Masters of Degrowth Week 7.2: Living Degrowth Week 2 - Decolonize and build pluriverse: key to long-term vitality of humans on earth

"I never had the chance to go to university, and become a doctor, or a lawyer, a politician, or a scientist. My elders are my teachers. The forest is my teacher. And I have learned enough" (NM).

Nemonte Menquino represents perfectly the wisdom and knowledge that is normally not consider in the dominant narrative and discussions of prosperity without growth. It is a reminder that we need to decolonize our minds for a false monoverse that treats the environment as a mere resource, instead of something to love, respect and to learn from.

This nicely brings to the discussion of this week, a discussion over how the "only" degrowth worth having is anticolonial and nurtured by Southern tought. It is necessary to confront mainstream narrative of green growth and development, but also to create constructive and challenging approximations on degrowth from South to North and vice versa.

Green growth or a pure economically driven degrowth are reduccionist, no sufficiently radical nor diverse. We need diversity in ecosystems but also in our sources of knowledge to propose paths for prosperity without growth that are resilient to unexpected change.

In this context, affirmative political ecologies should be transmited in multiple directions, practiced, so knowledge like the aquired by Nemonte and others is available when alternative ways of organizing without "development" and capitalism are demanded by the many.

The anti-colonial politics of degrowth

Economic growth in the North relies on patterns of colonization: the appropriation of atmospheric commons, and the appropriation of Southern resources and labour. In terms of both emissions and resource use, the global ecological crisis is playing out along colonial lines. This is often framed as a problem of “ecological debt”, but this language – while useful – hardly captures the violence at stake.

Just as Northern growth is colonial in character, so too “green growth” visions tend to presuppose the perpetuation of colonial arrangements.

IPCC models rely heavily on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) to get us out of trouble. But deploying BECCS at scale would require land for biofuel plantations up to three times the size of India, which would almost certainly be appropriated from the South. This is not an acceptable future, and is incompatible with socialist values.

Degrowth calls for rich nations to scale down throughput to sustainable levels, reducing aggregate energy use to enable a sufficiently rapid transition to renewables, and reducing aggregate resource use to reverse ecological breakdown. This demand is not just about ecology; rather, it is rooted in anti-colonial principles. Degrowth scholars and activists explicitly recognize the reality of ecological debt and call for an end to the colonial patterns of appropriation that underpin Northern growth, in order to release the South from the grip of extractivism and a future of catastrophic climate breakdown. Degrowth is, in other words, a demand for decolonization.

Southern countries should be free to organize their resources and labor around meeting human needs rather than around servicing Northern growth.

Degrowth defends to pursue a strategy of convergence: throughput should decline in the North to get back within sustainable levels while increasing in the South to meet human needs, converging at a level consistent with ecological stability and universal human welfare.

Degrowth, then, is not just a critique of excess throughput in the global North; it is a critique of the mechanisms of colonial appropriation, enclosure and cheapening that underpin capitalist growth itself.

It also calls for a different model of development, one that is focused on human wellbeing within ecological boundaries, rather than on perpetual growth. In other words, the Cochabamba statement articulated degrowth demands from the South well before the concept gained traction in the North

In other words, high-income nations could scale down aggregate throughput while at the same time improving people’s lives by organizing the economy around human needs rather than around capital accumulation—that is, by distributing income and wealth more fairly, while decommodifying and expanding public goods.

After all, degrowth is part of the broader ecosocialist movement. What degrowth adds is the assertion that growth in high-income nations is not required in order to achieve a flourishing society. What is required is justice. Recognizing this is part of building class consciousness against the ideology of capital.

Ecosocialism without anti-imperialism is not an ecosocialism worth having. And in the face of ecological breakdown, solidarity with the South requires degrowth in the North.

Susan Paulson 2019 Pluriversal learning: pathways toward a world of many worlds. Nordia Geographical Publications Yearbook.

Succinctly stated, those engaged in transition activism and theorizing in the North rarely delve into those from the South; conversely, those in the South tend to dismiss too easily northern proposals or to consider them inapplicable to their contexts.

“degrowth is not to be misunderstood as proposal from the Global North imposed on the Global South, but rather a Northern supplement to Southern concepts, movements and lines of thought. It is therefore imperative for degrowth to seek alliances with these Southern ‘fellow travelers.’”
“In parts of Africa, Latin America and many other regions of the Global South, including poor and marginalised communities in Northern countries, the term degrowth is not appealing, and does not match people’s demands”

Just as biodiversity enhances the resilience of ecosystems in the face of changing conditions, so too cultural, linguistic, technological, and cosmological diversity enhance the resilience of socio-ecosystems.

