The CEMUS Diaries – Stories from past, present and future

To navigate chaos Pi needs to find the balance between emotional despair and acting. Picture from the film Life of Pi.

CEMUS taught me leadership, or was it actually the place that taught me that? For me, CEMUS have been a place where to test things without being to afraid of the consequences, once again. In one sense a coming back to something childlike, at the same time reaching the bottom in questions that few grown-ups dare to really face. Are we but bacteria in a big petri dish? Do we enact a system that is coded to destroy other species and cultures? Where did all this start? What is the root cause to everything we see falling down around us? (biodiversity, some aspects of cultural diversity) Where do I stand in all this, what is my role to play?

My relation to CEMUS started when I first attended Human & Nature in 2008. Then it was a breathing hole for me, something distinctly different from my studies in material engineering. One important lecture was with Maria Pia Boethius, who told the story of her life. Young and popular columnist and writer for a Swedish tabloid. But after a decade of fame she started to see through the system. She was not controlled, formally, to write about superficial things. But she had done that because that was what she thought was expected by her, and that was why she had leveled so fast. Power structures are not always visible, they act in the shadows. Media as well as some other powerful institutions have a way of strengthening it’s own “right” believes and values. Some are promoted, while others that might be of the same talent, or even more talented, but lacking desirable values, are held back. This have always made me a little skeptical about the idea that you need to be part of or on top of a big organization to make a big impact.

My second semester at CEMUS I attended the greater part of Actor and Strategies for Change (the first year the course was run). During that course we had a lecture by Alan AtKisson about the Amoeba model that became very important for me. Years later, it stopped my endless searching for distant positions of leverage, and instead made me act on sustainability issues from the position I was in then, as a Master student.

The basic idea behind the amoeba model is that society could be described as an amoeba, with different parts, some that are constantly testing the limits of the unknown (scientists), some stay close to and well connected to the centre of mass (politicians), some parts are communicating between the central part and the more isolated parts (science communicators), some stand outside and scream to the mass that it should change way (activists). In society there are many different roles, you can’t play them all so you’ll have to figure out what your reasonably good at and then start trying. Do what you think is important, and you’ll develop your strong skills on the way.

In the beginning of autumn 2015 I attended an open lecture with Bengt Gustafsson. Bengt is an astrophysician and one of the founders of CEMUS. He talked about the Multiverse, the theory that there are multiple universe, teasing our imagination and made me feel deeply that there are more things at stake than just some different species on Earth. I often think of Earth as a closed system, isolated in space, our home, where there are planetary boundaries and challenges to build collective action to act on contemporary bigger-than-self issues. We have the responsibility to act. But when you transcend space, and realize there are 100-400 billions of stars only in our galaxy, these stars can have none, one or many planets circulating around them. And none of these billions of potential planets have had a mix of nutrients, heat, radiation and elements to even initiate reactions of life. On earth we do not only have these conditions, we have during billions of years been lucky to avoid (more or less) existential collapses leading to a millions of different life forms today. And now we homo sapiens, one specie that call our self the intelligent one, are leading a mass extinction of species that have only happened five times earlier in the Earth history. None of these times it has been one species driving an extinction, but rather geological change or external event like the impact of a meteoroid.

The universal perspective swiped my feet away, moved me to tears and somehow became a turning point for my environmental engagement. I was saturated with sustainability as a philosophy, I knew enough. Since then every thing I do with sustainability is a balance between mind and heart, of doing good things, working for positive impact, but at the same time avoiding emotionally falling down in that hole of tears and despair. I think that it was very important to be truly moved by the sustainability dilemma, to become emotionally calibrated to the existential dimensions of sustainability. Everyday work is not about life and death, but it is neither only a work. So far, it feels like CEMUS gave me stamina for a lifetime. Even so, it is nice to come back some times and get a re-fill of young ideas and driving inspiration. That is what the CEMUS model brings to CEMUS: new student with brilliant ideas and eager aspiration to try them. That’s what keeps making CEMUS ever young and actual.

The Oak Tree:
not interested
in Cheery blossoms.
– Matsuo Basho[1]

On a Monday evening in the early fall of 1992, over 200 students gathered in a lecture hall in the Main University Building in Uppsala. They had all signed up and been lucky enough to receive a spot in the first edition of the interdisciplinary course Humanity & Nature [2] at Uppsala University. The course description was not finished in time to make it into the printed course catalogue – and there was of course no internet or digital registration at the time – so a separate flyer had been designed and made available to students that stopped by the registration office. Adriaan Honcoop, a local Uppsala artist, had been commissioned to design a front cover to the flyer, which depicted a woman and a tree, or perhaps more accurately, a tree-woman.

