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Ecoaesthetics: Green Arts at the Intersection of Education and Social Transformation Susan Finley Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 2011 11: 306 DOI: 10.1177/1532708611409549 The online version of this article can be found at: http://csc.sagepub.com/content/11/3/306

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Ecoaesthetics: Green Arts at the Intersection of Education and Social Transformation

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 11(3) 306–313 © 2011 SAGE Publications Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1532708611409549 http://csc.sagepub.com

Susan Finley1

Abstract This article explores several dimensions of the role of arts education in processes of social change: It addresses the power of art as a voice of dissent at the core of a critical revolutionary pedagogy that is deeply relevant and transformative toward a socially just, democratic, and existentially responsible educational aesthetic. Of particular interest are the possibilities for creating an emancipatory pedagogy that scaffolds actively transformative teaching and learning and deepens understanding of education as an aesthetic experience based in social responsibility. Green art as an expression of ecojustice is explored as a potential space for a profound and revolutionary educational aesthetic. While focused on the potential for an educational aesthetic that is transformative and productive in terms of ecojustice, it is simultaneously an exploration of an aesthetics of discovery of the qualities of love and joy to be experienced in nature. Keywords environmental education, critical pedagogy, social justice, curriculum

Contested Terrain Among the photographs of skies and seas and vast forests of Plants and trees My computer and my telephone Screens Frame nature. Always of places I will never see Or will not see again There is the tree that I will not climb again There is a life of senses that is forbidden to me. Childhood has given way To a closed community in which my neighborhood once stood. A zip code defines my place In the world. Much of this article is about contested terrain: Researchers contest how we define terms such as “community” and “culture.” We debate the local and the global, the neighborhood, or the census zone. We live within the margins of our zip codes, but our area codes cross geographical boundaries. We love nature too much and so destroy it. Over a 1,000 people a year climb Mount Kilimanjaro. How many tourists can Fanispan sustain? We lack the foresight of the poet and environmentalist Jean Robert Foster (1916/2002), who wrote,

And the way things are going there won’t be woods Very long, or wilderness; it’ll be Imitation ranches, and ski runs, and places Called by names that the folks who lived there Years and years ago never heard of.1 We love nature, so we try to capture it in art. We sing of her. We express our devotion in poetry. We paint and photograph animal and plant life. We manipulate the growth of trees and carve human portraits into faces of stone mountainsides to forever claim our (human) place in nature. Historically, it has been thought that we experience life through the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, without acknowledging the distinct “sense of place” that is used to explain and describe human experiences of being. We feel our place in life. It has been acknowledged, however, that naturalistic intelligence is just one of the ways we can be “smart.” We photograph and film nature to bypass its ephemeral qualities. If not, no one sees it. No one can use it as a screen saver or desktop image. Without the photo, the poem or the 1

Washington State University, Vancouver, WA

Corresponding Author: Susan Finley, Washington State University, 14204 NE Salmon Creek Ave., Vancouver WA 98686 Email: [email protected]


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Finley painting we cannot imagine that which we cannot experience. Thus, we limit our awareness of the insults to nature to those that take place in our own backyards, our streets, our farms. Or we bask in the beauty captured on our screens as if the beauty of nature exists uninterrupted. We own GPS gizmos. We entertain New economies, revised colonialisms, and old injustices. We commodify. We suffer affluenza. We measure our carbon footprint as we watch it grow. Ecotourism is economic development and Poverty tourism captures the events of Hurricanes, floods, and tsunamis. While wars rage In the mountains of the poor India, China, and Kashmir, the Pamir in Tajikistan. Microbusinesses bring financial stability and education to women in poverty. U.S. imports2 collects for sale handmade items from remote Peruvian villages and Zimbabwe. Weaving, lace making, jewelry, and pottery are the new economies of production. A village woman creates unique embroidery on locally made cloth. With a business loan, this village woman hires 30 more villagers to replicate her own handmade, unique, items for export. No longer unique, her embroidered wares are mass made for market. Arts and artists in a place attract economic investment and encourage tourism. Arts organizations face challenges of regulatory and bureaucratic structures. Arts are not taught in schools, so to promote their return or inclusion in the curricula, arts education is standardized— it will be taught if it can be tested and subjected to measurements of rigor. Arts are at once both the sources of economic capital and of social capital, to be mined. Can green arts stand at the intersection of neoliberal education and social transformation? Wallace Stevens searched for truth in the dump and in the everyday, poetic discourse of the janitor. To Stevens, . . . . The dump is full Of images. Days pass like papers from a press. The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun, And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears, The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box From Estonia: the tiger chest, for tea. In the refuge of daily living, as in the vernacular poems of the minor poet, amid the scraps of consumption, “One rejects the trash,” Stevens wrote, while

