Blogs

Letter of Preparation to Students Before Our Global Education Trip to Taiwan

By Carter Latendresse posted 01-23-2016 01:13 PM

  

Preparing for Our Trip to Taiwan

—Carter Latendresse

January 22, 2016


In a little under two months, we are going to venture out together on a Catlin Gabel School global trip to Taiwan. Before we do so, let us pause to consider the nature of our Taiwan trip in particular and the nature of school global trips in general. We each have a notion of what will occur; we each have predictions. Part of the fun of trips like this, though, is that so much is unknown. The universe in its immensity seems to be beckoning us to take a leap into it. We will be leaping together, of course, but I would like to direct your attention first to the global part of global trip. What is the globe? Who are we? What are we doing here?


First, please examine the photograph below.

Second, please read the excerpt from Carl Sagan.


The Pale Blue Dot of Earth

This image of Earth is one of 60 frames taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 14, 1990 from a distance of more than 6 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. In the image the Earth is a mere point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Our planet was caught in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the Sun. This image is part of Voyager 1's final photographic assignment that captured family portraits of the Sun and planets.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.


The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.


Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.


The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Sagan puts into astronomical and historical perspective the global part of global trip. We live on this globe, on the only known planet supporting life. We as homo sapiens sapiens have evolved over the last 200,000 years or so, proving to be fabulously successful as animals on this planet. Organic agriculture, air travel, air conditioning, day care centers, solar panels, Instagram, medical care, the dramatic arts and theater—the list of our accomplishments could stretch on into next month, next year. Unfortunately, we have also mismanaged our precious host and our relationship with it. Swelling global population over the last century, war, poverty, epidemic disease, and human-caused climate change (and the attendant, interrelated problems of topsoil loss, deforestation, water shortage, global hunger, species extinction, and habitat loss) all combine to paint a grim picture—if we maintain our gaze and don’t look away—requiring urgent action. Despite our evolution as a species and despite the many amazing modern human accomplishments, we as humans cannot continue business as usual. With each new extreme weather event, each new hectare turning to sand after land mismanagement, each new drought and subsequent famine, each new wave of ecological refugees or wartime refugees becoming homeless and seeking asylum, planet Earth is telling us in no uncertain terms that we as a species must change or our species will begin withering on the vine rather than flourishing in abundance as we once assumed we were destined to. There are simply too many problems that act synergistically with one another to stay passive and indifferent.


Wait, give an example. I don’t believe what you’re saying.


Let me use the example of a simple banana to illustrate the synergistic, dire problems I am claiming exist. When I purchase a conventionally grown banana at Safeway in Portland from Ecuador, I create a demand for bananas that the bananas growers in Ecuador register, which stimulates them to supply more bananas to me. Because they are growing bananas with conventional methods, they are using nitrogen heavy fertilizers, which help the bananas to grow, but which also wash into their water tables and streams and create algae blooms in bays at the delta ends of their watersheds. These algae blooms kill fish and other marine mammals, which then affect the communities living along the bays who have relied on fishing for both sustenance and income for generations. In addition to affecting these people, my banana purchase also insists that it be created, packaged, and shipped 4,000 miles to the Safeway at which I shop. At each stage of harvesting, packaging, transport, advertising, and marketing, fossil fuels are used to run engines of one kind or another to produce horsepower and electricity to supply not only the desire to buy the banana, but the machinery to package, advertise, and transport that fresh, unbruised brilliant yellow banana to the shelf at Safeway. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas emitted when fossil fuels are burned, and these greenhouse gas emissions have pushed global temperature rise to dangerous levels, causing the aforementioned topsoil loss, deforestation, water shortage, global hunger, species extinction, and habitat loss. Therefore, not only does my economic decision to buy the banana have a negative environmental effect on the local aquifers, streams, rivers, and bays of Ecuador, it also has a negative global effect on our planet by producing more carbon dioxide emissions that are causing the global temperature to rise. Furthermore, just as my economic decision to purchase the banana has environmental consequences, it also has a social consequence in the lives of the fishermen and women who once were able to live in Ecuador along the bays but who now can no longer earn their dinners or their living from fishing, and they must move to a poor neighborhood, or even a slum, in a large Ecuadoran city. My purchase may be causing another ecological refugee and a poorer life for displaced, now unemployed parents and their kids in new schools in the city.


In a bitter irony, then, in seeking to ease my hunger by purchasing the banana here in Portland, I am perhaps causing more hunger, more poverty, more social upheaval, and more Earth degradation elsewhere.


At this point, many throw up their hands and mutter, What’s the point, then! Everything we do has negative effects!