Människan & Naturen 1992

Yggdrasil

Trees have a played a fundamental role in the mythologies and sense-making of human cultures for a very long time. Here in the north, the Sami people spoke of Saiwa Muora – the holy tree, and the Norse had their Ash Yggdrasil – the tree of life. An in the Celtic isles there were the Druids – also known as the Oak-knowers, or Oak-seers. The tree of knowledge of Christianity and Judaism, the Bodhi Tree in Buddhism. Even in contemporary fantasy literature, trees play an important role, often taking on characteristics of humans or other animals – from Tolkien’s Ents and Rowling’s Whomping willow to the The Weirwood in R.R Martin’s A song of Ice and fire.

Forest of Lyngen #1

I the late 19th and early 20th century the devastating effects of “modern forestry development” and various forms of industrial logging were becoming more and more apparent, and the fields of forest preservation, conservation and management were born. However, it is not until recently that some scientists and foresters are beginning to rediscover the breathtaking complexity and wonder of the life of trees. In his book The Hidden Life of Trees [3], forester and author Peter Wohlleben draws on recent research as well as his own experiences as a forester, to unveil the extraordinary abilities and sentience of trees. Believe it or not, trees seem to communicate with each other in a myriad of ways, have friends and enemies, they do parenting (often quite strict), take care of the elderly and sick, collaborate closely with other species (such as mushrooms), they breathe, and they even have a form of memory. However, trees often perform these activities in a slow and unhuman kind of way which seems to make it easier for us humans not to notice – or ignore while loudly exclaiming that we must be careful not to anthropomorphize, nor stand in the way of progress, of profit or of sustainability [4].

But at times we are struck by a sense of clarity that is impossible to ignore – even though we might later tend to forget it. A few years back I was hiking down from a peak in western Nepal, and as I came back to the tree-line and was making my way quickly down a steep little path, I literally felt my head being pulled up and to the left. I stopped and found myself face-to-face with a knotted old pine tree. It seemed to be saying: Here I Am. Here. I. Am. I stood transfixed for several minutes, not knowing what to do, before pulling my eyes and head back to the ground and slowly and contemplatively making my way down towards the village.

Old Tjikko

Trees can get old. Really old. And the oldest one of them all is a small Spruce tree known as Old Tjikko in Dalarna, Sweden. Using carbon-dating researchers at Umeå University have estimated its age to a bewildering 9950 years [5].

This is a tree, an individual tree that is almost 11 times older than the oldest Western institution of higher learning [6], around 18 times older than Uppsala University and as much as 400 times older than CEMUS.

Universities, like trees, tend to be slow to change and react and there is definitely some sort of analogy to be found between the path-dependency of institutionalized thought (e.g. in the form of academic disciplines) and that of trunks and branches. C.P Snow’s two cultures of the humanities and science [7] might be seen as two great trunks on a tree that decided to go their separate ways, and then splitting again, and again, and again – further and further down reductionism road.

But then, as all metaphors, it probably should be abandoned and recognized for what it is – a metaphor. How are new fields and disciplines born? How is the university renewed? These are question that probably are better answered in other ways.

Forest of Lyngen #2

But what about CEMUS? Is a tree (or tree-woman) still a fitting image for what CEMUS has been over the past 25 years, and hopefully continue to be in the future? Well, I think so.
But a question that remains is if is a smaller tree, shaded by the older trees above, with our students and roots [8] holding CEMUS to the ground, and with branches and leaves reaching for the little sunlight that is let through the canopy [9]. Or is CEMUS rather that unruly quality of life in trees, which might make branches turn in new and unexpected directions, refusing to conform to dominant trajectories set forth by external or internal circumstances?

