Global Citizenship Education and Smokey Responsibility

Smokey Bear, mascot of the US Forest Service.

Smokey Bear has been associated with forest fire prevention since he was first introduced by the US Forest Service in 1944. From 1947 to 2001, Smokey’s well-known tag-line was, “Remember, only you can prevent forest fires” (in 2001 the quote was adjusted slightly to refer more generally to wildfires). Though I grew up in Canada, I was familiar with Smokey Bear. This was partly due to the influence of US media, partly because of family trips to New England, and partly because Canada also knows a few things about forest fires. But somehow, growing up, I never asked the question: Why is the bear whose role it is to promote forest fire prevention, named “Smokey”? As the saying goes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. So why name the US Forest Service fire prevention mascot, Smokey?

It’s this image of Smokey Bear that I put up on the screen at the start of our Critical Global Citizenship class. This is a one semester course that I’ve taught at the International School of Kigali in Rwanda (ISKR) for the past two years (I posted the syllabus for the course in this previous post). As I’ve written about previously, one of our key practices in the class is to engage various texts through Socratic discussion. A primary overarching question for the class is “What does it mean to be a global citizen?” Also, as I noted in this previous blog post, an important lesson of the class is that there is no easy answer to that question. Our discussions about the meaning of global citizenship often bring forward tension, contradiction, and nuance. In this way, I have found that Smokey Bear and the very incongruity of his name make for a great place to start our class.

Smokey Bear’s famous fire prevention admonition is used as an illustration in our first text of the class, which is an excerpt of chapter 3 from the book Life Worth Living, by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmum, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz. With the book, the authors share some insights on a class they teach with the same name at Yale University. For ISKR’s Critical Global Citizenship class, we use this text to prompt some discussion about the meaning of the terms citizen and citizenship, as well as the idea of responsibility.

On Citizenship: Liberalism vs. Civic Republicanism

(As a quick aside before proceeding, in today’s world, the terms “liberal” and “republican” are quickly associated with particular political parties in different countries. While the original naming of these parties may have been an attempt to associate with certain historic political ideas, my discussion below of the history of liberalism and civic republicanism is not intended to connect to any modern political party or party platform).

Given that ISKR is an international school, many different nationalities are represented among my students and their national passports tent to come first to their minds when asked about the meaning of citizenship. In this sense, to be a citizen means that someone is a legally recognized member of a particular political state. A passport indicates the state to which you ultimately belong, which means you’re entitled to certain protections and privileges within that state. There are also certain duties that come with being a citizen of a particular state. Some states have mandatory military service requirements (e.g. Switzerland, Israel); in some states, citizens are obligated by law to cast a vote in elections (e.g. Australia, much of Latin America). Citizens are also obligated to pay taxes to cover the cost of government and the public goods and services of the state.

Though both come up in our discussion about what it means to be a citizen, for my students, the rights bestowed by citizenship tend to factor more prominently in their minds than the duties demanded. This is not surprising given the influence of Enlightenment liberalism on modern notions of political states and citizenship. Out of Enlightenment liberalism — think, John Locke and Jean-Jacque Rousseau and the like — we have documents like the English Bill of Rights 1689, the US Declaration of Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Enlightenment liberalism emphasized individual rights and liberties, either the natural rights of individuals upon which the state can not infringe, or the civil rights of each citizen that the state is obligated to uphold. Sometimes liberal rights and liberties are characterized as those that are “negative,” meaning that an individual possesses them naturally and the state cannot take them away (e.g. freedom of speech), versus those that are “positive,” meaning that it’s the state’s responsibility to provide them (e.g. right to education).

After discussing the liberal roots of our understanding of state citizenship, I shift our conversation by having my students take a look at the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which, in many respects, is a product of Enlightenment liberalism. The UDHR posits that all humans are “born free and equal in dignity and rights” (Article 1) and that all are entitled to the same human rights “without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” (Article 2). Unlike citizenship to a state, represented by a passport, global citizenship is not a legal category; one can’t talk about civil rights protected by a state when discussing global citizenship. Nonetheless, the idea of human rights can be a helpful place to start when discussing the meaning of global citizenship. What are the implications of a commitment to the universal principle of equality of human dignity and rights? To what extent are all humans afforded equal human dignity and rights in the world today? What systems and structures prevent it from being a reality?

It's not until later in the semester that we dive into the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but a little deeper reading of the UNDR helps to set up that discussion. What are the implications of “everyone has a right to life, liberty and security of person” (Article 3), or “everyone has a right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” (Article 18), or “everyone has a right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being” (Article 25), or “everyone has a right to education” (Article 26)?  These questions also help us pivot in our discussion from “As a human, I have a right to these things,” to “What is my responsibility as a global citizen when I see that these rights are not honored for others?”

With the notion of responsibility, we must explore a much older understanding of citizenship. In fact, the etymology of the word “citizen” refers to a person of a particular city, referencing the era of Greek city-states. A citizen of Athens during this era, for instance, was an inhabitant of Athens, but was also an active participant in Athenian civic life. While liberalism tends to focus on the individual member of a society, the civic republican idea of citizenship focuses more on the common social good. A citizen was one committed to the welfare of the society and actively involved in the furtherance of the public welfare. The Greeks of this era probably would not have used a term like “rights,” but they did believe in individual privileges and liberties.  Rather than as inherent, however, they saw them as an outcome of a good society and the good society could only be achieved through the contributions of its members. For the citizens of ancient Athens, declaring one’s natural individual liberties would make little sense if the society was not first created to promote those liberties. From the civic republican perspective, citizenship is about responsibility to the common good; responsibility to the society precedes the individual benefits one derives from it.

