A week in the life of wo-chan

Just like that and another week has gone by.

The start of the week saw a new prime minister elected in Japan after the previous PM quit unexpectedly. Yasuo Fukuda is the new Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leader and effectively the new Prime Minister. Since the end of the War the LDP have been out Office once briefly. The Japanese are rather conservative in their political selection this way.

He made some good pledges including:

• not visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine which enshrines the war-dead including war-criminals
• improving relations with its regional neighbours
• giving more emphasis to the population in the countryside in terms of federal spending
• reducing the burden of expenses to the elderly for medical costs.

But whether these and other pledges will be kept remain to be seen.

And on Tuesday I joined a vegetable growing class. There is a vegetable patch right smack bang in the middle of the campus. I discovered they had a non-credit class on hands-on experience on growing your own vegetables. Even though we have our own vegetable patch at home where my in-laws grow lots of food and I have my own little corner where I am growing carrots right now I chose to join the class to get more guidance from the more experienced. And besides during daylight I am literally not at home so tending the home patch has been difficult.

On Wednesday I spent the day at home looking after my daughter. She is one years old and has just started to walk. So now she is quite a handful. She is also talking a lot more but still what she says is incoherent. I discovered she can understand a lot though. Her vocabulary is much bigger than I had expected or believed.

And my son too has grown. He had his Sports Day this weekend which all parents attend (and participate in) in Japan. I had to run around a tiny track with other fathers. The cornering is more difficult than you would think. But my son compared to last year was much more controlled. He can actually sit still for more than several minutes. Truly amazing considering he is really active. I caught up with several teacher-friends of mine. They are all working hard as usual getting home at eight-thirty or later. In Japan this is common for teachers and is unthinkable back in Australia. For me the children are more important. But in saying so I myself work at night three nights a week teaching so I am guilty too of neglecting my parenthood duties. It is a work ethic philosophy here in Japan. Hard work is a sign of being Japanese. Blah! A ridiculous notion if you ask me.

Among other things we went on our monthly spring water collection. Once a month we go to bring home 80 litres of spring water for drinking and cooking. Although we have both clean tap and mountain water at home my wife still insists on the best for us kids and us. I don’t mind and its a nice trip out of the house.

We also went shopping. My wife needed clothes and I decided I too would get something for autumn. I bought a long-sleeve shirt and a wallet. After eleven years my old wallet was in tatters. I think I had gotten ample use from it and deserve a new one. Hopefully this one will last a decade or more also.

Enough about me and back to the world. This week saw Mr George W Bush go back on non-binding promises he made for his country. What did I say earlier? You cannot trust those who make half-hearted agreements. As usual the world’s greatest contributor to greenhouse gases fuelling global warming and climate change has reneged on its responsibility. I am not surprised, of course.

Our wild imaginings

In my last post I wrote about sustainability, weak and strong. But in trying to find where I came up with the idea I found I had crossed my thinking. Weak and strong sustainability are somewhat different than I had conceived.

But what I had said still holds as long as I leave out weak and strong sustainability. This just shows how much I need to check facts before I write about them. I apologize for my misinterpretation.

It is thought that we live in an age on biocentricism (also called ecocentrism) but I have argued that the anthropocentric view is still the dominant today after five centuries. Our way of speaking about the environment still is from the human-centred perspective. And until we realize that we share the planet with all other biophysical lifeforms, that we are just as dependent on the planet as other animals are then we will continue believe it is for our species alone. We will continue to abuse our false position of power.

When the French Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote “property is theft,” he was describing Man’s control of other men. But in a way it is an appropriate description of the our subjugation of other species and resources. Every time we use something in nature we should remember it is not ours but only in our imaginings.

Choosing between strong or weak sustainability

On the last day in my intensive class on environmental education I gave a talk on the the difference between sustainable development and sustainably. Basically this is basis of my entire argument until now about environmentalism but I haven’t been able to articulate it on either in my old blog or here.

The premise of my argument is that since 1987 when the Brundtland Report used the term sustainable development it has dominated the discourse on environmentalism. The “development” constituent part of the term and the basic definition (“… without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”) given in the report is enough to show what its focus is on – human needs.

This focus on our species is known also as anthropocentrism. But what I did in my talk was to show that this position has a far longer history than is normally believed. Being a fairly recent term, no more than the last century, it does not extend back to its basic root – Humanism – where I see the two terms, Anthropocentrism and Humanism (also Speciesism) as synonymous.

Humanism places Man at the centre of its discourse. In the Renaissance the activities of Man becomes the focus of art. The Enlightenment Movement brings to us Man’s rationality. The Protestant Reformation is a direct challenge to Church authority. The Scientific Revolution brings a greater understanding of the nature of the world sans God. The Industrial Revolution sees us manipulate and control the world in a new manner. And the theory of Evolution brings about a change in the way we see ourselves in the world putting us directly at the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder.

