NASC 1001 week 6 Assignment Essay
Environmental Science Reflections and Social Change
Education is not simply for the individual and for professionalization, but for community and for living in this world where all is not predetermined and secure. Education needs to go deeper than trying to know everything and must help us engage what we do not know.NASC 1001 week 6 Assignment Essay
Education is neither the subjugation or simplification of meaning, nor the elimination of mystery. I need to feel the land where I am, its life and history, its story in order to open up my story. There needs to be time for input, reflection, analysis, conversation, discernment (head and heart) and clear community action. Children are not prepared for life – for living – if they do not experience this approach to engaging and learning. It’s not just IQ, it’s I care, which makes for living.
Governments have to act and not be so far from communities in need. We learn the survival and balance of rural households is inseparable from access to local resources and livelihoods, and access to the economy that does not simply exploit people and the natural resources. The national economy cannot be divorced from ecology. The responsibility grows with global complexity for which we still lack the systems to address the emerging issues. Though vulnerable communities may show resilience, government and society must support them through better access to safe housing and in meeting basic needs. Security of life and livelihood has to have priority over the present support for economic growth and ever-greater consumerism that buys until ‘it knows not what.’
The broader reflection on the environmental “signs of the times” confirms this. Discerning our relationship with and responsibility for the earth’s natural systems is basic for the sustainability of all human life. Attitudes and the political and unspoken sensitivities, not just the facts, determine decisions. There are critical attitudes that are changing but there are evident struggles in our national and global societies and in our bureaucracies to give these relationships greater attention and to make the difference now, not later. The predicament today is both in society’s disconnectedness with the environment and in the processes of how we undertake decisions.
I work in an institute, the Environmental Science for Social Change, and with government as part of the scientific community in the Philippines. We share the assumption that people hold a scientific understanding of the “ecological crisis” without pushing it to the extremes of imminent doom. Our climate-based disasters are not merely a point of debate. In our situation, they have very real and tragic consequences especially for the poor who always take the brunt of such occurrences. The scientific community acknowledges this and there is greater attention to method and broader accountability for effective implementation.NASC 1001 week 6 Assignment Essay
Science contributes much, and so too does policy. Yet it is the relationships we share in doing and applying science and adapting it to meet people’s needs – the people most in need – that shapes what we can do and makes us who we are. The sharing and development of capacity at all levels – capacity networking – is now the buzzword in making a more rapid paradigm shift in the human development world. Why I engage and “do” science is because I share a hope that is not based simply on scientific enquiry, which is essential, but also on the gratitude for life I learn from those who suffer.
In this way we must understand the physical and climatic human disasters of earthquakes, droughts and floods. Scientific knowledge of the risks is vital and preventative action is best, but in the real world is not always achieved. A culture of creation provides part of the context of doing science with a human face. We need to engage the poor who feel powerless most of the time. Those who suffer have a right to ask questions, not to be quiet, and to complain in bewilderment and faith to government and to God.
At times it is too simple to blame or judge where knowledge does not meet action. At a deeper level it is painful to survive a situation of hopelessness with hope. The afflicted face the insecurity and suffering and seek Jesus in their passion and go on. And so our response is not simply in the realm of science but also to care whatever happens, and to care enough that it changes our lives.
So how can we live the confrontation of marginal communities where there is a sustained lack of basic services and inclusion, reinforced by the ecological and social imbalances that the economy creates through logging, plantation, mining or damming? There is the immediate advocacy needed and a network that supports this in action. But more critically, there is also the need to build a broader consensus for a culture of care.
Reading the signs of the time is about going through a fundamental experience of the present, and being able to communicate the matters of importance and necessary direction. Prophecy is not about the future but about what is now most important and doing it; sticking by what I have understood with others as that which makes a difference to the quality of life. The understanding is not simply relative but is of contextual importance. It often holds a truth like the rights of indigenous people so long ignored in the face of greater development and it is necessary to stick with this experience, give witness and seek the wisdom by which to live it out so that it will be.NASC 1001 week 6 Assignment Essay
This article is reprinted with permission from The Windhover, the Philippine Jesuit magazine, Year XIV, Volume 2, October 2012. As described in The Windhover, the above text is an excerpt from a paper entitled “Amongst Cultures, Amongst Creation.” As a hydrologist, Pedro studies the water cycle (rainfall, infiltration, runoff, evapotranspiration, discharge) and ‘natural’ events like landslides that cause human disasters due to social ‘malplacement,’ usually of the poor. He also works on the local interpretation of national government polices and where local government can be moved to implement basic needs servicing to communities. This often includes access to water and forest resources, and reduction of flood vulnerability. He lives with an Indigenous community in Bendum, Bukidnon where he founded the Apu Palamguwan Cultural Education Center, a pioneer in the use of mother tongue-based education for Indigenous children.NASC 1001 week 6 Assignment Essay