Thinking and Teaching Ecological Resilience with Simone Weil

Finding Roots

Working on environmental philosophy in the contemporary world of climate catastrophe is both harrowing and existentially pivotal. Academic teaching and writing about these ideas are certainly less radical forms of activism than some and it is easy, even encouraged, to fall into the role of armchair expert—a pursuit which is inevitably followed by a sense of despair and disillusionment as the gap between theory and action widens. Studying any type of applied ethics seems to require a movement from theory to praxis that is not necessary in normative ethics nor for most other forms of philosophy, and at times this work defies the structure of humanities departments.

As an early-career academic, I have moved three times in the past three years and as such I lack the necessary foundation for meaningful environmental work: roots, community, connection. Taking root in a community—what Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “becoming indigenous” to a particular place—is key to linking environment, justice, spirituality, and ethical duty. Kimmerer invites every person into the possibility of indigeneity with the land: “For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”2

As a Canadian of Irish and Scottish descent having lived a lifetime on the unceded land of many Indigenous groups, including my current home on the land of the Mi’kmaq, I find the generosity of this invitation from Kimmerer to be staggering. Being a white settler on stolen land can serve to further distance that person from that land even, or especially, for those who deeply care about righting such historical and contemporary wrongs. Allowing oneself this further level of shame and alienation from the land can lead to a lack of responsibility, however, which in turn can further perpetuate the historic harms to both the people and the land. Thus, Kimmerer’s invitation is not only an overwhelmingly generous gesture to settlers, but also a pragmatic decision aligned with principles of nonviolent civil disobedience. It is an invitation to imagine oneself in community with the land rather than as holding dominion over, or feeling oneself as separate from, that land.

In her writing, Kimmerer offers to educate rather than to reject and, as such, she imagines cooperative transformations. I have come to see Indigenous philosophies as some of the most advanced in the environmental field because for so many Indigenous groups, environmentalism is first philosophy, or the foundational branch of philosophy from which all other forms of philosophical pursuit can be derived. Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz notes that “to acknowledge origin or beginning from the land-earth is basic, vital, and essential. Without the acknowledgement, there is no way to understand obligation and responsibility that is basic to the relationship our Indigenous human community has to the land.”3

With this in mind, Ortiz argues that creation stories are to be understood literally and not metaphorically. A people are literally crafted from the land—including the natural world and its myriad inhabitants—and the language that is co-created with that world. I recall first seeing Bill Reid’s incredible statue depicting the Haida creation story, “The Raven and the First Men” (see Figure 1) and truly understanding the stakes of embracing this literal interpretation: a humanity integrally bound to and in community with the land. Reid’s statue incorporates a raven atop a clamshell that he has pried open, revealing the frightened and wonder-filled first humans emerging into the miracle of Haida Gwaii. The viewer can almost glimpse the shores of this North Pacific islands and they are transported into a dream that is both the mind of the human, the connection to the raven and the clam shell, and the entire surrounding world of the island.

Figure 1. Bill Reid, “The Raven and the First Men,” yellow cedar, 1978–1980, Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia. Photograph by Kathryn Lawson.

Of course, this type of interconnection is not the “natural” or only conclusion of an environmental ethics. In particular, settler scholars ontologically linking a people to the land must be conscious not to imply a “blood and soul” nationalism such as that used by the Nazi party to assert Aryan supremacy over their land.4 Perhaps Kimmerer’s invitation is how we can avoid an ethics of entitlement or exclusion. We must always look to the margins, inviting others in rather than casting them out, and acknowledging those people who have been excluded or dismissed. Predominately, this means giving attention not just to the animals and plants of the natural world but to the Indigenous thinkers who have long been listening to and in community with that world. Indigenous thinkers like Kimmerer, Ortiz, and Reid offer the foundational conception of environmental ethics as first philosophy.

Still, the “Western” philosophical canon is my main focus of study, and so I began searching for a thinker in that tradition that could accommodate the complex contradictions of our contemporary environmental moment. I sought someone who could allow for love and hope within the void of existential responsibility and destruction, whose work I could massage into an environmental ethics that prioritizes the most marginalized, decenters the “I” (the individual human subject), and encourages the movement from theory to practice. My goal was to find a thinker within the tradition I so loved that I could place into conversation with a diverse field of environmental thinkers and whose philosophy could withstand—and, ideally, thrive in—discovering its own weaknesses and adapting accordingly. In this effort, I found myself drawn to the twentieth-century French philosopher, activist, and mystic Simone Weil (1909–43).

