War and Ecocide
Lecture & discussion with
Igor Polskii, Peter Levich and Tatevik Gukasyan
TIME: Friday at 17:30
PLACE: North Wing of DNS
(max 20 participants)
Host and facilitator: Nadežda Jevdokimova
BACKGROUND
How can we break through conventional “truths”, our own prejudices and psychological defence mechanisms in order to live through the current ecological situation without hiding from difficult questions and complicated conclusions? Our analytical approach usually breaks complex questions down into simpler ones.
Usually, we think that some people try to solve problems of war, some others try to solve environmental problems. But if we look at it holistically, we can see that the extinction of species and loss of biodiversity is strongly connected with the extinction of indigenous people loss of cultural diversity.
The violence towards each other and the violence towards other specious has a lot in common. If we will change our optics, we will see that humans and non-humans are both suppressed and controlled from the very beginning of big civilizations (but not from the beginning of mankind) and that the problem of war and the problem of the environmental crisis of today are not two different problems.
CONTENT
After a short lecture, there will be a discussion about this important topic.
Igor Polskii
PhD (Social Philosophy), board member of Russian Ecovillages & Initiatives Union and Regional Networks for Sustainable Rural Development, со-founder of ON THE EDGE project
In the last few years, Igor was interested in the wide philosophic basis of such movements, studied primitivism and criticism of civilization (Taoism and cynic philosophy, Russo, Toro, Tolstoy, Fukuoka, Kachinskiy, Zerzan).
In 2016 his PhD thesis was presented, studying radical criticism of civilization. For a few years, Igor has been an Ecophilosophy trainer in Ecostream educational programme.
Peter Levich
Founder of Future Foundation. Member of TechnoAshram Project
Previously, he worked at Autodesk and Robotics Center of Skolkovo Foundation and was Head of science and technologies interactions (STS) Department of the Moscow Technological Institute.
Tatevik Gukasyan
human rights trainer, peacebuliding activist and facilitator, со-founder of ON THE EDGE project
Since then she got engaged in civil activism and non-formal education programmes in the area of human rights, conflict resolution, Soviet crimes memory, intercultural and interreligious dialogue.
In 2009 she initiated a youth Human Rights education and peacebuilding programme in the North Caucasus region of Russia including post-war Chechnya.
Facing the limits of the conventional human rights and peacebuilding discourse and approaches she looked for new more holistic perspectives in the field of deep ecology, ecophilosophy as well as body-mind and process oriented psychology and facilitation.
The talk will cover her current vision of peacebuilding in the wider context of ecology and the nature of violence.