TESOL and Sustainability PDF

1 Earth Democracy as Empowerment for TESOL Students and Educators: Though the Crisis Speaks English, englishes Can Become a Commons Language of Sustainability M. Garrett Delavan California State University, San Marcos...

1 Earth Democracy as Empowerment for TESOL Students and Educators: Though the Crisis Speaks English, englishes Can Become a Commons Language of Sustainability M. Garrett Delavan California State University, San Marcos Introduction Berta Cáceres received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 for her decades of work in a grassroots organization in her Lenca indigenous community in Honduras that fought against illegal logging, proposed dams to power expanded mining, and land privatization resulting in displacement of indigenous communities (Goldman Prize, 2018). In her acceptance speech, she declared in Spanish “Our Mother Earth—militarized, fenced-in, poisoned, a place where basic rights are systematically violated—demands that we take action. Let us build societies that are able to coexist in a [just,]1 dignified way that protects life.” She concluded by dedicating the prize to, among others, “las y los mártires de la defensa de los bienes de la naturaleza,” the female and male martyrs of the defense of the bounty of the earth (Cáceres, 2015). A year later, she herself was assassinated. Honduras is one of the countries with increasing levels of emigration to the United States—and its TESOL classrooms—which Miller (2017) argues is at least partly a result of climate change and the ever-expanding monoculture of palm oil plantations. If you talk to TESOL professionals about the ideas in this book, it is likely that many will respond with something to the effect of: “What does ecological sustainability have to do with me professionally? Why can’t I just let the science teachers handle that?” This chapter aims to ready readers to counter such responses and to encourage readers to think of themselves as discursive 20 TESOL and Sustainability strategists. I hope to document and stimulate conversation on persuasive reasons—framed in accessible, democratized terms—to disrupt traditional notions of our TESOL professional identity toward one that will do something (different) about sustainability crises while adding English to the linguistic repertoires of multilingual students. This chapter is a recipe book of possibilities for persuasion; it experiments with several new terms and combinations of concepts, hoping in the process to stimulate conversations that can go into more depth than space allows here. In the spirit of Fairclough’s (2010) fourth stage of critical discourse analysis (“identify possible ways past the obstacles” to “addressing the social wrong” [p. 235]) and what some have called positive discourse analysis (Macgilchrist, 2007; Martin & Rose, 2003), I ask readers to take stock of the discursive strategies that could most effectively impress the English–sustainability link upon the maximum number of professionals who educate English language learners. While I am in favor of the deeper root-metaphor transformations away from anthropocentric and Eurocentric discourse and thought that Bowers (2003) and others have called for, I choose to draw attention to discourse in a way that sees even small movements in thinking as potentially laying the groundwork for fuller transformation in due time. I argue there are multiple discursive possibilities that may prove more accessible and effective in persuading the biggest possible tent of TESOL educators to see language instruction as a logical forum for counteracting anthropocentrism and anti-posteritism, that is, discrimination against future generations. This chapter sees discourse as a strategic resource for social change (Hardy, Palmer & Phillips, 2000), and it sees democracy as a key strategic discourse that may motivate teachers to address environmental sustainability in their teaching. Heeding Cáceres’s call that we “build societies that are able to coexist,” the chapter’s vision for a focus on environmental sustainability that does not lose sight of other, more strictly human justice concerns is grounded in Vandana Shiva’s (2016) theory of Earth democracy, which arises out of her activism in India opposing corporate globalization and affirming local cultures of sustainability. Recognizing the strategic value of educators’ familiarity with John Dewey’s (1927/2012) early (although flawed) advocacy for democratic public education, this chapter seeks to recover the pragmatist, Deweyan ideal of the great community, a public that is called into being by a need to confront shared problems with the best available evidence. I follow Goulah’s (2018) use of Dewey’s concept of “the religious” as key to articulating this ethical vision. I side with Dewey and others in questioning the secular–sacred binary, in asserting that  Earth Democracy as Empowerment 21 (human) nature is such that a commitment to protect and sustain nature-bound communities great and small is always inherently religious—indeed, an act of a common faith (Dewey, 1934/2013; Hickman, 2009). Shiva (2016) reminds us that religious institutions and religious discourse do not always uphold this ethic, however. She calls for life-embracing religious diversity rather than destructive or negative fundamentalisms that lead us to ignore evidence of what the most ethical choices actually are. After a deeper foray into this theoretical perspective, the chapter will have two main stages. I start by assessing discourses the literature has already offered—based on their democratic potential to unite publics around shared problems (Dewey, 1927/2012)—first discourses applicable to educators in general then discourses for persuading TESOL educators in particular. I finish by suggesting three further possibilities missing from this list of discourses for