Paradise Imagined: Environmental Peace Education in Carceral Spaces

Jan 30, 2022 | Elsa Barron
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Where does the material that makes up a tree come from? When asked that question, many of our students turned to the soil for answers, inferring that a tree pulls itself out of the dense matter of the ground. However, the real answer is quite the opposite. A tree, amazingly, pulls itself out of thin air. It is an accumulated mass of carbon dioxide gas that ultimately forms the strong trunks and towering branches of our world. In a class of students at DePaul Academy, an alternative justice center in South Bend, Indiana, we asked everyone to pause, take a deep breath in… and out… and meditate on the interconnectedness of that breath. The oxygen from that breath may have come from the respiration of the trees just outside of the window, while the carbon dioxide we expelled might soon be taken back up by the seedlings we planted in the classroom for photosynthesis. Every moment of our living, breathing life reminds us that we are part of a community- kin with unlikely tree-folk and many others.