. . . .One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail. One beats and beats for that which one believes. That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear To a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear, Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace, Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead, Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve: . . . .Where was it one first heard of the truth? 3 (pp. 265-266) To rediscover the voice of the bird or to recall where we might find truth, we need a philosopher’s honeymoon in which devotion couples aesthetics with social justice. It is similarly Ellis Shaw’s purpose in his novel The Dump to critique the status of late capitalism and the possibility that caring and feelings of love and devotion for the world and for each other have been lost in the trash of capitalism. These authors implore we cast aside the material of the dumps and the wastelands to rediscover where we might have once heard of truth. Grande (2004) talks about “a growing awareness that the legacy of modernism and postmodernism in are is one of environmental deprivation and segregation of arts activity from nature” (p. xvi). “Economic progress,” he continues, “generally leads to a quantitative approach to art” (p. xvi). The practice of this type of ideology, Grande concludes, “deifies individualism and promotes ‘ego systems of expression’ that nurture an exploitative view of culture and history” (p. xvi). Transformation from this domination paradigm requires artists and their audiences to imagine autobiography in community, self in pluralism. It is the legacy of neoconservatism to have created ubiquitous capitalistic growth that threatens the world’s ability to experience and act on empathy in support of communities of difference. We’re all tied up with efficiency models and then complain at the ruins of public education as it stands today. Lost are the ideals of educating responsible, democratic citizens of tomorrow who are focused on creating a sustainable future. Capitalism isn’t given to moderation. Globalization of greed has led to the problems of “tightening oil supplies, intensifying extinctions of plants and animals, deepening energy poverty, strengthening petro-dictatorship, and accelerating climate change” (Friedman, 2008, p. 5). With the passage of 20 years, we’ve lost the urgency of Al Gore’s (1992) call to establish and enact a plan for global environmental education in order to promote a more complete understanding about the world’s ecological crisis and encourage new patterns of thinking about the environment in order to create new technologies to respond to ecological devastation. This challenge to U.S. leadership is key in what Friedman likes to call “Code Green.” Writes Friedman:


Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 11(3)

308 Going Code Green means making America the world’s leader in innovating clean power and energy-efficiency systems and inspiring an ethic of conservation toward the natural world, which is increasingly imperiled. We’re going to need both massive breakthroughs in clean power and a deeper respect for the world’s forests, oceans, and biodiversity hot spots if we’re going to thrive in this new age. (p. 7) A complication inherent to this strategy is the potential for Code Green politics to reinforce neoliberal globalization policies that renew American colonizing and continue exploitation of the world’s slum dwellers. By insisting that the United States must be “the world’s leader in innovating clean power and energy-efficiency systems” (p. 5), Code Green politics already give short shrift to the likelihood that ethics and respect will function as key discourses in mobilizing social activism to decolonize and rehabituate particular places of exploitation. To enact “an ethic of conservation,” careful consideration needs to be given to how relationships among people and the natural world are (differently) formed in any particular place. In part, the challenge will be the creation of critical, place-based pedagogies that respect and enact cultural pluralism and that open possibilities for deterritorialization (Bauman, 1998) and universalization, rather than globalization. Critics of the rush to technological development argue technology will preserve the status quo of world capitalism and reinforce systems that exploit the environment for capitalistic benefit of some and to social and physical detriment of others. “Ecological destruction is a profitable business,” (p. viii) writes Greg Palast (2003), who continues, we must understand “that the ecological crisis and the social crisis are two faces of the same disaster” (p. 25).