CEMUS Roots

Whatever CEMUS is, it was what stopped me in my tracks, spin me around and around, until I came to stand still, at least for a moment, and realize I wasn’t lost after all:

“Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows Where you are.
You must let it find you.” [10]

Note and references:
[1] Matsuo Basho was a Japanese poet who lived 1644-1694.
[2] The course was run in Swedish and was called Människan & Naturen. It is unfortunately no longer offered at CEMUS, but the syllabus can still be found here: http://www.uu.se/utbildning/utbildningar/selma/kursplan/?kKod=1MV001
[3] Peter Wohlleben (2016), The hidden life of trees. Greystone Books.
[4] Or your favorite word of choice when facing something you’d rather not discuss to deeply.
[5]Press Release from Umeå University: World’s Oldest living tree discovered in Sweden. April 16, 2018. http://info.adm.umu.se/NYHETER/PressmeddelandeEng.aspx?id=3061
[6] The University of Bologna was founded in 1088. The University of al-Qarawiyyin in Morocco was founded already in 859 but is still over 8 times younger than the Old Kjippen.
[7] Snow, C.P. (1959). The two cultures and the scientific revolution. Cambridge University Press.
[8] CEMUS’ student organization actually goes by the name CEMUS Roots.
[9] Around 3% in the average beech forest, and much less for the average interdisciplinary centre for sustainability research and education in the average university (such as Uppsala).
[10] The Poem is called ‘Lost’. It is an old Native American elder story rendered into modern English by David Wagoner, in The Heart Aroused – Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte, Currency Doubleday, New York, 1996.

Download PDF here

Collage by Dieter Urbach, 1974.

teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire in a different way [2]

And so we came here – to the point where our primary means to make sense of a messy present is through the futures we anticipate. Futures extrapolated, calculated, approximated, forecasted, backcasted, modelled, and dreamt. Futures brought to life in the present in visions, scenarios, hallucinations, performances, and as the measurable goals and targets in all those PDF-documents that govern humanity’s universalist aspirations.[3] Futures only occasionally truly desired, longed for; for the most part naïve dreams and equally naïve nightmares, eroded by accelerated change and suffocated by diminishing carbon budgets. Once-viable futures now become obsolete before they have had time to pass through peer-review: a mass-extinction of dreams and possible worlds for those of us who were somewhat recently born.

If we are ever to mobilize and materialize alternative futures that matter it is, in other words, crucial that we learn to desire more, better, differently – and faster. Narratives of unavoidable futures are often deployed to control and constrain the present, but the future may also be a creative and emancipatory domain. The “radical imagination” transforms the future into a space “to imagine the world, life and social institutions not as they are but as they might otherwise be” and then “bringing those possible futures ‘back’ to work on the present, to inspire action … today”.[4] But such efforts are often frustrated by our “incapacity to think outside the here and now”.[5] Our aptitude for foresight is limited by values, worldviews, paradigms, and a sheer lack of words.[6] Time and again, our collective anticipatory efforts converge on the two well-worn, but largely unproductive, narrative paths of either a status quo thinly iced with individualized behaviour change and miracle technologies, or – the end of the world.

This is the point where we should ask ourselves, as J. K. Gibson-Graham does, how we can create an more-than-academic practice that allows us to “become open to possibility rather than limits on the possible”.[7] CEMUS, I suggest, has cultivated possibility through a practice of pluralism based on participation, dialogue and debate.[8] Pluralism does not imply some form of sloppy “anything goes” relativism where all positions and “alternative facts” are equally valid. In contrast, pluralism-as-practice is a rigorous, disciplined operation, which requires us to “travel some distance beyond [our] own position in order to see reality from another point of view”.[9] Pluralistic practice is, to borrow from Frederic Jameson’s eloquent description of utopian form, a “meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality”.[10] By cultivating a discipline of examining, interrogating and reframing problems from the position of a range of different conflicting worldviews, aspirations, values and paradigms, and by rereading for difference to identify what is possible, we prepare the ground for “creativity to generate actual possibilities where none formerly existed”.[11]

In this, we can turn the broad and contested nature of sustainable development into a creative resource.[12] CEMUS is where political ecology meets resilience meets the self-help styled management platitudes from Harvard Business Review. We manage-our-energy-not-our-time as we turn green to gold, talk about the mountain, partake in a necessary revolution and review the latest ecological theory of unequal exchange. We close our eyes, get some damp soil and partly decomposed leaves in our cupped hands, breathe, we are not completely at ease when we – eyes still closed – walk in circles and bounce into each other while someone chants improvised poetry but that’s probably the point; we open our eyes and examine tax policy, the circular economy, and the merits of carbon capture and storage. We are the air aware, the engineers, the warriors, the alchemists; we are the diplomats with frequent flyer cards, the transition-preppers with local-resilient-life-boat-communities; we have blood on our hands and dirt under our fingernails; we are the shamans, the entrepreneurs, the feminist mansplainers; we are global citizens walking on the iron bridges of Uppsala. We get excited about A+++ fantastic washing machines and cheap red wine; we are always ready to make the business case for sustainability as a driver of innovation, to discuss the finer points of Schumpeterian underdevelopment and degrowth; we know how to find our way through almost any ecomodernist maze-in-the-air. We go to Norway each spring to kneel humbly before the flower at the tree line. We are the structures and the agencies; we are modern, pre-modern, mostly post-modern.

