Everyday Ecocide

I’ve started a new Medium-based platform for my Everyday Ecocide project.

I thought I should share something about that project here on my main blog, as it’s increasingly important for me.

So, what’s it all about?

Ecocide means the destruction of the natural environment. Ecocide is happening because of agribusiness, deforestation, mining, the oil industry, pollution and waste, and also because of the impacts of anthropogenic global warming and its continued denial. This ecocide is being perpetuated by globalised industry, which relies on fossil fuels and their chemical and plastic derivatives. Much of this ecocide is invisible to us because it has become normalised, and many of us live disconnected from wild places that are being damaged, or from where our food and goods are being produced. The media fails to expose the environmental damage behind the system of economic growth that supposedly sustains us and enables us to aspire to better futures. It fails to expose the corporate and political corruption behind the continuity of this ‘business as usual’ system. It fails to expose the hegemonies in our culture that tie us into this system.

In April 2016, I created a Facebook group called Everyday Ecocide, aiming to have a place where people could share examples they had found in media, adverts, artworks, academia, industrial policy or society of eco-blindness, climate denial or erasure of non-human species. All of these small ecocides are like a daily tide, in and out, causing disconnection from nature, psychic numbing to ecological harm and ultimately all adding up to the emerging catastrophe of environmental collapse.

The idea was inspired by the Everyday Sexism project which exists to catalogue incidents of sexism experienced on a day to day basis, including in representations and language. Everyday Ecocide is in some ways a tougher call than inviting stories of sexism. The BBC has run Woman’s Hour since 1946 and given a platform to feminism for at least the past 45 years. BBC has run nature programmes for a long time too, but not in a way that criticises the anti-environmental structural hegemonies of our socio-political system! It’s hard to find a way to describe this without jargon. We haven’t learned how to critique our lack of an ecological way of knowing. We, mostly, aren’t even conscious of it. That’s why I called out for help.

I set up the Medium platform to invite articles and short posts to help us understand Everyday Ecocide, the disconnection from nature, the denial of anthropogenic global warming, the erasure of other species, the devaluing of environmental externalities, the exclusion of ecological education and so on. What are all the different categories of this phenomenon? Why is it intensifying even while the Earth system is beginning to collapse around us? And what are some alternatives and creative solutions to an eco-blind culture?

On the Everyday Ecocide platform you’ll find the first article to get us going, and to introduce a range of ideas that may be helpful to underpin our thinking. I cheated slightly by accessing this range of ideas from a new journal called The Ecological Citizen, which promotes a shift to an ecocentric worldview. I’m really hoping to get suggestions for more articles, which could analyse particular ways that ecological thinking, or other species, or climate change, for example, are erased and denied. They could be articles, or artworks or short creative provocations. I’m a very light and tolerant editor, but I reserve the right to turn down submissions.

So, I hope to hear from you, with ideas for submissions.

Or join us on Facebook

Or follow @EverydayEcocide on Twitter, or use the #everydayecocide hashtag when you post examples.