Street Philosophy
As a tried-and-true street philosopher, this fundamental tonal quality of my identity that informs this memoir has been cultivated over the past 20+ years through numerous experiential accounts with how philosophy either helps or hinders applying sustainability in the real-world. Done from the perspective of the ‘street-up’ so to speak. While often ignored and underexplored, this living approach to philosophy consists of taking one’s love of wisdom outside of the high walls of academe where absolute zero (death) and ground zero (life) often get confused and into the streets in an experimental fashion to see what ‘living architectures’ sticks to the ‘physical walls’ of the real.
Basically, this living approach to philosophy merges the ideas formed within one’s mind with the extensions of one’s body in the real world where ‘we live, and move, and have our being.’ Ideas then become alive, full of potential and extended in such a way that forms what can only be described as a genuine realist philosophy filled with what literally matters: working hands, drinkable water, situated dispositions, intrinsic identities, objective morality, experiential truth, human empathy, tangible existence, concrete knowledge, indescribable Beauty, absolute Good, sovereignty of Truth and above all else, real living relationships become the end all be all of what it means to be doing philosophy.
It was this approach to doing philosophy that eventually led me to discovering post-9/11 (2003ish) an emerging paradigm in philosophical thought that is, according to cultural theorist Liedeke Plate, "currently sweeping through the humanities" where, "at its most radical, new materialism is posthumanist, part of the nonhuman turn.”1 After many years of deep reflections upon this emerging paradigm since my radical break from it in the fall of 2015, I am unwaveringly convinced that it signifies a turn toward ‘a life’ of Nietzsche’s ‘antichrist and antinihilist’ (death) rather than continuing our progressive journey towards discovering the mysterious depths of our 13.7 billion year old Living Universe (life). The following provides a general intro to the emerging paradigm of new materialism…
As my philosophical acuity towards putting ideas into action transitioned from various academic experimentations in the streets of Boone, NC from 2000-2007 where I had the opportunity to co-launch one of the first university-based Renewable Energy Initiatives (REI) in the country at Appalachian State University, I sought to identify a node or perhaps THE node par excellence within the vast ‘striated’ web of interconnected issues that held within it the greatest potential to impact the world on a variety of scales. Some of which included violence against women, poverty, health disparities, climate change, war, and most of all democracy of the radically direct/relational variety.
To this end, renewable energy seemed to be the first logical step in achieving a viable form of direct democracy given its de-centralized nature which was of course augmented by a merger between technology and policy such as bringing together the cutting-edge approaches of Virtual Power Plants and Community Choice Aggregation via integrating demand/response, net-metering and the like.2 Indeed, this excerpt for a January 2007 article in Biodiesel Magazine entitled “Appalachian State University Students Further Campus Biodiesel Use” illuminates the historicity of my point:
Thanks to a student-led initiative at Appalachian State University (ASU) in Boone, N.C., the campus' diesel-burning buses, service vehicles and a garbage truck are now running on B20. The ASU Renewable Energy Initiative (REI), one of about 20 student groups worldwide that aim to lessen universities' dependence on nonrenewable energy, also helped the school to purchase a 10,000-gallon biodiesel fuel tank and dispenser, funded in part by a student renewable energy fee-$5 per student per semester-that was approved by the student body in 2004.
"The fact that REI exists testifies to the importance of alternative energy on our campus," said Eric Mathis, project manager and REI member since the group's inception in 2004. "A greater majority of those students active on campus are fully aware of the important role that alternative energy plays in all efforts for positive social change.”3
Building from this as well as many other small victories in my various experimentations in street philosophy, I quickly jumped ship from the trajectory of my graduate studies in 2006 that sought to explore ‘radical pedagogy’ and its relationship to empowering women through self-defense (via “physical feminism”).4 Upon being asked by an old college friend Steve Wussow to come and work in the heart of Appalachian coal country the summer of 2007, my calling was crystal clear but how was I going to bring together my past work with this opportunity? With my previous work being ‘queer activism’ that was built in collaboration with my good friend and graduate studies colleague Franya Hutchins, I simply couldn’t just step away from a project already underway through my first non-profit venture called Appalachian Community for Progressive Sustainability or ACPS for short. Important work which was defined through ACPS’s “Women’s Self-Defense Initiative” as follows:
The women’s self-defense and educational program seeks to collaborate with community members and organizations whose goals are to provide relief to women and families who are victims of domestic violence, rape or any other form of violence towards women and those dependent upon them. ACPS believes that this meets it’s over all mission of sustainability which seeks to supplement the Appalachian community’s desire for social justice.5
After some reflection upon how I could potentially synthesize this work in ‘physical feminism’ into central Appalachia and thus enabling me to ethically accept the offer to work in coal country, this new chapter in my experimentations in linking renewable energy – to – social justice was twofold. My first mission in what many dubbed to be ‘ground zero’ of the climate change movement revolved around organizing a rather large consolidated class action law suit against “the largest and most powerful coal company in central Appalachia” and its infamous CEO who was correctly described by Rolling Stone magazine in November 2010 as the “Dark Lord of Coal Country.”6 Along with taking down Don Blankenship who was not only the CEO of Massey Energy but was also a modern day coal baron in the City of Williamson where he enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the local political machine, I moved to this area deemed the “heart of the billion dollar coalfields” as I believed that I had found THE node par excellence in the vast network of interrelated injustices that I deeply longed to work within – or so I had assumed it to be THE node.
In hindsight, the node or better yet, THE ‘Pearl of Great Price’ takes on many shapes and sizes during one’s journey towards absolute Truth but once you find it, it is unmistakably-unshakably real. Upon discovering this tried-and-true theological realism, ‘Eureka!!’ was the only proper exclamation to pronounce when its Archimedean point between subject/object relations was revealed to me in the fall of 2015 as ‘Being in and of itself’ – the absolute fulcrum point where Ultimate Reality and the Living Cosmos meet to form the Kingdom of Heaven.7 Here is where I eventually found my dial/tone or should I say He found me (i.e., God Finds Us)!
The Tone within the Chaos…
Despite Williamson not being THE node that I sought to find as it was more of a stepping stone in a much longer journey towards THE Peral of Great Price, this “prenodal assembly” was where I staked my battle flag…
STAY TUNED:
THE REST OF THIS SECTION WILL BE RELEASED ON MAY 3rd @11:00EST
Liedeke Plate, "New Materialisms," in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, March 31, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1013
The following model was the key focus of Sustainable Williamson’s energy action plan and was informed by Paul Finn and his team who attended the 2011 Central Appalachian Sustainable Economies (CASE) convening. See: Eric O'Shaughnessy, Jenny Heeter, Julien Gattaciecca, Jenny Sauer, Kelly Trumbull, and Emily Chen, "Empowered Communities: The Rise of Community Choice Aggregation in the United States," Energy Policy 132 (2019): 1110-1119.
Biodiesel Magazine, “Appalachian State University Students Further Campus Biodiesel Use,” Biodiesel Magazine, January 23, 2007, https://biodieselmagazine.com/articles/appalachian-state-university-students-further-campus-biodiesel-use-1409
For more regarding physical feminism see Martha McCaughey, Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women's Self-Defense (NYU Press, 1997).
J. Eric Mathis and Franya Hutchins, “Project Proposal for ACPS’s Women’s Self-Defense Initiative,” Appendix E (2006): 1.
Jeff Goodell, “Don Blankenship: The Dark Lord of Coal Country,” Rolling Stone Magazine, November 29, 2010, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/don-blankenship-the-dark-lord-of-coal-country-184288/
Matthew 13:45-46 ESV