Date: 05/09/2024
Taking this class feels like I’ve found myself back. I had to lose my grandma last year, with whom I would discuss for hours the state of the world. She was a far-right voter, she grew up in a dysfunctional American family and arrived in the Netherlands at 21, where she met my grandpa, who grew up in family of ten in a tiny apartment and is firmly convinced that humans and animals are one and the same. They later owned a supermarket together. I was raised in an atheistic, capitalistic milieu, listening to Bach and Beethoven and eating maple syrup: charity is a form of egoism, humans are by nature selfish and bad, for our 12th birthday my sister and me got little bank machines from ING, and in school we had to design an oil factory in Oman and sang joyful songs about the ‘Golden’ colonial age for the Netherlands. However, I started to become interested in the climate crisis and chose to study in Wageningen. But here I found a too-good-to-be-true world and found myself questioning what they were hiding. The Campina and Unilever research labs on campus began to raise suspicion. Then the End Fossil Occupy movement came, and I was pulled in: with tears in my eyes, I began telling people of the better world I envisioned, one in which humans would live in connection with the earth, instead of apart from it. I also decided to switch universities, I was going to study hydrogeology in the ‘real’ world, I had been green brain washed enough and wanted to know the truth. But here I was even further frustrated, as I found that historically and for many still the main if not the only goal of geology was the mining of resources for a capitalist machine. I consulted the study advisor and asker her how to study with the purpose of bringing clean water to the people within a capitalist framework? Is that possible?
Coming into this class, I realize I have so much to unlearn, even though I consider myself politically aware, reading the news, watching Instagram reels and participating in pro-Palestine protests. I have come to unlearn to view humans as selfish, isolated, mute and powerless, their actions controlled by animal instincts, like hunger and sex, and their highest goal in life to buy independence. Basically, life is suffering, and the American or Dutch dream is to escape this suffering by buying a house in a nice neighborhood, lead a healthy lifestyle, have kids and become old. In reality there are winners and losers, contradictions, and the world is based on a theory to which the world is forced to behave. It literally feels like a weight has lifted off my shoulders. I have to unlearn to speak generally, as I was taught that Western thought could speak on behalf of the whole world, and learn to root my thoughts in examples and positionality. I have come to unlearn that there are just two solutions to environmental degradation, namely reducing the amount of people living on earth, or become economically efficient, rather than learning about the immense amount of traditional practices, the value of moral economy and the effectiveness of everyday resistance. I have come to unlearn that the cause that women are closer connected to nature is because of biological differences between women and men rather than being put there by men so that they can control women’s bodies. I have come to unlearn that people with obesity have their own lifestyle to blame, that they are ignorant, rather than that they do not have money or do not get help, because they are part of a marginalized group. And lastly, I have come to unlearn that the world is entirely subject to human design, because they are an ecology, and above all a political one. I look forward to unlearning so much more in this class.