persuading colleagues who continue to see their work as apolitical or unrelated to any commitments to sustainability they may express elsewhere: (a) a narrative of the emerging environmental justice research demonstrating that minoritized language communities in the United States are exposed to more pollution, (b) a historical narrative that dramatizes the rise of the Anthropocene villainy that is to be met with justice, and (c) a protagonizing (heroizing) narrative that bridges students’ English-speaking identities with their other identities in empowering and culturally sustaining ways. Theoretical Perspective Discourse as a Strategic Resource Benjamin Lee Whorf was the first popularizer of the findings of the new science of linguistics (Carroll, 1956). His research in the 1930s compared European and indigenous American languages grammatically, and he is widely credited with being the first social scientist to begin to assert that possibilities for thought are deeply shaped by the structure of one’s language and the necessarily cultural concepts embedded in its lexicon. Whorf ’s claims such as that “economic behavior is conditioned by culture, not by mechanistic reactions” (quoted in Carroll, 1956, p. 21) heralded a linguistic turn— or cultural turn—in the social sciences in the second half of the twentieth century toward considerations of how power is exerted through language and how explanations for human behavior must ultimately come down largely to 22 TESOL and Sustainability culture, which is inherently diverse and arbitrary. Historian Michel Foucault (1995) was a key figure in this cultural turn and he focused in on the concept of discourse. He argued that the ways in which professions like medicine and education came to articulate and apply knowledge in the 1700s began to exert a more subtle form of control over populations than ruling classes had formerly been capable of. The approaches of Norman Fairclough (2010) and James Paul Gee (2014) have built on Foucault and informed much of the critical analysis of discourse in education. Fairclough defines discourses as ways of construing the world through language and other forms of semiosis (systems of meaning) that make the material world socially real, aligning it with the identity positions of speakers and reinforcing particular power arrangements. He demonstrates, for example, how discourse has operated in the increasing marketization of higher education. Gee sees discourses similarly, but emphasizes that they are principally ways of performing particular identity positions and thus belonging to particular discourse communities. Lewis, Enciso, and Moje (2007) build on this conversation by emphasizing the agency that individuals such as students from marginalized communities in the United States employ in navigating among these overlapping discourse communities and identity positions. Hardy and colleagues (2000) review this same literature on discourse theory to lay out a mechanism of “discourse as a strategic resource” for individuals in exerting some agency—within numerous constraints—to change organizations such as schools. They argue that “by intervening in these processes of discursive production, individual actors hope to achieve ‘real’ political effects” (p. 1235). In essence, they theorize the minute steps by which individuals summon available discursive resources, target them to be recognizable for their audience, and occasionally make tangible social changes insofar as “concepts are successfully attached to relations and/or material referents and create specific objects in the eyes of other actors”; change can occur because “new subject positions [identities from which to know or speak] and practices” become possible and because over time “the accumulation of individual statements and practices influences the context for future discursive activities as prevailing discourses are contested, displaced, transformed, modified or reinforced” (p. 1236). It is in this same spirit of teacher as discursive change agent that Martusewicz, Edmundson, and Lupinacci (2014), in their excellent textbook, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse, Democratic, and Sustainable Communities, demonstrate that ecojustice education is about language and metaphor, about reframing issues  Earth Democracy as Empowerment 23 by recombining discourses in order to catalyze differences in students’ thinking about the privileging of (certain) humans and the privileging of the current generation (anti-posteritism). Yet true sociocultural transformation through discursive persuasion would not be possible if discourse were confined to the logic of the head and did not also include the feeling of the gut. Following Goulah (2018), I argue for seeing “humanity’s deep interiority, or the sense of spirituality and interconnectedness” (p. 452) as a way to conceive what really commits us to or lets us feel sustainability’s urgent call rather than just know it is something we ought to eventually get around to. The discursive strategies that we might effectively use to move one another toward sustainability, however, might be various: religious/spiritual discourse (whether it be general or specific to a tradition like Buddhism or progressive Christianity), climate science discourse, economics discourse, curriculum standards discourse, or whatever discourse gets the audience moving away from accepting the unsustainable status quo as a fait accompli. Goulah draws on Daisaku Ikeda’s concept of religious sentiment and Dewey’s concept of the religious as a means of capturing this aspect of human experience and discourse. Although Dewey’s is often associated with an embrace of evidence-based, democratic, secular public engagement, he combined this with a critique of atheism in favor of “natural piety” (p. 49). In a series of lectures published as A Common Faith, Dewey (1934/2013) acknowledged “the ties binding [hu]man[s] to nature that poets have always celebrated” and argued that such a religious attitude “needs the sense of a connection of [hu]man[s], in the way of both dependence and support, with the enveloping world that the imagination feels is a universe” (p. 49). Dewey theorizes that religiosity (a) protects humans “from a sense of isolation and from consequent despair or defiance” against a universe seen as cruel or other and (b) “support[s] our idea of good as an end to be striven for” (p. 49). In essence, then, making the ethical/communal choice is always religious—felt in the gut rather than merely thought in the head—and especially so when it involves that which is beyond the merely human and other expressions of the parts of nature/humanity most akin to ourselves. Even when an evidentiary process, ethics that are gut-felt and not merely head-thought become religion in a fuller sense than when religious discourses are hijacked or perverted by reactionary leaders to justify particular power structures or obscure evidence that is unflattering to those power structures. The power structures that are synonymous with the unsustainable economic systemization of the last half millennium are an obvious example. 24 TESOL and Sustainability Earth Democracy That Strategically Recovers Dewey’s Great Community Martusewicz and colleagues (2014) argue that Shiva’s (2016) concept of Earth democracy is the most robust view of democracy with which to move toward social justice in the Anthropocene, which we can take to have begun at least as far back as the coal-driven Industrial Revolution in Northern England and the concomitant enclosures or privatization of common lands.2 Shiva’s Earth democracy is a powerful articulation of a unified but pluralist vision for local, sustainable communities that cooperate worldwide to resist the agenda of corporate globalization’s new enclosures and its patriarchal commoditization and destruction of the commons. Earth democracy centers on the production of food by small-scale farmers, who Shiva argues are able to produce more per acre as well as employ and feed more people more equitably in the process. Earth democracy rejects the chemical and factory model of the so-called Green Revolution that accompanied the neocolonial exploitation of the Global South by the Global North as well as rejecting the patriarchal fundamentalisms that have sometimes sprung up in reaction to it. Yet Martusewicz and colleagues conspicuously choose not to draw on Dewey’s well-known articulation of democracy in and through public education. This is probably because Dewey has been critiqued by ecojustice scholars for working from harmful root metaphors of Eurocentric, anti-indigenous progress and growth (Bowers, 2003) and racist applications of his theories of education for social justice that never questioned the White supremacy and colonialism of the Jim Crow era in which he lived (Margonis, 2011). Despite these apt critiques, the historical earliness of Dewey’s thought continues to help explain these limitations as well as to keep a spot for him in the canon of early heroes of critical approaches to education (Colonna & Nix-Stevenson, 2015) and of poststructural thought ahead of its time (Pierce, 2012). Following Margonis (2011), I argue we can “de-couple Dewey’s [and others’] visionary pedagogies from the [problematic] language that limits their pluralism” (p. 436). At the turn of the twentieth century, Dewey began to use the concept of democracy as an ideal form of social organization based on public deliberation over the best available evidence rather than dogmatic assertions of truth. At the core of his vision is a call for student-centered, inquiry-based, democratic pedagogy to build a problem-solving public of citizen-scientists who could more intelligently consider their collective habits. He argued that a great community could form among disparate social groups inasmuch as they were able to see that their common problems united them as one public. Dewey is  Earth Democracy as Empowerment 25 worth reaching back to for informing Earth democracy because he articulated a vision for democratically confronting the problems of the industrial age, a proto-environmentalism where individual humans are seen as part of a broader biological and ethical world. In a key text, The Public and Its Problems, Dewey (1927/2012) critiques humanity’s enormously enlarged control of physical energies without any corresponding ability to control [themselves and their] own affairs … generating enslavement of men, women and children in factories in which they are animated machines to tend inanimate machines. It has maintained sordid slums, flurried and discontented careers, grinding poverty and luxurious wealth, brutal exploitation of nature and man in times of peace and high explosives and noxious gases in times of war. (p. 175) After the Second World War, of course, this clear line between peacetime and war became increasingly blurred: so-called peace through prosperity now relies on constant explosions and noxious gases. We have already seen how Dewey (1934/2013) asserted that poets have always celebrated an obvious continuity between humans and nature. In describing Dewey’s proto-environmentalism, Reid and Taylor (2003) write of “Dewey’s radically ecological understanding of the aesthetic dimensions of experience” (p. 79) that is visible in statements of Dewey’s like this one: “‘Whenever the bond that binds the living creature to his environment is broken, there is nothing that holds together the various factors and phases of the self ’” (p. 83). Dewey saw his concepts of social cohesion as analogous to the interdependence of organism and environment in a way that went beyond mere metaphor. Tarrant and Thiele (2016) quote this excerpt of Dewey’s ecological or systems thinking: “‘In