For this assignment, I focus on the idea of Convivial Conservation,
as it contrasts with the false idea that the protection of certain
natural spaces requires the expulsion of locals or the prohibition of any
activity that could alter its wild state.
Large scale, oligopolistic farming has led to the
commoditization of seeds, agriculture and other essential goods to a monoculture
that kills biodiversity and marginalize regenerative practices and the
invaluable culture that comes with it.
Despite the threat of extinction, one can still find in the South
practices where the land, the forest, and everything that involves life is
treated as sacred, and not something to be cheapened or optimized. My
favorite quote of the readings is the following:
“Invest in the
millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did
not plant, that you will not live to harvest.”
The reason I choose this is because it encapsulates so much wisdom and contrasts with the commodification and a totally miss appreciated wealth of convivial conservation. This quote recognizes the gift, the forest, and our civilizational duty to provide for the next generations, to think beyond our own lives.
This perspective is very important to escape from economic
evaluations done by ‘experts’, where is considered irrational to think
of millennia, or to trust local traditions to remain as solid model of conservation.
As we are seeing through the master, the democratization of the
decisions over our territory is key to achieve justice and prosperity within
planetary boundaries.
We learned from the environmentalism of the poor literature,
that those whose life depends on the health of local ecosystems are
normally the ones that make an integral, complex and long-lasting management of
them. That means that convivial conservation is probably preferred to
development programs or the expulsion of locals to define pristine areas,
separating artificially the human and the nature.
Notes
Seeds of Our Ancestors, Seeds of Life
- the cultivation of wild rice is part of the culture, a particular relation with the territory a its people
- wild rice is attacked by genetic engineering and attemps to implement less diverse and large scale monoculture
- the locals manage to forbid genetic engineering on those rice fields on the whole island in Hawai
- food is not a commodity, is sacred,like some monuments from the north
- the fact that industrial agriculture practices are more common that reduces the biodiversity worldwide
- another implication is that ownershio of seeds and lands is way more concentrated in industrial and engineering settings
- the big chains sell mostly junk food, and not the rich various foods that ancient communities can provide, which affects our health and also the livelihoods of the peasants, who use to raise hundreds of varieties of corn
- the are impressive cases of fresh foods that last almost a year without refrigeration
- I do not want to hear your philosophy if you cannot grow corn
Convivial Conservation with Nurturing Masculinities in Brazil's Atlantic Forest
Rather than defending endangered nature from destructive people, this approach fosters intertwined human-environment care, wellbeing, and justice on
multiple scales
This chapter traces the emergence of vital interdependencies among
human and other life in the second scenario, set in Brazil’s highly biodiverse Atlantic Forest, which is home to a long history of struggles
by indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and others seeking to forge
alternatives to extractivist economies that degrade human and non-human life
exclusionary approaches that
use fences and guns to keep humans out of nature preserves are pitted
against participatory projects that train local residents to manage
preserves in approved ways
The strategy of securing conservation
by divorcing humans from other nature is exemplified in “Half-Earth”
proposals, championed by E. O. Wilson (2016) and other scientists, who
propose to designate 50 percent of the Earth’s land mass and water area
as a patchwork of conservation zones, protected from human life and
economic activities. While some proposals allow extremely small roles
for select groups such as rural women and indigenous residents, these
approaches portend forced removal and resettlement of historically
marginalized populations
What roles can and do relations with non-human others play in the
formation of good lives? How might conservation and care for diverse
organisms and environments be bound up with conservation and care
for human communities?
- “Principle of common naturality: Humans do not live outside a nature, of which they should become ‘masters and possessors.’ Like all living beings, they are part of it and are interdependent with it. They have a responsibility to take care of it. If they do not respect it, it is their ethical and physical survival that is at risk.
- Principle of common humanity: Beyond differences of skin, nationality, language, culture, religion, or wealth, sex, or gender, there exists only one humanity, which must be respected in the person of each of its members.
- Principle of common sociality: Human beings are social beings for whom the greatest wealth is the richness of the concrete relationships they maintain among themselves within associations, societies, or communities of varying size and natur
Brazil’s environmental protection agency did so much
to protect jaguars, but nothing to protect small farmers, protesting: “I
have no interest in cutting down a tree. But I have to survive.
Over the years, we witnessed burned forests transform
into bountiful agroforests, producing foodstuffs like manioc, bananas,
beans and vegetables, and cash crops such as cacao and rubber, under
the shade of volunteer saplings
“I plant because nature asks for it. The land asks for plants. So, if the
land asks, and there are no trees here, the farmer has to bring them
from elsewhere to plant. That’s why I plant. […] And this example that
I’m making here, I want it to serve for a century. So that all who may
come work the earth, who have their little farm, and also plant three
or four or five trees, to show their children and to show their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
“Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.”
