Knowledge, Culture, Ecologies

In this essay, I reflect upon how the idea of the ecological has undergone massive renovation across numerous disciplines. What animates this short communication is the question of whether this new ‘pluriverse’ of alternatives across ecological ways of thinking foreground the values of knowledge practices and methods that are ultimately capable of challenging the boundaries between the social and physical, human and non-human, and material and non-material.

To begin, we can’t disown the fact that these profound earthly challenges intersect with obdurate and unevenly distributed forms of violence and inequality particularly, but not only, in the ‘Global South’. Colonialism still lingers across many social, economic and ecological interactions, as a structural process that shapes our relationship to ourselves, to other humans and to non-human nature.

Yet, new ‘epistemologies from the South’ (de Sousa Santos 2015) that stress that understanding of the world by far exceeds the Western understanding of the world are providing the contours of new experimental knowledge practices that call for a more diverse understanding of these emergent socioecologies while provoking new ones, and demanding that global social justice cannot be achieved without global cognitive justice. There is a growing recognition that we live intimately intertwined within what Arturo Escobar has recently referred to as a “pluriverse of socio-natural configurations” where “designs for the pluriverse become a tool for reinventing and reconstructing local worlds” (Escobar, 2018: 4).  This is a call for being more attuned to the ‘worldings’ of life – and more open, consequently, to recognising the ontological amalgamation of the social and the political with geo-atmospheric conditions, chemical forces, geological vitalities and other inorganic powers that extend our sense of coexistence beyond how “life” has been conventionally defined. This draws upon the emergence of a multi-situated ontological-political field, which makes increasingly evident a range of practices conceptualised around the notion of relationality.

In Latin America, novel and thought-provoking epistemologies have emerged in the last few decades, including Buen Vivir (https://theconversation.com/buen-vivir-south-americas-rethinking-of-the-future-we-want-44507) and the related concept of Sumak Kasway and, in more academic circles, the notion of ‘Amerindian’ perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 1998). All these perspectives propose renewed ways of conceiving projects and worlds of life. Indeed, as Eduardo Gudynas has shown, in the last two decades Latin America has offered a wide and diverse range of interactions between knowledge and ecologies, showing both substantial innovations and unexpected setbacks, hopes for change, and disappointments about the results (Gudynas, 2011). This is important because it brings together emerging notions and social movements from the North, such as degrowth, commonalities, and a variety of transitional initiatives, together with debates more specific to the South, such as current struggles over the Buen Vivir, the rights of nature, a communitarian logic and civilizational transitions. Together with these concepts, the plethora of work on post-development, degrowth, popular ecologies, community ecologies and economies, post-colonial ecologies, and environmentalism of the poor are showing the plurality of ways through which people are engaging in emancipatory politics around the world and contributing to the de-colonization of environmental knowledge.

However, as Erik Swyngedow rightly notes, the expanding human/non-human predicaments do not always play to the orchestrated melody of their composers, challenging us to acknowledge the (in)visibility and (in)cognoscibility of the Anthropocene beyond geological strata and planetary limits. The Anthropocene is leaving traces not only in the geological strata but also in the biological and genetic layers of human bodies: exploitation and subordination are inscribed in the human body and in socio-somatic structures firmly rooted in inequality (Swyngedow, 2018).

In my view, those who call for new modes of care and ethical living in deploying a “postcapitalist politics” (Gibson-Graham 2006; Gibson, Rose & Fincher 2015) are precisely those resisting what Badiou has called a “gigantic operation in the de-politicization of subjects”, where ecology becomes “a new opium for the masses” (Badiou, in Feltham 2008: 139). On the contrary, it is a mode of countering de de-politicization of action on environmental issues. However, it does seem evermore important and urgent to be able to confront, and take distance from, some overly flattening topologies of relationality when necessary, if we are to rethink what a deconstructive and non-destructive critical theory has on offer. This is most important when considering, for instance, how new conflicts over the ownership, use and value of nature and the non-human are intertwined in complex imbalances of power/knowledge, corruption linked to extractive economies, inequalities and environmental suffering.