As we swirl and curl through this storm of desire, no one knows precisely where we will end up. What we are striving for is to make use all these divergent points of departure to critically examine the present and extend the range of conceivable futures. By “engaging with other ideas, with the multiplicity of ideas, we enter new spaces of possibility, spaces which were previously outside the realms of our imagination”.[13] Our aim is nothing less than to expand the space of the possible.

Such a practice of pluralism will not happen by itself, but requires structure, careful planning and facilitation. As Jeppe Læssøe asserts, participatory education is often nothing more than a “self-deceptive simulation” that serves to reinforce (instead of contesting) the discourses and values that are already dominant in society. To work, pluralism-as-practice therefore calls for a participation of a certain kind, a disciplined dialogue that brings up dilemmas, dissent and deliberation.[14]

I’ll be the first to admit how good it feels when a common understanding about messy social-environmental relationships starts to emerge in a group, when we get a language that we share so that we can reach each other.[15] In all courses there might be pockets of consensus, even a convergence of values and objectives of sorts from which change can be mobilized. But synthesis and redemption is not what we are here for: what we seek is dissonance, disagreement, disruption, trouble.[16] If we ever are to open up the future and the choices ahead for deliberation, that will be “predicated on not just the recognition but the positive encouragement of difference”.[17] We want countless ideas, visions and ontologies to clash all around us, and as we rise from the ashes it is imperative that we also dare to take our own normative standpoints, that we do not forget to desire.

For all I know that was why we came here in the first place: to re-educate desire. To desire (an academic practice that is kind of meaningful and fun). To desire more (there is more to life than a cheaper cup of coffee, we can always fight for that). To desire better (a more-than-human society; philosophy as a way of life where we practice radical solidarity through all our incompleteness and potential). To desire faster (before our dreams – and lives – dissipate). And above all to desire in a different way.

Notes and references
[1] A grant from Forum för ämnesdidaktiska studier at Uppsala University carved out the space where the reflections in this essay were initiated; it is acknowledged with gratitude.
[2] Miguel Abensour, translated by E.P. Thomson, quoted in Webb, Darren, ‘Educational Archaeology and the Practice of Utopian Pedagogy’, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2017, p. 2.
[3] For a discussion of anticipatory practices and anticipatory action, see Anderson, Ben, ‘Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies.’ Progress in Human Geography 34, no. 6 (2010)
[4] Haiven, Max, and Alex Khasnabish. The Radical Imagination : Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity, London: Zed Books Ltd, 2014, p. 3.
[5] Webb, Darren, ‘Educational Archaeology and the Practice of Utopian Pedagogy’, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2017, p. 4
[6] See, for example, Miller, Riel, ‘Futures Literacy: a Hybrid Strategic Scenario Method’, Futures, 39 (2007), 341–62 and O’Brien, Karen, ‘Global Environmental Change III: Closing the Gap Between Knowledge and Action’, Progress in Human Geography, 37 (2012), 587–96.
[7] Gibson-Graham, J-K, ‘Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for `Other Worlds’’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (2008), p. 614.
[8] I would argue that this is a dynamic effect of CEMUS’ educational model; for an introduction, see the chapters by Robert Österbergh and David O. Kronlid as well as Jakob Grandin in Hald, Matilda (ed.), Transcending Boundaries: How CEMUS is changing how we teach, meet and learn, (Uppsala: CEMUS, 2011). For an example of how participation may be designed, see Grandin, Jakob, Sanna Gunnarsson and Sara Andersson, ‘“It feels almost surreal”: being strategic about how we design participation in order to enlarge the space of the possible’ in the ActSHEN Booklet, available at http://blogs.helsinki.fi/action-for-sustainability/.
[9] Allan Meggill, quoted in Wals, Arjen E J, ‘Between Knowing What Is Right and Knowing That Is It Wrong to Tell Others What Is Right: on Relativism, Uncertainty and Democracy in Environmental and Sustainability Education’, Environmental Education Research, 16 (2010), p. 145
[10] Jameson, Frederic, Archeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2005), p. xii.
[11] Gibson-Graham, J-K, ‘Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for ‘Other Worlds’’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (2008), p. 614.
[12] On the contested and broad nature of sustainable development, see for example Hopwood, Bill, Mary Mellor, and Geoff O’Brien, ‘Sustainable Development: Mapping Different Approaches’, Sustainable Development, 13 (2005), 38–52, Sachs, Wolfgang, Planet Dialectics (Zed Books Ltd., 1999) Wals, Arjen E J, and Bob Jickling, ‘“Sustainability” in Higher Education: From Doublethink and Newspeak to Critical Thinking and Meaningful Learning’, International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 3 (2002), 221–32
[13] Osberg, Deborah, ‘“Enlarging the Space of the Possible” Around What It Means to Educate and Be Educated’, Complicity: an International Journal of Complexity and Education, 6 (2009), p. viii.
[14] See Læssøe, Jeppe, ‘Education for Sustainable Development, Participation and Socio‐Cultural Change’, Environmental Education Research, 16 (2010), 39–57
[15] See Johan Gärdebo’s entry for week 15 in the CEMUS Diaries.
[16] See Alexis Engström & Susanna Barrineau’s entry for week 12 in CEMUS Diaries.
[17] Healy, S., ‘Epistemological Pluralism and the “Politics of Choice”’, Futures, 35 (2003), p. 697.

