By: Emilia Laine (‘12, ‘13, ‘18, ‘19, ‘22)
What does ethical leadership mean during the era of multiple ecological crises? How does the necessity of ecological reconstruction, or more commonly known as sustainability transition, challenge the stories we tell about our communities’ pasts and futures? These big questions have accompanied me on my sustainability fellowship journey at LAJF. This blog offers a glimpse into my current work in envisioning a regenerative culture at CRS.
During the 2022 summer season, we started experimenting with how sustainability could be more holistically implemented in the everyday operations at CRS. Since we were aware of the multitude of things to do, we decided to start small and focus on symbolic acts: we organized evening programs that familiarized campers with environmental sustainability and regeneration while critically examining different conceptualizations of sustainability. The campers planted three fruit trees in the pouring rain and talked about how to build a more regenerative culture at CRS. We also provided campers and staff an opportunity to reimagine the unsustainable structures of current societies through a method called radical imagination. In the activity, the participants were encouraged to imagine transition pathways towards an ideal state of affairs in terms of ecological, racial, economic, and technological justice in a made-up country called Mediocre.
In addition to sustainability-themed evening programs, campers took ownership of our new sustainability teamwork, where they cared for our chickens (who then took care of us by giving eggs), maintained our newly-built compost, and watered our tiny gardens. Our new sustainability initiatives resulted in campers and staff asking many critical questions regarding meat eating, excessive resource use, and the absence of food gardening at Camp. It was clear that there was a lot more work to do during the coming years. Inspired by the joy and hope that these small changes sparked in our campers and staff, the sustainability work initiated during the summer eventually grew into this fellowship project.
Photo: On the last day of camp in 2022, campers and staff members jointly organized a harvest party celebrating the gifts of our small garden.
During the fall, I have had several fruitful discussions with LAJF’s board and committee members, recent alums, and representatives from other summer programs in the US. The insights gained from these interactions and the general observations during the summer have led to sketching an ecological reconstruction pathway for LAJF. The visualization currently includes action items from five different categories: structural & cultural change within LAJF, curriculum, food & kitchen, projects & gardens, and buildings & procurement. Ideally, the pathway would support LAJF in adapting a more strategic and holistic approach to environmental sustainability as well as supporting committees in operationalizing these changes.
Our alums creating radical change shows that our program works
During VCRS 2022, I had the opportunity to teach a three-day virtual intensive about sustainability and regenerative thinking. In the last hour of the program, the group had the honor to speak with Polish climate activist Dominika Lasota (CRS 2018) who began the conversation by mentioning how she regards CRS as a transformational experience from the shy teenager she was during her camp summer. She regards CRS as her first experience in thinking in a more in-depth manner about leadership and intentional community building – skills that have been vital for her growth as an activist.
It was also the self-confidence she gained at camp that later allowed Dominika to step out of her comfort zone in 2020 when she started her climate activism in Poland. Since then, she has featured on the cover of New York Times, challenged president Emmanuel Macron on France’s fossil fuel investments, and been officially heard by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.
During her presentation “Building resistance in times of crises,” Dominika highlighted the interconnected nature of the multiple crises our world is currently facing: the pandemic, wars, and climate and biodiversity crises. Her activism is first and foremost rooted in community building and storytelling: it matters what kinds of stories we tell about the current crises and the potential futures we can achieve if we succeed in solving the most pressing issues of our time. Telling those stories is a community effort – Dominika has regular conversations with inspiring people experiencing the impacts of climate change and it gives her power to fight for retaining the precious things we have on this planet.
As an educator, the most rewarding part of the hour was to hear the thoughtfully considered and complex questions our intensive participants had for Dominika – they were clearly inspired to create change in their own communities. Contact information was exchanged as Dominika offered to support our participants in their community efforts in Ecuador, Germany, and Azerbaijan.
Stories we tell and words we use matter
I strongly agree with Dominika – we need to become more intentional about the stories we tell and the words we choose to use when we talk about the bundle of cultural, institutional, and material changes that are needed to combat issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss. This entails critically examining our use of words such as “sustainability” and “green” which are losing their meaning through corporate greenwashing efforts.