Ecopedagogy The challenge is to create an ecopedagogy that will produce radical, political, emotional, and critical analyses of the system of privilege and domination and then follow that analysis with a humanistic and relational approach to combat material consumption and social inequality. It is a people’s pedagogy (Finley, 2003, 2005, 2008), one that is committed to democratic and ethical learning through inquiry and problem solving to arrive at socially just, creative solutions to local and global ecological problems. Within a pedagogy that is deliberately aesthetic, political, critical, and futuristic, place-based educational experiences would restructure the ways in which we perceive the world and perhaps put an end to nature-versus-culture, art-versus-science dichotomies. It would • create opportunities for sensory experiences and embodiment

• be based in concepts of love, care, and empathy for diverse people and for places that are “home” • be emotive, performative, and action oriented • be socially just, affirm difference, and enact pluralism. The future of the planet rests on the ability of a placebased pedagogy that can empower new leadership among future generations. This is a futuristic pedagogy that is purposeful in preparing a new generation of international, pluralistic leaders who are equipped to take on the kind of tenacious struggle against power elites that will be necessary if we are to enact ethical and just environmentalism without “Code Green” tactics. Educators need to make good on the 1991 Principles of Environmental Justice adopted by the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. These writers offered pluralism as their 11 tenet, thus formally linking presentation of social and cultural diversity and preservation of nature, stating that “Environmental justice calls for the education of present and future generations which emphasizes social and environmental issues, based on our experience and an appreciation of our diverse cultural perspectives” (Reprinted in Agyeman, Bullard, & Evans, 2003, p. 334.) Highly problematic in achieving this educational goal is the fact that in the United States we have educated an entire generation (or two) to the vagaries of neoconservative, neocapitalistic, and neoliberal dogma. “The educational force of the culture actually works pedagogically to reproduce neoliberal ideology, values, identifications and consent,” observed Giroux and Giroux (2008). The great challenge to neoliberalism will come about through the reclaiming of a language of power, social movements, politics, and ethics that is capable of examining the effects of the neoliberal order on labor, the environment, culture, and all those spheres and spaces in which democratic identities and relations of power are essential to viable forms of political agency. Educators and intellectuals must link learning to social change, recognizing that every sphere of social life is open to political action. What is needed to resist Code Green is place-based ecological curricula that emphasizes experiences in nature, rebirth of the skills of imagination (so that leaders of tomorrow can reimagine an ecologically sane world), and an ethics of care (based in democracy and existential responsibility).

A Critical, Ecological, Place-Based Pedagogy A critical pedagogy within any disciplinary area or interest exposes and critiques the colonizing, dehumanizing, and oppressive aspects of daily life (Denzin & Giardina, 2010, p. 15; Garoian & Gaudelius, 2008, p. 126 ), and then, to complete its transformative role, based in these processes of exposure and critique, critical pedagogies implement the goals