actual experience, there is never any such isolated singular object or event; an object or event is always a special part, phase, or aspect, of an environing experienced world—a situation’” (p. 57). They emphasize that Dewey’s proto- environmentalism is visible in his theories of adapting to the new conditions of the industrial economy as an organism does in changing environmental conditions, which they argue anticipates the current school of thought advocating “adaptive co-management” of imperiled natural resources (p. 60). Scholars and laypeople alike often use the strategy of grounding and legitimizing their position in the longest and most established tradition available. In this vein, I argue we can strategically carry forward a Deweyan conception of grassroots democracy, great community, or global public that is deeply biological and nature-defending yet also refreshingly evidence-based to inform our era of disinformation campaigns on climate change. Written at the inception of the public 26 TESOL and Sustainability relations and advertising industries, the Public and Its Problems was a treatise written to defend the idea of a democracy by all rather than by a technocracy of experts. Dewey (1927/2012) calls in essence for a view of discourse as a strategic resource for democracy: “The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public … the freeing and perfecting of the processes of inquiry and dissemination of their conclusions” (p. 208). This critique of the tyranny of experts in some ways presages Foucault’s critique of the tyranny of the professions. I argue that Dewey and Shiva pair well. Dewey was a voice for undoing factory schooling since 1897 (during the Industrial Revolution). Shiva was a voice for undoing neocolonial factory farming in 1982 (during the Chemical Revolution). The molar–molecular distinction is instructive in understanding these two phases of what might be called the Unsustainability Revolution. Molar refers to that which is seen in macroscopic chunks while molecular refers to that which is seen as composed of its many constituent particles. Dewey critiques the molar phase of the Unsustainability Revolution, the coal-fired factory model, and the burning of fossil fuels by the colonial powers. Shiva critiques the neocolonial, molecular phase which added on the conversion of petroleum into a vast array of chemicals and plastics over and above the continued burning of petroleum for mere propulsion. It added the tearing up of the molar tracks to make way for the molecular highways; it brought the carrying of the middle class and the sprawling of the suburb, and, of course, nuclear bombs, energy, and waste. Indeed, Shiva’s (2016) Earth democracy includes the concept of biopiracy—the patenting and thus privatization of DNA that nature has in fact invented—in its critique of this molecular capitalist revolution. We will return shortly to these molar and molecular phases of unsustainability. In sum, democracy is a discourse that may motivate teachers to address sustainability crises in their teaching despite it not being their purported specialty. In the following section, we will turn to other such persuasive discourses in circulation, first those that apply to all teachers and next those that apply to TESOL professionals in particular. Persuasive Discourses in Circulation Persuading Educators in General Any educator who has ever or will ever teach in English to students who are significantly less proficient in that language than in their other languages could  Earth Democracy as Empowerment 27 and should consider themselves a TESOL professional. Yet knowing that many will not self-identify as such, the three discourses in this section are framed broadly enough that they could be used with such TESOL professionals in denial of their TESOL-ness. Sustainability questions can highlight other social justice issues teachers may already address. Sustainability can be part of a social justice or human rights narrative already welcome in many curricula, especially if the inequitable effects on different social groups are emphasized. Martusewicz and colleagues (2014) and Shiva (2016) are excellent examples of this discursive pairing. Unconvinced teachers could be informed that in 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had already connected his theretofore focus on White supremacy to other aspects of social justice—economic, military, and even hints of environmental—to begin to stir interest in a broad agenda for social transformation that would unite multiple constituencies. His assassination just one year later cut this work short. In his Massey Lecture in Canada that year, King (2008) spoke of African Americans being confined to cities “gasping in polluted air and enduring contaminated water” (p. 172). In his Christmas Sermon on Peace that year, he reworked his theme of “inescapable network of mutuality,” which dated back at least to his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, into an explicitly ecological perspective of global sustainability: “All life is interrelated” (p. 211). Hearing such examples of the long tradition of collaboration between environmental activism and social justice activism in the United States— from Robert Bullard, founding scholar of environmental racism, to Aurora Castillo, “La Doña” of East Los Angeles, to the 2016 Standing Rock protests against unsustainable pipelines—might help tear down the metaphorical border wall where sustainability gets set to one side as if a purely scientific concern or a luxury for white middle-class contemplation. Nixon (2011) documents examples of a growing “environmentalism of the poor” in the Global South that, while still wary of “full-stomach” versions of environmentalism that are neocolonial or “antihuman” (p. 5), are firmly rooted in a desire for sustainable livelihoods rather than simply access