Simone Weil’s Ethical Framework

At the height of her intellectual contribution, Weil offers a politics grown from an ethics, from a spiritual attention. For Weil, spirituality necessarily leads to ethics, which necessarily leads to politics. But this line is not straight nor hierarchical because spirituality itself is realized through our ethical political actions. In Weil’s estimation, the spiritual, ethical, and political are interwoven and deeply connected facets of the human condition realized through the interconnection of thought and act. We come to know these facets through our ethical, political, or spiritual engagements with our neighbors, the natural world, religious rites, art, science, and friends.5

Another key element of Weil’s thinking is that she sees certain contradictions as foundational to the human condition: the gap between our glimpses of “the Good” (our highest ethical potential) and the reality of our lived experience; the distinction between the ideal and its reality in the embodied world. As Weil put it:

For Weil, this insight goes all the way back to Plato’s division between the reality of material existence and the ideal realm of the forms.7 Weil reads this contradiction as an agonism we must continually work to balance. But it is not a strict dualism between body and mind or matter and ideal. Instead, it is a continual and interwoven negotiation.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this process is the decreative act of prioritizing the most marginalized person in any given scenario.8 For Weil, the gap between the “I” and the other person seems insurmountable and can only be overcome by allowing the other person to fully “be.” This is not merely a thought experiment—it must be acted upon. Our ethical actions must give priority to the marginalized. Benjamin Davis notes that Weil continually brought her ideas out into the world to test them and subsequently adapted or fully changed her theories based on this fieldwork.9 In other words, ethics, philosophy, and spirituality are the vehicles through which we attempt to embody our ideals or move toward the Good.

In Weil’s philosophy, it is through attention that the racination or rooting process can begin and it is through attention that our ethical actions become infused with universal love.10 In attention, we realize our ethical duty to the other as well as the interconnection between self, other, nature, community, politics, and spiritual fulfillment. While Weil asserts that we have a primordial connection to the natural world which is closely linked to our connections to divinity and to our ethical obligations, she also notes that these connections are easily covered over. Indeed, they are ordinarily covered over.

Weil’s ethical structure is ripe for engagement with our ecological crisis. But let me be clear: Simone Weil wrote nothing about ecological responsibility. Her love of the natural world was considerable, but it was a means to our spiritual connection to the Good and to our ethical responsibility to other humans. Nevertheless, her foundational ideas felt to me to be some of the only ones that are steeped in the Western philosophical tradition and yet are still amenable to thinking ecologically.11 Weil’s struck me as a world in which students could perhaps step into the absurd existential demands of this crisis with hope and action. In summary, Weil offers an ability to hold open the pressures of reality as well as the beauty of the world in a communal entanglement with others. Through the art of attention, she asks us to prioritize marginalized others. And, perhaps most importantly, she demands that our thoughts are tested with our actions and correspondingly modified.

Embodying Environmentalism in the Classroom and Beyond

I have come to find that my own work on climate justice and environmentalism entails a delicate balance between reality and hope that can allow for an openness to both love and rage, in myself and in my students. When teaching this topic, I generally have not found the ecological despair I expected from students. Instead, I have often encountered an eerie disengagement, a refusal to stand in the staggering shadow of the absurd ecological responsibility, and a turning away in favor of issues like identity politics or the state of the family in contemporary society. Even when engaging with the discipline, students sometimes prefer to focus on specific issues within it, such as animal ethics, rather than to range broadly.

After my initial surprise, I came to understand their reluctance. First of all, these other topics are undoubtedly important—indeed, they are immediate life and death issues for many marginalized humans and other sentient beings and crucially, they are much more actionable than the global ecological crisis. Secondly, the existential dread and helplessness in the face of environmental degradation is a burden that seems unfair to put upon a generation with such grim social and political prospects.

And yet it is theirs, just as it is mine and it is yours. And when the earth is no longer hospitable for human and nonhuman animal life, these other areas—indeed all other foci—will be utterly inconsequential. It is not a problem we have the liberty to ignore, but this seems to be one of the main coping stratagems for many students. My current goal in teaching these courses is to offer my students the idea that ethical action as a natural extension of critical thought. I need for them to be able to recognize the existential dread of climate change, environmental racism, and mass extinction without losing the drive for action or the seed of hope.

