Association of the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) in collaboration with the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS)
July 9-12, 2023
Portland, OR
Cara’s presentation: “Radical Accountability through Creative-Waste Culture”
How can we shift our epidemic of individualism from consumer convenience-culture bred entitlement to creative self-accountability that integrates profound, sustainable changes in individual behavior, community action, infrastructural design, corporate accountability, and policy reform? My argument calls for collective action that disrupts ossified superstructures; collective imagination in which each of us co-creates opportunities for public investment in humane infrastructures in which human rights and ecological resilience is implicit in every social system. Countering the normalcies of consumer convenience-culture, I will offer an invitation to embody reciprocal, rhizomatic interrelationships: the personal is political as the political is personal. Parenting can be a daily commitment to anarchist, collective responsibility. Living my parental environmental ethics as an antidote to petroleum parenting (what I identify as market-driven choices parents make that overwhelmingly contribute to both environmental destruction and body-phobic institutional practices) involves not only my practice of decolonizing economies, it is at the core of the private-public, personal-political interface—the private as it seeps into and reshapes the public. Instead of ignoring other peoples’ exploited labor as a resource, we can establish infrastructures that support our local communities—where economies and ecologies can co-evolve rather than be in competition or opposition. Both the words economic and ecology derive from the Greek oikos, meaning home. Collaborating across cultural, economic, and ethnic differences, oikos can become a model for interdependency that generates community, cultural diversity, and biodiversity for ethical everyday living. A radical paradigm shift that embodies ecological civilization can only take root if we embrace our individual vulnerability and support one another collectively. The individual must function as collective change.
Association of the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) in collaboration with the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS)
