Clara H. Whyte has 26 years of international work experience mainly in Northern, Central and Southern America, and to a lesser extent in Asia. She holds two Master’s degrees, one in ecological economics and the other one in political science from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po Paris). She also completed most of the course work of the Master’s degree in Neuroscience of the Université Laval (Québec, Canada).
For the first 20 years of her career, she worked mainly as an agri-environmental economist and political scientist on both field and public policy projects, including with First Nations communities in the Andean region as well as on some projects in the Amazon region. Most of this work she did either with NGOs, or as a consultant with consulting companies or government institutions. Outside of providing her with strong knowledge in sustainable food systems economics and policies, this background also enabled her to develop strong intercultural communication and adaptation skills, as well as the human sensitivity to work with impoverished communities, some facing major socio economic and sustainability challenges. She is fluent in French, English, Spanish and Portuguese. She also has an advanced level in German as well as in Mandarin Chinese (HSK5). Over the past 7-5 years, she undertook a major career shift. In fact, some readings, initially in political philosophy, made her realize how broken our current worldview and ethics are. As a long-term specialist of sustainability issues, she also realized that we would not be able to go through an ecological transition successfully if we would not mend those deeply rooted philosophical and ethical issues. In fact, although the latter make up the less visible part of any sustainability initiatives, they also happen to be the foundational building blocks on which they rely. We shall not be able to transition to a sustainable future, if we do not mend the broken relations among human beings, and between humankind and the rest of the living world.
In this setting, she decided to withdraw from field projects and to focus entirely on research in public policies and ethics. Hence, over the past few years, she has dedicated extensive efforts at extending her knowledge in political philosophy, including in Western, Asian and First Nations philosophies. She also dedicated a huge amount of time at studying and researching social psychology and biology, including the neuroscience at a graduate level.
In fact, following such thinkers as scientist and novelist C.P. Snow or physical chemist I. Prigogine, she has come to realize that at the root of the worldview and ethical crisis which is currently affecting people, particularly in the Western world, lies a separation between “the two cultures” - that of pure sciences on the one hand, and that of the social sciences and humanities on the other hand. If we are to rebuild a coherent worldview, which shall include a
proper ethical compass to orientate our actions, be they individual or collective, we need to reconstruct our philosophical and ethical frameworks relying on our current scientific knowledge, which has deeply shaken the bases on which our previous worldview relied. This is a huge enterprise which requires to go through a huge learning process. In fact, connecting the two cultures requires to acquire deep knowledge both in the social sciences and humanities, but also in pure sciences, including biology, but also physics, chemistry, mathematics, etc. It requires to learn to think complexity, by relying on such tools as cybernetics, systems or information theory.
With the purpose of fulfilling this mission, she has created her own think tank, Paideia Mundi. All the work developed at Paideia Mundi has to rely on the philosophy of biophilia, which in the words of psychoanalyst E. Fromm is “the passionate love of life and all that is alive. It is the wish to further growth whether in a person, a plant, an animal, an idea, a social group”. This philosophy implies an ethics in which “good is all that serves life, growth unfolding” while “bad is all that serves death, that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces.” In this setting, she conducted some research on leadership, political regimes and ethics, some of which she presented in several scientific conferences. She is also working at using the tools of complexity thinking to come down with novel solutions to pressing public policy issues, including the opioid crisis, the homelessness crisis, the ecological transition, etc. In the future, she would also like to develop courses on such topics as complexity thinking, an ethics of the living world, etc.