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Finley of social justice and radical, progressive democracy. Phoenix-like, rising from the ashes and destruction of the exposed virulent flesh of oppression, a new and just way of being emerges that simultaneously preserves the good, eradicates the bad, and offers new, transformed life that is just and democratic. Theoretically. However, in any exercise in democracy and with social dynamics in general, transformative processes are messy affairs that readily smudge the boundaries of discipline, such that critical pedagogy in general can be characterized as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon that often generates resistance to the social transformations it introduces. As Denzin and Giardina observe: “The social justice community is huge, consisting of multiple disciplines, professions, religions, scholarly societies, individual researchers using multiple methodologies, a thousand different paths to the same ends” (p. 16). In the emerging context of place-based pedagogy, with a decided critical focus on science education, Orion Society Executive Director Laurie Lane-Zucker (2004) embraces a strategy for solving ecological problems with “an approach that celebrates, empowers, and nurtures the cultural, artistic, historical, and spiritual resources of each local community and region, and champions their ability to bring those resources to bear on the healing of nature and community” (pp. i-ii). David Gruenwald (2003) similarly offers an extended argument for merging the traditions of “place-based education” and “critical pedagogy” into a coherent, critical pedagogy of place. He writes: Though the ecologically grounded emphasis of . . . place-based educators differs from the socially grounded emphasis of critical pedagogy, taken together, a critical pedagogy of place aims to evaluate the appropriateness of our relationships to each other, and to our socio-ecological places. Moreover, a critical pedagogy of place ultimately encourages teachers and students to reinhabit their places, that is, to pursue the kind of social action that improves the social and ecological life of places, near and far, now and in the future. (p. 7) Place-based education and critical pedagogy in Gruenwald’s argument intersect with “place-based education’s call for localized social action and critical pedagogy’s recognition that experience . . . has a geographical dimension” (p. 9). That social action can (and should) be defined by geographical parameters is a workable foundational concept for a critical place-based pedagogy. According to Gruenwald, this geographical construct not only offers a general principle for understanding human relationships (human to human) but also extends the focus of enquiry about human oppression to also include human relationships to the natural world around them (human to nature).

While Gruenwald’s (2003) approach is decidedly relational, he has also said, Critical place-based pedagogy cannot be only about struggles with human oppression. It also must embrace the experiences of being human in connection with others and with the world of nature, and the responsibility to conserve and restore our shared environments for future generations. (p. 6) Similarly, while we must think futuristically in order to engage in transformative pedagogy, the transformations we seek must be informed by a deep understanding of localized struggles with human oppression. It is only through a critical place-based pedagogy that has as its sole focus human struggles with oppression that the kinds of radical transformative change can take place that allows both Gruenwald’s embrace of humanity and nature and enacts systematic ecological responsibility to future generations. A critical pedagogy of place provides the means for educators and others to think about how ecological, cultural, economic, and political conditions are produced and how to transform those conditions to be of benefit in the pursuit of social justice.

A Critical, Ecoaesthetic Pedagogy Artists, social scientists, educators, and ecotheorists all advocate for a pedagogy that demonstrates awareness of space, responsiveness to local issues, and community collaborations. The theory and practice of an ecoaesthetic pedagogy aligns with characteristics of other activist art (Finley, 2005), including (a) place/space are embodied, (b) education and public participation are the instruments of social transformation, (c) an ethics of care is exercised through cultural pluralism and collaboration, and (d) it is performative, action oriented, and politically transformative. Through language and imagery that are reflective of the vernacular and everyday, a critical, ecoaesthetic pedagogy is embodied and meaningful, personally and collectively. It is a sensuous, embodied pedagogy in which emphasis on sensory experience is encouraged as a way of relating self to local environments. “A life of senses” is a chapter title in Louv’s (2008) widely acclaimed book, Last Child in the Woods. Louv writes: One price of progress is seldom mentioned: a diminished life of the senses. . . . As human beings we need direct, natural experiences; we require fully activated senses in order to feel fully alive. He continues, Nature is about smelling, hearing, tasting, seeing below the “transparent mucous-paper in which the



