#psugse

If the recent global demographic movements, including refugee movements from Syria and North Africa to Europe, illegal immigrants from Central America to the United States, and fleeing Rohingya Muslims from Burma to Bangladesh, have taught us anything, it is that we are still very much entrenched in “us” and “them” narratives. In fact, these demographic movements have brought to the fore what was probably already there—a deep mistrust of “them,” filtered through racism, hate speech, and damage-based understandings of the other. This is our country, our community, our neighborhood, and they better acknowledge that by behaving our way, following our traditions, and becoming Us (pending our decision that these efforts have been sufficient). It is an ugly narrative, one that has often given rise to violence. Both historically and currently, political leadership has, in many cases, actively contributed to the mayhem; certainly the contemporary narrative feeds off well-embedded resentments and ideological positions in civil society. The much-taunted grassroots, which were associated with progressive and forward-looking ideas not so long ago, turned out to also exist as reactionary, small-minded, and often racist social groups.

In this final section of the Handbook, we turn to ecological aesthetics in response to radical changes in both the nature of childhood and the nature of nature in the contemporary world. Artistic and aesthetic approaches have become increasingly relevant as children encounter a world typified by the acceleration of social, technological, and environmental change, and the mutually reinforcing conditions of planetary instability, inequality, and precarity. Anthropogenic climate change, the mass extinction of plant and animal life, and the chemical contamination of air, food, soil, and water resources are transforming not only what we might think of as “the environment”, but also the aesthetic qualities and environmental sensibilities that constitute the experience of being alive. For many scholars these changing conditions of Earthly life have taken on the name of ‘Anthropocene’, an epoch defined by the total imbrication of human life with more than human planetary systems and technologies. The authors in this section take up ecological aesthetics as a relational, experimental, and theoretically adventurous field which aims to grasp the experiential qualities of life under these changing conditions, and to imagine alternatives. With chapters focusing on the role of movement, nature-study, poetry, pattern, sense-awareness, and the creation of experimental works of art, this section highlights interdisciplinary research and pedagogy which attends to richly textured compositions of childhoodnature experience through a diverse range of material, social and conceptual practices. In drawing together a range of Indigenous, speculative, sensory, cultural, empirical, and artistic approaches, the range of chapters collected in this section attests to the diversity and emergent shaping of ecological aesthetics as a field that is still very much in the making.

The new EAC has 20 education and philanthropic leaders from across Oregon including superintendents, K-12 teachers, foundation and government leaders. Four members of the council are PSU alumni.