It’s Time for Feelthinking: A Manifesto
In a 2022 essay about the need to preserve the precious and rapidly declining Taiga forest, a high school student included facts such as:
- 60% of the world’s roundwood comes from the Taiga.
- The most common form of logging in these forests is clearcutting.
- In 2018 alone, Siberia lost 5.8 million hectares of forest due to clearcutting.
- In Russia, the amount of forest that is destroyed because of wildfire is very comparable to the amount of forest that is clearcut every year.
These are mind-blowing facts, and are being absorbed and reported upon by young minds, whose brains are forming in response to the world around them. Let’s not take the resiliency of the neither the forest nor the human psyche for granted. As grim as the situation is, the assignment was to report on solutions.
The student went on to write:
So what can people even do about this? One way we can help replenish these forests is by simply listening. Listening to the forest, listening to the indigenous people who have lived in these forests for as long as anyone, and listening to the pain and devastation that has spread through these lands. All these disastrous issues wouldn’t be so bad if we could collectively empathize, and if we could actually feel the complexities of these ecosystems that are being destroyed.
What he describes might also be called, Feelthinking, or sentipensar in Spanish. This concept is present in the relational systems thinking approach put forward by Melanie Goodchild, a Native scholar at the Turtle Island Institute & Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience, and MIT. The essence of understanding a system is feeling into the relationship that knits it all together. Each ecosystem, from the giant Tiaga that makes up 11% of all land mass on the planet, and 57% of the coniferous trees, to the No Name creek running through my backyard, to the flowerpots on an apartment balcony, are part of a unified fabric that is the whole planet. Ultimately, mutually beneficial relationship is what holds us all together.
In order to know it, we have to experience it. To experience relationship, we have to feel it. What would happen, “if we could actually feel the complexities of these ecosystems that are being destroyed.”?
As a Nature and Forest Therapy (NFT) Guide, I think this is the best NFT to invest in. The movement of the Social Solidarity Economy of the Global South gets it.
So as we go forward to create a new curriculum that is endorsed by the interests and wisdom of indigenous groups around the world, and by the movements of the Global South, let’s invite the investment craze of the Global North in NFTs to be directed toward relationship with the planet, toward feelthinking, and toward Nature and Forest Therapy.
- Manifesto in español
Manifesto in English:
Manifesto for the Social Solidarity Economy Territory Curriculum
Four years after the birth of the Campaign for a Global Curriculum of Social Solidarity Economy, in the Year of the Pandemic, we, the signatory organizations, want to demonstrate, to claim the inaugural Letter of Principles.
The extractive model of Nature, agro-industrial productivism, unsustainable consumption patterns and the naturalization of thought based on capitalist and patriarchal logic, are largely responsible for the commercial exploitation of life, and the main culprits of the first global health, socioeconomic and climate crisis That is why, in the year of COVID-19, we consider it to be more urgent and necessary than ever, to make visible and claim the epistemologies of the territories and the wisdom of the Good Living (Bien Vivir) of the people.
This manifesto recognizes that territories host multiple ways of learning and knowing. All knowledge systems in the world are sciences. In communities there are technical, scientific, social, health, spiritual and popular knowledge that must be articulated with academics, as complementary knowledge to achieve endogenous development, from the local level.
The wisdom of indigenous peasant nations is Science with its own epistemology or theoretical framework, which implies that the way knowledge is organized, its logic, theoretical components, etc., are different. More than ever, new contributions to the epistemic diversity of the solidarity social economy of the territories, so often forgotten, are needed — contributions based on a decolonizing and intercultural education that enriches humanity and humanizes knowledge.
We claim in our Letter of Principles, in line with the recent contributions of the Manifesto for Critical and Ethical Economic and Financial Education, and the Social Solidarity Economy proposal of a Pact for the Economy for Life, proposing a Quality Education, feminist, decolonizing , which goes beyond the curricula of formal education institutions and considers the pluriversity of existing curricula.
It is the moment to generate confluence between intercultural and transdisciplinary models, with the promotion of non-violent methodologies of solidarity and epistemological fraternity among peoples. Through healthy dialogues in the territories, we overcame the orthodox and colonial matrix of the academies and arrived at a defined research not dissociated from their specific and methodological knowledge. Now all that remains is for the academy to recognize and legitimize these mixes of research and knowledge, as suns and horizons that illuminate Good Living (Bien Vivir), so that the curricula of other worlds that inhabit our territories, those of Social Solidarity Economy, can flourish.
In short, it’s time to feelthinking about Southern Epistemologies.
Signatories:
Red Educación y Economía Social Solidaria
Asociación de Familias con Identidad Huertera
CECIP — Centro de Criação de Imagem Popular
Colectivo Xok k’iin
International Peace Bureau — IPB Berlín
GAMIP América Latina y el Caribe
Corporación Creer en la Paz CENPAZ-Colombia
Revista Economía Social
Asociación Elkarcredit de Solidaridad
Finantzaz Haratago
Edualter
Amani Kibera
Red Latinomericana de Socioeconomía Solidaria
Xarxa d’Economia Solidària (XES)
Consejo de Educación Popular de
América Latina y el Caribe — CEAAL.
Chileufú
Federación Regional de Sociedades Cooperativas Turísticas
Cátedra Libre Soberanía Alimentaria
FETS Finançament Ètic i Solidari
Be. Pe. Bienaventurados los Pobres
Rede de Economia Solidária e Feminista — RESF Nacional
Sstudent at Middle East Technical University
Foro Hacia Otra Economía Santiago del Estero
Foro Hacia Otra Economía
Movimiento Hacia Otra Economía
Equipo traducción ESS
RIPESS LAC
Escuela Latinoamericana de Economía Social de Fundación OASI
CIRIEC-Brasil | Centro Internacional de Investigación e Información sobre la Economía Pública, Social y Cooperativa
Candidata Maestria es Economía Plural Solidaria y Comunitaria- CIDES-UMSA
UNISERES União de Seres sustentáveis
Corporación Red Colombiana de Profesionales, investigadores e instituciones en Economía social y solidaria — Red Unicossol
Colegio de Graduados en Cooperativismo y Mutualismo de la R Argentina
Instituto de Economía Social y Cooperativismo- Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia
Familia Kolping. María Peregrina.
Katalizo
Red Universidad y Compromiso Social de Sevilla
Instituto de Investigación y Estudios en Cultura de Derechos Humanos (CULTURADH)
Red Latina» Asociaciòn Latinoamericana de Cooperaciòn
Unicoop Cancun (Universidad Cooperativa de Innovación Comunitaria S.C. de R.L.
Mujeres Indígenas por Ciarena
Asociación Civil El Culebrón Timbal
Comisión Tecnica Ambiente — INAES
Red de Educación Popular Kat
Red Economía Social Solidaria /RedESS
Cátedra Libre de Soberanía Alimentaria — UNLP
UNICCS/FHYCS-UNJU
Comunidad Par — Moneda Social PAR
CAMPUS DE PENSADORAS URBANAS DELICIAS REGIÓN CENTRO SUR
Peace Profits
Communities in Transition
Cultura DH AC
XG Generación Si
REDE DE TERRITÓRIOS EDUCATIVOS DE VÁRZEA GRANDE MT
M.A Student
Peace Education Commission of International Peace Research Association
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