“Indigenous peoples, local communities, civil society and other actors of change need to continue dreaming, practicing, and promoting these alternatives, for one day there will be an overwhelming demand for them, and it will be tragic if we would have meanwhile abandoned them because we thought they were an impossibility.”

Especially relevant for affirmative political ecologies are ways in which decolonial initiatives intertwine struggles against political-cultural domination and economic expansion with positive alternatives, seen in Mahatma Gandhi’s message to ”Live simply so that others can simply live”, Yasuni’s cry ”Leave the oil in the soil”, and Via Campesina’s goal of food sovereignty.

Decolonial perspectives might interact with those of degrowth to loosen the hold of visions that have become globally dominant, and that in different ways influence and constrain thinkers and actors who are differently positioned in that dominance.

We raise attention to other calls to curb global metabolism, arising from actors such as those described by Eric Hirsch (2017), struggling to adapt lives turned upside down amid melting glaciers in Peru and rising sea levels in the Maldives. Billions more affected by deforestation, erosion,drying up of rivers and springs, pollution of air and water, fires, and depletion of wildlife are raising questions.

We should pay attention to unplanned circumstances, when reductions in production and consumption are not necessarily chosen or welcomed by participants, yet communities or societies respond affirmatively, with a commitment to construct low-impact livelihoods that prioritize well-being and equity. In Japan and Italy, for example, where years of economic stagnation have provoked some visions of urban planning that do not depend on or strive for growth, Robin LeBlanc (2017) researches architectural innovations designed to facilitate experiences of “beautifully poor” community and creativity.

Instead of calling for sustained growth overall,distinguishes needs for increased consumption in some parts of an uneven planet from needs for degrowth in others.

Degrowth scholars do not share a common position on economic implications of degrowth in low-income countries and communities.

Escobar (2015, 456) warns against “falling into the trap, from northern perspectives, of thinking that while the North needs to degrow, the South needs ‘development’; conversely, from southern perspectives, it is important to avoid the idea that degrowth is ‘‘ok for the North’’ but that the South needs rapid growth, whether to catch up with rich countries, satisfy the needs of the poor, or reduce inequalities.”

The revolutionary realization that uneven distribution of wealth and power is, in itself, a fundamental cause of planetary environmental crises makes visible the relevance and urgency of degrowth for low-income communities and countries positioned at the raw end of value chains.

That important work needs to be complemented with different kinds of conversations that find greater resonance beyond economists, including attention to the degradation and regeneration of ecological and sociocultural wealth, and the non-commodified human activities that are so vital among cases studied, including commons management, reciprocal, and reproductive labor.

Escobar (2015, 453) characterizes as the most imaginative transition discourses, those which ”link together aspects that have remained separate in previous imaginings of social transformation: ontological, cultural, politico economic, ecological, and spiritual.”

We were astonished to discover that half of the titles failed to indicate any people, places, or phenomena studied. Instead, authors had chosen to present their studies with abstract titles such as “The ontological politics of degrowth,” and “Building non-hegemonic socio-ecologies.” Why does disembodied and decontextualized theoretical discourse feel more attractive and powerful than words and practices of local actors? What may be implications of shifting greater priority to the latter?

One approach, advanced largely by economists from Europe and North America (in my own observation, mostly men), uses economic reasoning to point out limits and costs of growth, expressed through models that speak to concerns of wealthy capitalist societies. More radical approaches question the primacy of economic reasoning altogether, expressing southern perspectives, “critical of colonial relations of dependence and exploitation, revaluing alternative cosmovisions that challenge Western ideas of improvement and scales of progress that imagine the Western way of living to be the best”

Opportunities to learn in dialogue with participants on Zapatista, buen vivir, and agroecology pathways

(1) Bring together people and movements from both North and South that are critical of growth, development and modernity;
(2) Deepen the reflection on the colonization of the social imaginary;
(3) Open philosophical, psychological, anthropological and sociological debates about the destructive logic of Technoscience, Economics and the State:
(4) Promote debates around Coloniality, the Patriarchate and the idea of Scarcity,
(5) Promote the creation of social networks of cooperation and international collaboration for the defense of the territory, the survival of communities and cultures.

