Masters of Degrowth: Week 11.1 Cultural values in environmental justice

 There are existing disruptions in the relantionships between humans and the natural environment. Little space is given to other views but the westernized view that nature is dual and a mere resource from which to expand social metabolism.

Many populations hold strong bonds with nature, considering the natural spaces essential for their identity, livelihoods and the heritage towards next generations. Those are threatened by extractivism, understood and the abuse of the Earth with violent means towards local populations and livelihoods (economic or literal violence).

The following case studies illustrates conflict in natural and environmental values:

• Mauna Kean, Hawai: Native people opposed to the installation of a 30mts telescope as it intereferes with cultural practices in the mountain of Mauna. After 5 months of prostests, the project was stopped and did not take place.
• Thacker Pass, Nevada, US:  a lithium mine was expected to be implemented for the next 46 years in the region severely affecting nature, health and culture.  The land currently hosts ceremonies, hunting and other activities that are essential for the livelihoods of the locals. The place is occupied by activists to avoid the project to take place. 
• Seven Sister Dreaming against uranium mining, Australia: an artistic expression claims the importance of keeping this place preserved as it hosts 65000 year old indigenous livelihoods.
• Seabed mining, Cook islands. a very new mining method is about to be tested in the sea, without clear understanding of the impacts it will have on the land. Activists are organized to implement a Sacred Ocean Act to avoid this type of projects or at least ensure that natural spaces will be left untouched for a while in order to recover.The act has not been adopted so far, despite the large mobilization.

There is a common patterns, that is applicable globally, as the protests and bottom up organization is key to implement environmental justice and expand the scope of environental values that are considered.

From the Environmental Justice Atlas , we can see differences in the concentration of conflicts and the visibility of such:

• Most visible projects are related to biodiversity conservation, water management and land ~1000
• Nuclear energy and industrial projects are quite present, and mainly not transparent ~300
• Commodities are also associated with an attack to traditional knowledge and practices
• Most of the people affected are indigenous, racially discriminated and women
• Most of mobilization is preventive, so it is taken place before the damage is done
• The conflicts start because those who profit refuses to compensate or follow official procedures
• Many conflicts end up with desplacement (500), and even death (300) of the opposition

Degrowth can support further environmental justice and human-nature bonds by integrating more genders, ethnicities and groups in the gathering of ideas and perspectives of fair transitions and not only westernized scholarship. Communities on the ground require more visibility and support, from academia, media and other platforms of communication, ensuring that there is a strong movement that instituionalized environmental justice and the protection of human nature bonds.

On thin ice – The Arctic commodity extraction frontier and
environmental conflicts

Based on descriptive statistics, regression and network analysis, the paper reveals that socio-environmental conflicts predominantly overlap with Indigenous peoples' territories, from which a transversal opposition takes place, including Indigenous, non-Indigenous and international actors alike. The main commodities involved in these conflicts are related to fossil fuels, metals, and transport infrastructure. 

Associated large-scale extractive activities are bringing negative socio-environmental impacts at the expense of Indigenous groups, fishermen, and pastoralists, with loss of traditional knowledge and practices being significantly higher in Indigenous territories of high bio-cultural values associated to the environment. 

Our findings suggest that repression against activists is significantly more likely to occur in absence of preventive mobilization, and in Arctic countries with low rule of law. The chances to achieve the cancellation of a conflictive extractive project are significantly higher if dependency on natural resources rents in a country is low.

Despite of being located in the Global North, the Arctic frontier shares similar political ecologies with resource and commodity extraction frontiers in the so-called Global South. This suggests that clear-cut distinctions for North and South do not always apply, but both peripheral regions in the South and the North are being targeted by extractive capital.

Impacts of land-use and management changes on cultural agroecosystem services and environmental conflicts—A global review

• Social-ecological interactions between people and agroecosystems result in a range of cultural ecosystem services (CES).
• We analysed which land-use and management changes (LUMC) in agriculture influence CES.
• When LUMC create changes in CES, relationships between people and agroecosystems are threatened
• Changes around CES manly occur at the expense of the most vulnerable stakeholders.
• As a consequence of these changes and inequities, environmental conflicts emerge.
• Responses to these conflicts also take place, with mobilisation and resistance being one among many responses to these conflicts.
• Existing economic valuations of CES often leave unnoticed the socio-cultural attachment people have with their environment
• Since the structural heterogeneity of the landscape correlates with its aesthetic and recreational values (Hahn et al., 2017), a simplification of structure due to intensification may result in the decrease of the CES delivery of the farming landscapes (Pilgrim and Pretty, 2010).
• Cultural landscapes are the place where culture and nature meet, such as centuries old tangible and intangible patrimony, cultural and biological diversity (Tengberg et al.2012).
• Widely homogeneous agricultural landscapes lead to the cultural standardisation imposed by the global market. As a result, many cropping systems of great ecological, historical and cultural value are under the threat of vanishing (Guarino et al., 2017)
• Thus, studies on how land use changes affect ES, and CES that are particularly vital to the maintenance of human well-being, are of great scientific importance (Quintas-Soriano et al., 2016).
• Conventional ES assessment, mainly based on biophysical modelling and monetary valuation, may not detect these type of tensions beyond the identification of trade-offs (De Groot, 2006; Fagerholm et al., 2016). There is an urgent need to include socio-cultural approaches in the land use conflicts study (Plieninger et al., 2014).

