There’s no point to writing satire any longer. As soon as a satirist produces a fresh item, our crazies decide to make it happen in real life:
“The world is facing a looming existential threat caused by exploitative habits and intentional human negligence.”
That is how Brandon Edwards-Schuth and Marco Cerqueira, a pair of graduate students at Washington State University, describe the pending global crisis as they see it in their recent Northwest Journal of Teacher Education article.
Their solution to combat this dystopian future? “Plantifa.”
Plantifa is situated “at the intersections of anti-fascism, eco-justice, decolonization, and arts-based curriculum theories,” the scholars write.
“We feel that education rooted in a Plantifa curriculum can be one potential way for both teachers and communities to use a diversity of tactics to fight climate change and subvert power structures working against environmental justice,” the scholars state in their November 2022 paper.
If adopted, the authors note, they envision Plantifa being carried out by communities, as well as incorporated into current classroom lesson plans, perhaps as a final class assignment.
For that assignment, the scholars suggest students engage in the practice of guerrilla gardening, “a subversive and communal eco-justice approach to environmental degradation and inequity.”
Unlike traditional gardening, which the duo describe as taking place in “designated flower beds or defined community gardens,” guerrilla gardening, they write, entails intentionally “gardening without borders,” for example on somebody else’s land.
Anti-fascist guerrilla gardeners, they write, assist “nature in breaking trespassing laws, where it is really the insatiable consumption inherent under capitalism which has trespassed Earth.”
“[V]acant lots, medians, and ‘derelict land’” are just some of the sites anti-fascist guerrilla gardeners may target, note the pair of scholars, as these are all “spaces of eco-potentiality.”…
“We are nature,” they declare to the world. “We are the yarning tracing ways of common guerrilla gardeners. We are the planet. We are plants. As we plant seeds, we become the seeds. We all are Plantifa!”
Yes, really. That is a real article that was printed in a real educational journal. Laugh if you please, but the authors of that article appear to mean it literally. They propose a curriculum for grammar schools and high schools based on this lunacy. No doubt high-achieving Plantifa scholars will be eligible for scholarships to special institutions where they can add guerilla hybridization and progressive culling to their skills.
Really and for true, Gentle Reader: It’s time to ring every “institution of higher learning” in these United States with a thirty foot high, impermeable wall with one door in it: a door that can only be opened from the outside. Thereafter, while individuals will be permitted to enter, no one will be permitted to leave. All electronic communication from within the walls will be routed to the police. The compassionate will be invited to throw canned food and simple manual puzzles over the walls on alternate Tuesdays.
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Say it with me, kids: We are Negan.
Tell me about it. In my former calling as an internet troll, my preferred technique was to put out a slightly out-there idea, get a nibble, veer a bit farther off the beaten path, get a rebuttal, and then spin off into la-la land.
But some years ago, toward the end of the Obama misadministration, I found that my tried-and-true technique was much less effective. The lunacy of my trollishly crazy ideas was equalled or even exceeded by actual news and talking points and trial balloons.
The uninitiated always think gardens are simple to grow; until they have tried it. We have truly gone to the weeds.
Please let’s treat your solution seriously before the other does it to us.
This is the next linked article:
Volume 17, Issue 3 (2022) Confronting Teacher Preparation Epistemicide: Art, Poetry, and Teacher Resistance
Looks like they really “got it going on” in the northwest!
Heh. The jokes write themselves, don’t they?
We’ll have to weed out the underperformers.
Instead of GIGO, it’ll be CICO – Cabbage In, Cabbage Out.
Medical students will study tuber-culosis in the field.
Course title: “From Gherkin To Zucchini – The Slippery Slope”.
Unusually for university students, fertilization will be vegetable instead of animal.
Black Lentils Matter!!!
I’m sure your readers can contribute a whole lot more . . . 🙂
Do these clowns not have any idea what chemicals get sprayed in medians?
I am 80 + stand amazed how ignorant some young people are. Ooops…. make that older people also. I am guessing that ignorant is correct…. but stupid is more likely the case , which is more self inflicted.
There’s a theory that a malfunction of the Large Hadron Collider a few years ago has thrown us all into a bizarre irrational parallel universe. Every day brings more evidence supporting that theory.
It’s as good an idea as any and better than most. I plan to start using it.
Author
And I find myself wondering whether malfunction is an accurate way to characterize it.
Of course, since you wrote today
However, given what I believe (from reading them awhile) are the true inclinations of both Dan and SteveF, they likely agree with you and merely enjoyed, in a sarcastic moment, the fantastical over likely reality.
[…] Francis points out this little tidbit and I had to do a double take, since the auithors of that piece aren’t being satirists, they are dead serious,,,, But. when you read it, it could have been written by the Babylon Bee,,, I read it and thought ‘this has to be a joke’,,, […]