310 world like a bon-bon is wrapped so carefully that we can never get at it,” as D.H. Lawrence put it. (p. 58) Although Louv identifies technology as an incendiary manifestation of capitalism that interferes with sensory experiences of nature among children and youth, he also acknowledges that it is not a condition wrought of technological development alone. “Atrophy of the senses was occurring long before we came to be bombarded with the latest generation of computers, high-definition TV, and wireless phones” (Louv, 2008, p. 65), Louv observes of our shrinking sensory world. In a lyrical sequence, Louv brings his descriptions of learning the skills of keen awareness (what Wilson had called noticing) in application to experiences of nature to their parallel in arts instruction. He begins with a story of mother and daughter, Janet and Julia, and their nature game of listening for “the sounds they could not hear,” such as sap rising snowflakes forming and falling sunrise moonrise dew on the grass a seed germinating an earthworm moving through the soil cactus baking in the sun mitosis an apple ripening feathers wood petrifying a tooth decaying a spider weaving its web a fly being caught in the web a leaf changing colors a salmon spawning. (p. 76) The “sounds they could not hear” reads as poetry, with the poem’s final image drawn from the realm of still, soundlessness (not silence). Louv (2008) writes: And the this list might expand beyond nature, such as the sound that occurs . . . after the conductor’s baton ceases to rise (pp. 76-77) Conjectured in the interplay of sound and soundlessness music is the poetry that results from the reorganization of space to form a kind of beauty of sensory experience. Acumen with nature’s patterns, in cacophony or soundlessness, in the complexities of its vectors, and its null in its null spaces of transformation are learned skills that rest largely with an individual’s opportunities to commune with and learn about nature. Natural intelligence relies heavily on trained ways of seeing the world. That “keen sensory skills”

of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch are facets of naturalistic intelligence (Louv, 2008) underscores the need to embody learning. As a teacher educator, I regularly assign students in my classes to grapple with social issues, philosophical points of view, feelings, and experiences by creating an “aesthetic representation.” Once, there was a preservice teacher in my class who had been trained as a professional perfumer. On the day of the aesthetic presentations, she presented a tray with several decorative perfume bottles: I was the first to test her wares. She handed me a small vial and pulled the cork. I sniffed. And I recoiled. “Wow! That is oppressive,” I said, unable to curb my reaction. She smiled and turned over a little card on her tray. The card read: “Oppression.” I correctly named four in a row before my senses were dulled to imperfection. Years later, I retain a heightened awareness of information about my environment that is accessed through my revitalized sense of smell. My point is that sensory perception can be taught and it can be learned. McCallen draws on brain research in his discussion of the human sense of smell to demonstrate that while largely latent in terms of survival senses, smell retains its importance to modern human life. McCallen writes: “Odors and fragrances of all sorts, from wax crayons, pencil shavings, peanut butter sandwiches, eggs, and bacon, body scents, and perfumes to the scent of the first rains are powerful reminders of one’s culture, one’s community and even one’s identity” (p. 44). Use of heightened sensory skills can be learned—and the ability to articulate awareness of that heightened sensibility, as in the instance of my verbal outburst upon the assault of “oppression,” may be a matter of language acquisition. In addition to promoting the notion of ecological intelligence, McCallen calls for consideration of ecological literacy. The inner world of words, of reflective thinking, of dreams, and of poetry is at the heart of his version of ecological literacy. “It allows us to discover new words and new worlds. It takes us to the borders of other countries and into the skin of those who live there. Literacy stirs the imagination . . . and, because it is economically and politically empowering, it is easy to see why it is the cornerstone of what we broadly refer to as a modern education” (McCallen, p. 111). A pedagogy founded in concepts of empathy, love, and care. Garoian (1998) writes of the need for environmental education in which “empathic art and pedagogy represent caring, compassionate, and community metaphors” (p. 245). The notion of care and compassion is consistently present in place-based educational theory and maintains a place in arts education that is environmentally concerned (Gruenwald, 2003; Lane-Zucker, 2004; Sobel, 2004). Lane-Zucker exalts a doctrine of transformative education based in caring expressed as love. She writes of coming to “the realization that love—love of nature, love of one’s neighbors and community is a prime motivating factor in personal


