Changing our Institutions: PfS

Just over a year and a half ago, I heard of a group called “Philosophers for Sustainability”(“PfS” ). They want to change the profession of academic philosophy by calling us to take a stand on the climate crisis – not just verbally, but in how we walk the talk.  For someone such as myself who came of age in the profession with environmental philosophy being regarded as a fringe field, the ambition of the group was exciting.  They were calling for some of the core moral concerns of environmental philosophy to become important for routine academic life in philosophy departments. 

What is more, they were practicing philosophy not as a purely theoretical undertaking but as something that should show up in how we live from day to day.  This was not “philosophy as a way of life” as classroom motivation only, as it is sometimes taken, nor was it fanciful aestheticism, as philosophy as a way of life is often also taken.  It was institution shifting, quotidian, and centered on the norms shaping practices, not on cults of personality or even remarkable, virtuous people.  PfS took the ego out of philosophy as a way of life to a significant extent and centered the idea of it in work-a-day moral and civic responsibility.

I wanted to bring the voices of PfS’s founders Eugene Chislenko and Rebecca Millsop into this series, because what they are doing opens up what philosophy as a way of life should be. They seek to change institutions toward having more moral and civic integrity by building collective will. As I have done in these interviews so far, I asked them a bunch of questions, heard their answers, and then removed my questions and re-edited everything with them to recreate some of the spirit of their collaboration:

Eugene: I came to the US when I was 6 as a refugee from totalitarianism and anti-semitism in the USSR. I’d always felt alienated from domestic US politics. But in 2016, I gave my heart to climate change.

I’m not one of the many people that have built the environmental movement or other social movements for decades. I’m the new guy. Frontline communities have built the work and often been forgotten, and it’s important to follow those communities and their leaders. But that doesn’t mean waiting for frontline populations to win, or leaving them with all the work. You can join and be the new person and have a real impact – even enjoy it.

Rebecca: I grew up in a very conservative, evangelical, Christian home. I started rebelling against these ways of thinking early on, while remaining flabbergasted by the idea that we aren’t responsible for the well-being of others, especially those less privileged or less fortunate than ourselves.

Throughout my undergraduate years and into graduate school I was, embarrassingly, quite politically ignorant. If we lived in a more just world, then I think I would have continued to work in philosophy of logic and mathematics, because I find that work incredibly fun and personally rewarding. But once I began to look outside the academic bubble world I lived in, I realized that there’s far too much injustice for me to focus only on what brings me personal happiness.

In graduate school, I was lucky to work with some brilliant social-justice-focused philosophers, most importantly Sally Haslanger, and had multiple engaged graduate school colleagues and a radicalizing partner outside of academia. Through these relationships, I began to see that I wasn’t interested in focusing on, nor was I able to focus on, the topics I was once most interested in. I shifted my personal and professional interests towards the social.

Rebecca & Eugene [Sometimes the two answered together. – jbk]: Philosophers for Sustainability started with a conversation over dinner at the 2019 Eastern APA meeting. We’re both vegans and talked about meat products and climate. We discussed the lack of conference sessions addressing the climate crisis. Eugene brought up the APA’s then-recently published Good Practices Guide and suggested that we rally our colleagues and connections to reach out to the APA to request that a section be added on sustainability in philosophy.

The young climate activists we know always say the same thing: Organize your networks. They say: Talk to your friends and neighbors, talk to your communities, organize at work. That’s what we did. We started to organize our networks.

Many of us wrote in to the APA. The APA responded positively and asked us if we would be willing to draft a new section for the Guide, which was exciting! We began to realize that it wouldn’t be too difficult to bring together philosophers to work on shifting our profession toward sustainable practices. PfS’s network is for all philosophers, and anyone can contribute to sustainability, even if, like us, they have no background in environmental philosophy.

In not too much time, we started a monthly Sustainability in Philosophy forum series, with forums on many topics: teaching sustainability, sustainability advocacy, resources, climate change and public philosophy, climate strike support, e-conferences, handling emergencies, climate change and racial justice, and several meetings that resulted in our sustainability guidelines, now included as the “Sustainability” section of the APA Good Practices Guide. 

We then worked – and are working – with various members to have the guidelines translated into other languages and adapted to different organizational and geographical contexts. Like most professional guidelines, we expect that the guidelines will continue to evolve. Suggestions are always welcome. We hope the next version will be bolder and better informed.