As with much in political theory, taken to their extremes, problems arise in both the liberal and civic republican notions of citizenship. Liberalism can tend towards a selfish individualism with no regard for social justice and the common good; civic republicanism can turn authoritarian and repress the rights and dignity of individuals in the pursuit of some “common” vision of the state. I think it’s helpful to hold both approaches to citizenship in corrective tension with each other. Citizenship involves both rights and responsibilities. This is true of citizenship to a state, but it’s also true when thinking about the meaning of global citizenship. It is right to get angry when you feel that your rights as a human have been disrespected; I applaud when my students feel indignant when the human rights of others have been violated. But global citizens are those who also recognize responsibility— responsibility for their own roles in perpetuating systems that harm others, and responsibility to act in the world to protect the rights and further the well-being of others, to promote the common good.

Returning to Smokey Bear

After that long aside into some political theory, let’s now return to Smokey Bear, and delve a little deeper into citizen responsibility. In Life Worth Living, the authors analyze Smokey’s memorable quote — “Only you can prevent forest fires” — pointing out that there are three layers of responsibility implied in Smokey’s phrase: there’s the agent, the scope, and the authoritative source. Who is responsible? For whom are we responsible? To whom are we responsible?

The first layer is the agent. Smokey states “Only you…!” Of course, forest fire prevention is the responsibility of more than just one person, but Smokey isn’t speaking to just one person. He’s speaking to every individual who passes the sign, sees the TV-ad, or reads his words. It’s a second-person narration situation where Smokey is directly addressing the reader or the viewer. Each person’s actions matter when it comes to preventing forest fires. This is also true in the world more generally. Our actions in the world matter, whether we want them to or not, and each person is the one responsible for his or her actions. We each need to reflect on the ways our actions cause harm in the world; we need to recognize our individual ability to act for what’s right and good in the world. It’s the adage that says, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” One’s actions are not neutral; one is always a responsible agent acting in the world.

The second layer of responsibility is the scope. For whom and for what are we responsible? In Smokey’s admonition, it’s the forest. We need to ask, what or who is our forest? This is not a simple question to answer; it’s one that often promotes debate among students. To what extent is my responsibility diminished by the choices available to me? Do those with more power and influence hold more responsibility? What about the distance factor? To what extent do I bare a responsibility for the well-being of those far from me? There are no simple answers to these questions, but the discussion is important, as is the recognition that, in some way and to some extent, global citizenship involves a sense of responsibility for people and planet outside of myself.

Finally, the third layer of responsibility is the authoritative source. To whom or too what are we responsible? As the authors of Life Worth Living note, in the case of the forest fire prevention warning, the authoritative source is Smokey Bear. He’s the one pointing at you from the sign; he’s the speaker declaring that you must act to prevent forest fires. Some of my students immediately identify with this layer of the authoritative source. My religious students acknowledge that their moral code, their guide for right action in the world, comes from their religious belief in some way. Some may feel that it comes from God, or from a sacred text, or from the shared beliefs of their religious community. I respect the fact that religious belief can be an authoritative source that promotes global citizenship. It’s probably also worth noting that the Life Worth Living course at Yale University is part of the Yale Divinity School. However, the Critical Global Citizenship course at ISKR is not about promoting religious belief and the authors of Life Worth Living are not arguing that such belief is required of responsible citizens. They do, however, suggest that “without some sense of responsibility — to someone or something — for living our lives a certain way, the whole question lacks urgency… it becomes a matter of preference (which is) dangerously close to whim.” I have come to see this as a key objective of the Critical Global Citizenship class; it’s to create the conditions whereby each student can, together with their classmates, prompted by various texts, questions, and models, begin to develop their own guiding set of principles, their own personal philosophy — an authoritative source — that can guide them as responsible global citizens.

Smokey Responsibility

This Socratic discussion about Smokey Bear is the first discussion that kicks off our Critical Global Citizenship class about what it means to be a global citizen, and it’s a discussion we regularly refer to throughout the class. In fact, because we regularly reference it, my students have coined the term “smokey responsibility,” a term that I’ve come to appreciate. Each time we use the term, we recall Smokey Bear and the three different layers of global citizen responsibility: the agent, the scope, and the authoritative source. We’re reminded that each of us is a responsible actor in the world, that we each bare some level of responsibility for the social and environmental well-being of the world around us, and that we each need to be guided in our actions by some sort of thoughtful and reflective moral philosophy.

I also appreciate the term because it invokes for me an image of something that is not quite solid, a little malleable, somewhat hard to grasp firmly— like looking at a blurry shape through a cloud of smoke. I think this is a good metaphor for this idea of global citizenship and our global citizen responsibility. In a solid legal sense, one cannot be a global citizen, yet I believe there’s still something important about the concept. Meanwhile, there exists seemingly contradictory forces within the concept, such as how we must embrace both our rights and our responsibilities – both the liberal and civic republican traditions – at once as global citizens. There’s also the complexity to those questions: Who is responsible? For whom are we responsible? To whom are we responsible?  I think Smokey Bear, and the very incongruity of his name, helps us not only consider the meaning of responsibility, but to also embrace some of the inherent paradox of global citizenship.