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Finley transformation and the transformation of culture” (p. ii). Lane-Zucker’s words recall those of Paulo Freire (1998), who spoke to teachers, saying: We must dare, in the full sense of the word, to speak of love without the fear of being called ridiculous, mawkish, or unscientific, if not anti-scientific. We must dare in order to say scientifically, and not as mere blah-blah-blah, that we study, we learn, we teach, we know with our entire body. We do all of these things with feeling, with emotions, with wishes, with fear, with doubts, with passion, and also with critical reasoning. However, we never study, learn, teach, or know with the last only. We must dare so as never to dichotomize cognition and emotion. We must dare so that we can continue to teach for a long time under conditions that we know well: low salaries, lack of respect, and the ever-present risk of becoming prey to cynicism. We must dare to learn how to dare in order to say no to the bureaucratization of the mind to which we are exposed every day. We must dare so that we can continue to do so even when it is so much more materially advantageous to stop daring. (p. 3) Embodied, sensually aware, focused on transformation from the limitations of bureaucracy to the spirit of love, Freire (2001) urges “cultural synthesis,” exemplified by a people’s pedagogy in which actors learn “with the people, about the people’s world” (p. 180). This is a people’s pedagogy that is local, based in a sense of place and identification with one’s world through sensory perceptions. A pedagogy that is performative and action oriented. Performance is a way of knowing and of being. If the body is the site of knowledge—performance, is, after all, “place-based.” Knowledge is located in the body—it is embodied. Embodied knowledge indicates “an intensely sensuous way of knowing” (Conquergood, 1991, p. 180). Through senses the body experiences and by its place-based existence in space, in culture, in time, a knowing body gains cultural knowledge. Thus, “embodied practice calls upon the performer to employ a knowing, participatory, empathic, and political body” (Pelias, 2008, 186). Says Pelias: All performance is ideologically laden. Performers’ bodies are not neutral. They carry, among other markers, their gender, sexuality, ableness, class, race, and ethnicity with them. They signal cultural biases— beauty and blond hair, handsome and tan, jolly and round, and so on. Such claims imply that the performer’s body is always a contested site. (p. 188) Performance opens contested, liminal spaces to dialogue and interpretation in which individuals as well as communities of participants can construct and transform their political

identity. The political body knows Self and Others through empathic and sensuous awareness of place. “The political body recognizes how power functions, dares to explore and expose it, and welcomes the opportunity to subvert it in the name of social justice” (Pelias, p. 188). A pedagogy that is socially just, affirms diversity, and enacts pluralism. “Eco-theorists ask that we think about our relationships to the non-human world in a way that encourages interdependence, claiming that nothing less than this will sustain diversity in life on Earth” (Blandy & Hoffman, 1993, p. 25). Recalling the Nguni legend of the meaning of the ziziphus tree, with its opposing thorns, one set pointing inward, the other in the opposite direction, McCallum (2008) urges that their composition exists to remind us that “we must look ahead, to the future . . . but we must never forget where we have come from.” He writes: In the image of the backward-hooking thorn of the ziziphus is the explanation of the Human-Nature split—we have forgotten our animal past. It is therefore the direction of our healing. By all means look ahead, keep moving, follow your dreams, but never forget your roots. Together the thorns say yes and no. They are poetic. One row points toward the future and to what we might become, the other toward the Earth and our origins. The represent the push of the human spirit on the one hand, the pull of soul on the other; the wings of psychology in one direction, the roots of our biology in the other. They are complementary opposites. They hold the tension between science and non-science, between subject and object, and it is crucial that we hold that tension, for within it is the definition of ecological intelligence. (p. 18) Those thorns might be nature’s poetry, but we must also beware—the branch of the ziziphus looks rather alarmingly like man-made barbed wire. McCallen tells us that between opposing thorns there is a special space especially suited to poetry, He insists: We urgently need tongues that can speak with care, anger, protest—not with the scattered or whining prose of the fanatic, but the voice of those who can speak with anger and beauty in the same breath. Only poetry can do this. It is a language of protest but it is also a language of hope. (p. 18)

Green Arts at the Intersection of Education and Social Transformation Green art that emerges from sensory awareness of place and empathic awareness of culture can be a formidable tool for