to the Global North’s unsustainable level of consumption. Moore (2015) argues that an honest critique of capitalism or economic inequality should acknowledge how considerations of sustainability were always already part of capitalism and modernity. To take an economically progressive position without taking environmental sustainability into account is to misread history. Urgency and its denial. The urgency of the climate crisis in particular demands a politics of transformation rather than mere access. Unless TESOL 28 TESOL and Sustainability educators work to address sustainability, the goals of raising educational or social access via TESOL or exposing TESOL students to social justice content without an ecological component will ultimately amount to “rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic” (Dobson & Tomkinson, 2012, p. 271). The urgency is heightened by the high-profile and well-funded discourses that cast doubt on the consensus among climate scientists. Goulah (2017) draws on evidence that this discourse of climate change denial among the US population is often religious or spiritual in its appeal. This epitomizes the value of Dewey’s combination of (a) inclusion of spirituality in a conception of the great community’s dialogue and (b) faith in public intelligence, which he argued must include both the dissemination of experts’ findings and the rhetorically adaptive persuasion of one’s fellows to take such narratives seriously. This spiritual denial discourse is part of what Goulah draws on to argue for using “TESOL as a means of exploring the cultivation of an eco-ethical consciousness” (p. 92). Strategic uses of discourse built on a perspective like Dewey’s that is both spiritual and evidentiary promise to be more inclusive, allowing many who identify deeply with their religiosity not to thereby disidentify with the reality of climate urgency. Unsustainability framed as violence. In the spirit of Fairclough’s (2010) concept of critical language awareness, this chapter begins from the assumption that language teachers should not be naïve about the politics that language always already forces users to take a position within (Alim, 2010; Pennycook, 2001). By extension, all inhabitants of Earth have a responsibility not to be naïve about sustainability and the literal violence that unsustainable practices can inflict on contemporary communities and future generations—human or otherwise. The question is how and when do we inform and persuade others about evidence and responsibilities pertinent to environmental violence? In the spirit of Dewey’s critique of technocracy, we do not rely on experts who have extensively studied violence to be the ones to recommend that it stop. We all are obligated to recommend that it stop. For example, if teachers see violence occurring anywhere in the school, they are obliged to try to stop it themselves or solicit help in stopping it, regardless of their degree of expertise over that space or violence per se. Foltz (2010) writes through an Islamic lens: The most pervasive and dangerous form of global violence today is violence against the Earth’s life-support systems … Environmental degradation is directly linked to other forms of violence such as war, poverty, and oppression, though these linkages are often obscured by political and other factors, and sometimes deliberately so. … the various human struggles we see around the  Earth Democracy as Empowerment 29 world today are like fighting over possession of deck chairs on the Titanic. Yet we persist in treating the environmental crisis as merely one issue among many, rather than as the central issue that it is. How can we deceive ourselves so? (p. 132) An elitist environmentalism of “wilderness” and national parks can seem to those in bleak poverty like the rearrangement of first-class deck chairs on the Titanic, but an environmentalism of toxic (by-)products, sea-level rise, and desertification is about rerouting the Titanic, chairs and all. US educational standards now explicitly legitimize environmental advocacy. The Next Generation Science Standards now explicitly call for using sustainability questions to discursively frame and motivate students’ learning of science, and “climate change is prominently included” (Goulah, 2017, p. 91). Sustainability is a more easily defensible topic for TESOL and many other disciplines thanks to this legitimation. For the same reason sustainability is a compelling means of engaging students in science, it is also a compelling means of engaging students in learning a new language. Feinstein and Kirchgasler (2015) argue that to give sustainability the proper depth and context, it should be treated in an interdisciplinary way and not just by science teachers but also by social studies teachers. It is a rare TESOL lesson indeed that cannot defensibly be connected to either science or social studies. In my own context of California, as of 2016 there are now formal standards for integrating “environmental literacy” with science and social studies, and a strategic “blueprint” (Environmental Literacy Taskforce, 2015) lays out goals for expanding the standards to even more curricula, including English language development: Develop and increase educator access to, and use of, culturally relevant instructional materials that both address environmental topics and meet academic standards. … Consistent with the letter and spirit of existing law, incorporate the Environmental Principles & Concepts (EP&Cs) into future curriculum frameworks and related implementation plans for science (CA NGSS), History-Social Science, English Language Development, math (CA CCSS), and English Language Arts (CA CCSS). These efforts must include plans to increase awareness and understanding of the EP&Cs among educators through communication and professional learning. (p. 25, emphasis mine) Mandates