Ecological economics and degrowth: Proposing a future research agenda
from the margins

We conduct a comprehensive systematic review of the prevalent themes in the existing literature on the ecological economics of degrowth, and its engagements with North-South relations and gender issues. The analysis identifies seven research areas where ecological economics can better integrate these matters, namely: the study of post-growth policies for the Global South; the unequal exchanges that sustain an imperial mode of living; the deconstruction of ecological economic concepts that reproduce problematic Western or gendered assumptions; the study of the clash of metabolisms in peripheries of the Global South; the metabolism of care-work in growth economies; the leading role of women in ecological distribution conflicts, and the reproduction of gender inequalities in alternative post-growth spaces.

• As the map furthermore shows, there was hardly any research focusing on African countries, a continent with tremendous marginalisation and oppression.
• Studies on the EE of Degrowth addressing the specific issues of the Global South have been increasing since 2010.
• In contrast, issues related to feminisms, gender and women, were still poorly considered, as only 4 articles out of the 109 publications engaged with these matters.
• The analysis furthermore confirms that the degrowth discourse about the Global South is still at an early stage, focussed on making the point that the material extraction (mostly for energy production) that fuels global economic growth has negative social and environmental impacts in the countries of the South.
• The limits to growth argument remains central in this literature,pointing to the fact that arguments about global injustice are framed in relation to environmental limits of global economic growth. The analysis finds a common narrative in the degrowth literature, whereby global economic growth is facing limits, and therefore the North should limit itself so that the South has more space to grow. It is also observed how culture, identity and traditions still remain poorly addressed within the EE literature, as well as history, coloniality, and ecological debt.
• Global South and feminist approaches are far from studied thoroughly
• Following the principle of “deconstructing the social imaginary” (Latouche, 2009), a decolonial theory of degrowth must acknowledge that many post-growth ideas have non-
• Western roots, and voices of academics and activists from the Global South are as crucial as those critical streams of thought in the North.

How can work sharing (reduction of paid working hours) be implemented, for example, in economies that are not fully industrialized? Is there a place for a carbon tax (or dividend) or a basic income in low-income economies? If not, what policies would work in such contexts, and steer these economies to more sustainable, post-growth trajectories?

New research should move beyond the rigid redistributive dichotomy of “Degrowth in the North – growth in the South”. Escobar (2015) has noted how such a distinction is problematic in both epis-

temic and practical terms: first, it overlooks the important intellectual critiques to development and experiences beyond development unfolding in the Global South. Second, it forecloses spaces for dialogue between different eco-civilizational transitions, which are essential for an effective politics of transformation.

Rather than thinking of growth in the North and the South as separate choices or phenomena, a new research agenda needs to advance into more integrated, regional and global understandings of economic interdependencies and relations.

The concept of degrowth creates frictions with environmental justice movements in the Global South which do not necessarily feel comfortable with this framing of their issues or visions. The keys points of contention range from claims of it being too anthropocentric and Eurocentric, to nonacknowledgement of the multiple ways of organizing, understanding and discussing issues affecting groups in different parts of the world, to semantic controversies and the use of detached ideas and approaches (Rodríguez-Labajos et al., 2019).

Degrowth is often motivated in terms of an alleviation of environmental injustices and a promotion of care and reproductive activities. However, the authors argue how this is possible only if degrowth work-sharing proposal if designed in a gender-sensitive way.

The commodification of care work therefore increases total energy use and goes against the objective of degrowing energy use. Ecological economists have the tools to develop an important research agenda of calculating in non-monetary/biophysical/material terms the actual dedication of human time to care labour, and to help us understand better the role of care work in social metabolism.

Future research should pay more attention, and be written, from the ‘margins’ – from the perspective, that is, of the marginalized, in terms of gender, race, class and caste. Ecological economists can do much better in shedding light on the structure and causes of unequal North-South relations, or the ways women continue to be exploited within the growth economy, and the ways they challenge this exploitation. The state of the current ecological economic scholarship on these questions remain unsatisfactory. There is a need to go beyond the mere recognition of the important – and unpaid – care labour of women, or facile statements according to which the North should degrow, so as to exploit the South less (or let it grow).