Instead, it might be more impactful to adopt a vocabulary which highlights the procedural nature and presence of active work and care. For example, Finnish research institute Bios has suggested the term ecological reconstruction. The word ‘reconstruction’ implies a more radical approach: we need to evaluate our worldviews, value systems, and material structures that enable and encourage the unsustainable patterns which are undermining our societies’ ability to remain functional. Anyone who familiarizes themselves with the planetary boundary framework understands that we have already entered an era of great vulnerability and uncertainty.
Photo: In the summer of 2022, campers took care of the chickens during teamworks and chickens cared for us with their eggs.
Ethical leadership requires integration of care and ecological sustainability
LAJF defines its ethical leadership mission as “to develop promising young people from around the world a lifelong commitment to compassionate and responsible leadership for the betterment of their communities and the world.” I argue that ethical leadership is tightly connected to the concept of care which can be understood as “[e]verything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Tronto 1993, 103). However, care is also a contested and political area which is illustrated by María Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) invitation to ask “[w]hat worlds are being maintained and at the expense of which others?” (p. 44).
When we add an understanding of the current ecological realities to the dynamics of ethical leadership and care, it encourages us to attune with questions such as, where do our materials resources come from? Who produces them? Where does our waste end up? Where is the labor maintaining our everyday worlds done? Is it done in a socially and ecologically sustainable manner? How much of that labor do we undertake ourselves? Focusing on the intersection of ethical leadership, care, and ecological sustainability, we can become more attuned with the care work that other people invest in our maintenance. Concretely, this could mean contemplating by whom and in what conditions is the food we eat from during the summer seasons produced, or investigating how the monetary funds of LAJF are invested (currently they contribute to climate change, deforestation and the maintenance of prison industrial complex).
Willingness to recognize, appreciate, and participate in the care work required to maintain our communities (both at camp and back at home) should be at the core of ethical leadership. CRS provides fertile circumstances for such an approach: the program already considers teamworks as an essential element of the curriculum, projects teach campers concrete repair skills, and every camper gets to participate in a nature connection trip (earlier known as hiking and camping trips). This approach could be extended even further: we could be spending more time on caring for the land in the form of sustainable outdoor projects, gardening, repairing, and cooking.
Photo: Campers on a nature connection trip at Kaaterskill Falls in the summer of 2022.
Sowing the seeds for regenerative culture
According to Daniel Christian Wahl, “[o]ur collective challenge is to create cultures capable of continuous learning in the face of complexity, not-knowing and constant change.” One way to address this challenge is to shift towards a regenerative culture approach which views self care, community care, and Earth care as inherently intertwined. In other words, the approach presents the three dimensions as part of a holistic system: we cannot take care of ourselves and our communities without taking care of the Earth (either in local or global terms) and vice versa.
Although counselors can have some flexibility in reinventing the summer program during a specific season, many cultural and structural improvements regarding sustainability need to be systematically implemented by the foundation for CRS to embody its mission of ethical leadership. Ecological devastations are already taking place around the globe, and their impacts on livelihoods are inherently connected to the questions of ethics, fairness and responsibility. If the CRS community fails to address the ecological unsustainability of its own program, it will most likely undermine its credibility as a social justice program in the eyes of future generations.
Adapting a regenerative culture approach can easily be portrayed as a forced necessity that is done to improve public reputation. However, systematically reevaluating the underlying assumptions and practices of LAJF’s operations can also result in improved organizational resiliency and strengthen the commitment of recent and future alumni. Although our era is often characterized by despair, embarking on a journey towards regenerative culture can signify a material commitment to hope and protecting life in its many forms. If we succeed to plant the seeds of inspiration in the microcosmos of CRS, it has the potential to spread all around the globe when our campers return back home with their new toolkits, ready to repair their own local worlds.
In addition to her fellowship project at LAJF, Emilia (CRS ‘12, ‘13, ‘18, ‘19, ‘22) is currently working on her master’s thesis about future expectations of food-related biotechnologies at University of Helsinki. She has recently enjoyed wandering around snowy Helsinki and attending a class on Indigenous studies centralizing biocultural approaches in environmental conservation.