Idre, April 17
The Earth Rights Conference in Sigtuna, April 21-22

“Beech, Oak, Chestnut, Ash. Good, good, good. Many have come. Now we must decide if the Ents will go to war.”

The world is alive. This is not a subject-object divided world. The search for intelligent life in the universe should really begin here, on planet Earth. Tree, fish, rock, mountain, river, ice on water, ice on land, cloud, sky, stars, flower, human, more-than-human. Can you hear them? The dead and dying? The living? See the destruction? Beauty? Smell the oil burning? Early spring magnolia white?

What would they say of CEMUS efforts to save the world over these last 25 years? How we have failed, and how we hopefully in some way have succeeded.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (not including other greenhouse gases) were at 357.86 ppm 1992, the year CEMUS started its first course Man and Nature (Människan och naturen). 25 years later levels have reached 410.28 ppm (April 18, 2017). Numbers are abstract and most of you reading this might not be natural scientists trained in atmospheric gases, but this change over 25 years is staggering. Remember Bill McKibben’s 350.org? 350 ppm as a target for what is possibly a safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Less humans live in extreme poverty 2017 than 1992 (www.gapminder.org). The number of US dollar billionaires were 233 in 1992, now in 2017 the number has climbed to 2 043 (www.forbes.com). There were 115 conflicts in the world in 1992, 142 in 2015, with non-state conflicts almost doubling (http://ucdp.uu.se/). More cars, hospitals, computers, universities, more things and building and roads and power plants. Less sea ice, less land ice, less species, less free-flowing rivers, less old-growth forests, less animals, plants, mountains – more industrial human.

But what would they say? The more-than-human. And why haven’t they fought back against industrial civilisation and its expansion? Or maybe that’s what they are doing, playing the long game, fighting back and at the same time waiting for signs of weaknesses in human determination and infrastructure. Waiting and joining up with allies, such as the many students and other people that have passed through CEMUS during 25 years. We’re in this fight together, fighting for a beautiful world full of life, companionship, fun, meaningful relationships, love and passion.

Hopefully our failures can be mitigated and lived with, at best our successes will wait for us in a distant future, and maybe CEMUS have saved some small, small part of the world.

But what would they say? The more-than-human. One voice, for all of Earth, might say:

“The crucified planet Earth, should it find a voice and a sense of irony, might now well say of our abuse of it, “Forgive them, Father, They know not what they do.”

The irony would be that we know what we are doing.

When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, ”It is done.” People did not like it here.”

Another might say:

“They had voices of their own. Saruman. A wizard should know better! There is no curse in Elvish, Entish or the tongues of men for this treachery! My business is with Isengard tonight. With rock and stone. […] Rárum-rum! Come my friends. The Ents are going to war. It is likely that we go to our doom. The last march of the Ents.”

Run For Your Life

In 2009 me and my daughter were on our way to the climate meeting COP15 in Copenhagen. Everything was at stake, it was now or never. And I was afraid to bring her across the Öresund bridge: Police violence on the news; stories told by my friends of what happened. We all left COP15 running, some by feet and others by flight. I ran from 2009 and my daughter was left with the future.

