then to manipulate them. In order to do this, you have to be able to feel and then handle tensions within yourself, within a group and in the wider world. With multiple threads, you weave a web. Both thread and web traverse different domains of life, different ecological planes. And so ecosophical skills for children have turned out to differ very from those for adults. The skill is the same. Only the scale is smaller.

The fact that narrativity is the primary ecosophical skill actually shouldn’t have come as a surprise, for Guattari lauds Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers for explicitly introducing it into physics. However, his much stronger emphasis on the micropolitic and macropolitic scales of ecological problems creates a double bind that we found no use for in the case of “Ecosophy”. Even more than it holds true for grown-ups, the last thing anyone should do in the face of the ecological crisis is heap it on the shoulders of a child or a teenager. Employing such an “Atlas method” of education could rightfully be labelled as eco scare. However, the Titan carrying Earth is “the view from nowhere” or “le point de vue de Sirius” 14 under which ecology came to be: the Spaceship Earth metaphor. Therefore, it is not easy to avoid the Titan. We try to do it by breaking out of the economic and social stasis where much is happening around the children and their parents, but very little is happening with them. Breaking out of this stasis, “ek” in Greek, would literally be ecstasy or “ek-stasis”.

Excess

With transversality as the leading principle, the Atlas view is rejected. Tracing tensions, causal webs and patterns through storytelling is principally infinite, whereas Atlas’ plight is carrying and caring for all of totality – a debilitating curse which “Ecosophy” doesn’t exactly lift, but which it postpones for a lesser tension: dealing with the excess of an infinity of possible threads to trace, weave and recount. Through ecosophy, ecology becomes a field where anyone can enter and find a responsibility for one’s own life, of other people and of other beings on a scale they can handle. Ecology becomes inclusive even for children, though at the price of also becoming infinite. Then again, the idea of a finite horizon for ecology is exactly what we are trying to leave behind, and not just for the kids.

  1. Guattari, Félix, The Three Ecologies. The Athlone Press (Continuum), London, NewYork: 2005, p.28. Translation by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton.→
  2. Ibid. p. 29→
  3. Guattari, Félix and Antonio Negri, New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty. Port Watson: Minor Compositions, London, NewYork, 2010, p.83. Translation by Michael Ryan, Jared Becker, Arianna Bove and Noe Le Blanc.→
  4. Klein, Naomi, This Changes Everything. Capitalism vs. The Climate. Allen Lane (Penguin Group), London, 2014, p.169→
  5. Guattari, 2005, op cit., p. 41→
  6. Ibid.→
  7. Ibid. p. 42→
  8. Ibid. p. 44→
  9. Ibid.→
  10. Guattari, Félix, Chaosmosis. An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indianapolis, 1995, pp. 119-120. Translation by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis.→
  11. Guattari, Félix, The Three Ecologies. The Athlone Press (Continuum), London, New York: 2005, pp. 48-49. Translation by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton.→
  12. Ibid. p. 51→
  13. Stone, Michael K. and Zenobia Barlow, Ecological Literacy. Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 2005, pp. 30-40→
  14. Latour, Bruno, “Facing Gaia. Six lectures on the political theology of nature”, The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion. Edinburgh, 18th – 28th of February 2013. PDF, version 19-2-13. p. 54→