La Otra Campaña (The Other Campaign) in 2006 with the purpose of building alliances among voices and visions “from below and to the left,” including those expressed by farmers, fishers, environmentalists, factory workers, students, trade unionists, victims of natural disasters, activists for women’s and LGBTQ rights, and others.

Buen vivir is not about accumulating material wealth, nor “getting ahead” of one’s neighbors; it is about seeking harmonious interdependence among human neighbors and non-human nature. Buen vivir is not a universal model; its principles are expressed in plural ways grounded in specific contexts and perspectives. Finally, foundational cosmologies of buen vivir represent what Rodríguez-Labajosa et al. (2019, 179) identify as a key missing piece of degrowth to date: “the non-anthropocentric/Nature’s perspective that leads to an absolute transformation of the relationship between humans and their environments.”

Instead of debating the correct way to define one buen vivir or one feminism, Vega Ugalde offers the possibility of gathering dissimilar concepts and actions into dialogue that is difficult and fruitful.

The ability to access, adapt, create, use, and defend agroecological knowledge in its own terms is a political act, an exercise in autonomy.

Long traditions of non-hierarchical mutual learning among differently positioned participants in agroecological movements offer promise for attempts at new kinds of learning in which western agronomists, environmental scientists, and degrowth scholars not only gather data from local farmers, but also open themselves to local knowledge processes.

Conclusions

Moves to decrease the quantity of material and energy transformed by human economies constitute a necessary, but not sufficient, response to current socioecological crises. A more radical cultural transformation is needed to generate (re) productive systems, politics, and human relations around a new set of values and visions.

How can scholars facilitate “the collective will to achieve not only a lower material metabolism, but a different social metabolism that supports conditions of possibility for lives worthy of being lived with joy by all and for all” (Pérez Orozco 2015, 27)?

The transition to more sustainable and equitable worlds cannot be driven by one grand theory or a single socio-ecological model, researchers in our network seek to learn through varied thoughts and experiences. This challenge begins with efforts to recognize other ways of understanding and (re)creating worlds. It also requires struggles for cognitive justice, a continuous project to make heterogeneous and emancipatory paths visible and legitimate in global society,in education, and in the production of knowledge. Thus we promote a transition toward pluriverse with the zapatista inspiration to create a world in which many worlds can thrive.

This is my message to the western world – your civilisation is killing life on Earth | Nemonte Nenquimo | The Guardian

I am writing you this letter because the fires are raging still. Because the corporations are spilling oil in our rivers. Because the miners are stealing gold (as they have been for 500 years), and leaving behind open pits and toxins. Because the land grabbers are cutting down primary forest so that the cattle can graze, plantations can be grown and the white man can eat.

Because our elders are dying from coronavirus, while you are planning your next moves to cut up our lands to stimulate an economy that has never benefited us. Because, as Indigenous peoples, we are fighting to protect what we love – our way of life, our rivers, the animals, our forests, life on Earth – and it’s time that you listened to us.

But for Indigenous peoples it is clear: the less you know about something, the less value it has to you, and the easier it is to destroy.

It took us thousands of years to get to know the Amazon rainforest. To understand her ways, her secrets, to learn how to survive and thrive with her.

When you say that the oil companies have marvellous new technologies that can sip the oil from beneath our lands like hummingbirds sip nectar from a flower, we know that you are lying because we live downriver from the spills.

When you say that the Amazon is not burning, we do not need satellite images to prove you wrong; we are choking on the smoke of the fruit orchards that our ancestors planted centuries ago. When you say that you are urgently looking for climate solutions, yet continue to build a world economy based on extraction and pollution, we know you are lying because we are the closest to the land, and the first to hear her cries.

I never had the chance to go to university, and become a doctor, or a lawyer, a politician, or a scientist. My elders are my teachers. The forest is my teacher. And I have learned enough.

I won’t be able to teach you in this letter, either. But what I can say is that it has to do with thousands and thousands of years of love for this forest, for this place. Love in the deepest sense, as reverence. This forest has taught us how to walk lightly, and because we have listened, learned and defended her, she has given us everything: water, clean air, nourishment, shelter, medicines, happiness, meaning.

And you are taking all this away, not just from us, but from everyone on the planet, and from future generations.

The Earth does not expect you to save her, she expects you to respect her. And we, as Indigenous peoples, expect the same.

Berta Caceres acceptance speech, 2015 Goldman Prize ceremony

The Wretched Of The Earth Collective - speech at Global Climate Strike - Real Media - The View From Below

Alan Fortuny Sicart

Search This Blog