like this are an extremely hopeful sign, but educators will still need to persuade one another to follow through meaningfully on what such policies call for. 30 TESOL and Sustainability Persuading TESOL Professionals in Particular Sustainability issues with consequences for the global public are clearly global learning. Discourses have been circulating in language education for some time asserting the need for global learning (Christiansen & Kasarcı, 2016), a global workforce (Delavan, Valdez, & Freire, 2017), or world readiness for global communities (ACTFL, 2018). Sustainability issues affecting the global public are clearly topics that belong in any multilingual education program that promotes itself with such globalization discourses. Dewey would argue that the global public called into being by these discourses takes on its fullest meaning for members when it focuses on solving that globe’s problems. Climate refugees and migrants. As the example of Honduras suggested at the outset of this chapter, many TESOL students’ reason for being in a new English- dominated space is displacement related to climatic unsustainability (Goulah, 2010, 2012). Such “ecological refugees” (Reid & Taylor, 2003, p. 85) may not often identify with this label if they themselves have not had the democratic opportunity to see evidence of a deeper anti-Earth un-democracy driving the poverty or social instability that forced them to migrate. Loss of languages and cultures of sustainability. Many scholars have pointed out the links between language shift toward English and language extinction to the loss of cultures of sustainability (MacPherson, 2003; Maffi, 2001; Nettle & Romaine, 2000). This brings attention to the maintenance of language diversity as one aspect of the positive cultural diversity embedded in the goals of Earth democracy, which rejects the negative diversity of fundamentalist responses to imperialism that mimic its violence and patriarchy. By emphasizing to TESOL teachers that part of their professional mission is to “act as advocates to support students’ home culture and heritage language” (TESOL International Association, 2010, p. 38), they may grow more concerned about global language loss and its environmental correlates and bring these connections more clearly to the attention of their students. Proposed Discursive Strategies Using Data to Link TESOL Students to Environmental Risk: Minoritized Language Groups Face More Pollution It is well established that many environmental consequences unequally burden communities with less economic and racial privilege or mobility (Bullard,  Earth Democracy as Empowerment 31 1999). Yet empirical research on whether this holds true for minoritized language groups in the United States has only recently begun to emerge. As one might have predicted, TESOL students and their families—whether recent immigrants or from established multilingual communities—live and work in spaces at greater risk to the environmental hazards of unsustainability in the United States. Liévanos (2015) reviews one study that found “the spatial concentration of immigrants and non-English speaking households” to be “positively associated with the concentration of two of three environmental pollution indicators” and another that found “the spatial concentration of recently arrived foreign-born individuals” to be “positively associated with the spatial concentration of air-toxic health risk” (p. 52). Liévanos’s own study found similarly “disproportionate environmental health risks faced by economically deprived, linguistically isolated, API [Asian/Pacific Islander] and Latino immigrants” (p. 63). The TESOL International Association’s (2010) standards call for training TESOL teachers to see themselves as “resources to support ELLs [English language learners] and their families as families make decisions in the schools and community” (p. 68). Using History to Reveal Complicit Identity: The Crisis Speaks English It should hardly be a revelation to lay out the argument that English is the world’s most powerful language because of the colonialism of the British Empire and the neocolonialism of the US Empire. See, for example, Kumaravadivelu’s (2006) chapter titled “Dangerous Liaison: Globalization, Empire and TESOL” in a book titled (Re-)locating TESOL in an Age of Empire. Furthermore, I am likely not the first to try to urge TESOL professionals to consider deeply their complicity with the consequences of those two empires at least as often as they cash their paychecks. Kumaravadivelu lays out globalization in three periods: the preindustrial Spanish/Portuguese-led phase, the industrialization- driven, British-led phase in the 1800s, and the United States-led phase after the Second World War. We have already established above that molar fossil fuel exploitation is what accompanied industrialization and that molecular innovations of the Chemical Revolution are what drove the postwar economy. English owes its hegemony—and TESOL professionals owe their livelihoods—to the overproduction of urban sprawl, carbon dioxide, air and water pollution, herbicides, pesticides, nuclear waste, and the like. Two ironies emerge from histories of industrialization, however, that offer hope for cultural change. Both 32 TESOL and Sustainability ironies demonstrate that it was cultural choice and not some inevitable (human) nature or destiny that led us down the unsustainable path. The first irony is that there is in fact no evidence to support the assumed narrative that coal won out over waterwheels to power the Industrial Revolution because coal was more efficient or less scarce. Malm (2016) meticulously refutes this assumption, showing that the steam engine first designed for factories could not initially find many buyers because those who did convert made less profit in comparison to factories still using waterpower. Malm finds