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JBK: At this point, I wanted to know more about how Millsop & Chislenko have found their lives affected by their organizing within the profession, and I wanted a better picture for readers of what they were asking for.

Rebecca & Eugene: The impact of organizing PfS has been amazing. We have had so many small interactions over email, by video forum, or in person that lead to a department starting a college-wide task force on sustainability, offering more courses on the environment, ordering a few hundred fewer beef sandwiches, or running a conference differently. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit. We’re growing our understanding of what’s possible and how to make it happen.

Most of our members are busy philosophers with very little free time. So we’ve set up a minimal model of membership, requiring a commitment to 1-2 hours a month of any activity at all toward stopping climate change and supporting sustainability within someone’s work as a philosopher. That includes talking informally with students and colleagues about climate change, integrating environmental issues into courses or service, writing about those topics in a way that advocates change in practice, or supporting sustainability efforts on campus.

Because our members are so busy, we emphasize integrating sustainability into ongoing work as philosophers, rather than adding large extra commitments. We then have various larger and smaller projects and events that offer options at different shapes and sizes of involvement, within a broader network of philosophers who have made some minimal commitment to work toward sustainability in practice.

We hope to grow PfS much more. The better that goes, the more you have to be flexible and occasionally restructure. We started with a small group and one initial project [getting the sustainability guidelines written and adopted – jbk]. Our second year, we had enough people to form smaller advocacy teams with specific areas of focus, working on teaching, e-vents, social media, public philosophy, resource gathering, and climate strikes. That also allowed our leadership to grow, with one or two leaders for each team and a newly formed steering committee.

In general, we approach PfS organizing this way: People deserve kindness and support, period. But climate change is especially terrifying and depressing. Harsh, indifferent, and dehumanizing treatment is a major cause of it. Kindness and human connection help offer a model for counteracting it, and help make it possible for people (and us!) to stay involved long-term. Unsurprisingly, then, often in our PfS meetings, we’ve found that tone can be more important than format for advancing our collective goals.

We want people to be excited to come back, and to be able to stay with us for years without burning out. We try to set a tone of kindness, enthusiasm, and opportunity. You can’t get to scale by guilt-tripping people and burning them out.

Good relationships are the building blocks of effective social movements. Within philosophy, we think kindness and care help people think clearly, collaborate with each other, and take on bigger challenges.

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JBK: Sustainability in Anglophone countries has often been (tacitly) imagined as a white project fitting the modernism of settler colonial fantasies. I wanted to know how PfS acted in response to the largest social movement in U.S. history this past year.

Rebecca & Eugene: When the recent protests and social uprising surrounding the murder of black Americans by police shone a spotlight on racial injustice, PfS decided to urge all members to square up with anti-racism, indigenous rights, and decolonization, and to put time and effort into racial justice movements like Black Lives Matter.

Within PfS, we have three goals going forward in relation to racial justice: expanding internationally and especially in the global south; further diversifying our leadership; and keeping racial justice and indigenous rights and people at the center of discussions of sustainability. The last of those goals is also something we hope to help achieve in our profession.

Environmental damage and racism have a common root in the extraction of resources. They have a common obstacle in police and state violence. And climate change is fundamentally racist, both in the selective indifference that has largely caused and rationalized it, and in its ravaging communities of color in this unfolding century to an extent that few of us have fully faced.

(source)

PfS has been lucky to find leadership in philosophers of color and philosophers in the global south. Lynn Chiu, Kian Mintz-Woo, Gisele Secco, Olúfẹmi Táíwò, Robin Zheng, and others have been essential contributors. Any philosophers of color who want to collaborate with us are welcome to come and shape PfS [philosophers of color already have! – jbk].

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JBK: I wanted to bring the write-up of the interview toward a close by turning to how PfS approaches teaching. One of their biggest foci is on what philosophy teachers in any field might do to advance climate responsibility and sustainability.

Rebecca & Eugene:  Most of our students are young, and the climate crisis is, and will continue to, dramatically affect their lives. Teaching can be about helping our students use philosophy to make more critically informed decisions, become more engaged and empathetic citizens, and find meaning and connection in their lives. Focusing on climate crisis in the classroom can help our students better understand what is going on and what is at stake while also demonstrating that we see them and there are tools available to help them respond to the difficulties ahead.