The violence has continued and it is a slow violence.⁠(1) With a combination of overgrowth and under-nourishing species go extinct and climates change. But the violence against oneself is the most dangerous. When I cannot understand, explain or change it becomes hard to feel at all. That violence you can never run from.

When my friends, activists and politicians, ask for change very little has changed in their message: “How do we solve this problem?” Generations are kept hostage; grown-ups anticipating solutions and children anticipated to be the solution.

Is it coming soon, the climate change? For some it is already here. It has been a slow narrative, ancient long before Copenhagen.⁠(2) And the threats will remain long after the COP-meetings. I do not wish to solve environmental problems, I want to live them. I want to say to my daughter that I have lived the change and that the slow violence against ourselves finally is over. I want to feel my stride rip up the ground beneath me. It is not for climate meetings, politicians, or manifestations by activists that I am running. I am running for my life.*

A student on a similar path to mine once said that all students come to CEMUS with different ideas but leave with similar ones. The similarity, I believe, is that one learns a language for expressing feelings and thoughts about a world of environmental fragility. The language taught us to speak of things dying and to listen for ways of living, still, in that world. It is a language we share but that can be spoken using many individual variations of words and movements. CEMUS is part of that movement because its students keep it in motion, always learning. Together we have learned how to run. Run for our lives.

——————

* This text is based on a contribution to Run For Your Life⁠ (3).

(1) Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011).
(2) Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change. Under- standing Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
(3) Run For Your Life: http://www2.runforyourlife.nu/en/about-2/

My interaction with CEMUS has in many ways being a series of life changing experiences. I will always remember my first semester of studying sustainable development; it was like being hit in the head by a well-hidden, scary and inconvenient truth. It hurt a little, yes. But more than that, it opened my eyes to see a world of amazing people, fighting for what they believe in. I instantly knew that in some way, I wanted to join. At some point during this semester, our course coordinators gave us the most exciting assignment I had ever had. We were to express something about sustainable development in art! Another life changing event for me to realize that, to find sustainability, no one should be forced to choose between creativity and ”serious stuff”. Instead, we should encourage each other to always combine the two.

At the time for this assignment, the Green Revolution had recently become a symbol of evil to me. A symbol of climate change, hunger, poverty, capitalism, inequality and the disgusting power play of ’the western world’. The Green Revolution, known and awarded to have ended the world hunger… Well hidden is the truth about all those peasants who lost their ability to provide for there families, lost their lands, lost their honor, and lost their lives when committing suicide. I embraced the opportunity to express my frustration and anger in art. And that’s how Poor Man’s Kingdom came into being.

The big world – a world of climate change, political turbulence, inequality, violence, environmental damage and dysfunctional globalism – is a place where you’re engagement and will to fight is needed desperately. But it is a place where you can easily be consumed by dark tidings and disasters, loose your spirit, wellbeing and joy of life.

The small world – a world of creativity, friendship, love and joy – is a place where your actions may or may not make a difference. Where your stories may or may not be remembered. But it is a place where it is essential for you to spend time, in order to keep well, enjoy life and see the beautiful things in this world.

A wise old man, a lecturer at CEMUS, once explained this to me and emphasized the importance of spending at least as much time in the small world as in the big world. Now, to all of you who have recently or a very long time ago, been hit in the head… Keep up the good fight, but try not to loose yourselves in that scary and inconvenient truth.

Thank you CEMUS for helping me finding the way I want to live my life – professionally as well as personally. I feel certain that without your guidance, I would not be as knowing, as worried, as caring and as happy as I am today.

X is for the people that haven’t been heard, those who speak Dari, Mandarin, Persian, Swahili, Spanish, Serbian, Swedish.

For Valentina that never could make it into this university because she doesn’t speak 
that language, even though she speaks the third most spoken language in the world.

For those who couldn’t or weren’t encourage to enter the world of education but teaches things anyway. For those who didn’t learn to read or write but manage to communicate important insights.

X is for the visionary ones with a million wonderful ideas that never were discovered.

For him that never became that scientist or pianist.

For those who write books signed with others names.

X is for those who had to make hard decisions.

For Antonia, whom I had the chance to be for a week at the web page enotroszapatos.org, where you live the life as someone else. Leave my family to go and study at a university far away in Bogotá or stay at home and become a community leader.

For those that not even make it into the books of the Global environmental history course – a course that aims more at looking at the angels of the history.