312 social transformation. Art and its methods and ways of facilitating dialog in support of communities of difference can transform the dominant cultural politics of neoconservatism and ubiquitous capitalistic growth that threatens the capacity of the world’s environments to nurture human life. Métissage is a term associated with the powers of transformation and might be appropriated here. Métissage refers to “a political praxis that resists ‘heterophobia’,” a “reading praxis that engages the world as dialogic and heteroglossic . . . and invites readers to attend to the interreferentiality of texts” (Chambers et al., 2008, p. 142), and “métissage is a writing praxis that enables researchers and their audiences to imagine and create plural selves and communities that thrive on ambiguity and multiplicity” (p. 142). In textual practice, métissage weaves and juxtaposes colonial with vernacular language, local culture, with autobiography and dominant traditions in literacy as a way to highlight differences among texts. It will not be enough for politically activist artists to conceive of environmental arts as subject matter in representational forms. Instead, a critical and performative green art will incite action. It would be possible, for example, to construct a genre of green art that draws its audience into communion with the natural world and its pleasures, but that does not enact a politically transformative agenda. Some green art that has been produced in the past may have fallen short of the mark of heightening ecological awareness because it was either inaccessible or elitist (in its costliness), or remote in space, in inaccessible spaces; for example, land artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer are described by Grande (2004) as representing a period of expansionist thinking that included transforming the land, permanently, in an act of dominance over Earth. This type of powerful transformation of the land itself is compared by Grande with more recent trends in green arts to transform urban landscapes and works by artists such as Ana Mendieta, “whose ritual performances and artworks reflected a merging of the body with the land” (p. xviii). For green art to be transformative, for it to complete a people’s pedagogy, it must be embodied. It must be political. And it must be ethical. Grande writes: By realizing we are a part of nature, even if we live abstracted, decontextualized lives in major cities, we can gather a holistic sense of purpose in our lives that would otherwise be relegated to distraction, delusion, and distempered life. Contemporary criticism often addresses public issues, questions of siting, and public space. It is an interesting part of the contemporary art scene. But unless public art gets beyond the production of imagery to investigate the process of life unfolding around us, it will remain decorative, an adjunct to, and not a beacon of consolidation, something that engenders a holistic sense of purpose beyond the political.

There is an ethic to life. Artmaking has an ethics, even if it involves simply deciding what materials to use— leaves instead of stones, or wood in the place of earth. The installation that ingests—places itself in the environment with a sense of the place—is exciting. The drama is in the sense of place, of participating in a living history. (p. xx) My conception of green art is that it is a tool for education and for social transformation. As such, this tool must be accessible; it must exist in the vernacular. It cannot be elitist. It must be inclusive to a pluralist, collectivist community. It could be the role of the environmental arts to entice a diverse community to use their sensory responses and their love of life and of nature to cross the contested terrain that makes up the natural world and humankind’s relationship with it. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes 1. Excerpted from the longer poem Neighbors of Yesterday by Jeanne Robert Foster. 2. A fictive company. 3. Excerpted from Wallace Stevens, The Man on the Dump (1923/1990).

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Louv, R. (2008). Last child in the woods. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. McCallum, I. (2008). Ecological intelligence: Rediscovering ourselves in nature. Golden, CO: Fulcrum. Original work published 2005 Palast, G. (2003). Foreword. How the rich are destroying the Earth. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company. Pelias, R. J. (2008). Performative inquiry: Embodiment and its challenges. In J. G. Knowles & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research (pp. 185-193). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Sobel, D. (2004). Place-based education: Connecting classrooms and communities. Great Barrington, MA: The Orion Society. Stevens, W. (1990). The man on the dump. Collected poems. New York, NY: Random House. Original work published 1923 Biographical Note: Researcher, teacher, artist, and author. Susan Finley has implemented community-based research efforts and action research with people living in tent communities, street youths, and among economically poor children and their families, housed and unhoused. She focuses her pedagogy and inquiry on research approaches to understanding social and cultural issues in educational contexts. Major curricular innovations for K-8 students and preservice teachers have been developed through the At Home At School Community Education effort that Susan designed and directs (2002–) (See http://AtHomeAtSchool.org/ )
