Philosophers Fight Climate Change Series
This interview series highlights the exciting ways philosophers engage the public to combat a central crisis of our time.
Ben Mylius is an Australian writer and lawyer, specializing in environmental political theory and jurisprudence. He is currently completing a PhD at Columbia, and is Founding Convenor of the Columbia Climate Imaginations Network, which builds community and momentum around storytelling and climate change.
What civically engaged project(s) or work do you do with students? What is your role?
I’m a writer and lawyer from Australia, and I’m currently completing my PhD in Environmental Political Theory at Columbia, in New York City. As part of my time at Columbia, I’ve been fortunate to be able to get a variety of projects and initiatives off the ground, to bring people together across disciplinary boundaries and practices to think creatively about how we imagine our futures under climate change. Most recently, I’ve served as the Founding Convenor of the new Columbia Climate Imaginations Network (CCIN), through Columbia’s newly-established Climate School.
Give an example of an insight or project that has developed out of the CCIN.
Our goal is to provide a sort of “communal table” for students and others at Columbia and beyond to explore how stories are central to the ways we understand ourselves, our relationships to one another, and—crucially—how we identify our values and imagine the kinds of worlds we hope might come into being in the future. It’s still early days, but we’ve had great fun connecting students across departments and schools via informal art viewing and community-building sessions, collaborating on some art installation projects, and working with a set of faculty to consider how climate storytelling might find a bigger place at Columbia generally.
What inspired you to convene the CCIN?
CCIN arose out of a set of insights from my experience in grad school, and in academia more generally. I think creativity and imagination are central to our ability to respond to the most pressing challenges of our time, including climate change—because so much of our attempts to make sense of and engage with these phenomena happens through stories (in all their forms). At the same time, we need a way to think together about making our stories ethical, and so to ask questions about our values and about the challenges and opportunities we face in working across difference. Many of the university communities I’ve been part of have missed this opportunity, I think, because they succumb to the wrong kinds of logics and incentives (competition, reductionism, etc.) So part of my hope is that we’ll be able to create a place that helps build trust and the ability of folks across a whole set of spectra to learn one another’s “languages” (disciplinary, cultural, practical, or otherwise) and work in solidarity with one another.
Do you have a philosophy of teaching?
I’ve been inspired by the work of many colleagues, as well as by the American pragmatic tradition, which I take to hold that our goal as teachers is to nurture our students as whole human beings, giving them skills to pursue meaning and strengthen the communities in which they live; and to hold, further, that we advance this goal by bringing our students into an ongoing conversation about how our collective intellect, ethics, and imagination can help us respond to the world’s most pressing contemporary problems. This is especially important, and often challenging, in teaching political theory and law, both of which (at their best) draw from environmental philosophy. These fields involve an important tension. On the one hand, everyone understands that the work coming out of these domains plays a significant role in shaping the contours of our lives. On the other hand, that same work is often discussed in terms that are high-minded, abstract, and difficult to relate to lived experience. It is dangerously easy to present them in ways that make students feel intimidated, inadequate, and disempowered. For that reason I’ve found it crucial, again, to bring storytelling and personal experience—mine and that of my students—to my teaching work.
Is there a classroom experience that’s been especially memorable for you?
A highlight of my teaching experience was running a course I designed as an introduction to Environmental Political Theory. (You can find the syllabus here, along with many other terrific syllabi designed by others, in the International Society for Environmental Ethics’ syllabus library). We began by looking at the different ways that canonical thinkers have conceptualized “humans,” the different ways they’ve conceptualized “nature,” and—consequently—the different ways they’ve conceptualized the relationship between humans and nature and the role of humans in nature. We then began to explore how these answers informed both the questions that thinkers have subsequently asked, and the answers that they gave. What impact does defining humans as “part of nature” or “separate from nature” have on how we understand ourselves in the world: as masters or as stewards? Should the benefits of democracy and the Polis be limited to human beings, and if so, why? How should we approach the future, given that our capacity to intervene in natural systems is growing larger and larger, even as the consequences of mistakes is growing more and more dire? My goal was to act as a sort of tour guide, giving my students a map and a set of tools for navigating a landscape, so they can orient themselves and then explore paths (or create new paths) according to what matters to them.
You emphasize creativity, imagination, and stories as core elements of your work. Why are these so important to you?
Creativity, imagination, and stories have been a defining part of my life, and in my quest for a philosophical and ethical community that is communal in the true sense—a place of solidarity and love, where folks work together to nourish and support one another—I’ve found that using these things has been a way to stay connected to the things I think are most central to universities and cultural institutions in the context of our contemporary challenges. Three come to mind in particular. First, the ability to honor and learn from diverse experiences and perspectives. Second, the capacity to set up mentorships/relationships that emphasize a “whole person” approach to life and learning. And third, the ability to affirm that all of us come to universities and other educational institutions with a set of “big questions” about our own lives and about the world more generally. It is vital that we explore and do justice to these, I think, if we are to live in a fulfilled and sustainable way!
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