instead that the historical evidence suggests fossil fuels were thought superior because they allowed factory owners to make up for that efficiency loss by having more precise control over the timing of labor and production. “More export-oriented than any other, the cotton industry fostered a novel sensitivity to the ups and downs of water” (p. 166). The on–off switch on coal-fired engines allowed owners to more precisely and efficiently extract labor from each laborer by disconnecting from the commons. Coal power allowed owners to avoid the natural fluctuations of the free, renewable energy sources technologically accessible at that time, chiefly the amount of water currently flowing in the stream. What made this disconnection possible was borrowing the plant matter from another time period. We now know with certainty it was literally borrowed time. Particularly once labor organized for more sustainable schedules and government stepped in to regulate exploitation, an intensification of the efficiency of each hour became an owner’s source of increased profit, and fossil- fueled engines could precisely tune that intensification. Malm (2016) writes, “The increased expenditure of labor had to be placed on the solid footing of the steam engine, utterly malleable to the temporal needs of capital—turned on, turned off, speeded up at will. Such virtues were mere corollaries of the essence of fossil fuels: their ejection from perceptible natural rhythms through burial underground” (p. 56). Now that more natural rhythms are “perceptible”—now that the global public has new evidence to revise its best possible explanations and plans with—together these two ironies put the lie to the narrative that the Unsustainability Revolution was inevitable because it was most efficient (in the most reductionist sense) and therefore ultimately most beneficial to the largest number in the grand scheme of things. These are, of course, the presuppositions of the “science” of mainstream economics and its logic of the “necessity” of perpetual growth. Recall Whorf ’s early warning that we admit that economic behavior is predominantly cultural. It might prove strategic, moreover, to trouble an audience’s acceptance of the narrative that coal’s climate dangers were in fact as imperceptible as even Malm  Earth Democracy as Empowerment 33 implies above. A recent collaborative online inquiry (Revkin, 2016) revealed that the discourse of the detrimental, human-caused, CO2 greenhouse effect goes back at least to Furey (1890). A highly visible article in Popular Mechanics by Francis Molena (1912) subtitled “The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate—What Scientists Predict for the Future” created widespread discussion in the newspapers around the world. Similarly, it was recently revealed that at least one major oil company suppressed its own conclusive findings on human- caused climate change in the 1970s (Hall, 2015). This surprising lack of scientific ignorance on coal’s dangers even during its heyday echoes the second historical irony: Adam Smith, the first major theorist of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, included the crucial role of nature—that is, photosynthesis and the domesticated animals fed off of it— when theorizing the mechanisms of economic production and growth. Duncan (2004) reveals that economic theory and thus both capitalist and socialist discourses were built on the British case, and specifically on David Ricardo’s and, thence, Karl Marx’s missed opportunity to embrace Adam Smith’s “green vision,” as Duncan calls it. Marx, Engels, and the economic and progressive thinking that adopted their discourses—chiefly, asserting labor’s right to take over and run the dirty, destructive factories themselves—severed social justice from environmental justice. Instead of Smith’s green vision, they accepted Ricardo’s anthropocentric frame, which claimed it was entirely “human” labor that produced value. In other words, anthropocentrism was not predestined by so-called (human) nature but chosen—strategically for some in the short term— from multiple available discourses. That anti-posteritist choice among available discourses set in motion severe consequences for us today. It is in this spirit that Moore (2015) advocates for a theory of capitalism that fundamentally abandons the society–nature dualism. He argues for seeing capitalism as a particular regime of environment making that exploits humans- in-nature to extort value or profit. The age of capital can be defined as having arisen after 1450 as a new political economy and knowledge paradigm emerging along the Atlantic coast of Europe began to alter landscapes and consume resources at an accelerating rate. Led by Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, and France, wealthy nations then colonized other geographies as frontiers to fuel that new technique. The invention of the slave–plantation–commodity system on the Portuguese island of Madeira was a key inaugural event. Moore prefers the concept of the Capitalocene to the Anthropocene to describe the geologic impact of this era because a discourse of “human” impact obscures the fact that it is the age of intense economic reorganization or “growth” and not the age of 34 TESOL and Sustainability Homo sapiens per se that is at issue. Thus the term “Anthropocene” could also imply that capitalism was somehow humanity’s natural or destined course. This view challenges us not to oversimplify the correlation between the sustainability crisis and the hegemony of English. Nevertheless, a narrative of how the crisis speaks English can effectively tell the most visible and incontrovertible part of the story, positioning TESOL educators to then explore and de-inevitablize (hopefully along with their students) the deeper roots of the crisis within preindustrial capitalism. Creating Additive Anglophone