In this way, philosophers might work towards a more engaged pedagogy by integrating content on the climate crisis. A quote from “Engaged Pedagogy” in bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress (p. 13) seems relevant here:

To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.

We want to be clear: Telling students what to think about climate change would be overly politicizing and often counterproductive. Most students need to talk more than they need to listen, especially in the context of climate change. Our job is to present them with a variety of arguments and points of view, facilitate open discussion, and teach them to think critically. We can do that without being overly political, or overly neutral, if we keep an open mind while also pointing out fallacies and unsupported assertions.

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JBK: I was happy to hear that PfS advocates for teaching sustainability in a way that isn’t doctrinaire. They have a moral position, because climate justice and the threat of mass extinction are perhaps the major moral issues of our time. As mainstream an institution as the United Nations has recently acknowledged this moral position in how it conceptualizes human development. What did PfS’s founders think about the politics of their organizing within the profession?

Eugene: PfS is the most political part of my life, by far. It puts me in contact with the political side of philosophy as a discipline, and forces me to take myself seriously as a political agent. I think it’s renewed my sense that philosophy can be political in a good kind of way.

I really feel this at department events and dinners. They’ve always made me extremely uncomfortable – too work-like to relax, too non-work to get much done. Suddenly I have a sense that I can have meaningful conversations with philosophers in those contexts about the future of our field, and that we can do something really good together.

From the point of view of sustainability, I think we – the APA, but really the profession – will have to come to terms with the fact that our activities are doing grave and often fatal harm to large numbers of people and to other life forms, in addition to missing some opportunities to prevent large harms. Climate change is an atrocity, and we’ll have to face our role not only as bystanders, but also as contributors.

I’d like to see the APA be carbon neutral by 2025, and I’d like to see a large APA initiative organizing philosophers around our role in the climate crisis. The APA’s been tremendously responsive to member feedback. I think the vision here is not of fighting the APA or of hoping that it will do something. If enough members ask that something be a priority, there’s a very good chance it will happen.

Rebecca: I completely agree.

I would also love to see, and be part of, more creative and less traditional conference sessions at the regional conferences. Engaging in brainstorming these types of sessions could lead to less travel-intensive conferences in the future.

Rebecca & Eugene:  Working on the APA guidelines was the first big collaborative project PfS did, and it was also the way we made our first set of new connections [about 30 people worked on drafting and revising the guidelines -jbk].  The guidelines provide some “easy” suggestions along with several “hard” ones. There are lots of simple ways that philosophers can adapt things they are already doing to promote sustainability: teaching units on climate crisis and climate justice, for example.

But there are deeply entrenched practices, such as conference travel and event catering preferences, that require difficult conversations and collective will to change. The decision of how strongly to word those harder sections was a challenge. We had to figure out how to put forward a vision without turning people off.

As PfS’s authors wrote, “[a]lthough individual and departmental choices have highly significant impacts, in many cases philosophers can make the most effective environmental contribution by taking on larger collective issues of sustainability and [by] doing what they do best: generating discussion, presenting arguments, seeking insight into larger human experiences and struggles, and challenging others to think critically. Individual choices should be made in tandem with encouraging others to treat sustainability as a priority, both in its own right and in connection to many central human values.”

This is a good time to shift our own institutions as philosophers. We have a lot of students who are taking direct action, or thinking about it, or not thinking about it. They could use some good readings, some good questions and challenges, and some encouragement.

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JBK: As I closed out the interview, a remark Rebecca made stuck with me. Eugene & Rebecca signaled how collective will is needed to get at some of the hard “asks” of the Good Practices Guide section on sustainability. In my experience, collective will grows alongside learning how to cooperate. So it seemed fitting to end the write-up of our discussion with this remark:

Rebecca: I would love to see the profession of philosophy adopt an even more collaborative ethos. There are plenty of philosophers who see their work as, essentially, a kind of battle. We are certainly battling with ideas, but we need not see one another as enemies.

The best experiences I have had in the profession have been in genuine workshop settings where everyone is actively involved in helping one another with their ideas and their practices.

JBK: Yes, I thought, “It’s a lot easier to change our institutions when we build on each other’s strengths and are healthily imperfect (yes, imperfect!) enough to give and receive care where it might help.”

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This is an installment of Into Philosophy.