How the Liberal Arts Can Instruct the Way Forward in Our Climate Crisis.
Ann Siqveland, MLA 2022
The possibility mindset we need for future world-making is unlocked by the very principles of a liberal arts education. Humanistic inquiry imbues a curiosity ethic, inviting students to challenge "what is" and work towards "what can be." The increasingly complex challenges facing society today are often rooted in unexamined narratives that presume troubling ideas of relationship. A liberal arts education empowers students to revisit and revise these narratives, thereby building a foundation to address complicated problems and realize a more just and sustainable future.
Worldviews –– narratives about human-nature relationships –– shape ecological outcomes. In the Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) program, I learned to deconstruct relationship narratives that have led to climate crisis and to champion alternative narratives that envision more sustainable human-nature relationships.
The climate crisis has been a mission-orientation in my career since 2007. I have focused on decarbonizing the economy through the development of renewable energy and electric vehicle infrastructure projects. A passionate outdoorswoman since childhood, I have found this work to be personally rewarding due to the professional impact I have had on one of the most critical issues of our time: protecting and restoring the natural environment that is home to all species.
After twelve years of working in cleantech, I had grown increasingly frustrated; technological solutions had become more efficient and economical, yet our climate crisis had only worsened. I wondered: What is holding dominant society back from responding to this ever-encroaching threat with the required speed, and, moreover, what can be done to address it at an adequate scale?
Longing to understand the root problems, I enrolled in the MLA program at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). As I explored the prevailing dualistic narrative of humans existing separate from nature, I worked to connect the dots on how this disassociation manifested and led to our contemporary crisis. Relatedly, I explored initiatives that have been designed for redress. This culminated in a thesis that wove together a holistic, interdisciplinary, and synthesized answer to the questions that vexed me.
Through my intellectual inquiry, I deepened my conviction that the world’s environmental crisis is rooted in a long-standing cultural narrative that predicates humans as being not only separate from but superior to nature. This narrative is one often described by Diné leader, Pat McCabe, Woman Stands Shining, as a "power-over paradigm." Appearing not only in the relationship between humans and nature, the "power-over paradigm" is a common narrative in other relationships too, which we've seen beget a long history of oppressive practices in the form of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism, to name a few.
I dove into the study of this dominant Western worldview related to nature. I found it historically espoused through Ancient Greek and European philosophical traditions as well as some religious ideologies. In turn, I found it expressed through the instruments of colonialism and capitalism. Examining primary and secondary sources spanning millennia, I observed that the relationship narrative that sees nature as a material resource designed for human utility has caused declining planetary health. It has led to damaging environmental practices manifesting into twin crises: climate change and the accelerating extinction of species due to biodiversity loss.
At the same time, I discovered hopeful prompts in these historic records for addressing our ecological crises, taking a cue from Albert Einstein, who said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." It is my informed belief that the world-making of a just, healthy, and sustainable climate future hinges upon social and environmental redress premised upon understanding and reforming the systems that suppressed the more sustainable worldviews in the first place. I came to the conclusion, as have many other scholars and activists, that decolonization is required to facilitate progress.
The decolonization I speak of is a two-step process. First, an understanding and deconstruction of harming beliefs. Second, a reconstruction through action. Abandoning the view that nature is a resource to be exploited for human benefit is the deconstruction work. The reconstruction work is centering worldviews that see humans as a part of nature, interdependent with other species for mutual long-term benefit and survival. In addition, reparative action, such as land return to Indigenous communities, is an important step in restitution for addressing a long history of social injustice.
Through enriching and humbling self-discovery, intellectual decolonization can be borne out in praxis in the next step –– collective systems change — which, taken together, can heal our relationship to nature and foster futurity for the environment and humanity alike. Through my experience in the MLA program, I found that a liberal arts education is the best mechanism to initiate this self-discovery process.
Human-caused climate change is a complex problem due to its manifold intertwined roots –– spanning science, philosophy, religion, and even art –– that have collectively contributed to our state of crisis. The liberal arts serve as the connective tissue bridging these multiple disciplines. Studying them enabled me to unearth interdisciplinary ideas in order to more deeply grasp how we arrived here — and how we might move forward.
There are innumerable organizations doing groundwork in the arena of centering narratives that heal human-nature relationships. For example, the NDN Collective is facilitating narrative change and reimagining our relationship to each other and the land through enlivening Indigenous nature-based epistemologies and advocating for landback to Indigenous stewardship. The Doughnut Economics movement is a framework for moving away from an economic model that is based solely on quantitative growth, pivoting to a sustainable model that factors in qualitative elements to improve social and environmental conditions. These examples are just a few of the organizations making "good trouble" that I offer to show the range of praxis that is underway across the healing spectrum.
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Working in cleantech, my pursuit of an MLA degree was not a traditional path. While enrolled in the program, it sparked questions from my community: Why not a STEM degree or an MBA, programs that could have direct day-to-day “practical” application? No doubt those paths could benefit my career. However, for me, the humanistic inquiry of the liberal arts is more important than ever because of the mounting problems we are collectively facing. Climate change is rooted in our relationship to the earth; but other problems we are tackling as a society –– racism, poverty, biodiversity loss –– are also rooted in relationships, our relationships to one another as humans and with our non-human kindreds. The liberal arts take on these challenges and help us understand how they came about — an imperative step in formulating a plan for addressing them.
Accordingly, the study of the liberal arts offers so much more than mere personal enrichment. Students are taught early about Aristotle's belief that contemplation is not only the highest form of happiness and the path to a virtuous life, but is grounded in a desire for knowledge, something that binds us all as humans. Students quickly encounter that happiness by discovering highly interpretive ancient and modern ideas that stoke the fires of curiosity. This liberating mental exercise not only instills confidence but spurs independent thought and capacity to recognize patterns and continuity across a range of disciplines, all of which serve society in more profound ways than simple “pleasure.” Further, they develop essential life skills and tools, including reasoning capabilities and sharpened critical thinking skills that enable students to cogently understand and communicate.
There is transformative power to the study of liberal arts. They help us not only dream up imaginal possibilities, such as in the visual and literary arts, but also to shape real-world solutions in the social and natural sciences. The liberal arts not only inform, but weave together data and facts with creative arts and storytelling to help us make sense of a holistic and interconnected world. They prompt emotional responses — connecting students with their individual values and motivations to effect real and positive change in the world; making it personal. Simultaneously, the liberal arts make the world a bigger place by building the foundation of knowledge needed to bring about reform, which is what I find to be motivating as I integrate my learning into my livelihood.
Having built a career focused on deconstructing the carbon economy by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, my experience at JHU helped shape my understanding of the world by interlinking decarbonization to other necessary deconstruction work. To address our climate crisis, what’s called for is a paradigm shift in beliefs and values that no longer centers on a utilitarian view of nature but rather embraces nature as the underpinning of our very existence; a holistic change in reference point that elevates worldviews with the type of ecological conscience that holds all species as equal members of the biotic community in reciprocal relationship. Deconstructing the harmful hierarchical narrative in the human-nature relationship, as well as other relationship narratives that lead to toxic “-isms," is a critical step in future-building toward "what can be" with the aim of a more just, inclusive, and equitable society.
Ann Siqveland is focused on climate action and decarbonization through her 17-year professional dedication to the clean energy sector. She graduated from the Johns Hopkins University Master of Liberal Arts program in May 2022.