While these conflicts arise in response to ongoing predatory formations and new forms of extractivismo (activities which remove large quantities of unprocessed natural resources for export), they are also generative of an inventive ethics of care and responsibility, forms of environmental justice, and conceptions of the rights of nature. These in turn, are instigating a politics based on new modes of coexistence and relationships with ‘nature’. Some of these consequences of extractivismo In Latin America are explored by Macarena Gómez-Barris’ in her book The Extractive Zone, where she follows the political, aesthetic, and performative practices that emerge in opposition, not only to the devastating effects of extractive capital, but also to the form by which neoliberalism – as an ideology and practice – has over the past four decades normalized what she calls an ‘extractivist viewpoint’, which “reduces the representation of living things and entities to commodities” and “legitimates the power of the state to oversee the management of nature from above” (Gomez-Barris 2017).

These methods are being tested out across hundreds of urban settlements and precincts across the world to address urban vulnerability and socio-environmental fragmentation. Simultaneously, ongoing forms of capitalist urbanization – including enclosure, land grabbing and the commodification of the commons and of life itself – are also escalating. Similarly, transformational changes are taking place in energy practices and infrastructures, and sustainable energy transitions are still a field of contention and controversy. For example, Manuel Tironi’s study of environmental conflicts in Chile analysed 1,153 energy projects processed by the Environmental Impact Assessment System (SEIA) between January 2000 and March 2015. Seventy-one of these projects presented a socio-environmental conflict at some point in their development. This amounts to 6.2% of total projects, but a much higher level – 35.3% – of total megawatts entered the system in the period.

What studies like these show is that new and old energy infrastructures and ‘infrastructuring processes’ involve different modes of engagement that envision different (and often contested) futures. Energy transition and decarbonisation goals are increasingly provoked, mobilized and contested by different actors (such as global markets, NGOs or nation states), and in different socioecological spaces. Yet contested energy futures are played out through a range of instruments and practices of forecasting and scenario work, both institutionally but also in everyday life.

In this regard, it is striking to observe that while Latin America has one of the highest per capita levels of fresh water allocation in the world, it is also a region prone to ongoing water crises where a range of socio-technical and socioecological water conflicts are reshaping the energy landscape and creating novel forms of social organizing around water rights.

To draw from an example from Chile, let me briefly underscore water struggles around Santiago – a global city of 7 million with a growing migrant population – to illuminate these complexities further. The availability of water for Santiago, for example, is expected to fall by 40% by 2070. Undoubtedly, climate change and the country’s natural conditions are important factors. But the problem is mainly political, coming from the privatization of water during the military dictatorship. The water privatization process that began in Chile in 1981 established a model for water management that strengthened private water rights, adopting a market-based allocation system and reduced state controls. This model became a symbol of the neoliberal reforms promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

To conclude this essay, let’s embrace the political responsibility that comes with the fact that life on earth is forcefully shifting for everybody and everything. Ecological change and catastrophe seem to be proliferating in a world of ongoing crises and relentless flux. These contemporary planetary predicaments, felt both at the local and global level, are perhaps indicative of novel and increasingly coupled social-ecological assemblages and dynamics that are creating new forms of social cohesion emerging around environmental issues, conflicts and justice. Moreover, unexpected forms of interspecies intimacy and environmental emergency are challenging existing knowledge practices that demand different modes of collaborating and acting.

What has become clearer in recent years, is how the nature/culture dualism has been productively and generatively challenged, from a diverse range of epistemic perspectives. These interventions signal the emergence of new exchanges between the human and non-human and the proliferation of hybrid ecologies. Anthropocenic vulnerability, extinctions, metabolic rifts of the Earth, are all phenomena prompting us to acknowledge our ontological entanglement with other species beings, geo–atmospheric conditions, chemical forces, geological vitalities and other inorganic powers to the point where our sense of co-existence has extended beyond ‘life’ as traditionally defined.

References

de Sousa Santos, B. 2015. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. London and New York: Routledge.

Escobar, A., 2018. Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Feltham, O. 2008. Alain Badiou: Live Theory. A&C Black.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. A postcapitalist politics. University of Minnesota Press.

Gibson, K., Rose, D. B., & Fincher, R. 2015. Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books.

Gomez-Barris, M., 2017. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Gudynas, E., 2011. “Buen Vivir: Germinando alternativas al desarrollo”, América Latina en Movimiento, 462:1-20.

Swyngedouw, E. and Ernstson, H., 2018. Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene: Immuno-biopolitics and Depoliticising Ontologies in the Anthropocene. Theory, Culture & Society Vol 35, Issue 6, pp. 3 – 30.

Viveiros de Castro, E. 1998. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3):469–488.