So, my first step as an educator has been to take note of who in the community is already doing this work and to show up and listen. I have begun this by learning about the communities that are most affected by environmental injustices in my current city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The work of Dr. Ingrid Waldron—first brought to my attention a few years ago with a documentary from Ian Daniel and Elliot Page called There’s Something in the Water—has been particularly beneficial in this effort.12 Waldron created ENRICH, or the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities & Community Health Project, a collaborative community-based research and engagement organization designed to investigate the social, economic, political, and health effects of environmental racism in Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotian communities.13 Waldron is quite clear that ENRICH is focused on actionable events and engagement. It is not meant merely to educate, but to do so in order to incite change.

Following the lead of grass roots organizations and people in communities that are marginalized is the first priority in this work and this has meant meeting and speaking with a number of incredible scholars and activists such as Louise Delisle and Vannessa Hartley from Shelburne, N.S. co-founders of The Centre for Environmental Justice Society (CEJ), which addresses the longstanding issue of environmental racism in the historic African Nova Scotian community of Shelburne.14 A key issue here is the Morvan Road landfill, operational for 75 years, which was used to dispose of a wide range of hazardous waste, including household and medical waste, without adequate environmental safeguards. The resulting contamination has had significant negative impacts on the community’s socio-economic health, biodiversity, environment, and quality of life. Louise and Vanessa came to speak to my class about systemic racism, environmental racism, and their own work toward environmental justice in Shelburne both historically and in the present day. These types of talks are difficult to give and to receive because many Canadians are aggressively reluctant to acknowledge racism in our own country and the nature of these stories are necessarily deeply personal and traumatic for the women whose lives and communities are at risk. The contemporary and historical work towards racial equality and environmental justice by women in the African Nova Scotian community is all too often covered over and requires what Reakash Walters calls thinking “against amnesia” in our scholarship.15

Similarly, the historic Africville community in Halifax, which was torn down in the mid-1960s while many of its residents still inhabited their homes there, was saddled with the environmental burdens of an infectious disease hospital, human waste pits, a slaughterhouse, a city dump, a prison, a bone meal plant, a rolling mill, and a nail factory, all while the municipal and provincial government denied residents city water and access to transportation that would have connected the area with the rest of Halifax. Railway tracks, power lines, and a highway still cut Africville off from the rest of Halifax today, despite its desirable location on the north end of the city. Historically, Black loyalists fleeing American slavery were met in Canada with a barrage of discrimination and violence that continues to this day in many forms, but in particular, in the form of environmental injustice. Denise Allen, a former resident of Africville, notes that it is “the most blatant and extreme illustration of environmental racism.”16

Finding roots in a place means learning the seasons, the plants, the humidity in the summers, the hurricanes in the fall. It means knowing that here, rhododendron blossoms like I never could have imagined and the hydrangeas are a stunning shade of blue. It means recognizing the doe and her fawn that stroll through the local community garden, along with all of the beauty and attention that environmentalists from Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold to Arnae Naess and David Abram have suggested.18 But it also means getting to know the telltale signs suggested by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring: the wildfires once so foreign to this maritime land, the shortages of fish, the air quality, the growing severity of the hurricanes.19And perhaps most importantly from an ecological viewpoint, it means recognizing those pushed off of their land due to population growth; those most affected by the rising prices at the grocery stores due to poor growing seasons; those most affected by pollution, water contamination, and industrialization. This level of attention and environmental responsibility can be all too conveniently overlooked by environmentalists interested in the beauty of the wilderness and the communion with nature. In the spirit of Weilian agonism, roots come with finding oneself in community and beauty but also with taking responsibility and facing that which is utterly devastating and ugly.

In addition to classroom readings, the cultivation of attention to the natural world, and the ethical prioritization of those most affected by ecological destruction, my hope for students is to introduce them to avenues for practicing ecological ethical actions through activism, art, and science. I have some ideas of how this may look but, ultimately, I am sure I will learn more from them and the paths they choose to explore. In the end, the success of this will rely on a student’s willingness to engage and be vulnerable with this work and their capacity for hope in a void and fury defined by love. So much of this work is already happening in the world, predominately led by the Indigenous and racialized communities that have borne the burden of environmental degradation. The goal, then, is not to reinvent the wheel but to build community and support around the scientists, artists, and activists already doing this work—to broaden the community of those who benefit from ecological goods and those who are burdened with ecological harms. To pursue this effort recognizes Weil’s unconditional obligation to listen to and act with those who have been marginalized and sees this as a key step for building community and growing roots.