And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world.
This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. Anxiously focused on national economic growth, we increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable and empathetic citizens.
But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry both in the United States and abroad. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have rightly been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. The challenges they face demand the close attention of the environmental humanities, not only to deeply engage appropriate texts, but to engage them with a framework that expands the orchestra and zeros in on the critical problems of global agriculture, planetary health, and human rights. Just as Thousand Acres’s mastery of a complex environmentalist voice is hard won, so too is that of dozens of rural people across the world. These local voices underscore the challenges human subjects face in articulating and narrating environmental relationships-even despite their intimate proximity to these landscapes. The article aims to show the struggles of rural people to embrace a planetary consciousness-a global awareness that can paradoxically foreground as well as participate in the continued ecological devastation of the landscapes these activists hold dear.
Foregrounding the voices of grassroots environmentalists as well as the public-relations campaigns of multinational agribusiness trade groups, materials collected in the special collections of Iowa State University, the article resituates Smiley’s prizewinning novel and offers a complication of current conceptualizations of eco-cosmopolitanism. This article blurs the boundaries of literature, agriculture, public history, grassroots political activism, and public policymaking in order to problematize the current eco-cosmopolitan trajectory of ecocritical theory, a trajectory promulgated by Ursula K.
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