Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, April 18, 2014

Teaching Day

It's Green Eats day in my Planetary Thinking and Environmental Justice course. Discussions of eating practices can turn out to be quite tense, even at nine in the morning, I find. Although I've been an ethical vegetarian for longer than some of my students have been alive by now, my own environmental politics and teaching tends to stress structural and regulatory interventions rather than individualized lifestyle choices like boutique eco-consumerism and the various vegetarian tribalisms, and yet these food questions turn out to be the obverse face of permaculture practices that have long seemed to me the best face of sustainable planetary civilization. Food justice politics takes us right back into the heart of environmental justice politics, food deserts right back into the crisis of unsustainable neoliberal/neoconservative over-urbanization, anti-vegetarian agitprop right back into eco-feminism, and so on. My graduate seminar is cancelled since this whole week has been given over to critiques of student studio work. And so I will be home a bit earlier than is usual for a Friday and may even have time to be annoyed by the world enough to blog something -- we'll see.

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