Identities: englishes Can Become a Commons Language of Sustainability If we tell the story of unsustainability as a villainy that all started with the enclosure of the English commons, which then spawned the global hegemony of English, it might prove particularly effective to disclose this history with English, to disclose with English the possibility of a return to the commons. English was not only and always a language of domination, a global language subtractively replacing others. English was also a language of multiple regions and classes, of struggle and organizing, a negotiable commons with no centralized institution to set supposed rules. It has always been a mishmash of Germanic, French, Latin, and loanwords from many cultural contact zones (Durkin, 2014). Centuries before there were World englishes (Kachru, 1992) there were its appropriations in the British Isles where communities gave it their own Celtic cadences. Englishes were always hybrid and contested and they continue to become so no matter how dominant and monoculture-inducing “Standard English” may at first appear (Mahboob, 2014; Pennycook, 2006). TESOL educators could be invited to take this discursive step toward thinking of themselves as teaching englishes instead of English. To teach englishes, uncapitalized and non-singular, is to teach them additively, helping students to add an Anglophone identity while still sustaining their other identities. From an Earth democracy perspective, multiple forms of languaging can find sustenance on the same section of earth. Uncapitalized englishes teaching could become a social movement for taking action in the midst of economic capitalization and its mounting consequences. It can offer fertile ground for cultivating the more democratic global language of sustainability discourse itself. Educators might be enticed by the opportunity to use sustainability content in particular to empower TESOL students in particular to be protagonists of their futures. Such teaching of englishes can  Earth Democracy as Empowerment 35 make it function as a commons language that (a) discloses injustices and solutions even if English has been and may continue to be used to enclose and poison the commons for the benefit of only a few and (b) fosters a protagonizing (heroizing) narrative that bridges students’ English-speaking identities with their other identities in empowering and culturally sustaining ways. Teaching englishes could include, for example, a process of empowering TESOL students to find and study sustainability activists they can racially, culturally, and geographically identify with. Conclusion: Earth Democracy as Empowerment for TESOL Students and a Call to Responsibility for TESOL Educators I have attempted to detail how the history of ecological villainy can be told as a unique fit for TESOL. After showing how quantitative research has begun to show that TESOL students and families are more likely to live near pollutants in the United States, I make the argument that climate change speaks English, as do industrial pollution and mass production of consumerist waste more generally. By that I mean that the historical processes that brought the British and American Empires and their shared language and similar cultures to a globally hegemonic position were precisely the same processes that initiated and solidified an unsustainable process of industrialization and consumerization. The mining and burning of coal was what propelled Britain past other colonial powers, and the post–Second World War petrochemical revolution propelled the United States to neocolonial and resource-consumptive supremacy. I argue that TESOL educators’ job security is thus one and the same with their complicity with the unsustainable ascendance of the language of access they peddle. I have then argued that to teach TESOL with a naiveté about this complicity is to teach a subtractive English rather than additive englishes for Earth democracy. If TESOL educators can embrace this responsibility inherent in their complicity with the Unsustainability Revolution, then they can act as some of the experts who help the global public inform itself about its problems and deliberate democratically on their solutions. They can help empower TESOL students to lead local communities—their leadership consisting of a constant engagement in strategic use of discursive resources—to resist the destructive and homogenizing aspects of corporate globalization as well as the reactionary fundamentalisms that try to claim purity in the face of global flows of people and culture (Pennycook, 2006). Neither englishes, nor other 36 TESOL and Sustainability languages, nor any of their speakers or geographies will ever be pure or permanent, and language teachers will always be needed to help us prepare for and adapt to the flows. These communities always in flux can then reclaim the space around them as a commons called Earth, or at least a piece of it, like the rivers and valleys and towns that Berta Cáceres fought to keep safe from mines and dams. A return to organic agriculture and other versions of sustenance economies like the one Cáceres died in defense of can be the metaphor that guides the negotiation of the shared consequences of how natural “resources” are treated and how equitably they can be accessed. Adaptive co-management of resources through inquiry (often in englishes) will keep dialogue alive both among diverse communities and also back and forth over “the bond that binds the living creature to his environment.” Notes 1 This word was missing from the Goldman Prize translation. 2 Further along I will address how Moore (2015) argues for different name for the geologic era, Capitalocene, and an earlier starting point c. 1450. References Alim, H. S. (2010). Critical language awareness. In N. H. 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