In conventional economic terms, Floriano’s orientation to the trees
that he cultivates is non-utilitarian: they offer nothing for his family
to eat or sell. Environmental impact assessments may illuminate the
trees’ contributions to ecosystems services or agroforestry, yet fail to
capture the wholeness of interspecies commitment. Floriano’s insistence on planting for nature and for future generations, and planting
so that insects, birds, and mammals can also eat, represents an interesting convergence with arguments for Half-Earth-style conservation.
Both perceive that the ability to provide for human groups is bound up
with care for other organisms, and both aim to ensure that nature has
its share: one by excluding human activity, and the other by making
space for all at a shared table.
Here we have presented a curious case in which landless men with
little formal education, branded as violent destroyers of nature, affirmatively reconstruct life-worlds through nurturing relationships with
land, trees, and other features of their biophysical world, as well as with
each other. Their lives still involve harsh challenges, and their expressions of masculinity continue to embrace conventional roles as producers and providers. Yet, even in the face of violent norms and structural
domination, these men have managed to expand and enjoy identities
as reproducers and caretakers. That amazing feat, and its sweet rewards,
should motivate readers in diverse other contexts.
Shifts from political ecologies of mutual violence and degradation
toward dynamics of mutual flourishing show that convivial futures are
possible, and that struggles for more equal distributions of the means
of (re)production play a vital role in such transitions.
To support conditions in which these principles can thrive, political economic systems must be reoriented away from domination and
growth and toward equitable wellbeing and resilience. And diverse communities must be strengthened in their own collaborative and intergenerational efforts to build life-worlds that seek and celebrate human-environmental wellbeing and justice
Survival International There you go!
When sustainabe development programs are imposed to already sustainable communities, imposed development happens. For some reason them seem to be fine with less than a dollar a day. We knew they need our help, even if they do not know it themselves.
Degrowth, culture, power and change
Potential for transformative change is found in habitual practices through which skills, perspectives, denials and desires are viscerally embodied, and in cultural systems (economic, religious, gender and other) that govern those practices and make them meaningful. Case studies reviewed illuminate diverse communities acting to maintain old and to forge new moral and material worlds that prioritize wellbeing, equity and sustainability rather than expansion.
Conspicuously absent, however, among the sundry aims associated with the term is ambition to
consolidate an orthodox scientific paradigm or a unified political platform. Instead, degrowth is embraced as
a banner under which actors and movements gather from sources as diverse as ecological economics and
green theology, in pursuit of goals ranging from increasing democracy to reducing climate change. It should
come as no surprise, then, that debates about what degrowth is, is not, or ought to be entail extraordinary
theoretical and normative complexity.
Innovative science and activism, north and south
Some researchers think about
their work in terms of "post-normal science," conceptualized as a problem-solving strategy appropriate
"when facts are uncertain, values are in dispute, stakes are high, and decisions urgent"
The environmentalism of the poor arises from the fact that the world
economy is based on fossil fuels and other exhaustible resources, it goes to the ends of the earth
to get them, disrupting and polluting both pristine nature and human livelihoods, encountering
resistance by poor and indigenous peoples who are often led by women.
It has been far more difficult to think critically about harm done along the way to "developed"
lifeways and worldviews. As Latouche (2009: 11) emphasizes, societies whose political-economic
domination has occasioned global dissemination of their "superior" languages and cultures have—in the
process—suffered a crippling colonization of their own imaginaries:
We know that we were seduced into accepting an ethnocentric and ethnocidal concept of
development, but it went hand in hand with the violence of colonization and imperialism, and
represents what Aminata Traoré eloquently describes as a real "rape of the imaginary" (Traoré
2002).
Their inability to fight the growing social divide combined with their overuse of resources
therefore shows that today's high-income countries in their current shape can no longer serve as
role models for the developing world. In terms of sustainable development, all countries are
now developing countries.
As transgressions of planetary boundaries not only jeopardize the survival of poorer people and places, but
increasingly threaten the stability and security of wealthy populations, incentives may strengthen to learn
from and with those who have been less successful at growth, and those who are refugees from uneven
impacts of growth.
Decolonizing political ecology: ontology, technology and 'critical' enchantment
Scholars with an interest in political ecology, among
others, have thus pointed to the complex intermingling of non-linear geological and cultural histories,
suggesting that "the Enlightenment distinction between Nature and Society is obsolete" (Malm and Hornborg
2014: 62). Closely related to this line of reasoning is the idea that 'matter matters' or, put differently, the idea
that entanglements of the human and the nonhuman, of organic and inorganic matter, are deeply enmeshed in
the interdependent web of life, where they are gaining quasi-autonomous agency in their actual and virtual
interactions
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