Teachers answer that it’s more complicated than this knee-jerk reaction. The problems are serious and pressing—yes, but giving up is not an option, nor is dichotomous simplification. Besides, one can’t simply do nothing: even in turning away we are acting. Worse, turning away actually condones the environmental degradation, social upheaval, and economic calamity.


I would urge us to stay brave and confront our shared global problems as a group, to stand together and to stay clear-eyed and pure-hearted about this, humble and honest. Let’s also recognize, too, as Michael Pollan suggests, that we aren’t saints, and we can’t solve global warming by refusing to buy one banana, one time. We do, however, have three choices a day on what we eat, and over a lifetime our choices add up. Consider, too, that we can and do, in fact, make good choices every day when we choose a vegetable-based meal over a meat-based meal, an organic fruit over a conventionally grown fruit, a local food over a food shipped thousands of miles. If we have access to these choices and if we can afford them, many of us make these choices many times every day. In fact, then, we are working to solve global warming. We often times don’t give ourselves credit for our own decisions and actions. It’s time we started doing that too.


Now, let’s complicate our thought process about our daily decisions by going away from the subject of food and looking instead at air travel, specifically at our air travel to Taiwan. We will load seventeen people onto airplanes in two months and get carried 12,600 miles there and back again. David Suzuki, the acclaimed scientist, environmentalist, and broadcaster, reminds us that “Although aviation is a relatively small industry, it has a disproportionately large impact on the climate system. It accounts for four to nine per cent of the total climate change impact of human activity. But at a time when we urgently need to reduce our impact, greenhouse gas emissions from aviation continue to grow. For example, since 1990, CO2 emissions from international aviation have increased 83 percent.” We have a paradox, obviously, then: for in traveling to Taiwan to interact with others to see how we can collaborate on solving our most pressing global problems, we are unintentionally contributing to one of our most pressing global problems.


Again, let’s please not throw up our hands and mutter, What’s the point, then! Everything we do has negative effects!


Instead, as Joanna Macy and Molly Brown suggest in their book Coming Back to Life, let us start in Stage One, where we focus not on what’s wrong but on rather what’s right. Let’s focus on the things we are grateful for and people whom we love, on the choices and actions others and we are making and doing that are helping the world. After firmly placing all this gratitude and love, all the daily positive practices, all the people, places, things, and ideals into the center of our consciousness, let’s move to Stage Two, what Macy and Brown call Honoring Our Pain, which includes taking seriously the naturally occurring feelings of guilt, anger, fear, and powerlessness that surface when we consider the big problems like global (over)population, war, poverty, epidemic disease, and human-caused climate change. When these negative emotions surface, let’s please try to remember that they are instinctual and predictable to us as humans. Let’s not downplay these feelings, but rather honor them by not turning away from them. Once we listen to the complaints from ourselves and others, we can move together into Stage Three, which Macy and Brown identify as Seeing the World with New Eyes in order to move away from what David Korten calls the business-as-usual “extractive economy” that has caused pollution, economic inequality, species extinction, and global warming. Macy, Brown, Korten, and your Catlin Gabel teacher chaperones would have us move toward a “Living Earth Community Economy” that is responsive to people and ecosystems around the world, an economy that inspires a new planetary consciousness where we make choices understanding the impacts that those choices have on others and Earth. Environmental concerns and concerns for the wellbeing of people come first in this new economy and planetary consciousness, followed by financial concerns.


In Stage One we may note that we at Catlin Gabel are grateful for delicious food, clean water, reliable medical care, quality education, international air travel, and our Taiwanese hosts that will feed and care for us for a few weeks in March of 2016. Each of these is a gift beyond compare. In Stage Two natural negative emotions will bubble up, though, and we may think, Most people will never travel in an airplane in their lives. Most have never had a hot shower, gone to the movies in a theater, or been to a Starbucks. Why do I get these things and most people don’t? Why do Americans account for 4.5% of the world’s population but produce 16% of the world’s greenhouse gases? We should change so that we only produce our fair share of greenhouse gases so that global warming that we create doesn’t cause more extreme weather events, more droughts, more famines, more ecological refugees. Maybe we shouldn’t even go to Taiwan!


This is the black dog one encounters in the dark night of the soul that is Stage Two. Let’s remember that in Stage Two, though, we should honor our pain by not turning away from either our own discomfort or the discomfort that our relatively privileged lifestyles forces onto those, especially in the global South, who are not as privileged as we are.