During the intensive course Prof. M also mentioned gave her version of anthropocentrism where it is contrasted to ecocentrism. In her summary the eighteenth-century starts with the anthropocentric view culminating with the ecocentric view in the twentieth-century. She also shows how two strands of thought throughout this period, that of conservation and preservation. Conservation is the view that the environment needs human intervention, while preservation is the view that environment needs to be left alone as it is without human intervention. In this summary the model seems to point to the ecocentric view represents both conservation and preservation. But this is where I differ to her view.

Conservation seems suspiciously anthropocentic in that humans still need to interfere before nature can take its course. In fact nature does fine by itself without us butting in. Preservation seems the better option but it is not a term I have been comfortable using.

Personally I prefer using the terms strong sustainability and weak sustainability in describing my ideas,. These terms are used by Dr. David Suzuki, the Canadian environmentalist. Strong sustainability is one where the ecosystem, flora and fauna, geography and geology take priority. In other words it is ecocentric or biocentric the latter term I prefer to use. And weak sustainability is where human needs take priority. In other words it is anthropocentric.

Much confusion today also comes from the fact that the terms sustainable development and sustainability have come to be used interchangeably some time after the Brundtland Report. While it is clear that sustainable development means thinking about the environment with human needs in mind it is not so obvious when we use the term sustainability. This ambiguity is where disinformation starts and where it is often taken advantage of by those with hidden agendas.

If we are to understand and filter the ecological discourse effectively we need to look at where the priority is placed. In short we need to ask which sustainability is strong and which is weak. And when we can do this we can start to make headways in the current discourse which is dominated by weak sustainability.

Here is an example from the news this week:

The price tag for restoring the Great Lakes was recently estimated at $26 billion by a group of economists who projected the economic benefits of a cleanup.

Completing the immense task — rebuilding antiquated sewer systems, restoring decimated wetlands, blocking invasive species, and cleaning up contaminated lake sediments and polluted tributaries — would lift residential property values that are within sight of the lakes by 10 percent, their report concluded. The $50 billion real estate gain would alone justify the investment that the researchers said could revitalize the surrounding region known as the Rust Belt.

All italics are mine. This is a good example of a typical newspaper article. But it could be any academic paper, study or blog post out there.

So, tell me, which side of the fence do you belong?

Intense

I have just finished an intensive course on Environmental Education. It had been a good four days. The teacher is a former student of the graduate school and I think is now doing NPO work nearby. Her class gave me many good ideas about how and what to teach about the environment. And I learned a lot from her about the history and current state of environmentalism. Thank you, Sensei.

Other than that I have been doing my fatherhood bit at night in between teaching. I have decided to use my English class as a second testing ground for my theory on vocabulary retention. I will be using Harry Potter. I know, I know, people will say Harry isn’t real literature but that would be missing the point of English language teaching.

In my opinion there is no better work to read to learn English than Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (HPPS). According to my research Harry is just under 80,000 words long and has over 5,600 unique word types. This means it has relatively few words for its length making for a high rate of repetition (a key ingredient in learning vocabulary). But enough about academia.

My daughter started to walk recently. As of this morning she can trundle around without falling over. She has that raised-hands-for-balance style of walking right now. And my son is using fishing-for-agreement structures in his language. He is gaining more and more social skills as shown by his interaction with other children.

And my wife is now used to the work routine. We balance things by tight scheduling so that the kids get food before irritation sets in. Then I can go to teach in the evenings. Like clockwork… until it breaks down.

But if you see me blogging too much you know I am not being a good father, fine husband and an earnest student.

What on Earth is a nonbinding agreement?

So this week at the APEC Summit the countries in Asia and on the Pacific rim have agreed to feel that the environment is still an important issue but not something to do something about. All very nice but I must say it is “a bit of a cop out”, to use the colourful Aussie slang.

May be these leaders – our leaders – should check themselves into OA (Over-consumption Anonymous) before it is too late. Or may be we should lock them up in a room for their own good like the parents of Renton, the drug addict in the film Trainspotting. The latter option might be our only chance of survival.

No, no more do we agree to disagree. Rather nowadays we now agree to not bind. Just terrific.

Busy, busy, busy

So I have been busy with part of my thesis of late. I have been trying to create a list of vocabulary for use in one of my professor’s classes which hopefully will yield some data for my research. So far it has been going well. In case you have been wondering my area of enquiry is applied linguistics with a corpus slant to it. More specifically I am a stylistics man, on how the use of literature in English language teaching.

I also had three days of conferences last week. I had learned quite a bit from those three days which will help when I give my paper in a few months time. I am nervous about it as I haven’t given a paper in language education before.

Other than that I have been busy with the kids. The youngest is walking now so we must vigilantly watch her. Things once out of reach are now targets for potential disaster. Cleaning up the food off the ground isn’t our idea of fun. My son is getting more conscious of his place in the family structure of things. The boss is still us but he now understands it and is going through a period of adjustment. And with my wife is back at work after maternity leave so it means I have to go home from university earlier than I would like to prepare dinner and so on. Sigh.