X is for my grandfather who begged his neighbours for money to go and study at the university to become an engineer. Who later wrote books about steel. Superman, steel man my grandfather.

X is the space.

How can we make space for difference in a world screaming for words spelled in one way?

Education for her to educate others so that they can educate her. Welcome to the world of possibilities! Sadly, you didn’t have that key. But one hole in the net, some silver coins, an ace of hearts and you slipped thorough the space. I couldn’t be more shocked or speechless.

The university needs to return to big questions; it must engage in public crises and engage in the translation of what it means to be a learner in this age of climate change. ©Christelle Enault, Institute of Light

Did you know that there is no potential for learning without dissonance? That it’s only in times of pedagogical crisis that we can shift our frames of understanding? These are statements more and more commonly expressed by researchers – and while we don’t necessarily (dis)agree we still ask ourselves: What would make anyone believe this to be true? It is, we assume, a very specific form of learning that they are talking about.

Two things: First, there is no consensus on how learning happens or how it happens best. Second, we find ourselves in the mess which we call climate change, and in order to prepare current and future generations to deal with climate change, some educational institutions are working with education for sustainable development, a term that is equally contentious and used to various ends, some for better and others for worse.

CEMUS’s conspicuous usage of ‘sustainable development’ in all of its courses can make one wonder, what is actually different here? Is CEMUS free from institutional constructions of the term that result in nothing except for ‘business as usual’? Hardly. We may never know exactly what all the students, coordinators, professors, researchers, and so on, take with them from CEMUS education and CEMUS is part of a very old, traditional university structure.

Yet, CEMUS invites translation. It invites agency and creates conditions to “re-learn [ways] of teaching and learning” (Wals and Jickling 2002, p.228). In a way, it further invites learners to “re-gain the agency we need to move towards the crisis rather than away from it” (Houwer 2011, p.111). The sometimes abrupt realization that your courses are actually being led by students and not professors of sustainable development is the first clue that, as a place where old traditions may not have such a stronghold, CEMUS education offers opportunities for different translations of sustainable development. The moment the “sage on the stage” disappears and students are invited to plan and lead courses is the moment where the idea that someone is going to tell you what it means to be “sustainable” vanishes and the moment where uncertainty, and where crisis may emerge.

But how can crisis in the classroom possibly be constructive? Houwer argues that, “Crises, when accessed, defamiliarize normative frames of reference and reveal the structural, historical and political roots of the situation…[and] produce a potentially pedagogical cognitive dissonance” (2011, p.112). Students that learn in and through crises do not return to their pre-crisis framings, but instead re-frame and make the world anew. In this process, the learner cannot merely feel the crisis, but must also act and reflect in order for it to be transformative. This involves becoming a subject (as opposed to a passive object) and choosing to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway 2014).

“The urgent task for schools is not to respond to ‘the climate crisis.’ Rather, the task is to learn how to learn with and through any public crisis” (Houwer 2011, p.115). In that sense, the university needs to return to big questions; it must engage in public crises and engage in the translation of what it means to be a learner in this age of climate change. So thank you CEMUS, for your pedagogical crisis and for all your trouble. We hope we can stay with it.

References
Haraway, D. (2014) Lecture: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble. In Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet on 05/09/2014. http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/

Houwer, R. (2011) Learning Freedom: The pedagogical potential of crisis. Journal for Activism in Science & Technology Education, 3(1), 109-117.

Wals, A. & Jickling, B. (2002) “Sustainability” in higher education: From doublethink and newspeak to critical thinking and meaningful learning. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 3(3), 221-232.

I heard it over and over again. Think globally, act locally. But I never really got it. Or perhaps I didn’t listen. It sounded like nice words. In a big scary world.

Now I see the world shrinking. At my doorstep. In my office. I meet refugees, asylum seekers, families, babies, musicians, football players, dreamers. I talk to them, but mostly I listen. And the stories are beautiful and gruesome at the same time. Like the boy, who at 16 years of age fled through the Sahara desert. He had one bottle of water to keep him from drying out. At one point, a guy in the same group asked him for water. The boy with the water made a quick judgement, realised that his own chance of surviving dramatically decreased if he gave it away. So he kept it to himself, and survived. The other guy died. Or another time, when a woman started crying when I asked her how she was doing. After a few seconds she told me that they were tears of joy. A man had never asked her how she was doing before. In her world, that was rational, the way things worked.

“The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.”

― Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust

The modern world, that I grew up in, gave me boxes and boundaries. It also gave me the privilege of never having to deal with such a dilemma as the boy in the desert faced. But every time I meet someone who comes from a different world than mine, on the other side of all the boundaries. With different boxes. Every time this meeting occurs, the boundaries are faded out. The boxes are rearranged. My world is rearranged.

When the world comes to your door step, it shrinks. Overwhelmed by emotions, it grows smaller. Let it change. Let it challenge you. Let the rationality be challenged. Think globally, act locally, tell stories. And listen to the ones waiting to be told.

Storytelling in Bo, Norway, as part of the Life Philosophy course.

Practicing what we preach: The COP22 delegation (#minivandiaries) getting ready to embark on our 5 day drive down to Morocco to attend the COP22 negotiations. We felt it was hypocritical to emit huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere to fly to Morocco to attend a Climate Change discussion, so we spent extra time, money and efforts to drive a minivan from Sweden to Morocco. Classic CEMUS style.

“muse” : to become absorbed in thought; to think about something carefully and thoroughly; a state of deep thought or dreamy abstraction.

Today, all the scientific evidence is telling us that we cannot afford to delay the reckoning with climate change. With each passing day, the case grows more compelling and the costs of inaction grow beyond anything that anyone with conscience or common sense should be willing to contemplate. Studying Sustainability puts an interdisciplinary perspective on the world, its’ finite resources and of our human impacts. The world has learnt to judge success and prosperity by a monetary figure often gained by the exploitation of fellow humans, or our environment. But we need to rethink this.

And this is what CEMUS inspires us to do.

“Muse”:

To meditate. To ponder. To ruminate.

To consider or examine attentively or deliberately.

To think about something carefully or thoroughly.

CEMUS is a quest to find answers. The big questions that loom over us relating to climate change, environment, energy, poverty, economic development, power structures and more that are forever debated with never a concrete solution.

It is a response to the ‘too-hard-basket’ excuse, pardoning those in power for overseeing the hurdles of our time.

It is group of impassioned people motivated to tackle the impending problems of the world, which can too often be overseen or brushed aside.

It is a response to the top down usual teaching methods. It appreciates everyone’s diverse background, insights and inspirations in their own ways.

It is about transcending boundaries, pursuing individual initiatives and defining our own questions.

CEMUS calls for collaboration. In this individualistic world we live in, it is a refreshing touch. And this is what happens when thousands of minds come together.

It is a collective identity. It is a network of like-minded people.

It is that feeling of acceptance. A feeling that you have found what you were looking for.

CEMUS is about becoming a someone and not a something. Someone who challenges the most habitual trains of thought, who can take an external perspective and who has developed their own voice and morals. Not a something that has emerged from a professionalization process without an interdisciplinary perspective.

It is a “meeting place.” It is a magnet for all those individuals who seek a sense of community, inspiration and a platform for taking action together.

CEMUS does as it preaches. (Even if this means driving for 5 days from Sweden to Morocco with 9 people in a minivan trying to avoid flying in order to minimise our CO2 footprint).

It is so much more than Pass / Fail. It is long nights in the CEMUS library, a full schedule with activist groups, gardening days, petitioning, sign making, dumpster diving, documentary screening etc etc shenanigans.

It inspires those not only who sit within the classrooms, it permeates far beyond the university walls. A butterfly effect creating ripples.

It is a blur of accents from every corner of the globe, a buzzing mind full of never ending questions seeking answers.

It is a collective of cynics, social reformers, activists, optimists and engaged compassionate human beings.

It is not static, but ever changing with the contributions of each group of students and teachers who help it to evolve.

CEMUS is our home away from home.

CEMUS is our muse.

So happy birthday CEMUS. 25 years of inspiring students and co-habitants on this finite and ever evolving planet. Though you look not a day older, you are more the wiser.

“Environmental education must be an exercise in applied hope that equips young people with the skills, aptitudes, analytical wherewithal, creativity and stamina to dream, act and lead heroically. To be effective on a significant scale, however, the creative energy of the rising generations must be joined with strong and bold institutional leadership to catalyse a future better than the one in prospect.”

David Orr*

Communal action and change: Friendships form at CEMUS and with a common goal and motivation for change, group actions evolve. Pictured above is the “climate justice” march held in the cold winter months of Uppsala prior to setting off for the long drive down to Morocco with the COP22 delegation.

*Orr, “What is Higher Education Now?” The State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures from Consumerism to Sustainability, London, Earthscan, 2009, p.82.