I bring these up in order to stimulate gratitude for the privileges, families, and cultural infrastructures we were born into rather than to stimulate guilt, which is a negative emotion that more often than not causes people to turn away, to turn inward, and to continue our negative behaviors. Gratitude, on the other hand, seeks to share, to move outward, to connect, to fix problems and correct negative behaviors.


It’s vital to start with gratitude so that we can buoy ourselves through the systems thinking analysis of our global trip to Taiwan. Let’s remember Suzuki’s measurement that CO2 emissions from international aviation have increased 83 percent since 1990. Let’s also acknowledge that it is people like us—people who now attend and once attended prestigious independent schools—who can afford international aviation.


So we’re the problem, then? Everything is all our fault?


No.


As teachers chaperoning an international trip, we want to teach hope, problem solving, and Systems Thinking. We want you as students to look at the world with the understanding that environment, society, and economics are all part of the same thing, not isolated phenomenon, issues, or subject matters. We want you to see that all of our decisions have impacts on society, the economy, and on the environment—because these three seemingly disparate sectors are one, not three. Economic decisions have social and environmental consequences, just as all social decisions have environmental and economic consequences, and so on. The triad is never broken in the analysis because the triad is never broken in the “real world.” Furthermore, it must be underscored that not all three sectors in this triad are equal. Environmental considerations should take primacy, as all earthly economies and societies have their roots in the environment. As bodily creatures who create material living spaces in the tangible world, everything we can see, smell, hear, touch, and taste has its beginnings in the environment. No environment, no economy and no society. Because the environment underlies both economy and society, all our jobs and other needs like food, shelter, and clothing come from nature. When we degrade the environment with carbon emissions and pollution, we degrade societies and economies.


What does any of this have to do with our trip to Taiwan?


The concerns regarding global (over)population, war, poverty, epidemic disease, and human-caused climate change aren’t Asian, African, North American, South American, Antarctican, European, or Australian concerns to ponder in the isolation of these respective continents; rather, these are global issues, and just as we have created the problems together, we must solve them together. Some would say that since wealthy, developed nations have disproportionately released more carbon dioxide per capita—thereby causing more global warming—than poorer, developing nations, that we as a wealthy nation have a greater responsibility to be leaders to solve this problem. While I don’t disagree with this notion, I would also reframe the notion to insist that the problems are so vast and interconnected that no single nation can solve them alone. This is also the good news, however: we have the opportunity to begin working not as nations in isolation but as one Earth people.


Before reframing, though: I absolutely agree that we as a Catlin Gabel School group need to justify and make good on the environmental, social, and economic costs of our international air travel. The vast majority of people in the world will never take such a trip in their lifetimes, and they therefore will not be asking us to deal with the carbon dioxide emissions of such a trip. We, however, are taking this trip and therefore we will be asking the world to deal with our carbon dioxide emissions on our behalf. It is our responsibility to shoulder this understanding in gratitude and love (not shame or resentment) and to commit ourselves to creating a more sustainable, just, and empathetic world because of our unique opportunity to travel to and stay in Taiwan.


I also absolutely agree that we as a Catlin Gabel School group are not uniquely responsible for human-caused climate change, nor could we alone create a better world even if we were fully empowered to do so. That said, it is our responsibility during the next seven weeks as we prepare for our trip and especially during the weeks we spend in Taiwan to seek commonalities, friendships, and mutual respect with our Taiwanese brothers and sisters so that we can work and play together as one Earth people. We create our problems as one Earth people, and we have to solve them as one Earth people.


Ultimately, after the trip is over and you have been back for months, you will see that we teach Catlin Gabel students global problems so that we can work together to research and carry out solutions, both locally and globally. This curricular objective is at the center of real world, future-thinking education. Of course, we as teachers call on all of our training and years of experience to delicately balance the bad news with the hope as we teach about climate change, history, economics, and the rest. One curriculum design objective for nearly every one of our lessons is, in fact, hope—that nebulous but essential feeling of inspired can-do, of creative what if. We as teachers understand that all real, lasting positive change requires hope and the oomph that it brings. We’ve got to believe, like Dr. King, that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” We as teachers believe this because teachers by nature are hopeful people. Many of us gravitated to this profession, mostly by instinct, decades ago with the dim but vital suspicion that this occupation, this vocation, insisted upon hope, and would be fed from below each new year, as if by healing spring waters, by each new class of hopeful students who passed through our grade levels. Experience has proven this suspicion true: the students every year reaffirm for teachers that people are by nature hopeful, that they seek connection, empathy, community, and justice, and that the universe itself, therefore, bends toward justice. Teachers then mirror back this hope, connection, empathy, community, and justice to our students in order to ground our examinations in earthquake-proof gratitude and love before diving into subjects that may seem at the outset like hopeless, depressing subject matters. We always start and return, though, to our twin curricular objects: hope and real-world solutions. Our sojourn through the wilderness of addressing the facts at hand—the global warming, the war, the poverty—is buoyed from the start in our insistence that we are one Earth people wearing different masks with different stories to tell. Understanding that our species, with its mirror neurons, is hardwired for collaboration, inclusivity, problem-solving, and empathy, teachers know that the study of science, history, current events, and literature kicks starts what is best in each of us and moves us to reach out to our classmates and to people across the state, nation, and globe to solve whatever problems that our investigations turn up.

This global trip to Taiwan is borne out of this deep knowledge of our essential human nature and of the curricular enduring understanding that teachers and students need gratitude, hope, and love to sustain us through the dark nights of our investigations so that we might reach the morning time solutions to the interwoven web of global crises. Li-Ling Cheng, our teacher leader, embodies this message and has passed through many such midnights and dawns. In preparation to chaperone us all on our own journeys, she has spent countless hours arranging and preparing everything for us, from our flights to meals to home stays to emergency contacts to medical documents, passports, and the rest. She is a tireless, hopeful, just, and brilliant teacher.

Recall for a moment that I started this reflection with the acknowledgement that Earth is precious and unique. Recall too that we as a human species slowly seem to be ruining this unimaginable gift for our descendants. Education, seen in this cosmic historical context, becomes vitally important not only for our survival as a species but also to reawaken the awe, gratitude, and love we need to help us push through the inevitable, temporary shame, resentment, anger, and hopelessness that will surface so that we might act as one species with the understanding that this is the only planet we will ever have, the only life we will live.

Let us realize now that our trip to Taiwan brings us another set of astonishing opportunities: one, to learn how our brothers and sisters on the other side of the globe navigate urgent global crises with innovation and sacrifice; and two, to teach these brothers and sister how we are responding to the same crises in our own ways in this country. Ultimately, of course, all nations will have to collaborate and mutually sacrifice as a human family in order to co-evolve in balance with mother Earth.


Let us also realize that just as we need to respond to urgent global crises, humans need community, family, joy, gratitude, and love. In fact, we need the good news more than we need the bad news to sustain us through Stages One, Two, and Three, as we scratch to make a new, sustainable, equitable, and just world. Let’s enjoy our Taiwan trip, then, and not be overburdened by feelings of calamity or crisis. Let’s understand that it will be in those simple bonds of friendship and goodwill that we will share with our Taiwanese hosts where the answers will come to whatever problems we have inherited or that we create unintentionally.


Let us also realize that just as we are trying to solve urgent global crises and just as we need good news more than bad, so too do our brothers and sisters in Taiwan. They too are working to solve the world’s problems and their country’s problems. They too are daily gravitating to family, community, laughter, dancing, and joy as well springs of rejuvenation and inspiration—just like we are. We are on the same team and on different continents, and the joy we will discover in one another and will create together will sustain us later as we are doing that same scratching to make that new, sustainable, equitable, and just world for us all. When we focus on what makes us similar as people and what humans need as animals to survive, that lens allows us to easily find what is good, lasting, and worthwhile in our separate communities and families. When we focus on what makes us different as people and that cultural diversity is a gift that strengthens any one nation and certainly planet Earth, that lens also allows us to easily find what is good, lasting, and worthwhile in our separate communities and families.

As teachers, then, we see this trip as an important opportunity to teach and learn so that we as a species can work in global empathic awareness to survive and thrive in this new century. Our trip to Taiwan is therefore not simply a tourist sight-seeing trip but an opportunity for us all to figure out how to stay alive, communicate across cultural and language barriers, create art, play with children, write blog entries, and sustain positive international relationships on spaceship Earth. Although we certainly hope to have fun and make lifelong friends and memories, this trip is more about the world than about us, more about what each of us can magnanimously bring to it than what we each can selfishly hope to get.

This being said, let us summon our full attention and respect, our engaged and active hearts and minds over the next two months. The stakes couldn’t be higher; the potential rewards couldn’t be sweeter. When Li-Ling is talking, let us resolve now to cease side conversations and mindless wanderings on a screen. When our Taiwanese hosts are talking, let us give them the same undivided attention and respect. All these adults are our leaders who have worked for countless hours to put together this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fix what ails the planet and us. If we do these things, we may one day look back on this trip as the time when we started creating a better world for us all.



0 comments
50 views

Permalink